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Ozfer
2012-12-11, 12:50 PM
When using a system's combat rules do you prefer super-realism, tracking every detail, or a more abstract system, where a couple rolls can settle a fight?

What part of those systems do you like best? Personally, I like something in the middle, but its a big plus if it tracks where a wound was taken and how it affects your character.

Knaight
2012-12-11, 01:47 PM
I generally favor more abstract systems in general, with the abstractness of subsystems being connected to their importance. In a combat heavy game, a more simulationist system is fine, in a game where it is a side note it really isn't.

Ravens_cry
2012-12-11, 01:50 PM
I tend to go for fairly abstracted system with kinaesthetics that encourage the style of play desired. Pen and paper is a slow system, so hyper detailed simulations tend to be off putting to me. Broad strokes that tell the story are better suited, in my opinion, than trying to simulate every detail.

Jay R
2012-12-11, 02:14 PM
They have very different purposes. If the combat is the point, I prefer to simulate it. When it is a consequent of the real point, I prefer to keep it abstract.

Neither kind of game is superior to the other, or can replace the other.

CarpeGuitarrem
2012-12-11, 03:21 PM
I tend to go for fairly abstracted system with kinaesthetics that encourage the style of play desired. Pen and paper is a slow system, so hyper detailed simulations tend to be off putting to me. Broad strokes that tell the story are better suited, in my opinion, than trying to simulate every detail.
Yeah, basically this. I want to see mechanics for the things that matter. Even in systems where combat is the point, I don't necessarily want realistic action, I want to see dramatic action, where there are immediate and strong consequences to actions.

NichG
2012-12-11, 03:23 PM
For me it has nothing to do with realism, it has to do with depth - either things like battlefield tactics or social tactics (bidding, etc) or whatever. So an inaccurate but tactically rich system is good, but a highly realistic but tactically boring system is not (or for that matter, realistic details which don't enrich the tactics but increase the tediousness of resolution, which can include extensive uncontrollable random elements).

valadil
2012-12-11, 04:05 PM
For me it has nothing to do with realism, it has to do with depth - either things like battlefield tactics or social tactics (bidding, etc) or whatever. So an inaccurate but tactically rich system is good, but a highly realistic but tactically boring system is not (or for that matter, realistic details which don't enrich the tactics but increase the tediousness of resolution, which can include extensive uncontrollable random elements).

I wanted to say this but couldn't word it right. I'm all for realism if it's fun to play with. But I don't need to experience everything my character experiences and there are some parts of his life I'd prefer to handwave away. Whether he grapples his foe by the wrist or the elbow is one of those details that I don't need to simulate.

Xefas
2012-12-11, 04:09 PM
"Simulationist" vs "Abstract" is a meaningless dichotomy, in this case.

You will always have abstraction to one degree or another, unless you plan on creating rules for determining the movement of the sub-atomic particles in the atoms in the molecules in all the matter in your entire fictional universe since the beginning of its existence. That would be the requirement for accurately simulating the real world.

There will be abstraction. To force a distinction between "This is Simulationist" and "This is "Abstract", you'd need to draw an absolutely arbitrary and subjective line somewhere, as to the degree of abstraction. And, by definition, any conclusion you draw from this absolutely meaningless, arbitrary, and subjective line, would be, itself, pointless.

What you should, instead, be focusing on, is what you actually want your conflict resolution system to do. And then make it so it does that. Not worry about its level of abstraction or simulation. It will only distract you.

Carry2
2012-12-11, 04:29 PM
"Simulationist" vs "Abstract" is a meaningless dichotomy, in this case.
I feel it is still possible to gauge a system's simulation-ness in terms of how optimally it predicts or models a given reference system for a given budget of complexity. I would furthermore suggest that in games that strive hard for that goal, the complexity budget tends to be higher than average.

CarpeGuitarrem
2012-12-11, 05:03 PM
For me it has nothing to do with realism, it has to do with depth - either things like battlefield tactics or social tactics (bidding, etc) or whatever. So an inaccurate but tactically rich system is good, but a highly realistic but tactically boring system is not (or for that matter, realistic details which don't enrich the tactics but increase the tediousness of resolution, which can include extensive uncontrollable random elements).
That's a really good way of putting it, actually.

lesser_minion
2012-12-11, 07:05 PM
You are seriously misrepresenting what simulationism is here. It isn't the opposite of abstraction, and it isn't really about details or realism either.

