hack and slash

Slasher's Guide to Running Combats

My friend Matt asked for some advice on how to run combats, quote, "both in keeping it dynamic and also not including enough negative consequences for missed rolls." Now, not to toot my own horn or anything, but one of the pieces of feedback I get consistently is that I am pretty dang good at running combat encounters, so mostly for Matt's benefit but also for whoever reads this I thought it would be nice to kludge together a few words about what I think a good combat encounter looks like. This spiraled a little out of control and became an essay.

To establish my credentials, I have been a fight choreographer for theater and film. My wedding even included a sword fight against my dastardly nemesis, the mysterious Il Tigre. Some of my advice stems from this training and experience which shapes how I design violence both for the stage and at the table.

Content warning! In order to address this topic I will be discussing violent conflict and injury. There is no gore or body horror within.

The Three Levels of Conflict

A fight takes place on three levels: mechanical, dramatic, and character. This is true for both fight choreography and for rolling bones at the table. The mechanical level consists of the material nuts and bolts that allow us to simulate combat: on stage, these are our prop weapons, training, the set, and fight rehearsal; at the table, these are the game mechanics.

The dramatic level of a fight describes the story the violence tells, while the character level is what the performers are bringing to their roles. They are intertwined but distinct. The character level is how the actors in the scene get to whatever space they need to be, emotionally, to make the performance believable while also protecting themselves; the dramatic level contains the stakes around the conflict (what the characters stand to lose or gain) and the "beats" of the fight - a beat being a tiny story (beginning, middle, and end, with the end having changed something) within the larger story of the combat.

Beats

I'll begin here by repeating my definition: a beat is a tiny story with a beginning, middle, and end, and the end has changed something. The drama moves forward as the result of beats. Beats are the smallest building blocks of drama. I choreograph a fight scene by breaking it down into beats. In order for a fight in a game to feel dynamic and dramatic, you are aiming for each action taken to feel like a beat.

When I say that "the end has changed something," I mean that in order for a beat to be a piece of a larger drama, it must have altered one of the levels of the fight: the mechanics, drama, or characters have been affected.

Example

I will start with an example of beat analysis based on probably the most well-known sword fight in modern cinema, the duel between Inigo and the Man in Black from The Princess Bride (1987). We must understand the stakes of the conflict first.

The stakes surrounding the conflict are these: Inigo, who is one of a party of knaves who have captured the Princess Buttercup, has been assigned to stop or delay the Man in Black pursuing them. The Man in Black wishes to continue pursuing Inigo's companions, presumably to rescue or capture Princess Buttercup. There is no third way out of this conflict; one or the other must be victorious, therefore combat ensues. Dramatically, this is all the naive viewer knows.

However, the dramatic level exists alongside the character, where there is more going on. For those of you who have seen the movie before, you understand the the character motivations as well: Inigo, the best swordsman in the world, wants a real challenge (therefore he initially decides to fight left-handed), and took up the blade in order to revenge himself on his father's killer. The Man in Black is actually Westley, the true love of Princess Buttercup, and will stop at nothing to rescue her from the clutches of these men. Despite the dilemma at the dramatic level, the character level of this fight allow the two a way out besides killing each other - Westley can appreciate the tragedy at the core of Inigo's being and the artistry of his swordplay, while Inigo could be moved by anyone who he feels might be an ally in his own quest for revenge against the man who killed his father. They must still fight, but it might not need to be to the death.

And now to the fight itself. There are 4 dramatic beats. I will italicize what the beat has changed.

  1. A brief exchange; Inigo attempts two strikes and a slash, which the other dodges, and the Man in Black mirrors him. Each has learned the other knows what they are doing.
  2. A furious clash accompanied by footwork, gaining and losing ground. Inigo quizzes the Man in Black about his sword theory and cites his sources (Thibault, Capo Ferro, Agrippa). Inigo learns he is facing another master and is forced to change tactics, switching to his stronger hand.
  3. Inigo takes the offense, forcing the Man in Black to use the environment as a defense. The Man in Black is also forced to change tactics and switches his sword to his right hand.
  4. They fight until Inigo tires and is disarmed. The Man in Black is victorious; moved by his earlier story and by his rival's great mastery of swordplay, the Man in Black shows mercy and knocks Inigo out, as he cannot allow Inigo to follow him further.

You will not always achieve results like this model, which is as it should be: games do not neatly fit the rules of drama or conventions of storytelling; they are definitionally pastimes where the outcome is uncertain. But by aiming to create this push and pull of mechanics, drama, and character moments, we can begin to make tabletop combat feel dynamic and engaging. We may do this by taking steps to ensure combat is interesting, feels urgent, and centers the characters. This scrum of elements works together to create a sense of change, which drives things ever forward.

Let us talk now of mechanics.

Mechanics

The mechanics we can most easily pull on to create a sense of interest are consequences and the environment.

