Ditching Team-on-Team combat in RPGs

[Josh_Kablack]

Most RPGs are descendants of RPGs which are descendants of tactical minis games. Such games were used to play out force vs. force combats. And as RPG genres expanded, that was a really good fit for modeling stuff like the Fellowship of the Ring vs. the Uruk Hai or the Avengers vs. The Sinister Six. With only minimal tweaking, systems set up up for Team PC vs Team Monster matches can also handle Team PC vs single Boss Monster.

But, there is a fair amount of source material (fighting games, several anime) where fighting just does not work like that - it's mostly one on one with only occasional many-on-one or one-on-many matches, never many-on-many fights. Team on team combat does not happen as the protagonists will break into solo fights, using lines like "Leave this to me", "or this is his fight, and his alone" to enforce 1-on-1 combat.

And systems that assume team on team combat often have mechanical breakdowns in one-on-one fights, where things are either too simplistic and/or much too lopsided.

But conversely, running one-on-one fights in an RPG system deep enough to be tactically interesting makes it so only one of the PCs is getting screen time during such a fight with the traditional small-group social RPG setup.

So purely in the interest of genre simulation (and to avoid acutally useful work on my own games), I would like to brainstorm hypothetical ways in which one could run an RPG with most conflict being one-on-one and yet keep multiple players engaged.

1. Everybody takes turns, really long turns. In this setup fights are one on one, and they are resolved in sequence. Or at least mostly resolved, this is used frequently in movies, shows and comics for dramatic effect. This does not work well in RPGs as it outright requires players to be out of the spotlight for length periods
2. Three-Ring Circus. In this setup, everybody takes short terms, just like the team-vs-team rules of the game, but nobody influences anyone else's one-on-one fight until they win their own first. This keeps everyone in the spotlight as much as normal, but can easily run into problems with suspension of disbelief and is subject to limited tactical depth and a greater chance of mismatch.
3. Evil Twin - In this setup, fights are one-on-one, but you keep an additional player engaged by giving them the antagonist to run. This is an old trick for making MC's life easier, and can be combined into most of the other options.
4. Tag Team. In this setup, only one PC fights at a time, but other PCs get to swap in as an interrupt when certain conditions are met. This is very metagamey and has issues with suspension of disbelief in RPGs, but is totally how a lot of video game fighters work. It has the drawback that only one player is active, but not quite as badly as really long turns since the inactive players are waiting for their cue to tag in.
5. Moral Support. In this setup, only one PC "fights" at a time, but other PCs have abilities which provide bonuses to the fighter or unlock additional moves for the fighter to use. If you use support abilities which are expected to change round-by-round, this could be a decent way to keep all the players involved in a one-on-one character fight that didn't involve their character.
6. Mid-Fight Flashback - a seemingly odd hybrid of Tag Team and Moral Support that seems to be the way a heckuvalot of anime works. You're all nerds, you've doubtless seen the anime where Dweeb the Impulsive fights Bishonan the Badass Badguy, until Dweeb takes enough of a beatdown that his teamate would be able to swap in if this were Marvel vs Capcom. But Dweeb is the combat character, so there is nobody else to tag in, thus instead a montage of other scenes is triggered - these can range from flashbacks to training montages to memories, to previously unseen speeches from greatful villagers about how Dweeb is their last hope, to memories of the Bishonan's villainy against Dweeb's love interest, to outright taunts from Upperclassman the Rival - but when the noncombat scene ends, Dweeb has attained new understanding and he's back in the fight with his combo meter charged.

What other options are there?

What are other useful combinations?

What are benefits and drawbacks to handling things in various ways?

[Manxome]

My instinct would be a combination of #2 and #5.

Each combatant "engages" a single enemy; "engagement" is mutual and exclusive, so if you engage Bob, that prevents your allies from engaging Bob, and also prevents any other enemies from engaging you. (It strains believability, but can be justified to some extent by saying that allies in a close melee would get in each others' way.) Major attacks only target an enemy you've engaged, but all characters also have "support abilities", typically triggered with some sort of swift/minor/immediate action, that can affect other targets.