This is also kind of an odd question to ask. There are very few people who want their combat detail-heavy: ideally, you want combat to be quick and easy to play. Other priorities -- having combat that's deep, interesting, and somewhat realistic -- are all secondary.

As for realism, it is more important for a game to be practical than it is for it to be realistic, and there are some things that couldn't be done realistically without becoming insomnia cures. That said, realism is still well worth having, even in a game about dragons playing frisbee on the back of a giant turtle.

Gralamin
2012-12-11, 07:24 PM
ideally, you want combat to be quick and easy to play. Other priorities -- having combat that's deep, interesting, and somewhat realistic -- are all secondary.

Quick combat isn't always desirable. The system should be built to allow you to have quick combats for combats that don't really matter, or longer encounters for big important foes.

Coidzor
2012-12-11, 07:45 PM
Quick combat isn't always desirable. The system should be built to allow you to have quick combats for combats that don't really matter, or longer encounters for big important foes.

Quick is a relative term of course, but few people actually enjoy the endurance run of spending a 6 hour pen & paper RPG session doing one single battle.

Winter_Wolf
2012-12-11, 08:50 PM
I prefer an abstract battle, not one which requires huge amounts of paperwork and slogging through. In D&D, each edition and add-on made combat that much longer. I've heard about 4e comabat* and I have a hard enough time with 3e combat.

*I know it's a typo, but my subconscious must be telling me I'd be bored to death by the length of time one combat apparently takes. Based on prevalent hearsay.

Totally Guy
2012-12-12, 02:08 AM
Quick combat isn't always desirable. The system should be built to allow you to have quick combats for combats that don't really matter, or longer encounters for big important foes.

Is there such a thing as a fight that doesn't matter? What would you be fighting over?

Raimun
2012-12-12, 02:40 AM
I generally want accurate combat. That doesn't mean I want ultrarealism or such. It means the current battlefield conditions should be clear to the GM and PCs and understood the same way by both of them.

Hence, the battlegrid.

The combatants' positions are set and clear and you can draw terrain, etc. on them. There are two big things I really like about this:

- Tactics matter more -> combat is more variable
- Quickens the play (no more endless questions like: "Are there enemies close to me?" "Are there any allies nearby?" "Is there any cover?")

The only downside is that rules systems that don't know the battlegrid, require a bit of tweaking. Ie. determining how many units of movement one square of the grid is.

ThiagoMartell
2012-12-12, 03:01 AM
Why is it so common for people on these forums to misrepresent simulationism? :smallconfused:

Carry2
2012-12-12, 05:42 AM
The only downside is that rules systems that don't know the battlegrid, require a bit of tweaking. Ie. determining how many units of movement one square of the grid is.
The problems with the battlegrid system are threefold: (1), it's relatively prep-heavy, which tends to mandate linear plotlines, (2), it entails initiative systems which imply that characters are sequentially 'un-paralysed' before reverting to stone again, which is hard to square with strict verisimilitude, and (3, closely connected to 1), it doesn't handle cases of wandering off the grid very well (e.g, in cases of falling back or giving extended chase.)

Of course, those drawbacks may not matter particularly for the games that you most enjoy. But they do exist.

And regardless of how common people who prefer in-depth combat-simulation happen to be, they also do exist, and there are rule-sets with expressly cater to that particular itch. (The Riddle of Steel, for example. EDIT: I would furthermore remark that genuinely realistic combat tends not to drag on for too long. Hit Points don't apply, remember?)


.

valadil
2012-12-12, 09:00 AM
Is there such a thing as a fight that doesn't matter? What would you be fighting over?

I've been in plenty of fights that don't matter. Usually it's a wandering animal has found itself on the road the PCs are using. We could go around it, but that beast is a walking stack of experience points and oh look, it's getting away.

