Using Sword's Path: Glory, Phoenix Command, and Living Steel as extreme examples of the Simulationist side, and heavily abstracted or loose-representational systems on the Abstractionist side (I'm looking at you, VtM), what are the general thoughts about using avoidance theory to promote roleplaying and non-combat solutions to conflict?

Here's what I mean.

Most of you are aware of my unhealthy infatuation with the Living Steel game, in which, if playing unchanged from the baseline rules, it runs like a combat simulation with every action and movement gradually working down the character's action count until their turn is done (actually, I found that the computer game Jagged Alliance felt a lot like playing the baseline Phoenix Command).  The combat is involved, detailed, and accurately deadly (there's four locations on the hit table where a single assault rifle hit will result in immediate death.  Like the table just says "Dead").  For the purposes of Living Steel, the designers specifically left the combat as deadly as the original simulation presented it, with the intention that players would quickly realize that a firefight was somewhere they DID NOT WANT TO BE, and would seek to find other options besides charging in guns blazing; and if they did decide that combat was inevitable, they would do everything in their power to make sure they stacked the deck appropriately, using ambushes, support by fire, and in general all the proper tactics to make sure they were successful, while minimizing their casualties or injuries.  Just like real life.  

(IRL Protip: A Tank is a big metal thing with a nasty gun on it, not your buddy who takes all the rounds for you.  A Dragon is an old missile launcher, or possibly Puff (AC-130 Spectre), who is your friend and you love.  An honorable combat is where you establish fire superiority and then they all surrender.  Or they don't, and you don't have anyone around taking pictures.)

On the opposite side of things, you have games where combat is of reduced effectiveness, and where as part of the setting and the system it's presented as a bland, less effective secondary option, either that isn't as effective or not as scary.  (V:TM, Storygames, assorted other highbrow concept games, etc)

Along with that, although not directly in the same category, I include hit point systems, where your degree of injury doesn't have any direct impact on the game (although good players will roleplay combat fatigue and their injuries).  Combat becomes a part of everyday life, and the capability exists to have someone ride you down, shove a lance into you, then ride over you on their horse and you survive.  Heroic stuff, which I approve of depending on the setting.  (D&D of pretty much all editions, Elric!, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Hero, Gurps, etc)

So, I've played, and enjoyed, games in each of those examples, I'm not trying to make a 'this is right that is wrong' statement, or looking for specific corrections on my examples of the game systems and how they interact, but what do you think of the use of detailed or very dangerous representative combat as a means to promote roleplay?

By very dangerous I'm talking about something like running 3.5 with no change to the weapon or spell damage, 3d6 take them as they fall ability scores, and saying "You never have more than your CON in HP and you're DEAD when they hit 0" level dangerous.

Most of my favorite games feature the potential for one-shot-one-kill. In the case of Traveller - where characters have essentially six hit dice and can be attacked with weapons that do twelve dice of damage and where a single laser hit to your ship can cost millions of credits to repair - and Top Secret, with guns which shoot over a dozen bullets in a round, combat is best avoided unless the odds are overwelmingly in your character's favor or you simply have no other choice. TS, in particular, is about espionage, not commado ops, and the lethality of the weapons reinforces that - if you run around getting into firefights, you will end up dead in short order.

Boot Hill is about as lethal as they come - the rules aren't intended to simulate Saturday matinee Westerns so much as they are actual gunfights, so running and dodging and using cover are both rewarded by the system. Two guys blazing away in the middle of Main Street is extraordinarily risky in BH, despite being a staple of the genre.

Flashing Blades is probably the most interesting exception in this. Combat in FB is more likely to result in incapacitation than death, but it is possible to kill someone outright with a single sword thrust or pistol ball. What makes this interesting is that this is a game and a genre where combat is expected - to shirk it, to look for alteratives to combat, is to risk considerable disapproval toward your character. FB is a game where combat is difficult to avoid and potentially deadly at the same time.

I run a pretty dangerous system, where a knife in the back can mess up any character's weekend, although it would need to be a very high roll on the attack or a really bad dodge, basically a professional assassin or one-in-a-thousand against your typical min-maxed PC.

My experience has been that yes, PCs tend to take their time a bit more, not so much talking things out as becoming more strategic, planning and picking their fights, applying proper tactics when doing battle. Groups used to the stand-up pugilism of D&D need to be made well aware before starting a game that a different playstyle is probably advisable, or you'll have some angry players on your hands.

There also tends to be a drift towards working around problems, by stealth, diplomacy, or cunning.

I should say as well that the combat system makes up a significant proportion of the game, so its not like it deliberately goes out of its way to discourage battle. My belief is that pulling the teeth of combat is counterproductive to both gameplay and atmosphere in any system. When the game mechanics don't behave approximately in the way they would in the real world, the whole experience suffers.

I don't like very dangerous combat. Or rather, I like somewhat dangerous combat, but also combat to be a viable choice for solving problems, if not all of them (other options including asking the villain out, poisoning their food or beating them at an arcade game).

