Anatomy of a Fight Scene, or, What I learned from Buffy

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 5:06 am

I went on a bit of a buffy-watching marathon this past week, and in doing so I noticed that After Sundown really is a quite good engine for emulating buff-style hijinks. Right down to the slayer being a monster that doesn't think she's a monster, and Willow having most of the Dryad powers. However, there was one respect in which AS failed to deliver on the buffy dream, and that was its total failure to deliver anything that looks like a buffyverse fight scene. That really isn't a criticism of AS specifically; rather, every RPG system delivers only one narrowly structured kind of fight.

In After Sundown, as in most games, players trade individual blows and special attacks in combat rounds which represent relatively short periods of real time and are relatively complex to resolve. There are relatively minimal rules for doing anything but slugging during "combat time" and the expected result of a fight is that within a few exchanges every major participant of one side will be incapacitated or routed. Victory in battle, therefor, depends almost entirely on which team came in more prepared, on early advantages, and on tactical combat choices. There are three, interr-related limitations of this system that I find problematic.

Timing: After Sundown has unusually long combat rounds for exactly this reason, but I really don't think we went far enough. IIRC a combat round is 12 seconds, which in most cases still means a firefight will be over in less than a minute. That doesn't give much time for anything other than fighting to happen, but it also means a whole lot of fights simply can't be modeled. Having a way to play out fights that use large amount of game time would let you play out escorts, escapes, and sieges more satisfyingly.

Fairy tale knights can fight from dusk until dawn. A hero can make a heroic last stand, killing as many of the orcs coming through the door as he personally can to buy time for his friends. Two supers can beat each other black and blue through several city blocks, finally collapsing from exhaustion an hour later in the ruins of the commercial sector. But none of those can be played in a game where every 12 seconds are resolved in depth.

Chunking Because each "round" of actions takes so long to resolve, good RPG designers try to minimize the number of combat rounds in each encounter. After Sundown usually has fewer than five. The need to keep the number of combat rounds low compresses the time frame, making all violent encounters take approximately the same amount of game time. There's no way to model a truly epic slugfest where all parties are pushed to exhaustion, or a nigh-invulnerable boss who takes dozens of attacks to bring down, without boring your players to tears.

In fiction, however, some fight scenes go on for a VERY long time. Buffy can spend almost an entire episode trading punches with a hell-god, get knocked through multiple separate walls and both fall for an execute a half dozen clearly marked special combat manuevers. But what's more interesting than the number of tactical shifts in any given fight scene is that the fact that the downward spiral mechanics that rapidly accelerate a fight to its conclusion don't seem to be there. In fact, in Buffy, as in many superhero movies, one gets the impression that most super-on-super fights would go on literally forever if not for outside intervention. Which brings us to the big point:

Steady States
In After Sundown as in most RPGs the assumption is that when a fight starts, everyone at the table will stop doing other things to play out the fight scene until one side or another breaks. There's really no satisfying way to run two stories in parallel when one is a fight because the fight is too granular and takes too long to resolve compared to anything else that uses the same game time. However, in fiction, very often a fight will begin but fail to resolve until some outside event changes the scales.

Often Buffy and a boss monster will go back and forth for ages without either one seriously harming the other, the fight stopping only when an outside ritual is completed, the scenery is completely destroyed, or one side''s allies show up. Having a way to model this kind of "steady state" battle could make the combat minigame interact more fairly with other minigames and allow noncombat PCs room to shine.

Conclusions

I mashed these complaints together into one post because all the ways I can see of addressing them bleed over into each other. I don't yet have anything ready to implement, but I have some intuitions. It would be cool if you could somehow adjust the game time each combat round represented for each individual fight, based on the effectiveness of the weaponry possessed by each side. That would let you play out your running battles and your holding the line scenes, but also give noncombat characters room to act during combat. You could come up with some way for roughly equivalent characters to "neutralize" each other for a set amount of time, which would both allow you to simulate a fight with a large number of tactical exchanges, and allow noncombat scenes to play out during the fight scenes. However we do it, I'd like to see a game where the Fighter character can engage the demon king in one on one combat while the Rogue is searching his treasure room for traps and loot.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 5:56 am