Consequences

In combat mechanics, a character who is meaningfully struck by an attack suffers consequences - I will use "hit points" as my catch-all here, but different systems have different ways to portray consequences (the loss of drama points or character equipment, damage to skill levels or character attributes, wound levels, and so on). Characters who suffer enough consequences are unable to continue fighting and their fate is up to the referee (whose non-player characters may kill, capture, or humiliate the character, according to their nature) or other players (who might rescue the character, heal them, or continue fighting to drive off the enemy).

I will now discuss tactics for when characters fail to inflict consequences, when they inflict only minor consequences, and how the environment may be used to shape a combat. For how to deal with major consequences, I discuss that later on, under "Being Mean."

Missing With Style

If an actor (player character or non-player character alike) attempts and fails to inflict consequences on their action, we may call that a "miss." This may be due to rolling poorly, or using a type of damage the opponent is resistant to, or because you as referee have spent some sort of drama point to avoid an attack. The important thing is that they made an attempt and need to be rewarded with feedback, which must always accomplish two goals:

  1. A miss respects the actor by providing a capable opponent.
  2. A miss provides the player with information.

When a player whiffs big on an attack roll, or when the villain fails to connect, describe the miss as the result of ability, speed, toughness, luck, or guile on the part of their opponent. A player's character does not swing their sword and hit nothing, they were ably parried by the shield of the guard. The villain did not roll a natural 1 and poop his pants, he aimed a thrust right at the character's heart which deflected off their heavy armor with a CLANG (causing him to shake his hand, now clearly numb with the impact). A player did not miss their roll by a hair, they traded blows back and forth with the mysterious masked duelist and discovered they were evenly matched.

Hitting With Style

When an actor does inflict consequences, we can call this a "hit." Most of us have a good sense about what "big hits" look like - the cleaving of limbs, a bullet right through the other sniper's scope, jumping on the ogre's back and driving a spear through their heart - but minor consequences often lack this kind of description. However, inflicting enough consequences on the other side is how one wins the fight, therefore even minor hits need to feel impactful. As above, one must always center the actors and provide feedback.

In games with Hit Points or similar, "small hits" (where damage dice are minimal, or where an actor has so many hit points that it takes a great many hits to render them unable to fight) are often described as minor cuts and bruises, yet anyone who has accidentally cut themselves on a pocket knife or whacked their hand with a hammer trying to drive a nail knows exactly how incapacitating these little injuries can be. Hit Points may be understood to represent not just a character's "meat" but their luck, stamina, and general fitness. We may look to games such as Blades in the Dark for examples of how consequences might manifest as "small hits" in games with Hit Points. Shaving a couple HP off may not be a small cut with a knife, but might be described as diversely as:

Each of these small hits provide feedback which a player might seize on to affect the combat in ways besides reducing a big barrel of Hit Points to zero. Many of them also interact with the environment, the final mechanic I want to touch on.

The Environment

In this case, "environment" refers to the place in which battle is fought (including its natural and artificial features), the distance between combatants, and the opening circumstances (surprise, weather, access to equipment which might affect the battle such as vehicles or ranged weapons). Indeed, recall any time you misjudged a step, stubbed a toe on a chair in a dark room, or had to make a little jeté over a puddle getting off the bus; each of these environmental factors affected your behavior and forced you to make a plan about your next move - you change the way you dress when you're expecting snow.

To describe the surroundings, add something, then go one step further. Are there ruins? Ask yourself, how tall are they? Are there rocks? Ask yourself, are they big enough to hide behind, or loose enough to trip up a horse? You do not need to go build a miniature or draw a map for any of this, nor does every battle need to be a duel of the fates over a lava pit, but every battlefield needs something to anchor it in the material world.

Whenever possible, your non-player characters should use the environment to their advantage, both mechanically and in your descriptions. In the duel from The Princess Bride, the fighters deflect swords into the ruins around them in order to maintain distance or gain a temporary advantage - describing these actions as part of your dynamic hits and misses will begin to spur questions, and you want your players curious; curious players will help to fill in blanks in the world with their questions.

Above, I alluded to "small hits" being potential points of contact with the environment - might an actor's equipment become useless or lost due to the environment, and how might that affect someone's tactics or will to fight? As before, you create beats in your fights by giving them a sense of change, and the environment is a potent source for this.

Drama

The dramatic level of conflict is the story surrounding a fight - what is he context before the first blow is struck, what is risked by the combatants, and what happens when one side or the other is victorious. In order to be engaging, a fight must have a sense of both risk and reward, an urgency that requires swift action, and this requires an understanding of stakes, goals, and how to be mean.

Stakes

Every combatant should be able to answer the question, "what do I stand to gain by fighting? What do I lose if I fail?" This is not the same as motivation - that applies to the character level of conflict. This is the risk and reward. Clearly, when one fights, their life is always at risk. Because this applies evenly to all sides, we may discount the threat of death as a dramatic stake. One enters into battle because they pursue greater goals and are left with no options but combat. So without the threat of death as a motivation, what are dramatic stakes?