I think spending a lot of time to write a combat system that is then deemed too dangerous or - worse - too cumbersome to use in practice is a huge waste. I don't want my book to have 50 pages I don't want to ever use. As you mentioned Phoenix Command, guys spent an inordinate amount of time and effort to produce all those tables and stuff. That they are to be relegated to just the direst circumstances is a tragedy, not a triumph of design.

I think lumping GURPS and HERO in with D&D is pretty unfair.  Both are pretty brutal at the base line.  It's just that they have options that can be dialed up to make things more cinematic for heroic individuals.

For instance, in GURPS it's strongly suggested that less skilled combatants and animals generally make all out attacks which, of course means they don't get a dodge roll.  And if you take a 2d6+2 (9mm round) hit to the vitals it does 3x normal damage, averaging 21 points which is enough to kill a normal person in a single shot.

Similarly in Hero, joe average has ten Body and a pistol does 2d6 killing damage.  Which is a 7 in 36 chance of an instant kill on any hit.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;579324Flashing Blades is probably the most interesting exception in this. Combat in FB is more likely to result in incapacitation than death, but it is possible to kill someone outright with a single sword thrust or pistol ball. What makes this interesting is that this is a game and a genre where combat is expected - to shirk it, to look for alteratives to combat, is to risk considerable disapproval toward your character. FB is a game where combat is difficult to avoid and potentially deadly at the same time.

That is a pretty interesting example, and one that makes me wonder:  when you're wounded in FB, how long does it take to heal, and what are the negative effects of it?  I read your example combat for your house rules, on the surface it seems like a combat system that's quick but with some depth to it.

Quote from: The Traveller;579325Groups used to the stand-up pugilism of D&D need to be made well aware before starting a game that a different playstyle is probably advisable, or you'll have some angry players on your hands.

Yeah, I anticipate warning them about it, but most of my players are current or ex- military with multiple tours over here or in Iraq behind them.  I was expecting to show them how the damage and healing rules for my d20-fied version worked and let them see that it's going to be a bad thing to pick up wounds.

QuoteI should say as well that the combat system makes up a significant proportion of the game, so its not like it deliberately goes out of its way to discourage battle. My belief is that pulling the teeth of combat is counterproductive to both gameplay and atmosphere in any system. When the game mechanics don't behave approximately in the way they would in the real world, the whole experience suffers.

I agree, and I hope I'm not taking it too far with my version.  One of the things that is going to be the case, however, is that for slightly different reasons than the social ones that BV brought up, combat will be unavoidable in some situations.  I just want it to feel like a failure of diplomacy when the guns start coming out.

Quote from: vytzka;579329I don't like very dangerous combat. Or rather, I like somewhat dangerous combat, but also combat to be a viable choice for solving problems, if not all of them (other options including asking the villain out, poisoning their food or beating them at an arcade game).

Do you think that it should be less than lethal?  Like Shadowrun, for instance, where it's relatively easy to put someone down, but hard to unintentionally kill them outright?

QuoteI think spending a lot of time to write a combat system that is then deemed too dangerous or - worse - too cumbersome to use in practice is a huge waste. I don't want my book to have 50 pages I don't want to ever use. As you mentioned Phoenix Command, guys spent an inordinate amount of time and effort to produce all those tables and stuff. That they are to be relegated to just the direst circumstances is a tragedy, not a triumph of design.

Unfortunately, unless you're intimately familiar with the system and interested in micro-managing every move of a given combatant, the PCCS rules are cumbersome as hell.  I liked what they did for the streamlining in LS, but even that makes most players' eyes glass over when you start going into Aim Line Modifiers.  

The original (especially with the advanced rules) made it a requirement to adjust the penetration based on the range, and the chances of hitting a given target with Autofire based on the ballistics of the weapon you were using, then you had to do calculations to figure out what the chance of the round glancing off armor (if any) was, then determine the effective penetration of the round through the target, then its effects...

PCCS was just too involved.  I've tried to run the setting with Cyberpunk, Hero, and Palladium before, and much like my opinion of Palladium Robotech, I can't seem to create the same sense of appropriateness with any of the those systems.  I'm trying now to work on making something that feels like PCCS, but only using one more roll than D&D (and that's for location).

Quote from: David Johansen;579332I think lumping GURPS and HERO in with D&D is pretty unfair.  Both are pretty brutal at the base line.  It's just that they have options that can be dialed up to make things more cinematic for heroic individuals.

For instance, in GURPS it's strongly suggested that less skilled combatants and animals generally make all out attacks which, of course means they don't get a dodge roll.  And if you take a 2d6+2 (9mm round) hit to the vitals it does 3x normal damage, averaging 21 points which is enough to kill a normal person in a single shot.

Similarly in Hero, joe average has ten Body and a pistol does 2d6 killing damage.  Which is a 7 in 36 chance of an instant kill on any hit.

I wasn't trying to place a judgement on either of those systems, they fell in with the others because they make use of a hit point system that, by default, doesn't take into account injury with regards to performance.  I placed Shadowrun and Cyberpunk there as well, and they both have degraded performance, but they have a similar feel of 'counting up/down to dead'.

I've been watching Burn Notice.  The main character is a spy, and individually he's pretty deadly.  Taken in isolation, most of his actions could be understood as possible - but taken in conglomerate, the idea of him having survived is pretty ludicrous.  