So in an even fight, everyone breaks off to engage their alter ego, but everyone is also constantly throwing out support abilities into the other one-on-one fights, doing things like helping an ally escape a grapple, distracting someone so an ally has combat advantage, disrupting an attack, throwing down a minor buff, etc.

In a many-on-one fight, you can't all engage the enemy, so by default one of you engages and the rest are stuck just using their support abilities (no special rules required - that's optimal tactics given the mechanics). However, assuming you've got HP, spell slots, or other ablative resources, it's in your interests to switch out the lead character mid-fight, if you can. You'll want fairly involved mechanics for keeping someone engaged or escaping an engagement, but you needed those anyway so that people can (try to) run away, so in this case "tag team" falls naturally out of the other mechanics.

Optionally, big scary bosses can have "support abilities" that actually pose an existential threat to secondary targets, so the boss taking on the entire PC team can make real attacks against everyone, though he has to focus against whoever he's engaged.

Of course, you'd need something that prevents allies from engaging each other to make themselves immune to enemies' main attacks. Maybe if your engaged opponent fails to damage you for a round (or two) that automatically provides an opportunity for someone else to cut in.

[Josh_Kablack]

In general I like the concept Moral Support + Tag Team done more straightforward than the flashback. Only one PC is "in the ring" at a time, but the rest are "in the lineup" ala Marvel vs SNK. The PCs in the lineup have both Support Abilities and a Tag-In condition.

Now you could do the Support Abilities as actions resolved in round-the-table (or initiative) order, but it might be more interesting to set them up as reactions to stuff happening in the fight - because you could then "react" to moves the PC in the ring performed and develop inter-character combos and synergy.

Or for today's inspiration and something truly hard to sell your game group on actually playing, you could have support abilities be partial moveset swaps in a winds-of-fate grid. I know this is into crazy territory, but bear with me as I make up an example: We have Ken, who normally has the Street Fighting list, the Shotokan Karate list, and the Flaming Fists of Fire list in his WoF matrix. Now in this WoF tag-team support setup Ken gets space for two* more lists in his matrix. And what those lists are depends on who the next two* PCs in the lineup is. If say, Ryu is next up, then Ken gets to add Ryu's "Way of the Honorable Warrior" support list to his WoF matrix; and if Cammy is after Ryu, then Ken gets to add her "Impress the Girl" support list to his WoF matrix. Ken still gets to use his basic moves, but he has additional movesets that are contingent upon his teamates who are not active combatants. The point of this craziness is that the players not actively fighting get to switch positions in the lineup, and thereby vary the moveset available to the in-the-ring character in a meaningful way. So if there's nothing useful against the current opponent on the "Honorable Warrior List", then Guile could step ahead in the lineup, giving Ken access to his "Soldier On, Buddy" support list instead. Thus the out-of-combat characters have to communicate moveset uses to each other as well as the active character and the whole group participates in a combat that technically only involves one character.

*or you could use a number other than two, but smaller than your whole playgroup. Two just made the example easier.

Now for those of you who absolutely hate the idea of WoF, this could also be done - and might even be better - with characters providing support abilities which are additional movesets, but the ability to provide that moveset runs on a cooldown timer (or other resource management scheme). The advantage here is that the normal added bookkeeping of such mechanics is actually helpful in keeping the players of the "lineup" characters occupied, and hopefully engaged.

[name_here]

The games I tend to play with my cousin involve varying between multiple people at dramatically appropriate moments. Of course, that only works if people enjoy kibitzing and listening to other fights.

[Manxome]

A mechanic where the support characters give more options to the lead character but do not take any actions themselves (other than changing order) does not sound to me like it makes the support characters more involved.

[Josh_Kablack]

Hrm, point taken, but that does lead to option 7:

7. The Democratic Combatant. In this setup, only one character enters combat at a time - but during such combat each and every *player* gets to choose that character's actions according to some sort of pre-set split or turn rotation.

