Thread by @AlexandraErin

(Caution to bystanders: Do not @ me with RPG suggestions or "Have you tried...?", that's not what we're doing here.)

So, I enjoy D&D-style tactical combat and I've been trying to drill down what I like about it while moving away from what I see as the wargame fossils in it...

https://twitter.com/micamoan/status/1463345751875072000

...which I think robs it of a lot of narrative richness and the actual dramatic potential of combat by basically reverting to the "all these characters are just *very small* units in a war game and they're fighting to the death" model as soon as combat is joined...

...and in between working on models of tactical combat that allow for more back and forth, more variety of win and loss conditions, more ways for the player side to lose and the game and story keep going... I keep thinking about things like the Kids on Conveyances system.

In Kids on..., the "combat system" as I recall it is that when there's a conflict between two characters, it's abstracted as a contested roll, and if the player wins, they describe how the fight goes.

Which, you know, a fight between a kid and an adult in a Juvenile Adventure Show... it tends to be over quickly, because generally either the kid pantses (or something) the adult and gets away, or the adult grabs them and it's over, and they only show it if it's interesting.

And that system is designed to tell the kind of story where mostly people aren't fighting on equal terms or with equal physical or social power, and they're almost contractually and constitutionally not fighting each other to the death, even if in-story one wants the other dead.

But the thing is when I think about a "describe how you're dealing with this person in your way, roll the check, narrate the results" approach as a placeholder for an early test of the basic mechanics of my TTRPG system before I put in combat rules... what I find is, that works?

Because it turns out that most of the time, if I'm playing an RPG, what I want from combat is *not* the detailed tactical combat rules but the cool narrative moments that they enable. The critical hit. The clutch use of a limited ability. The clever use of circumstances. Etc.

And tactical combat... it can be fun and engaging in its own right. Especially if you're a systems nerd and you're really into it. But... it's not much fun if you're the one person at the table who's into it and everybody else is just waiting for it to be over.

And the thing is that once you replace "intricate tactical combat rules with detailed special maneuvers that all have their own rules" with "You know what your character's deal is. What are they throwing at this problem? Okay, roll for it."... first, there's a lot less waiting.

And second, the same conflict resolution method being used to abstractly answer if you can pants an adult or verily cleft an orc/king in twain also works fine with whatever else the character's deal is, so long as the player can tell a story about it, or at least an explanation.

So that's where I am right now in my TTRPG design. And when I go back to running D&D, I'm going to be handing more narrative control over to players when they're interacting with NPCs, violently or otherwise. Let their ideas for dealing with This Guy just (potentially) work.

I've always been pretty skeptical of the 3E style "Diplomancer" builds on the grounds that I feel like persuasion should have limits because people have limits, and I still agree with the idea expressed in that clause.

But the NPC's not a real person whose limits are known.

And when I think back over my years of running D&D to all of the ideas players had that they were really into that I shot down out of character or no-sold in-character because "Well, this person obviously isn't going to go for that."...

I have regrets.

I've always pooh-poohed the very typically D&D way of running combat that's "Well obviously kobolds never stand within fireball radius of each other because they know wizards exist and obviously they go right past the big warrior for the scrawny guy because wizards exist", etc...

...and the people who metagame the NPC side of combat like that will always insist that the reason they *have* to leverage every scrap of system knowledge they have is because "Well, it's realistic, because it's a fight to the death so they want to win.", which I hate.

Like the video where Spoony explains the 3E contrivance of the "Conga Line of Death" (when a room full of combatants end up fighting in a line so they can all be flanking one another) and he says how much he hates it, then basically sighs and says, "But you gotta do it."

Because why would any kobold *not* take +2 to hit? It wouldn't be realistic for the kobolds to not all want +2 to hit, so turn by turn they rearrange the fight from a semi-plausible skirmish into a farcical side effect of mechanical metagaming. And it sucks but "you gotta do it".

And I'm like... if you don't want that to keep happening, then stop doing it. Take advantage of the flanking rules in a way that feels natural and produces the results you *want*. It's so obvious.

But all along I've had the same kind of dead angles in my game running.

I've been vicariously angry at other DMs who shut down their players' combat tactics both creative and "this is literally from the book, they're just using their characters' key class features" on the basis that they don't like to think they'd fall for it so the NPCs won't.

But at the same time that's often by my response to out-of-combat gambits (and get-out-of-combat gambits) by players, thinking "There's no way this official would go for this wacky pitch they're making." and not "Well... could it be interesting if they did?"