Consider once more the duel from The Princess Bride. One might imagine a Blades in the Dark style clock hanging over the whole affair. If the Man in Black cannot defeat Inigo in a certain amount of time, the people he is chasing will get away, or they will have time to prepare further challenges for him and make his life more difficult. Thus, it is important that the Man in Black finish this up quickly; the more time he saves now, the closer he will be to Princess Buttercup when he resumes pursuit. Furthermore, the audience is aware that once Vizzini, the leader of Inigo's gang of scoundrels, crosses the border into a neighboring country he intends to kill Buttercup in order to start a war.

Those are stakes: there is a risk, there is a reward. For an additional example: In a campaign I played in, my character led an expedition to gather alchemical components which turned out to be guarded by a deadly basilisk. The only way to accomplish that mission was to overcome this territorial monster. The alchemical compounds were needed to accomplish a long term goal (create explosives to destroy a vampire queen's barrow-mound) and this was the only source of these supplies that we knew of. Furthermore, the island we were on was populated by bands of extremely xenophobic warriors, and the longer we stayed the more we risked being discovered and outnumbered. Therefore, the reward of these components was worth the risk of being turned to stone or killed compared to the alternatives.

Goals

Both sides in combat do not simply have dramatic stakes, they may have different definitions of victory. Consider Morpheus deciding to fight Agent Smith in The Matrix (1999). Morpheus and Smith have different goals. For Morpheus to win, Neo must get away; for Smith to win, he either needs to kill Neo (effectively beheading the human resistance) or capture Morpheus (which will enable him to locate and destroy the rest of the human resistance). Morpheus even quite helpfully shouts that Neo is "all that matters," stating his goal for the combat clearly.

As a referee, you should understand the goals of your NPCs clearly. It is also helpful (for you and the players both!) to make these goals clear at the beginning of combat - "okay, so the cultists are all chanting to summon something. Since you did that research earlier, you know you have about 10 combat rounds before whatever happens...happens." Typically, battle is over once one side achieves their goals or once they are impossible to achieve. It is also possible for both sides to achieve their goals.

As always, we return to our basic unit of the beat here. As a beat is a change, here a beat means meaningful and clear progress towards a goal, or towards stopping an actor from achieving one.

Being Mean

In your career as a referee you will need to be mean when assigning consequences to botched rolls, bad plans, acting on incorrect information, and other rulings. This is listed under the dramatic level of conflict as being mean often affects the ability of the players to achieve their goals. Furthermore, as the stakes escalate - the risks, and proportionate rewards, increase - consequences must also.

It is hard to be mean to your friends. The binary resolution of OSR games actually has a nice advantage over storygaming here, as the cruelty is determined for you - I am sorry that you exploded into a red mist, but the dice say it is so. Assigning big consequences to failure, or towards mixed/messy success, is an acquired skill in systems like Powered by the Apocalypse (which throws the referee a bone by prompting them to "make a move as hard as you want" under certain circumstances). There is one simple solution found within human nature: we all hate ourselves and it is very easy to ask people to make their lives worse.

You may always ask the players "what do you think happens here?" and then range in on if they're being too kind or too cruel. Always start with the affected player before you throw to the rest of the table.

Character Level

Finally, we have the character level of the conflict. I have the least to say about this section as I believe that most character work, by volume, is being done by the players. The referee does plenty to bring life to the characters in a scene, and is doing character work, but does not typically spend as much time inhabiting and exploring any one character to the exclusion of others. But it is worth thinking about why individuals fight, and as a corollary, why they might cease.

Soldiers fight to protect their comrades, their homes, their personal sense of honor, and their own lives. Mercenaries fight when they think they can win, or when the profit outstrips the risk, or for any of the same reasons soldiers do. Dangerous beasts fight because they are hungry, or to drive enemies out of their territory, or to protect their young, or to attract a mate. Robots and zombies, and indeed robot zombies, fight because they are ordered to, or because it is their programming, or because they are the living wrath of an angry god, or because they are ideologically driven to wipe out the living. A thief fights when he is caught in order to avoid prison. A dragon fights because he has been insulted. All these creatures have a context which would force them to battle, and for the most part, they are not willing to throw their lives away without good cause.

Morale

And so we come to our last section. Morale is the term we use to describe the emotional wellbeing and discipline of a group, especially regarding their ability and willingness to achieve goals held by the group. In wargaming, a unit's morale often stands in for their fighting strength and cohesion; as a unit suffers losses, their ability to withstand further losses diminishes until they break and their token is removed from the board - they are not killed to a man, but are presumed no longer capable of mounting an effective defense and not worth considering a fighting unit.

Morale mechanics in roleplaying games wax and wane in popularity. I find them an indispensable part of both combat scenes and understanding the character of NPCs I control. A morale statistic indicates how often creatures break under combat conditions and also prompts me to think about what "breaking" looks like. An ambush predator withdraws to try again, a guard raises an alarm, soldiers with reason to expect fair treatment surrender, outlaws who break might choose to fight to the death rather than withdraw. Morale mechanics should be held up at the same time as a character's drives, desires, and goals.

In Conclusion

Well Matt you asked if I had a couple tips for running dynamic combats and instead I wrote this, hope you like reading, dummy