That's an odd experience, and dilutes the primary player's narrative control over their character, but potentially workable within the usual tight constraints of RPG combat. Heck, if this is implemented in a system where damage to HP is set to 4e-or-about-that-soft, it's probably even workable to have the character take his/her set of one actions per PC and then have the antagonist take a similar set of actions.

[K]

I think some combo of Tag Team and moral support is doable.

So you could have the main guy for the battle be the one best suited for that battle, then have people add stuff and interrupt actions as needed.

So you might have an enemy who is a Wizard. Your own Wizard becomes The Main, the the Fighter jumps in to block attacks and the Rogue pops in to fire off damage and restricting attacks but the Wizard-on-Wizard battle is the core of the battle, ending with some climatic end move like Stone to Flesh.

[Username17]

The democratic combatant sounds like you might as well just give each player a robot lion rather than try to get one player to be Voltron's left leg.

For the players to be engaged, I think they have to be choosing an action every round. Singing bards contribute to the party's chance of success, but the players find it boring and unengaging to provide a passive bonus and then not have anything to do for the rest of combat.

The other players could have available events that they could play on the field and the combatants, but you're really looking at providing 3 or 4 such events for every action taken by the character who is actually fighting. And that is going to dilute individual events so hard that they won't feel important.

Honestly, I don't think there is room for more than one player in a passive assistance role to one player in a duel. Which means that the number of simultaneous combats pretty much has to be at least half the number of players outside the occasional rare exception where a single player duels someone as a side quest plot point.

You have the Duelist and you have the Second who plays moral support and places favorable terrain and shit. I can't see there being room for more than that.

-Username17

[shadzar]

The problem is that the game is played by a TEAM of people all working towards the same goal. this TEAM forms a party and sets out to work on all the small things while trying to take care of the larger goal.

as long as the game is played form a cooperative standpoint, then everything should emphasize that as best as possible.

If some tactic is to be used during combat, then the best would be assign "roles" to the members of the party. I dont mean the crap like 4th...

Roles like this person takes out the front filed...this other works the right flank, this one the rear flank, etc.

effevtively giving each member of the party a list of target to work on one at a time.

but this combat wills till happen at the same time unless you return to the fornt line firing, then sitting while the second line fires, and you can only return fire at the one currently firing and such as combat of old.

so bumping into someone else will happen unless you take it to some private room to fight one on one with your chosen opponent, and always only have the same number for everyone to fight one on one, which could easily break SoD.

[Lago PARANOIA]

What other options are there?

What are other useful combinations?

What are benefits and drawbacks to handling things in various ways?

If you want something really quick and dirty but applicable to most game systems, you could impose a massive combat bonus to people who have the 'unengaged' status during a non-surprise round. As in if someone isn't targeting attacks at this person or taking some action to declare that they are paying attention to them then they get OMG hueg benefits.

This would cause players to break off in every fight and try to get a character on each of the enemy combatants that they see. If you seeded the encounters so that elite or trash mobs were rare, a lot of battles would resemble the Justice League team fights. There are two stipulations though.

1) One of the players or monsters might defeat their opponents first though and team up against someone. You can then make it so that this sends the players on the fallen person's team to go into panic mode and bring them up or cause morale to break and enemies to flee/surrender after losing just one or two guys. You'll pretty much have to accept this as an inevitability of combat though, but as long as you don't have a 100% commitment to 1-on-1 fights you needn't worry about it.

2) Area attacks will be highly valued. Don't be surprised if people load up on area attacks to try to sneak in a hit on someone else's fight. Of course any system is going to have this problem unless you ban area attacks entirely or you cockblock people from interfering with 'wrong' fights.

[mhensley]

I believe that TROS handled combats like you are looking for- a series of one on one fights. You might want to take a look at that.

[fectin]

What if you had a set of "screw-you, pay attention to me" abilities, but also a set of "run away" abilities?

So generally, the problem with punishing disengagement is that it forces a losers lose resolution. If that were counterable by reflexively activativating an ability which gave higher evasion, higher speed, and an inability to make attacks for e.g. ten minutes, would that work out well?