The idea I got while reading this is not fleshed out at ALL. But what if this was a character ability instead of something put in the rules of the entire game. Meaning what if some people get "Nigh Invulnerable!" as an ability and that means they can basically brawl forever. More than that it would have to be some sort of ability where you can basically say "I don't think we can beat this guy. I'm activating Nigh Invulnerable, so me and this monster just stay here and fight forever until one of you guys do something". There are logical flaws here, and I will try to iron some out by the time I come back but as a basic idea I think that is really cool

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 6:19 am

I watched a lot of Buffy fight scenes chunking up After Sundown, and I found that fight scenes being over in a minute or less was pretty standard. Many of them feel longer, and many of them are cut up with commercial breaks or "meanwhile elsewhere" scenes, but the significant majority are over and done in a minute or less. Check it out on Youtube and pay attention to the second counter.

To really do Buffy properly, you'd want to have some sort of rule where a player could declare that a round of combat was going to be spent trading insults instead of fighting, because fights are frequently interrupted by 10-50 seconds of snappy dialog. I'm not really sure how to make that work, which is why After Sundown went out without such a rule.

-Username17

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 6:36 am

FrankTrollman wrote:because fights are frequently interrupted by 10-50 seconds of snappy dialog.

That's just because Whedon wrote it, and all he's really good at is snappy one-liners people quote the next day ten years. It's probably not something you really want in either a game (where I can guarantee most players are not Joss Whedon - one at most will be) or in the majority of "killing demons" or "supernatural fighting" shows (because they should be able to stand up on more than just the rapid banter).

But if you did want to replicate it, you'd probably want to start with something similar to the D&D Demoralise thing where you spend your round talking at someone to (this time significantly) penalise their attacks, but if they spend their turn retorting they can negate it or turn it back on you.

To keep it interesting (rather than "two opposed rolls") you might want say, three (for the R-P-S) targets of attack (ie "I fucked your mum", "What's it like living inside a soul crystal for ten thousand years, did you finish your biography?" and "I can see why you're the master of hypnotism, with a face like that you'd need to be."), although there'd need to be something here that actually makes one choice better or worse than another one in certain cases, and you'd expect the player to actually say something halfway relevant to the avenue of attack.

And then you can go "Okay, so you're making a [Your Mum] Repartee attack against the demon prince? Not too effective there, what with demon princes not having Mums, so -X for that. But hey, you succeed, barely. The demon is angry that you said he's basically adopted, whatever. He makes a [You're a Homo] Repartee attack for his counter, which is super-effective against [Your Mum] attacks - except actually being gay, that doesn't really affect you too much."

Or whatever.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 8:11 am

Banter during fights isn't just a Buffy thing. Basically all the big shounen anime include the idea that characters will battle with each other for several quick attacks and counters, then jump back and yell a conversation at each other, and then charge each other and repeat. Tons of other anime do the same sort of thing (Full Metal Alchemist, Pokemon, Gundam Wing, Slayers). Marvel and DC comics do it all the time, the animated incarnations are particularly guilty of this (Spiderman TAS 1994, X-Men: Evolution).

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 8:29 am

I don't think it particularly matters that the actual choreography of a Buffy fight only lasts 15 seconds. It feels like a ten-minute slugfest, and the combat of a TTRPG trying to model it should also feel like a ten-minute slugfest.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 9:10 am

The main thing to take away from this is that while the actual amount of action in fights is "about right" for five 12-second rounds, very rarely do those five rounds occur back-to-back and there's tons of shit that isn't a part of the combat minigame that happens inbetween.

If you wanted to successfully emulate this, you'd want characters to have a choice of stances like press the attack and back off and if your enemy chooses to press the attack while you are backing off, you get substantial bonuses. Also: you should make each subsequent combat round more swingy than the last, encouraging even characters with an advantage to back off and let their opponents have a breather, because pressing the attack against a backing off opponent gives them bonuses and increases your odds of some attack being a "critical." Which kind of makes sense: even if you have the enemy on the run, chasing them recklessly through hallways during their retreat increases the odds you're going to round a corner into a [insert genre appropriate attack here].

Plus, you can create an entire minigame out of rounds in which players are mutually backing off: adding dialogue attacks like Koumei's described, adding environmental effects like letting players look for fire extinguishers or some shit to use, or set up some kind of clever trap.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 2:29 pm

Personally I always assumed that the fighting was still going on offscreen during the meanwhile-elsewhere scenes, and we only got to see the highlights. Otherwise it's even harder to justify how other people can travel all over Sunnydale during the 45 seconds Buffy is fighting.

