Let Us Talk About Combat

It is a routine thread on gaming boards. Combat in (insert any game under the sun here) is boring, slow, too long, etc. The one I bemoan is Champions so I get it. But not when it comes to the pile-on heap of shade thrown at B/X and OD&D. You know, the OSR, that OSR.

If your combat in OSR games is boring you to tears it is because you are boring. Do something interesting! We are all going to have our “sweet spot” for the amount of rules we like to have in combat. For me, these days, it is DC Heroes for my homebrew supers campaign. I want a quick resolution mechanic for combat which doesn’t have a ton of modifiers to calculate. And B/X D&D sure doesn’t have many modifiers.

Sometimes I wonder, why have a list of combat modifiers in the rules at all? Why can’t your number just be the number? Why delay orgasm? Without a long list of modifiers, it gives GM’s an PCs an opportunity to decide on a modifier quickly and roll for resolution. The only thing in the way of such loose application of combat modifiers is us. I can see the worry-beads knotting through tangled fingers as I say this. But, but what about blah, blah, blah. Beads furiously fondled. Even I can’t get that level of acceptance from my players, and I think I’ve done a very good job at earning trust with any group I’ve run since getting back into gaming.

If you describe your combat action by announcing your “to hit” result followed by a damage total and nothing else you are going to have a boring combat because, well, you are being boring. There is nothing stopping you from declaring “I run at the orc with sword tightly gripped in my blood-soaked hand, screaming my death chant, and at the last minute before our blades meet I’m going to make like I’m sliding into second base and cleave his feet from his legs” then now things have gotten interesting. Now the to-hit roll and damage total are indicators of success on the just described action. And detail breeds detail. This means a GM must describe the combat zone in enough detail to make it sticky, to give PCs something to play off.

The group initiative roll helps in this case. When it is the PCs initiative, they can act in coordination with each other, off each other or whatever. This is where an interesting combat environment helps. The more details one has the more creative things one can devise. Roleplay this shit! The PCs should be shouting at each other, encouraging each other in their own special way. All the things you see in any action movie is up for grabs. Swinging from chandeliers, desperately trying to refuse the flank, calling for more ammo, striking the match to the fuse and running away screaming “It’s going to blow!” while the orcs look at you puzzled.

Instead of saying you stab with your spear why not say I am going to skewer the monster’s sword arm to the tree with a savage, two-handed thrust? If you hit and do damage the GM now has something to describe; the scream of the beast as it struggles to pull the weapon free, blood flows like sap down the bark. Come on people, get invested in your game, your struggle, your PCs life!

 

A combat is only going to be as interesting as you are. Combat rules can either be a barrier or an aid in this regard. That is probably the hardest part of this whole exercise. Finding the level of combat “crunch” the game group is most satisfied with. Fortunately, we live in an age of abundance and there surely is a system for whatever genre you are playing which will accomplish this. For me it has been found in many early rpg games. DC Heroes for supers, BRP for black powder and the age of sail and modern man-on-the-street settings, USR Sword & Sorcery when I want to get my Conan on Classic Traveller for my sci-fi itch (though I have tamed FGU’s SO and wish to play it). Each gives me just enough rules or built-in flexibility to drop rules while being exceedingly suitable for the particular genre. If there is one common thread through these systems is they allow me and my players, maybe require it, the freedom to narrate action, success and failure in highly descriptive and fast moving ways.

Steve Taught Me Much of Game Design

News of Steve Perrin’s passing reached the “Press” just now and yeah, I love the game system he pioneered. It clearly built on the success of early Dungeons & Dragons and dropped a D100 skill system on it for action and combat resolution. It seems the dynamics of D&D combat with a passive defense and an armor rating deciding how easily one was hit was dissatisfying to the young Perrin. It was not an unusual criticism. You could say Perrin’s Runequest was just a tightly house-ruled version of the world’s most popular roleplaying game, and you would have a very defensible position.

But the design was more sophisticated than simple house ruling an existing game. Runequest included contested actions where opponents rolled against each other using an appropriate skill and “best” roll wins. This alone added tension and excitement at the table with almost any encounter. But the skill system brought fantasy gaming out of the class and level paradigm and championed the ability to customize your fantasy hero to one’s own liking. Add in the fact armor absorbs damage instead of making one harder to hit and Perrin and Co. had instant converts clamoring for their game.

