The Gaming Den

So people whined and bitched about 3e because of ROCKET LAUNCHER TAG. Like, I could hit you with an attack and you would die on a failed save. Or maybe you wouldn't even get a save, because my attacks were so powerful you just took hundreds of damage and died.

Then 4e had "padded sumo", with impotent characters wailing on each other for 20 rounds with pathetic attacks like losers. The only people who thought that was cool also fantasize about Mike Mearls inserting his shriveled smelly penis into their oral cavity.

Nowadays, people say they want something in between. Not too hot, not too cold, but just right.

I'm here to proclaim to you that Rocket Launcher Tag is better than "in between" and better than padded sumo.

Let's say you have a 50% chance to defeat your enemy with an attack or spell or whatever. That means you will defeat your foe in one or two turns only. Say you sometimes need another turn to sort out positioning sometimes. That means your enemy will be defeated (or will defeat you, if it's roughly equal in strength) in 1-3 turns ONLY.

Similarly, say you have an attack that pretty much always hits, and tends to knock off 50% of your enemy's health on a hit. Again, if you factor in a turn of positioning, you are talking about 1-3 rounds ONLY.

Throw in some special defenses or counters and you might bump things up to 4 rounds maximum. MAXIMUM.

I'm telling you... THAT IS ENOUGH. Why dick around for longer than that? It's almost always better for the story's progression to have MORE short battles than it is to have FEWER long battles. Remember, the story doesn't progress much during a single two hour fight scene. What if you had three fights in those two hours, with a bunch of non-combat stuff in between?

I've seen a lot of people say "Fights should be five rounds on average!" That's just too damn long.

People complain, "Oh no, the big important villain died in only one hit!!! cry cry cry!!!" Seriously, is that such a big deal? I don't see why it should be. Happens all the time in stories.

You might say, "OMG my character got knocked out in one hit!" But if the fights are short, that's okay! If your team can't fix you on the fly, they can fix you right after the fight -- which is short! As long your compadres have the ability to fix your condition after (be it Dead, or Petrified, or KO, or Paralyzed...whatever), what's the big deal?

My conclusion: If you are making a fantasy game with hardcore wizards and warriors and monsters, most people should be defeated in one or two attacks. And I don't mean "fully optimized characters run by ultra-nerds with absolute system mastery" should kill things that fast. EVERYONE should kill things that fast. Anything more is shit.

Discuss.

I'm not going to argue with that, I like the idea of short, decisive battles.

There are some definite arguments in favor. I mean, if you're a badass assassin, and you sneak up on somebody and shank them, you'd expect them to be very seriously wounded at least - probably dead if they weren't tough as nails. 20% wounded? Insufficient.

Also, it means you can have things like "Decapitating Strike" and "Disintegrate" without restricting them to the end of the fight or making them a sick joke (ala 4E).


There is a downside though - it definitely cuts down on what types of tactics and resource systems you can have. If the fight only lasts 1-3 rounds, then any tactics that take longer than a single round are almost useless. Climb up the pillar so you can swing down the chain and kick the death knight into a pit? Unless that move is nearly guaranteed victory, you're a chump for trying it.

Also, many resource systems just don't work with that short a duration. Per-encounter? May as well be at-will. Charge up? Probably useless. Cooldown? Who cares, fight's over already. Combos? You can't even do "five moves of doom", more like "two moves of doom". Conditional moves? Not much time to use them.


So whether it's strictly better depends on what you want out of combat. I would say that RLT shifts much of the tactics from in-combat to pre-combat, because things like getting surprise, preparing for the particular foes, and having the right defense in advance are relatively more important the shorter the battle is.

So who ever win initiative is the one who gets to kill things, and everyone else doesn't get to do anything? That seems unfun to me.

By that same token I'm not going to enjoy making a new character every ~4 fights, let alone multiple times in one gaming session because I happened to get instant gibed by an NPC that went first.

Previn wrote:So who ever win initiative is the one who gets to kill things, and everyone else doesn't get to do anything? That seems unfun to me.

By that same token I'm not going to enjoy making a new character every ~4 fights, let alone multiple times in one gaming session because I happened to get instant gibed by an NPC that went first.

The responses to those are to allow group initiative and not have getting taken out of a fight be character death. You could also shift things a little towards the PC side, where a PC gets dropped in 2-3 turns while a monster goes down in 1-2.

Ice9 has good points as well: it's at-will, pre-combat charging or nothing under RLT.

This might be me being a dumbass but doesn't rlt destroy granularity so that your post-combat options are "fine, half dead, and all dead"? That seems like a problem. You certainly can't very well balance a series of encounters like a dungeon crawl this way because it is super swingy. Also, swingy is bad for the survivability of PCs (who we presume are supposed to survive)

Mask_De_H wrote:Ice9 has good points as well: it's at-will, pre-combat charging or nothing under RLT.

