Less Rules To Do More: Combat Maneuvers

In my previous post I suggest removing mechanics around the important parts of the game to see if a more freeform rulings style of play will give you what you looking for, instead of defaulting to adding new mechanics.

Let’s look at one of the most popular areas to begin to add rules to games: combat maneuvers.

Classic Dungeons & Dragons’ combat is an extremely abstract system. We inherit this from wargames. High degrees of moment to moment maneuvers wasn’t the focus. This is perfect for what D&D is going for. The game isn’t really about combat to a high degree, so by abstracting that down to a few rules the table is given tools to have battle occur but not dominate the game.

It already has all of the maneuvers you could want, abstracted behind the mechanism of attack roll + damage roll + narrate. You want to perform a called strike to the head for additional damage? That’s a successful hit + a high roll on your damage die plus some narration. You want to bash them with your shield to create an opening for an ally? That’s a hit on your part, and then a hopefully successful hit from your party-mate. Disarm? Probably dropping your opponent to 0 hit points and telling the Ref that you want them alive for questioning. Or perhaps its simply a situational morale roll.

You get all of this and more for free with the alternate combat system provided in the original three little brown books, but maybe this isn’t enough for you. Just d20 plus damage alone doesn’t give you a ton of control. What if you want to start adding in maneuvers, techniques, etc.? Hypothetically let’s start with something like a beat. You want a technique where a character forcefully moves their opponent’s weapon away from a position where they can reliably defend.

Your first inclination may to create a specific beat maneuver mechanic. Some mechanic where you attack, maybe make a double attack and if both succeed you perform the maneuver, maybe you utilize a contested strength roll. You then give the enemy who has suffered under the technique a disadvantage – next strike gets a bonus to hit them, or maybe they degrade their armor class. You start thinking of how to balance this, maybe what class restrictions lay around it, and ask how will you rectify this maneuver with weapons that aren’t blade or blade-like.

I recommend by default: don’t do this. Or at least, don’t start here.

This requires at least a bit of work, it may not even be something your players want, and as you implement it you might find that instead of getting really cool flashy sword play in your fiction, you instead get that aspect glossed over. The players look down on their sheets and start tallying up numbers, saying things like “ok well the wizard-mans and thief-gnome gets to go after fighter-lady but before this ogre, both of them have really low attacks so if you could use your beat maneuver to drop the ogre’s AC then both of them would more likely hit.” The tables attention is drawn down to the mechanical knobs and buttons, while the fictional discussion falls to the wayside.

Start first by seeing how you can use the tools at your disposal. Does the simple ruling get what you want? Awesome, do it – see how your players feel, and adjust as necessary. Maybe it turns out what you’re doing isn’t “balanced” for whatever that means at your table. Well since it was so easy to rule in the first place, its going to be easy to tweak or rule out.

Another option is to go with less than what you started with. Don’t even make the ruling, maybe look at the combat procedure and ask if perhaps what is already there is blocking you from what you want.

Instead of utilizing a declare, roll initiative, perform actions in specific phases move more to a more freeform method. Ref describes what is happening – the ogre approaches, menacing with a wicked, heavy saber. Fighter-lady takes advantage of his surveying the party and dismissing the puny opposition to rush forward, putting her whole weight into the bind, pinning her opposition’s saber to the stone floor. Now the other party members have fictional elements to deal with beyond a shuffling of numbers – they get a picture of fighter and ogre locked, they know where his weapon is, and the fiction is flowing. Maybe they strike him now that he has an opening, maybe they crowd his sword arm and try to release his hold on the blade, slip by while he’s preoccupied to grab some mcguffin, or maybe they do one of a hundred other tactics.

The great thing about ruling in this fashion is that this gives you whatever other combat maneuvers you want to utilize “for free”, you have the control to initiate the maneuvers through the fiction, and the Ref can rule it to the level of specificity or genre-specificity as is appropriate for the game.

How you go about deciding how this happens and succeeds dice-wise is not that important to me. Maybe you call for a roll, maybe you just rule it within fighter-lady’s capabilities to do that until the ogre has a chance to respond, maybe something else. The important thing to me is that you start with the fiction, and you make sure that the fiction is flowing – the actions taken and ruled on are things that “make sense” from a verisimilitude standpoint and keep the game fun. This isn’t “rule of cool”, this is – think about the fictional world and situation you’re playing in, make rulings that consistently portray this fiction.

The more I play in the style of the ogre example the more fun I have, the more out inventive stuff the players try, and the more our moment-to-moment discussion is on the fictional situation, and the less we go back to itemized lists of numbers and categories. This may not be for you, and to be honest its not for me 100% of the time – I love games like Burning Wheel, Riddle of Steel, Mythras.

But by playing with less you may find that your table keeps the important stuff the important stuff – you want cool flashy swordplay, have the discussion be about that stuff. If you abstract it to a number or a procedure or dice you may find that the discussion of these elements fall aside and the rule takes over.

Try it out, the next time you feel you there is an aspect of your game that you want to focus on, maybe try playing fast and loose with the procedures that are there and just discuss and negotiate the fiction, and then add in rules and rulings as they’re needed, instead of starting with a lot of mechanical guard rails.

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