Stubbazubba · Post by **Stubbazubba** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 4:11 pm

So, the fact that TTRPGs don't create cinematic action scenes is a revelation now? I thought that was an accepted staple of the medium.

Regardless, OK, so you want to make climactic action scenes into a pseudo-Skill Challenge where Iron Man goes and dislodges the debris that's blocking the helicarrier's turbine, Captain America stands by to pull the red lever at the critical moment and has to fight some mooks, Thor keeps Hulk occupied while Nick Fury improvises how to deal with him, and Black Widow takes it to Hawkeye? Sweet, I can get behind this idea.

Idea #1: Make combat rounds a variable amount of time, depending on what the non-combat people are doing.

Iron Man has to get 3 successes to clear away all the debris and then kick start the turbine. So, Captain America has at least 3 rounds of action that need to be filled. The first can simply be him jumping to the correct ledge. After that, the mooks show up, and each time Iron Man rolls to push the turbine faster, Cap rolls to pop a mook. The mooks roll back. Cap doesn't do so well, and ends up making a Save to not fall off of the helicarrier, catching himself on that cable/wire. Iron Man is done, and now needs Cap to pull the lever, and while that would normally be a free action, it now takes a 'beat' because Cap has to make a Climb check to pull himself back to it. During this beat, Iron Man attempts to extricate himself from the turbine, fails, and takes some damage from the turbine chewing him up. But when Cap successfully makes the Climb check, the lever is pulled, the mag-levs engaged, and Iron Man flies out. One round later, Iron Man shows up and takes out the last mook shooting at Cap.

So, we have 5 rounds here; 3 for Iron Man to do his thing, 1 for Cap to climb back in, and 1 for Iron Man to fly in and end the fight.

Thor has to survive a rampaging Hulk long enough for Nick Fury to figure out a way to get him off the helicarrier. Nick Fury's player says "I'm going to use my 'Order an F-22' ability and order an F-22 to get his attention and get him to attack it, meaning he'll have to jump off of the helicarrier and onto the F-22, whose pilot can just eject at that point and the Hulk won't be our problem anymore." Sounds legit enough, given the genre you're working with. But for that F-22 to get out there is gonna take 3 rounds. Thor needs to be able to not just survive, but keep him in the right location as well. Here you'll have to get creative mechanically to figure out just how to make that work. But it ends up working just fine. Nick Fury gives the orders on the first round, and Hawkeye's mooks show up and start storming the bridge on the 2nd (just so he's not left doing nothing). After the third round, Thor has got Hulk in the right area, and the F-22 opens fire, enraging him, and sure enough, Hulk leaps into action, which is to say, away from the action. Thor then decides to go check on Loki. This takes 1 round. Loki successfully tricks him into the Hulk-cell, and then the GM has a good NPC Agent Coulson show up, Loki kills him using GM fiat (that interaction is completely fiat, no rolls necessary), then drops Thor into the sky. That's the fifth round, maybe sixth if you rule that Loki and Agent Coulson's interaction is a beat unto itself.

Black Widow took some damage, both from the explosion that started this scene and her tango with the Hulk. She's resting and licking her wounds (so there's something you can let people do if they're not actively doing anything else). On the second round, Fury alerts everyone that Hawkeye is moving to the detention level, and Black Widow knows that's her cue. She goes to intercept him (1 round). They fight, and they both really go at it, so in 2-3 rounds, he's out cold. So this takes 5-6 rounds.

It's a good way to make Skill Challenges work better - instead of failure being determined by reaching an arbitrary number of failed rolls, failure is the fact that someone else is potentially paying for every round you don't come closer to success. And this works either for the combat guys or the non-combat guys; the guys in the combat might be trying to stall the enemies so the non-combat guys can 'win' the encounter, or the non-combat guys might be trying to get through their challenge in order to come help the combat guys win the encounter. If that's the case then stalling and not taking damage need to be things the players can reliably do, while they wait for back-up.