CarpeGuitarrem
2012-12-12, 10:04 AM
I've been in plenty of fights that don't matter. Usually it's a wandering animal has found itself on the road the PCs are using. We could go around it, but that beast is a walking stack of experience points and oh look, it's getting away.
I believe what Totally Guy is getting at (particularly because we're both Burning Wheel fans, and Luke Crane touches on this topic heavily) is this: if there's nothing really at stake, why is there a fight? There shouldn't be an incentive to fight.

And, when you consider that D&D (and D&D-style games) are the only games which primarily hand out XP for fighting things, the idea of only getting in a fight when there's something at stake begins to make a whole lot more sense.

NichG
2012-12-12, 10:22 AM
I believe what Totally Guy is getting at (particularly because we're both Burning Wheel fans, and Luke Crane touches on this topic heavily) is this: if there's nothing really at stake, why is there a fight? There shouldn't be an incentive to fight.

And, when you consider that D&D (and D&D-style games) are the only games which primarily hand out XP for fighting things, the idea of only getting in a fight when there's something at stake begins to make a whole lot more sense.

A game about powerful characters tasked with protecting a certain section of the kingdom. Their duties require them to fight all sorts of things all the time, but really its only the handful of genuinely dangerous opponents that you want to spend time on because they will crush everything else. There are other possible examples (a game about pit-fighters, say, where its generally assumed that they will win unless their opponent is someone important; a swashbuckling genre game, where you fight mooks because it develops your character when you determine how you inevitably trounce them, but they really had no chance)

Basically fighting-as-backstory, rather than actual contest. Of course I think the right way to handle these situations is handwave the fight and never let it actually make contact with the combat system in the first place. "You are doing your rounds and wipe out some small groups of goblins and a rabid wolf, when you find..." ; "After a day of easy fights in which you trounce your opponents, finally it has come time to face..." ; "Each of you tell me how you take out the mooks in your way..."

So actually, that changes my initial answer somewhat. What I really want is a system that is easy to run at different levels of abstraction dynamically. Something where I can run key fights in high detail, and then (within the system or using clever approximations like discarding the battlegrid, taking average on rolls, using group initiative, clustering enemies in 'mobs', etc) dial back the detail for fights that are less important (or for that matter, simply larger in scope).

Totally Guy
2012-12-12, 10:23 AM
Valadil's got a point. That is fighting something. And it doesn't really matter so much.

But do you go into the deep detail and start doing initiatives, and five foot steps and power attacks for doing that?

Would a hunting skill roll be inappropriate be for doing that stuff because it's technically fighting?

Has the game on some level tricked you into having a fight that doesn't matter because of the way it rewards you for doing that stuff? I mean compare that question to the first few posts in Craft(Cheese)s' "Cue" thread. It's pretty similar, at least in my mind.

Raimun
2012-12-12, 11:22 AM
The problems with the battlegrid system are threefold: (1), it's relatively prep-heavy, which tends to mandate linear plotlines,

Not at all. The GM can easily improvise and make things up. Drawing a terrain takes about a minute or two and that's nothing compared to question time(s). Placing the figures takes even less.



(2), it entails initiative systems which imply that characters are sequentially 'un-paralysed' before reverting to stone again, which is hard to square with strict verisimilitude,


Umm, yes? Those are called rounds and turns. They feature rather heavily in this particular medium. They exist even if you throw away the grid. :smallamused:



and (3, closely connected to 1), it doesn't handle cases of wandering off the grid very well (e.g, in cases of falling back or giving extended chase.)


Okay, that is true. You would need more than one grid for this, if there's no room on the original grid. Still, it's not that hard to do it without a grid, since most of the time the majority of the fight doesn't change place. A couple of people is easy to describe and track verbally. A ten or more is not.



Of course, those drawbacks may not matter particularly for the games that you most enjoy.

I just prefer it to the alternative and I don't think those are really drawbacks. You are free to disagree if you think grids are too wargamey or something. :smalltongue:

Water_Bear
2012-12-12, 05:35 PM
I like abstract combat in theory, but I've never seen an abstracted combat system which had any tactical depth.

In D&D, nWoD, and most of the crunchier systems you can use those rules to set up awesome shenanigans. Hide timed explosives in key spots and lead enemies into them. Funnel them through doorways or other narrow spots to make up for the differences in numbers. Scurry up walls and hit the enemy with bits of masonry as they try to follow, knocking them to their doom. Granted, it's usually my GM minions doing this stuff, but that's just because the players aren't very clever.

