I Hate Monsters & They Hate Me
This is as short as I can make what is basically a polemic on the combat procedure of many OSR games because I hate it like Herod hated the baby jesus.
Why, though? What’s wrong with it? They’re tedious. They’re an investment of time and effort that could be better spent thinking about the next fight, room, social milieu, or character advancement. So much work dedicated to grinding away at X-many Hit Points, the pretence of each action being representative of some risk often giving way to painful theatre.
I know that I want to kill the bugbear, and I know the bugbear wants to kill me. There is no benign reason to draw things out for the dice’s sake.
Fixing the problem first means identifying the part that slows things down the most. In most games, this has got to be any system which defines “turn order”; rolling for initiative, or action speed, or 3-inch-squares-per-turn. Because most systems also have a means to track whether an attack can be reacted to or not, and it’s rolling for the attack itself.
This has the effect of reducing the combat minigame down to actions which all have real value.
Cal, a design friend of mine, managed to get this down to a science, and I’ll reproduce his method here:
Combat includes 2 phases, planning and action. During the planning phase, every “side” in the combat gets 30 real life seconds to think of what they’re going to do. The player group and the GM are, importantly, counted as different sides, considering that the GM is playing the monsters. This also means that while players are bound to communicate what they’re planning to do with each other, they get no such dialogue from the GM’s side.
Once those 30 seconds are up, the monsters do what they want to do, and the players do the same. There are often attempts at actions which fail due to poor rolls, or are changed amidst suddenly relevant information like seeing a specific character being attacked. Enemies may be caught unaware, or make morale checks with unexpected results, due to actions they did not accurately plan for. Not that it’s any different for player characters and their hirelings.
And then when everyone has finished their allotted number of actions, they go back to the planning phase. So it continues until combat finishes.
In Cal’s game, where I first experienced this approach to combat, it usually took 3 rounds and less than 5 minutes, despite characters having substantial abilities and options at their disposal, it never felt rushed or “dumbed down”. In line with “Experience As Ideas”, it only left us all with a better understanding of how to apply the abilities we had.