A few years ago I made a post about a dueling system I was using to run a less abstract, tactical version of Torchbearer/MouseGuard’s rock-paper-scissors conflict resolution. So very much not in line with the stuff I have been posting about recently, but if you find a set of rules that add fun to your game, include it. This is definitely verbose, but sometimes I have fun with very crunchy mechanisms once and a while. While at the time I wrote this “for” Into the Odd (because thats what I was running) this could obviously be used in many old school or adjacent systems.
So while I still would run a majority of combats closer to freeform, sometimes its fun to have the suspense of flipping over a card to find out your opponent has blocked when you feinted. This can be a fun minigame for knightly duels between a player character and their hated rival, or even maybe a system to throw into a small miniatures game to play out a fencing bout between generals. I definitely wouldn’t break this out for every single combat (if you could model them with roughly Into the Odd stats).