No rules-light system I've seen has the ability to make those sorts of decisions. At best it's "I set up tons of hidden bombs!" "Great, now the battlefield has the 'hidden bomb' aspect. You can compel it once to make an attack against everyone nearby." and at worst it's just refluffing skill rolls as attacks.

I would love to see abstract combat which gave rich options, but if it exists I've never heard of it.

NichG
2012-12-12, 07:19 PM
I would love to see abstract combat which gave rich options, but if it exists I've never heard of it.

Well, all combat systems have abstraction; its just a matter of how much, and where its applied. The 'where its applied' is really what determines what tactical depth remains. Take a game like 'Go' for instance. Every piece is identical. There are only a few rules. It has a lot of tactical depth, despite high levels of abstraction. Chess also has a lot of tactical depth, but it has less abstraction (pieces can be different and work in different ways, ...). Calling it 'less abstraction' is a bit strange (its really that it has 'more complexity' since neither game truly represents an attempt to model something on a deeper level, even if they are both used as analogies to warfare), but that roughly gives the point.

The key is that some things don't actually have a chance of impacting tactics meaningfully, either because they're completely overshadowed by others or because they're just too hard to actually make use of. Range increment penalties for ranged attacks, for instance - they're a realistic detail but they're really just a twiddly modifier amidst a dozen other things. Cover in a game with a high emphasis on melee. Little +1's and -1's associated with various transient factors. Whether a kobold has anywhere from 1hp to 5hp randomly, versus just having 3hp all the time.

So lets say you want a tactically rich but abstract system. What you need is to focus on the origins of tactics and design those into the system. One source of tactical depth is spatial reasoning, which is why a battlegrid lends itself to accidental tactical consideration. Another source of tactical depth is when you have predictable chains of events with branching - here the key is to make actions highly connected to eachother. Another source of tactical depth is the ability to set contingencies and then respond based on which contingencies you have and which you failed to prepare.

Generally for all of these things the key feature is that each decision must matter. The closer things are to 'one wrong move costs you the game', the more intense things will be, and the less tolerant the system will be of randomness.

I'd actually say 7th Sea's combat system is close to being abstract and also tactically deep, at least in having the capacity for it. Instead of the tactics being played out in the arrangement of people in space, its played out in the arrangement of events in time. People move at certain points in the round and can spend actions, hold actions, or even spend future actions to react now. A duel against someone with stop-thrust can be kind of complicated, since you basically want them to be out of actions to counter with before you attack. Its not incredibly rich as written though - most of the combat styles don't have that kind of interplay, but its a seed one could build on.

Water_Bear
2012-12-12, 07:47 PM
<Enormous Post>

Well, the thing about fiddly details and little bonuses is that those tend to be the pebbles which form avalanches, at least in my experience.

The Range Increments of ranged weapons and spells, and how they differ, generates much of the battle-space of 3.5 combat; where can you go and not get hit is a big issue with bows at low levels, and with spells even at Epic. The Cover rules, as useless as they are 90% of the time, make Tower Shields into a nearly ideal way to get Mooks safely from Point A to Point B through those arcs. This in turn leads into the Feats or other tricks to get little +1s here and there, especially with AC, which again means quite a bit for the survival of low level PCs or the formations of Mooks they'll fight at mid- to high- levels. The variable HP is a bit of an anachronistic holdover, but does help push you away from overt metagaming and into a more tactical mindset.

Granted, 3.5 is granular to a really absurd degree and there's a steep learning curve before you can really take advantage of these factors, but it's a lot closer to what I would like to be able to do in combat than FATE.

Tengu_temp
2012-12-12, 08:26 PM
I like something in the middle. Systems that require a battlemap to keep track of are definitely too much in one direction, while something like Risus is too much in the other. I like a system that offers a cinematic feel to its combat, with many options available, without getting too bogged down in details at the same time. I hate to sound like a broken record, but Mutants and Masterminds is a perfect example of such a system. Fate is borderline too abstract for my liking, while DND is a bit too simulationist. GURPS is definitely too simulationist.

ThiagoMartell
2012-12-12, 10:32 PM
Tactical combat can use abstract positioning and still work. Fight! and Burn Legend both do it pretty well.