What it also means, however, is that the effect of each combat roll can't just be damage. Fighting defensively, evading your enemy to catch a breather (or run entirely), and moving your enemy into a certain position all need to be important as often as delivering a damaging blow.

You also need to be able to emulate big battles where you just take out 3-5 or more mooks in a single beat, a la the Manhattan battle at the end of the movie. That's if decreasing mook numbers is, in fact, inherent to your goal; Captain America, Hawkeye, and Black Widow all spend some time rescuing the civilians caught in the line of fire before Captain America convinces the police to do this for them. After that point, Cap decides that they want to draw as much mook aggro as they can to keep the carnage contained while someone else figures out a way to close the portal, which Black Widow eventually decides to do. This is a nice, big, epic battle sequence which, with variable round or beat lengths, you can do in roughly a similar amount of time as the skirmish above.

The problem inherent in modeling this is that party members are dependent upon each others' success. Failure has a much higher cost when it contributes to someone else's failure, as well. Should PCs fail less, then?

Finkin · Post by **Finkin** » Sun Jun 03, 2012 2:49 am

Rolemaster using the Arms Law (and zero magic, lol imbalance) can get to the level of detail of which you speak, but it bogs down heavily, with players constantly moving.

Most of the fights I played through using that system very much like a simulation of actual melee combat, with opponents circling as they swing, dodge, and parry, looking for a leg up.

Which of course eventually ends with a near-insta-kill crit roll on the charts of doom.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Sun Jun 03, 2012 8:08 pm

Wasn't there a superhero RPG where one round was explicitly supposed to be one panel of a comic book? That's probably the most accurate metaphor to use, I think.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sun Jun 03, 2012 9:27 pm

I know the Marvel RPG used that metaphor. MRPG sucked really bad in general, but it had a pretty good approach to how you should think about the game, making use of more genre conventions and explicitly telling you not to worry about being an exact simulation of anything.

Stubbazubba · Post by **Stubbazubba** » Mon Jun 04, 2012 6:27 am

Marvel Universe RPG to be exact.

In a supers game, you'd want your tactical movement to be pretty abstract, I'd imagine. That's debatable.

Idea #2: Open-ended Combat Actions

The combat engine needs to deliver certain results; hold 'em, move 'em, kill 'em, don't get killed, take a breather, taunt 'em, but also weirder ones like 'use environment' or 'improvise weapon.' While most of these are do-able in most game combat engines, to emulate action media better, you'd make the "kill 'em" option actually the most difficult to set up, and instead of taunts and disarms being strange secondary mechanics which no one uses or even understands, those need to be streamlined into regular combat rolls.

Choosing "kill 'em" "kill 'em" "kill 'em" three rounds in a row needs to expose you like crazy, so you only do that when you've got a serious advantage to press. Perhaps if you take the same action 2 rounds in a row against the same target, you take a defensive penalty? That might be a little harsh. Definitely for aggressive attacks, though, your defense needs to degenerate the longer you stay there. An effective social attack should negate any Breathing benefits, so that you can attack, then taunt them into having wasted their breather, and then attack again.

I'd give everyone just one action per beat/round/panel, whatever you want to call it. Maybe also one Reaction, triggered situationally.

I think the best way to do this is to create a set of stances, each with a set of effect options. Aggressive Stance would let you Move 'em, Knock 'em down, or Intimidate. Balanced Stance would let you Trip 'em, Disarm 'em, or Hold 'em. Defensive Stance would let you Take a Breather, Assist a Party Member, or Taunt. These are just examples for now. Aggressive Stance makes you easier to hit, Defensive Stance makes you harder. If you attack in Aggressive Stance for two rounds in a row, enemies might be entitled to a Reaction attack against you or something. Some of these effects would be in addition to dealing damage, some would replace dealing damage. Improvised attacks would be their own category, I suppose.

This is kind of rambling and incoherent, but hopefully you get the idea.

EDIT: Oh, and the conceit of many non-climax encounters must be that the heroes can't win by fighting, but can still survive long enough for other PCs to 'win' the encounter somehow, whether that's opening a portal back to hell, or getting an F-22 to attack the Hulk, or whatever else. In fact, even climaxes tend to go this way; the final battle in the Avengers was won by Iron Man delivering a nuke to the alien armada, and Black Widow closing the portal, neither of which was really an attack.