I was first introduced to Chaosium games when a high school friend showed me his new Stormbringer boxed set. I had devoured Moorcock’s fiction at this time in my gaming life, so was immediately intrigued. Scott (his real name) was someone who loved being a player and not so much a Game Master. I was the opposite in our gaming scene, so Scott would dump new purchases on me because he knew I would devour the game and commence to set up a game session. He never got this game back though. I loved the system and bought in to how it could be used for any game setting you had a mind to play. It in no way broke down with modifications I or anyone else would make to better fit our game’s genre conceit and begged a gamer like myself to look at magic in a different way than Gygax had stamped on the industry.

I never played a session of Runequest, or set foot in Glorantha, but I had walked the streets of Miskatonic U, driven my unmarked police cruiser through the streets of modern LA, pulled off clandestine operations for the Congress of Truth, and fingered black-powder weapons on the Spanish Main. I had seen several competent and well-loved characters go down under a fickle, gruesome critical hit and had put bullets through many an adversary with great satisfaction. For a while I would convert every different game, I had on my shelf into Chaosium’s basic D100 mechanics and bell-curved stat blocks.

Eventually I would come to preferer Willis and Watts take on Stormbringer, the Elric! version released in 1993, but by then I had been exposed to the entirety of Chaosium’s range of games and understood the company’s importance in the TTRPG business. And they had my respect.

I was more of a Ken St. Andre guy than Steve Perrin. I loved his original take on character creation in the Young Kingdoms, but it was Perrin I met at Gencon 2017. He gave me a quick, spirited debate what real roleplaying was before he pulled himself away as I was viciously drunk, but he smiled, I smiled, and we parted with neither being terribly embarrassed.

This game pioneer, like many of the rest, have died early because of poor health. The Standard American Diet and the relatively non-athletic attributes of the hobby have connived to take early game creators from us way before they were done creating. I hope this next generation of players and creators tackle healthy eating and exercise with more enthusiasm than past. There is so much more to be uncovered in this amazing art form and time at it does make a difference. At least in having an informed opinion on the nature and purpose of the sport. The next book is generally better than the last. The more adventures one writes the better they get. And that is all gamers really want. Your best stuff. Thanks Steve, for all the quality game product you gave me to study, play and develop from!

ICON does what DC Heroes Already did, or ICONS/DC Heroes Conversion Guide

I’ve found Icons, one of the latest ttrpg supers game released with some decent popularity, to be completely backwards compatible with the old-as-dirt-old-school supers game DC Heroes. Currently the only copy of this great Mayfair game from the 80’s easily had is the retro-clone from Polaris called The Blood of Heroes. BoH is a complete set of rules which incorporate all the powers and mechanics through DC 3 edition. I like that it is also divorced from the DC Universe, emphasizing the best utility of the game is as your game system used in your own super’s hero universe. 

Icons should be noted lends itself to creating your unique superhero setting. It does this with its character creation process. World building and super villains are created the same time everyone is making up their random character. But I’ve used the Icons random character creation method generate BoH/DC Hero characters. The two systems are so compatible it fits like peanut butter and jelly.

Interesting, the game Icons bills itself as rather FATE-adjacent, with its inclusion of Aspects and the use of FUDGE dice, but really, it is just a recasting of Mayfair’s ground-breaking Exponential Game System! It also shows these “innovations” FATE’s story-telling system touts as a new way of playing ttrpg’s with a more player-focused set of rules is not. Early superhero games like TSR’s Marvel and Mayfair’s DC Heroes had these player-facing rules and mechanics consciously built into the fabric of these games. I’m obviously referring to the supers’ genre conceit of heroic flaws, disadvantages, drawbacks, complications, etc.   Every superhero role playing game at the dawn of the hobby included these character-driven world building and character-building elements. Really, a new game of Champions, or Villains & Vigilantes always started players and referee bouncing ideas off each other and coming up with their various enemies and power-origins. The act of character creation in any superhero game is automatically player-gm world building collaboration.

The next reveal this thought experiment of mine gave me is the relationship between the superhero genre and story-game intent. The juice of a superhero game is the soap-opera level drama players get involved with due to their alter-ego and the consequence of ultimate power. I mean SOAP-OPERA, afternoon television over the top back from the dead silly storytelling. And then you get to have a monster fight which wrecks cities!