Actually, RLT is very good for conditional utility.

Where picking the right ability gets "instakill" and picking the "wrong ability" gets 2 round kill, you care a lot more about using the right abilities, so things like Snowscaper type classes don't just default to icebeam every turn.

(I mean, ignoring for the moment that 3e is RLT, and Snowscapers don't default to icebeam.)

Generally, it makes it lamer if you go for an oldskool dungeoncrawl where you have no idea what you're getting into and every encounter is "You and X suddenly spot each other, COMBAT STARTS!" Though there are solutions to that:
1. Stop doing boring oldskool dungeoncrawls, fuck. I mean, they're the most modern and revolutionary things of the eighteenth century.
2. Don't make death literally death for most cases. So the PCs gank all enemies but one PC goes down? They finish the enemies off (and they totally die), then bring that one PC back around. If retreat/surrender get made into something that works, even better!
3. Actually provide opportunities for players to research and plan for encounters - they find out what the enemies are, prepare an ambush, get the fight happening in terrain they benefit from and so on. Oh, I guess that's the same as solution 1.

The bit where one PC acts and then it's over can be a problem for giving everyone a turn, but I hear you can fight groups of weaker monsters (that can each cause a really painful injury but not a OHKO usually) rather than one fat dragon with a TPK effect. So everyone can one-shot a single enemy or whatever.

I mean, 3E is a real thing. And it doesn't typically suffer from "PCs die all the time" or "one player acts, all enemies are dead and we go home for tea and biscuits".

I thought old school dungeon crawl was all about making sure that what combat happened was already largely in your favor, and lots of pains were to be taken to avoid stumbling around into monsters.

Just because you're doing rocket launcher tag doesn't mean you can't have resource management systems. Just add more monsters. The 3e concept where you fought your monsters one at a time was really weird and kind of dumb.




-Username17

Remember -- as noted by Frank on numerous occasions -- the length of a fight in real-world minutes is much more important than the length of a fight in fantasy-world rounds. If your rounds only take 5 seconds of real-world time, a fight that lasts 4 rounds is going to be a bit silly ("Hit, hit, hit, hit and sunk! Next fight...").

How long I want a combat to last depends on how engaging the system is. I don't mind longer fights as long as they aren't boring. If a fight comes down to: Move 6 spaces, roll at will attack, every turn then, yea I'm gonna want that to end pretty damn quick. If combat were more engaging, like say chess can be, then I am more than willing to have it be lengthier.

MGuy wrote:How long I want a combat to last depends on how engaging the system is. I don't mind longer fights as long as they aren't boring. If a fight comes down to: Move 6 spaces, roll at will attack, every turn then, yea I'm gonna want that to end pretty damn quick. If combat were more engaging, like say chess can be, then I am more than willing to have it be lengthier.

exactly. nobody likes auto-attack, but setting up conditions which insure victory is fun. if the latter takes one round, RLT is fine, if it takes more than one round, it's perfectly fine for battle to last several rounds.

Conflicts become boring when the outcome is already known, but there is still grinding to get to the end point.

A fight doesn't necessarily mean it's less important than a talking head scene either, you can work story into the fight, or the actions of your enemy are part of the storytelling experience (cowardly orcs and disciplined hobgobs will react differently and so on)

But yeah it's better to be too short than too grindy. I've enjoyed tense retroclone games where I either smash the skeleton to itty bitty pieces or they stick their fingerbones through my torso more than I enjoy swatting a few minions on my way to a brute to whittle down because I used my daily already.

*how many rounds of combat does Lvl4-9D&D tend to be? Leaning towards optimized.

Having recently played a campaign spanning level 1 to level 22. Rocket Launcher tag does grate on the feelings of the players and DMs in such a system. Initiative becomes the most important thing and a game becomes a series of interrupts and counter interrupts and so forth.

Generally speaking people would like a combat with more rounds. However, as mentioned by others in this thread, if taking a round of combat takes forever, then we definitely want the combat to have fewer rounds. I think is is just more a side effect of the complexity of 3.5E combat and all the decisions involved.

I notice in adventures where there's only 1 player or 2 players, the combat seems to be a whole lot more memorable. Why? Because each player gets more spotlight and the combat time and we can have more combats.

I think this is just a reality of the tabletop and it's just flatly slower than playing a videogame. The better players and DMs can be trained to act quickly in combat the better.