Seerow · Post by **Seerow** » Tue Jun 05, 2012 4:41 am

So I've been thinking about this since I read it, I do think it's interesting, and variable combat lengths in particular is something I want to see explored.

Particularly:
-What if the length of the combat round was based off your level, and/or the level of your opponent?

Say for example a couple of level 15 characters going at it, they're evenly matched, so they have a lot of back and forth before managing to land a solid blow. The round timeframe might be measured in minutes rather than seconds, and you might apply some auto damage to both sides (based on basic attack damage or some shit) to represent that each round, in addition to their normal action.

But then put either one of those level 15 character up against a lower level character, and that combat round time shrinks drastically, as there's no back and forth, it's one side frantically trying to do anything at all while the other blows through them.

So you have Hulk smashing hundreds of puny aliens in less time than it takes to tell about it, but when he faces off against Thor, the fight drags out considerably longer as a part of a climactic showdown.

I mean, I'm not sure if this is entirely workable. I'm leaning towards it feels too complicated, but it seems interesting at least.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Tue Jun 05, 2012 6:59 am

Or that same flavour by arbitrarily pausing combat whenever anyone talks, does a chase scene, or heals a companion while the bad guys monologue. Otherwise use more reasonable time frames. How long is the fight? However long it needs to be to do everything you did.

Wulf · Post by **Wulf** » Tue Jun 05, 2012 9:39 am

Its rather simple. When two beings clash in battle, and then step back to trade insults, it is really just a small time-out to gather their breath again.

So in D&D world that would mean, insulting your foe for a round gains you a part of your hitpoints back. Which leads to longer battles...even hours long if you insult each other enough with bantering.

As a sidenote, this normally happens only in small-scale battles like duels. Fighting a swarm of minions is quicker then fighting a duel with the big bad. Minions dont have a personality to insult

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Tue Jun 05, 2012 9:58 am

Wulf wrote:Its rather simple. When two beings clash in battle, and then step back to trade insults, it is really just a small time-out to gather their breath again.

So in D&D world that would mean, insulting your foe for a round gains you a part of your hitpoints back. Which leads to longer battles...even hours long if you insult each other enough with bantering.

As a sidenote, this normally happens only in small-scale battles like duels. Fighting a swarm of minions is quicker then fighting a duel with the big bad. Minions dont have a personality to insult

In SR3, I houseruled that the characters had to spend a combat round (or was it just a complex action?) gathering their breath in order to refill their combat pool. When opponents were evenly matched and/or combat didn't end as soon as it started, it did led to characters trading insults, or circling each other.

You could also imagine a system where the insult have an impact on how much you recover, or how little your opponent is able to recover.

The problem I can see with such a system is that if one character is better than the other, he'd better not stop and keep on fighting, so you might have to add self-control check to see if the character keeps on fighting or feel forced to answer the insult.

Or you can have the character engage in insult duels. ("You fight like a cow!") Or play Dying Earth where combat is so deadly (and uncivilized) that most people would try to persuade each other that they're better than their opponent rather than really fight.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Thu Jul 09, 2015 9:44 pm

DSMatticus wrote:The main thing to take away from this is that while the actual amount of action in fights is "about right" for five 12-second rounds, very rarely do those five rounds occur back-to-back and there's tons of shit that isn't a part of the combat minigame that happens inbetween.

If you wanted to successfully emulate this, you'd want characters to have a choice of stances like press the attack and back off and if your enemy chooses to press the attack while you are backing off, you get substantial bonuses. Also: you should make each subsequent combat round more swingy than the last, encouraging even characters with an advantage to back off and let their opponents have a breather, because pressing the attack against a backing off opponent gives them bonuses and increases your odds of some attack being a "critical." Which kind of makes sense: even if you have the enemy on the run, chasing them recklessly through hallways during their retreat increases the odds you're going to round a corner into a [insert genre appropriate attack here].

Plus, you can create an entire minigame out of rounds in which players are mutually backing off: adding dialogue attacks like Koumei's described, adding environmental effects like letting players look for fire extinguishers or some shit to use, or set up some kind of clever trap.

This is a pretty neat idea. If I ever run After Sundown again, I might try to mathhammer out a working implementation and throw it in. You could use something like the escalation die from 13th age as well and maybe have the backing off action decrease the die's effect.

