Wizardry and wild romance

The latest news about the forthcoming Blood Sword CRPG from Prime Games will appeal to devotees of both Blood Sword and Dragon Warriors. I need add nothing more -- it's all there on Steam -- except to say that the more I see of this game, the more exciting it becomes.

While we're on the subject of low-fantasy medieval mayhem, I'm sharing this to remind everyone of the value of armour:

When to go all-in

John Whitbourn, author of the wonderful Binscombe Tales and many other first-rate fantasy stories, has the knack of finding out about a wide range of interesting curiosities. "Perhaps you've seen this," he'll say, pointing me to an obscure book or a movie or a game that is absolutely right up my street and yet that I'd never heard of before that moment. If I try it in reverse, telling him about a little-known Nigel Kneale SF drama, say, or a 1960s Soviet folk horror movie, or a seminal work of English apocalyptic fantasy, it usually turns out he already knows all about it.

I've given up looking for an explanation. The universe just looks favourably on John while I'm its red-headed stepchild. But I'm grateful to be kept abreast of news that otherwise would have passed me by. For instance, he recently dropped me an email about an OSR game called Slay. This line jumped out:

Slay has a unique d6 combat system. Roll a red effort die along with your white task dice. Make a decision to either add the effort die to your attack or convert it to a dodge die and keep it to improve your defence. This makes every attack roll a decision: do you go in for damage but potentially leave yourself open? Do you play defensively even though you could potentially deal damage?

That made me think of Tirikelu, another RPG where you can trade off attack against defence. But there are differences worth pondering. In Slay, you roll the dice and then decide how to share out your zanshin. In Tirikelu, you set your priorities first, then you roll. You also get the chance to alter your tactics as the round progresses. Say you get initiative and you start off with a half-value attack. That leaves you with the option later in the round of either using the other half-value action to parry, or letting your opponent strike at you unopposed and then at the end of the round you can use the remaining half-action to attack again.

One system gives more tactical choice, the other is super-quick. Which you opt for depends on your playing style and preferences. In fact, since Slay is pay-what-you-want and Tirikelu is free, why not try both? And now that autumn is here, and Halloween barely a month away, the perfect reading matter as the nights draw in is the aforementioned Binscombe Tales. Tell a friend about them and you'll soon have a reputation for spooky synchronicity.

Cut and thrust

Assuming your roleplaying campaign involves combat, how long should fights go on? In Sagas of the Icelanders, a fight is usually just one dice roll, which is just how quickly it would be resolved in the sagas:

"A great sheet of ice had been thrown up by the flood on the other side of the river as smooth and slippery as glass, and there Thrain and his men stood in the midst of the sheet. Skarphedinn took a spring into the air, and leapt over the stream between the ice banks, and did not check his course, but rushed onwards with a slide. The sheet of ice was very slippery, and so he went as fast as a bird flies. Thrain was just about to put his helm on his head. Skarphedinn bore down on him and hewed at Thrain with his axe Rimmugýgur, the 'battle-witch', and smote him on the head, and clove him down to the teeth, so that his jaw-teeth fell out on the ice. This feat was done with such a quick sleight that no one could get a blow at him; he glided away from them at once at full speed. Tjorvi, indeed, threw his shield before him on the ice, but he leapt over it, and still kept his feet, and slid quite to the end of the sheet of ice."

Contrast that with games of Runequest (I'm talking about v2 here; more recent editions may have fixed it) where battles between two reasonably skilled fighters became a case of slash, parry, slash, parry, and rinse and repeat until eventually somebody fumbled. And in GURPS a combat is like a slow game of county cricket. (Imagine replicating Skarpedinn's feat at the frozen river using GURPS 4e -- we'd still be here next Christmas.)

How long should fights go on? As long as suits the setting and the players. Sagas of the Icelanders is true to the literary reality of the original stories. For all I know, the presumably saga-length combats in RQ Vikings are nearer to how they played out in reality. If you're playing a game that's trying to recreate the feel of a kung fu movie, you'd feel cheated if every fight was over in a single strike. And even when it is, the manoeuvring beforehand tells a story in its own right:

A combat should be a little story, with a beginning, middle and end. But it's only worth playing out the beats of those mini-stories if they're going to be interestingly different each time. We'll tolerate combat mechanics that take longer to resolve if they generate dramatic outcomes. I've found Tirikelu hits the sweet spot, being both quick and cinematic, but after all it would be pretty surprising if I wasn't satisfied by a system I devised. You'll have to judge it for yourself.

Tekumel is a good place to look for the emergent story possibilities of combat. One-on-one fights are often formal duels held under the terms of the Manifesto of Nobel Deliverance. The beginning of the story is the quarrel or insult that instigates the duel. The middle is the negotiation between the seconds as to the form of the duel. And, as in any good story, the decisions made at that stage almost always set up the denouement which is the fight itself.

Duels make for interesting fights because the stakes are clear (honour, sometimes life too) and there are all kinds of ways it can turn out. Somebody might win by resorting to inelegant or even dirty tactics (use of Warrior skill rather than just Weapon skill, in Tirikelu). In pistol duels, one of the combatants might choose to fire in the air, or otherwise pull something unexpected; look at the duels in Scaramouche or The Duellists for inspiration.

If combat is frequent in your games and simply functions as an obstacle you throw in front of the players to prevent them from smoothly achieving their goals -- hordes of orcs in a dungeon, say -- then a single roll to decide the fight is probably enough. If the characters are samurai, Spartans, musketeers, or kuruthūniyal, then it's quite likely that the minutiae of each battle comprise a significant part of their story. Gun battles in a noir setting will be decisively shorter than in special ops adventure. The rules should put the focus on whatever matters in the campaign, and generate just enough blow-by-blow detail to fuel the kind of stories you want to emerge.