This isn’t for everyone and running a supers’ game is a good challenge for Game Masters just on that point alone. It is a refreshing take from general murder-hoboing and the black and white moralities of the fantasy gaming realm. Supers’ games, like most games set in a contemporary setting, are NPC-heavy. A city street is a city street. It is the people who make the place fascinating, dramatic and filled with tension. The ordinary has to be made extraordinary without descending into camp. And this is what story games are really about. Spinning tales of interpersonal conflict in a very soap-opera way.

But back to the conversion method. Really, it is so simple I just went on the above rant to fill out the post.

Here is how the ICONS attributes translate to MEGS attributes:

Prowess = Influence

Coordination = Dexterity

Strength = Strength

Intellect = Intelligence

Awareness = Aura and Mind

Willpower = Will and Spirit

Stamina/2 = Body

Stamina is a derived stat in Icons and is a simple addition of two other attributes. When attributes are added together in BoH’s it is an increase in one point, not a straight addition. This is because the system is exponential, each number is twice the value of the number before it. 3 is twice as much as 2.

Now it is just a matter of plugging the Icons values into the appropriate BoH’s attributes.

Powers work the same way. A Flight of 10 in Icons is a 10 in Flight in BOH. Specialties are Skills. Qualities and Aspects are Drawbacks, Limitations, Advantages, and Bonuses from old-school BoH. Even resolution is identical. Both compare an Acting to an Opposing value and establish a degree of success. The spread of results, from terrible to nothing to exceptional success, is the same to.

Vehicles work the same way. You can take Icon stats and use them directly with BoH/DC Heroes rules, no modification!

I don’t have much interest in playing Icons. Blood of Heroes gives me a denser supers experience and the level of “crunch” and dramatic roleplay and pace of combat all come together perfectly for me with these rules. I don’t really much care for ICONS adventure material. I find the stuff terribly derivative framing of superhero cliches. Buuut, if you love your game of ICONS you have the whole DC Catalogue of heroes and villains all in ICONS numbers. Any of these old-school adventures can be dropped into your Icons campaign world with no mechanical prep required. The official Icons setting of Stark City and its sourcebook can be used with any DC Heroes/MEGS campaign you may have. Any of the Icons third party adventures and books can be used with your MEGS.

So that is really all there is to it. DC Heroes and ICONS are completely compatible games! It seems Steve Kenson has successfully traveled from writing a supers game on an old D&D chassis to writing a supers game on and old DC Heroes chassis and calling it some kind of original or different take on FATE, FUDGE and story-games is off the mark. The “neat” things ICONS claims in bullet points on the back of their book are old achievements by various old school games made a long, long time ago.

Multiple GMs

My first opportunity to roleplay in my own campaign world happened. Even Heroes Bleed had an alternate Game Master, one of the other players, this past Sunday and I was able to run an NPC Hero I created. Sitting on the other side was an incredible treat to see how the city smelt from the perspective of one. 

First "fact" of interest was campaign date. This adventure is occurring a month in the future from the current game action. This means the facts we established during the session are now future facts, events which will occur. My next thought of intrigue was how easy it was to become part of the player group. Makes sense, I've grown to know these characters right along side their players. Same with my PCs roleplay. I created the character and they have fought on the streets of Capitol City already. 

It also triggered some cool ideas for the current adventure I am running back in "real" world Capitol City circa May 2020. The entirety of the campaign's length is 7 days. A half a year of game play and we have advanced through seven days of activity. And what a busy seven days it has been! There is a record of history on each character which has so far appeared in the game, including the other Player Characters. This made for a deeper connection between my Player Character and the others. Ultra Rosa (my PC Hero) has formed opinions on her co-workers already and has had a chance to respond in kind. 

Last but not least, I got to "not know" what I was going to do because I was not in charge of pace. I could increase pace of action by having my PC do increasingly extreme actions in the game world right then. But overall, if the Referee says it is tomorrow, well, it is tomorrow gosh darn it! This type of control over pace is not something the players get to dictate as much as the Referee does. 

I have two more sessions (more or less) before this adventure will conclude and I am back in charge of the who, what, where of Capitol City and I intend to use Ultra-Rosa's guns before then. Before I have to release her back to the game world I want to see her light some shit up!

Long and short of it, I am sold on mixing up the game master work with the other players at the table. I don't know if any of the other Players wish to referee a game session, but I hope so. I think it is fostering greater and greater investment in the game world by everyone at the table.