I think it is essentially false that most resources management systems fail to work well in RLT. At-will is to be preferred for various reasons. However, contrary to ICE9's claim, per-encounter seems fine for some things. Sure, one might only get a single attack in some quick battles. But in other battles, even if you only get two or three attacks, it is quite meaningful to have an ability that can only be used once. "Setup moves" need to provide almost guaranteed victory, as he said -- so you can just have them do that. This can make things intense and interesting, because players can try to stop enemy setup moves, and stop enemies from stopping their setup moves. Same for "conditional movies," if I understand what is meant by that.

bill bisco wrote:Initiative becomes the most important thing and a game becomes a series of interrupts and counter interrupts and so forth.

Initiative seems to be something that annoys people the most. If there is a combat scene, players want to act in it. That's pretty reasonable, really. They don't want to just get KO'ed without their own chance to act, just because their initiative roll was ass.

How do you deal with this?

Damage could be applied only after _everyone's_ turn. So even if an attack kills you, you could still act that turn. There are some board games and video games that do that. I can't think of an RPG that does it.

Another option is to have a meaningful tradeoff between the ability the act first and something else.

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People also don't like when there is a crazy arms race. So that means winning and losing in combat is less a matter of dice and tactics, and more about whether or not you had an X-Shield to block the X-Beam.

To avoid that problem, you need to limit the advantage gained by using attacks to which opponents are especially vulnerable. Also, full immunities should be rare. Yet you still need to have some meaningful strengths and weaknesses to expand the tactical dimension. This seems to be a complex problem.

infected slut princess wrote:Damage could be applied only after _everyone's_ turn.

and what about effects like web?

I think there is a pretty strong argument for collapsing all rolls in combat down to one roll a turn max.

The counterargument is that people do like saves and soaks and damage rolls and multiple actions per turn that need rolls to resolve, but that stuff quickly adds up to very slow and boring turns for everyone else.

Even "one roll a turn" is pretty variable, going from Toon to HERO damage rolls.

Rolling a single die is quick and easy.

Rolling a single die and adding a bunch of modifiers is slightly less quick, but still generally easy.

Rolling multiple dice, summing them and then adding modifiers tends to be not-quite quick.

Rolling multiple dice, looking for a specific properties on each die (Dice pool systems, HERO normal damage Body) is only quick for very small numbers of dice.

Rolling multiple dice, looking for specific properties on each die and also for properties in the entire set of dice isn't quick (Storyteller, where 1s negate sucesses and 10s count as multiple successes and any 1s left in a set with no net successes; or HERO normal damage for both Stun and Body)

If you want a system with saves and soaks and multiple actions per turn and out of turn interrupts, you're better off with a die rolling convention that resolves things faster.

Josh_Kablack wrote:If you want a system with saves and soaks and multiple actions per turn and out of turn interrupts, you're better off with a die rolling convention that resolves things faster.

i've never understood why you roll for attacks and ac assumes a 10, while you don't roll an attack for spells but roll for a save. i think that's something 4e did right: let the attacker roll the dice and do away with saves in favor of defenses.

zugschef wrote:

Josh_Kablack wrote:If you want a system with saves and soaks and multiple actions per turn and out of turn interrupts, you're better off with a die rolling convention that resolves things faster.

i've never understood why you roll for attacks and ac assumes a 10, while you don't roll an attack for spells but roll for a save. i think that's something 4e did right: let the attacker roll the dice and do away with saves in favor of defenses.

If swinging a sword and magic rays are different rolls, it helps with the immersion that magic and sword swinging are fundamentally different.

when both a sword swing and a magic bolt are "roll vs target's REF", it is 'samey'. In 3e dodging a giant boulder (giant rolls attack) and dodging a fireball (you roll reflex) feel different because of how it's rolled. When you're used to that and move on to 4e where fireballs are an attack roll, it can feel very samey.

This bothers some people, others don't care.

it would be an improvement if an attack spell and a melee attack wouldn't be perceived as fundamentallz different. at least that's the way i see it.

zugschef wrote:it would be an improvement if an attack spell and a melee attack wouldn't be perceived as fundamentallz different. at least that's the way i see it.

Right, you're still rolling an attack of some kind.

K wrote:I think there is a pretty strong argument for collapsing all rolls in combat down to one roll a turn max.

The counterargument is that people do like saves and soaks and damage rolls and multiple actions per turn that need rolls to resolve, but that stuff quickly adds up to very slow and boring turns for everyone else.

If you have an attack roll and a damage roll, then one player has to do two distinct procedures with his action. If there is an attack roll by Player A, then a soak roll by Player B, this splits up the work. They can even be done at the same time.

As long as the operations are not absurdly complex, the second option seems to preserve speed of play, yet also engages the player a bit more. Maybe. What do I know? I'm just a whore!

even if some rolls can be rolled at the same time, practice has shown that rolling just once is always faster.