September 2024 – Geek Gab

Kick Ass TTRPG Design: Combat As A Challenge

Night Danger, an up-and-coming Bro, went on Rollin’ Bones to discuss combat in tabletop roleplaying games. And, although I haven’t watched the entire thing (yet), I needed to respond to what he presented as the two schools of combat design and his ideas for a third. I liked his ideas, and I wanted to expand on them and present them in the context of a precise understanding of what a game is and what combat itself is.

Here’s the two sides:

Combat as a Sport: Two sides are equally balanced via Challenge Rating; you get a series of equally matched encounters in a module. Everything is more or less fair.

Combat as War: Encounters are unbalanced, and you will die if you pick a fight every single time. Combat is a killer of individual characters and sometimes parties as a whole. It’s better to avoid combat whenever possible. Getting into a fight means you failed as a player.

Here’s my approach:

COMBAT IS A CHALLENGE.

All games involve using player skill to overcome challenges. Games that present no challenge are boring. Challenges that are impossible to overcome are frustrating and hence boring. Challenges that test your abilities as a player, forcing you to be creative and use your resources in innovative ways, are what make a game fun.

As Night Danger said, combat is fun. It’s fun precisely because there are real stakes involved, that being the loss of all the time you’ve put into a character (and losing that stings), and because you can use the resources at hand—equipment, weapons both mundane and supernatural, roleplaying skills, tactical acumen, rules mastery—to overcome the challenge.

Game Design 101: Real difficulty and real stakes make a challenge fun.

Combat is an enjoyable part of the game, but should present real risks. Not every encounter should be balanced or beatable. Some will wipe out the whole party in an instant.

Part of the challenge of play lies in judging which situation you’re facing. But if combat does happen, the game mechanics need to support making it a challenge to be overcome.

Maneuver, enemy and ally morale, resource allocation, attack and defense, positioning, and VIOLENCE OF ACTION. The mechanics should support all of these, as well as reflect the weapons and armor in play. If the mechanics support these, “realistic” tactics will emerge as players learn how to best utilize the tools at hand.

Combat is a tactical wargame challenge. If the players are good at utilizing the tools they have available to overcome the enemy, to defeat the challenge, they can win. And have fun doing so.

Even if characters die in the process.

Where Did “Orcs As Klingons” Come From?

Orcs, in Tolkien’s works, are an inherently evil race of raiders, murderers, cannibals, and rapists. They are utterly evil, without any redeeming qualities except a low sort of loyalty to their masters.

In modern fantasy, such as NuD&D and Warcraft, Orks are (in essence) Klingons. They’re Noble Savages, warlike and ferocious tribals who nonetheless have a code of honor, and are capable of love and tenderness towards their own families and tribes. For those in the know, they are more like Tharks with two arms than Tolkien’s orcs.

A question arose on Twitter: where did this approach come from? Here’s my answer:

The “barbarian reaver” (as in the Mongol Horde or the Huns) has fallen out of fashion intellectually and in stories. Civilization has come to be seen as something equal to tribalism, or maybe even inferior (environmental damage, etc) so the Noble Savage came to replace it.

More, actual inherently evil monsters have fallen off the map in the last 12 years. Today’s players and game designers prefer a “nice” Twee&D where instead of adventuring in dangerous and dimly lit labyrinths, the trackless wilderness, and the urban jungle, you hang out in coffee shops and at a magical college prom.

Danger is out; lattes are in.

The combination of these two influences has taken orcs from the footsoldiers of evil armies, brutal and nasty, into just another kind of barbarian tribe, from which Barbarians (the class) come. This is a mistake.

We already have barbarians, plenty of barbarians, in humanity’s own history. These are reflected in the many settings of Dungeons & Dragons, from Greyhawk to Oriental Adventures, and we need not use a non-human race to duplicate these.

Non-human races should be NON-HUMAN. They should be alien in some way, varying from humanity, not just carbon copies of the real world people we know so well.

Elves are long lived, stand-offish, and inherently magical. Dwarves are stoic, greedy, more comfortable under a mountain than in the sun, and they have an innate relationship to stone. And orcs are savage, violent, and inherently malign. This is who they are.

Erasing inherently evil creatures erodes some of the variety of the game. It makes it LESS diverse. It makes it more bland, less wondrous, and less compelling.

Bring back evil orcs. Dungeons & Dragons needs them.

Secrets of the Planes of AD&D

There’s a lot of deep thinking that goes into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, much of which just isn’t explained in the books, so you have to infer a lot, or study the sources Gygax was drawing from to deduce. Here’s some secrets of the Outer Planes, gleaned from reading the various manuals and related materials.

In AD&D, the Outer Planes are the afterlife where souls go when they die; originally only clerics could cast spells to allow travel there because they are the domains of the gods and their servitors.

There were no Neutral clerics because there was no Neutral Outer Planes. True Neutral was the Prime Material plane, in the middle of the planes. (Check out the diagram above.)

Druids, the True Neutral Cleric sub-class, worshipped “nature”, or the Prime Material plane.

The Abyss is apparently inspired by Paradise Lost, as well as the Bible. In Genesis, is said to be the place of primeval chaos from which the world was created and in later books it is the place where demons dwell. Gygax drew on all of these sources to make the Abyss be Chaotic Evil.

The Ethereal plane was the domain of spirits and ghosts. Its quicksilver nature resembles the “Spirit World” of gospel and folklore, and was probably inspired by such.

Dungeons & Dragons was inspired by a wide swathe of folklore, literature, and scriptural sources, and the advanced version of the game drew on even wider sources (including a bag of plastic Chinese toys). if you go spelunking through the rules, you’ll find a bunch of strange correspondences between the game and pre-existing material.