I wonder whether it would make more sense for sides or individuals to make the decision to press the attack or back off. Having to collectively negotiate each turn whether or not you all will attack seems like it could make turns drag a bit.

Pedantic · Post by **Pedantic** » Thu Jul 09, 2015 10:42 pm

Blicero wrote:This is a pretty neat idea. If I ever run After Sundown again, I might try to mathhammer out a working implementation and throw it in. You could use something like the escalation die from 13th age as well and maybe have the backing off action decrease the die's effect.

I immediately jumped to that mechanic as well, but I think it'd be better to make "exhaustion" or "escalation" a resource that's tracked on a per character basis. Perhaps only someone actively involved in combat has a slowly ticking up counter. It becomes kind of a press your luck mechanic if you go keep fighting to ward off enemies, you can potentially retreat to keep it from increasing,you could have swingy supermoves tied to getting the number up to a certain level and so forth.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Fri Jul 10, 2015 12:47 am

Why have combat rounds of fixed length? Use a time chart, where round one is Time Rank 1, round 2 is Time Rank 2, etc. If the combat goes 4 rounds, it takes 20 minutes. If it lasts 5 rounds, it takes a whole hour.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Fri Jul 10, 2015 1:16 am

FrankTrollman wrote: To really do Buffy properly, you'd want to have some sort of rule where a player could declare that a round of combat was going to be spent trading insults instead of fighting, because fights are frequently interrupted by 10-50 seconds of snappy dialog. I'm not really sure how to make that work, which is why After Sundown went out without such a rule.

-Username17

The easiest way to do it is to have flexible combat round length instead of specific time chunks and make talking a non-action. You presume that when players hold a five minute conversation between gunshots that the actual combat round took five minutes.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Fri Jul 10, 2015 5:05 am

Pedantic wrote: I immediately jumped to that mechanic as well, but I think it'd be better to make "exhaustion" or "escalation" a resource that's tracked on a per character basis. Perhaps only someone actively involved in combat has a slowly ticking up counter. It becomes kind of a press your luck mechanic if you go keep fighting to ward off enemies, you can potentially retreat to keep it from increasing,you could have swingy supermoves tied to getting the number up to a certain level and so forth.

Giving people a new resource to track would make After Sundown's combat a bit more involving. Ideally it would also make it more interesting. It could make things get rather complicated on the MC's end, though.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Fri Jul 10, 2015 6:26 am

So long as exhaustion responds only to your own actions and doesn't care what other people are doing or who the target of those actions are, clumps of spawn can behave identically to one another but just target different PCs, allowing their exhaustion to be tracked collectively. That doesn't solve the problem of a monster mash boss battle with multiple enemies with different builds, though.

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Fri Jul 10, 2015 7:54 am

I had the idea, for "cinematic" combat, of having combat be made up of a collection of vignettes, the way many action movies do when they have multiple characters: you get to see one character do something, then another deal with another situation, etc.

So instead of having a clear view of the situation second per second, you just put each PC (alone or in groups for group actions) through successive scenes.

"Ninjas appear all around [PC1]"
"We cut back to [PC2] who's being held by a fat guy while a small guy is running at him for a running jump kick"
"Meanwhile, the battle has weakened the floor below [PC3] and [PC4]. It will soon crumble!"

The outcomes of these scenes might or might not have an impact on the following scenes, but they've got an impact on a "combat score" which represents how well the combat is going. Once the combat score gets above a TN, the enemies are running away/rolling on the floor in pain/etc. If it goes below another TN, the PCs are captured/rolling on the floor in pain/etc. It could also be possible to have the situation gets worse for the PC when the combat score is low, and better when it's high.

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Sat Jul 11, 2015 3:33 am

I was actually just reading Blade of the Iron Throne (the Riddle of Steel reboot) and the combats are very much as envisioned here. They're not any particular unit of time- instead each turn ends when the action shifts focus (melee turns to grapple, you try to evade this particular engagement, you disarm or kill your opponent) or if someone pays a drama point to jump up in the order. They even state that it's modeled on movie fight scenes. That's really just the initiative system, though. The nuts and bolts of it are more complicated.

(And by "nuts" I mean "100 hit locations" and by "bolts" I mean "succubus boobs in the margin art of every other page")