NichG
2012-12-12, 11:57 PM
Well, the thing about fiddly details and little bonuses is that those tend to be the pebbles which form avalanches, at least in my experience.

The Range Increments of ranged weapons and spells, and how they differ, generates much of the battle-space of 3.5 combat; where can you go and not get hit is a big issue with bows at low levels, and with spells even at Epic. The Cover rules, as useless as they are 90% of the time, make Tower Shields into a nearly ideal way to get Mooks safely from Point A to Point B through those arcs. This in turn leads into the Feats or other tricks to get little +1s here and there, especially with AC, which again means quite a bit for the survival of low level PCs or the formations of Mooks they'll fight at mid- to high- levels. The variable HP is a bit of an anachronistic holdover, but does help push you away from overt metagaming and into a more tactical mindset.


But really, you could get rid of almost all of that and preserve tactical richness. Better yet, you could distill it down to the ways in which its important and discard it everywhere else. Keep the fact that tower shields basically make you immune to attack if you sacrifice your next action, but don't bother with things like computing cover from a map. Reduce things to strongly-interacting heterogeneous abilities and scrap the edge cases.

But maybe a concrete example is best. I've got a currently relatively weak character (due to bringing it in late) in a campaign of highly modified D&D. Because of a personal goal, he has to fight certain solo arena battles against what are basically gimmick monsters. There is no interesting terrain or spacing - big 200ft radius arena with the combatants starting 200ft away. One fight involves an enemy that splits in two and changes its power set whenever its killed, until there are 64 of it on the field at which point it stops. Its a construct. My plan is to knock it unconscious without killing it; however, constructs are immune to pretty much everything that can do that. However, there is a spell that gives constructs the Humanoid type and its weaknesses in Eberron. So I can think ahead 'my strategy is, round 1 cast that spell on it, then round 2 do nonlethal or cast hold monster or whatever'. In principle, if this were a dynamic adversary instead of a static fight with particular set abilities, they could also anticipate this and bring a defense against it, and so on. Nowhere in here have I needed to refer to spacing, numeric twiddle factors, etc, but its still a tactically rich situation (I could also think how to defeat the 64 eventual things or whatever). The tactical richness here isn't from a grid or positioning, its from complex sets of heterogeneous abilities that interact multiplicatively.

I think another good example is games like MtG. They are very tactically rich yet are also very abstract as far as modeling combat.

Knaight
2012-12-13, 12:41 PM
Tactical combat can use abstract positioning and still work. Fight! and Burn Legend both do it pretty well.

I'd consider Firefight! a better example, though Burning Empires is not as well known as it should be.

Carry2
2012-12-13, 12:42 PM
Not at all. The GM can easily improvise and make things up. Drawing a terrain takes about a minute or two and that's nothing compared to question time(s). Placing the figures takes even less.
I dunno about you, man, but my dungeons tended to take me hours. *shrugs*

I'm a big fan of turns-taking when it comes to the players, but there are systems where you pre-select your actions independently in such a way that the order in which players announce actions doesn't affect the resolution of character-interactions.

Ozfer
2012-12-13, 01:39 PM
For me it has nothing to do with realism, it has to do with depth - either things like battlefield tactics or social tactics (bidding, etc) or whatever. So an inaccurate but tactically rich system is good, but a highly realistic but tactically boring system is not (or for that matter, realistic details which don't enrich the tactics but increase the tediousness of resolution, which can include extensive uncontrollable random elements).

Wow. You just summed that up perfectly.

Coidzor
2012-12-13, 05:55 PM
So actually, that changes my initial answer somewhat. What I really want is a system that is easy to run at different levels of abstraction dynamically. Something where I can run key fights in high detail, and then (within the system or using clever approximations like discarding the battlegrid, taking average on rolls, using group initiative, clustering enemies in 'mobs', etc) dial back the detail for fights that are less important (or for that matter, simply larger in scope).

Hmm, that would be interesting. Having a clear way to tone down or ramp up various focal points in the rules set would be interesting, not just for combat.


Why is it so common for people on these forums to misrepresent simulationism? :smallconfused:

Conflation with Gygax syndrome which can easily become fatal.