The competing priorities of combat in RPGs.

I just finished reading an incredible blog post at Knight at the Opera that attempts to aggregate “all” the different ways that games handle initiative and turn order. It’s a seriously fascinating read that I’d highly reccomend. Reading through it helped me sort out my mixed opinions about combat in RPGs. Simulating combat in an RPG means having to balance 3 competing priorities. Namely keeping the game moving, emulating a fight, and emulating “speed”.

Of the three I’ve listed, I think keeping the game moving is honestly the most important. A brilliant combat system is useless if it takes forever to execute. Over time I’ve increasingly come to believe that any combat system should handle player input in clockwise order around a table (or around the thumbnails of a video call). I used to hate this because it was “unrealistic”, but I’ve come to understand just how valuable it is to keep up the pace in a fight scene. Different games have different answers to this problem, but I think it’s absolutely key that you keep the game moving.

The second issue is actually emulating a fight, and stands in direct opposition to keeping the game moving. The more you work to make a fight “accurate” the more you have to bog down everything in minutia. A simple example of this is “to hit” rolls in D&D. They bog the game down and force players to simply miss a turn, all in the name of “accuracy” to how a fight can actually happen.

The final problem is the matter of “speed”. This isn’t universally addressed in RPGs. Some of them do it, others don’t, but many games try to figure out how to differentiate “fast” characters or actions from “Slow” characters or actions. This connects heavily to the question of emulating the fight. The more granular you get about fast/slow characters/actions, the more crunchy and emulate-y the combat becomes.

All of these exist on competing poles and work as part of a kind of tug-of-war. Pulling on one priority means taking valuable rope away from the others. I don’t have some miraculous solution to this problem, but realizing that these three things are fighting each other offers a clarity I’d previously lacked.