Combat in roleplaying games has a lot of variation, but most game systems break it up into two main components: how hard it is to hit someone, and how much damage that person can withstand.
So in Dungeons & Dragons, everything has an Armor Class, which determines what one must roll in order to score a hit. Armor Class is a combination of protection from armor and shield, the character's ability to dodge and avoid blows, and any magical protection guarding him from harm.
If you do get hit, you lose Hit Points. Hit Points represent your ability to shrug off damage due to your innate toughness, luck, and years of experience. That's why a high-level character has many more Hit Points than a novice: he's better at avoiding harm.
But isn't that the same as Armor Class? Isn't that also your ability to avoid harm or absorb damage? And what about Saving Throws? Aren't they also a measure of how well the character can keep from getting hurt?
Other roleplaying systems tried to address this paradox. In original Traveller, armor affected how well certain weapons could hit someone, but when a character did take damage it directly reduced his physical attributes — making him slow, or weakened, or reduced in stamina. When I first started playing Traveller I thought this was odd and unwieldy, but now I kind of like it.
GURPS made your ability to avoid being hit entirely a matter of agility and skill, and armor simply absorbed part of the damage done to you. GURPS characters could improve their skills with experience, but their damage capacity remained more or less fixed. Gamers accustomed to high-level D&D characters, able to ignore dozens of sword blows or arrows, were always shocked by how fragile even the toughest GURPS characters are.
Some systems tried to localize the damage, so that a hit to the arm would have different results than a hit to the leg or abdomen. (GURPS used that as an optional rule.) I always found hit locations to be overly complicated: instead of rolling twice (once to hit, once for damage), hit locations rules add a third roll, and probably an extra step of calculations to see how the damage to that body part affects the character.
Combat systems in roleplaying have to satisfy multiple contradictory requirements:
• First, they have to feel realistic. A powerful sword blow or a hit from a heavy firearm should be deadly.
• Second, they have to allow quick takedowns. The commando must be able to silence a guard before he can raise the alarm, and a burly bruiser should be able to knock down a scrawny heckler with one punch.
• Third, they have to allow the player characters to survive. Which means an enemy commando should not be able to kill an unsuspecting hero before he can react.
• Fourth, they should be fast-paced and smooth-running in actual play.
• Fifth, they should allow for skilled swordplay, secret martial-arts techniques, and cunning tricks invented on the fly.
• Sixth, they should be able to account for all possible situations, no matter how bizarre, and have clear rules about them to avoid arguments.
As you can see, these goals are contradictory. Emphasizing realism slows everything down and makes fights deadly (because real fights often are deadly). Emphasizing story means player characters are somehow much more lethal than non-player characters. Emphasizing play balance means weapons are often underpowered.
Sadly, there is no one great combat system which can do everything and please everyone. The trick, I think, is to decide what kind of "reality" the game is going to simulate, and find a system which does that well.
So if you're playing a Western, you'll need a combat system with quick-draw rules so that a highly-skilled gunfighter can get off the first shot. But that shot's going to be deadly — possibly leaving the wounded man time to gasp out a confession or a mysterious clue before dying. Armor is (mostly) useless and hit points are low, but gunfighters can make use of concealment or shoot from hard cover, and it's hard to hit a moving target so galloping out of town is usually a good way to keep from getting killed.
By contrast, a Musketeers game should have plenty of parries and counter-thrusts, with bonuses for chandelier-swinging or a goblet of wine to the enemy's face. Wounds are seldom fatal, though, and an opponent bloodied in a duel can be back in his box at the Opera in just a few days.
Complicating all this is the problem of the learning curve. It takes time and mental effort to learn a new game system, and often players simply aren't willing to do that much work. This is why you see gamemasters using the Pathfinder/D&D 3.5 system to run a modern espionage game, or Victorian ghost-hunters. The rules may be an awkward fit, but the players are familiar with them so just throw out some patches and house rules and get on with the game.
I'm a firm believer in simplicity. For instance, I think hitting and doing damage should be combined into a single die roll. Add up your bonuses, subtract the target's defenses, and the result is how much damage you do. Or perhaps have both combatants roll, with the difference as the damage inflicted by the loser. I think the fewer die rolls and the less mathematical calculating, the better.
Dice do have a place. I've tried various diceless systems and most were unsatisfying. In the Amber Diceless system, the "highest Warfare ability always wins" mechanic worked because the game was all about social conflict and intrigue rather than open fighting. But that's a highly specific setting.
Greg Porter created one called Epiphany which was diceless but still gave the player some agency: each character had one or more combat points (based on skill, physique, weapons, magical bonuses, etc.) but could allocate them to offense or defense. So a weaker combatant might still be able to overcome a superior foe by clever allocation. I've never actually played that one.
The actual "roll of the dice" does have some useful features. First, it marks an end to the decision-making stage. Dither all you like, but once you roll, you're committed. Second, it provides a good physical action and a moment of tension, mirroring the imaginary battle being waged.
All of us have a paradoxical relationship to violence. We don't like to be hurt, but as human animals we have a hard-wired urge to settle problems with physical action. (Men and women both: it was a female player who said "Enough talk, let's kill something" in a game I played in.) It's satisfying to come up with a cunning plan that avoids all confrontation with the enemy . . . but it's more satisfying to drive them before you, take their horses and goods and hear the lamentations of the women.
Game systems try to satisfy those conflicting desires. I think the key to a successful combat system is to know what desires you want to satisfy.
For two stories about conflicting desires and exciting combat, buy my new ebook Outlaws and Aliens!
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