That's the thing about a recurring character in heroic situations.  Given enough times, your number comes up.  

So being 'realistic' and dealing with things that are more 'heroic' than people typically do, you're likely to kill them.  While realistic, as a player it's not very satisfying.

If death is too common, you don't really role-play your character because he's seen as expendable.  Mike 1 through Mike 8 are basically the same character.  Further, if the situation is really 'believable', characters will walk into an ambush; even if it happens once every six or seven sessions, the likelihood of one (or more) deaths when the bad guys open fire is pretty high.  Again, realistic, but not very satisfying if you want to do heroic things.  

To that end, you're best with a good chance of incapacitating someone, but a much smaller chance of death.  Assume that anybody you get to Walter Reed gets basically better.

To reflect that, you need some kind of rule like this:

If you take enough damage to 'die' or 'death' is the result, roll a die (d20?).  If you roll under your Body (or Con or Toughness or whatever) you can recover with medical care (treat as critical condition for 2d6 days).  If you roll a 1, you recover, but you're left with some permanent disability from the wound (ie, you step on a landmine which results in death.  You roll a d20, aiming for less than a 13.  You roll a 1. You survive, but you lost a leg).

Quote from: Panzerkraken;579334Do you think that it should be less than lethal?  Like Shadowrun, for instance, where it's relatively easy to put someone down, but hard to unintentionally kill them outright?

I don't play Shadowrun but I'm leaning towards this type of combat systems nowadays. It's even okay if they can one shot knock you out and leave you to bleed out without aid, but your friends can still patch you up after the battle, or the enemy can collect the PCs for further, ahem, processing.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;579343I've been watching Burn Notice.  The main character is a spy, and individually he's pretty deadly.  Taken in isolation, most of his actions could be understood as possible - but taken in conglomerate, the idea of him having survived is pretty ludicrous.  

That's the thing about a recurring character in heroic situations.  Given enough times, your number comes up.  

So being 'realistic' and dealing with things that are more 'heroic' than people typically do, you're likely to kill them.  While realistic, as a player it's not very satisfying.

If death is too common, you don't really role-play your character because he's seen as expendable.  Mike 1 through Mike 8 are basically the same character.  Further, if the situation is really 'believable', characters will walk into an ambush; even if it happens once every six or seven sessions, the likelihood of one (or more) deaths when the bad guys open fire is pretty high.  Again, realistic, but not very satisfying if you want to do heroic things.  

To that end, you're best with a good chance of incapacitating someone, but a much smaller chance of death.  Assume that anybody you get to Walter Reed gets basically better.

To reflect that, you need some kind of rule like this:

If you take enough damage to 'die' or 'death' is the result, roll a die (d20?).  If you roll under your Body (or Con or Toughness or whatever) you can recover with medical care (treat as critical condition for 2d6 days).  If you roll a 1, you recover, but you're left with some permanent disability from the wound (ie, you step on a landmine which results in death.  You roll a d20, aiming for less than a 13.  You roll a 1. You survive, but you lost a leg).

That sounds like a really good working rule for a modern game, I already have permanent disability as a possible outcome of serious wounds in my LS game (added in, actually, they didn't have it in the original game), but I like the rule, I think I'll keep that in the back of my mind for a more d20 modern type environment, thanks..

Quote from: vytzka;579350I don't play Shadowrun but I'm leaning towards this type of combat systems nowadays. It's even okay if they can one shot knock you out and leave you to bleed out without aid, but your friends can still patch you up after the battle, or the enemy can collect the PCs for further, ahem, processing.

Yeah, I tend to lean that way pretty heavily as well.  I've run a lot of Shadowrun in the 2e/3e versions, as well as Cyberpunk 2020 and I found it pretty useful to be able to do exactly that.  I wanted it to mean something when a character was killed, so I tended to have lower actual lethality than the game would normally expect.  Not that I didn't stick it to them, there was a lot of brain damage and maiming going on in my CP2020 games, for instance.

@vytzka Since you're passably familiar with Living Steel, I'm counting on the Exceptional Merits to provide a lot of cover for the Swords themselves; every Sword gets a minimum of 1, and that by itself means that they get to roll two times to recover from wounds and permanent disability, but unless they have the higher levels, they don't heal any faster than a normal person would, and it's those healing times (easily crossing into the month range) that I want to serve as a serious deterrent.  I doubt that they'll catch on to just how MUCH more survivable EM's make you initially, so the initial scare tactics should sink the idea of even numbers being bad in pretty well.

Quote from: Panzerkraken;579305Using Sword's Path: Glory, Phoenix Command, and Living Steel as extreme examples of the Simulationist side, and heavily abstracted or loose-representational systems on the Abstractionist side (I'm looking at you, VtM), what are the general thoughts about using avoidance theory to promote roleplaying and non-combat solutions to conflict?

I don't have a preference. That is to say I like different methods in different ways, for different purposes.

-clash

Quote from: David Johansen;579332I think lumping GURPS and HERO in with D&D is pretty unfair.  Both are pretty brutal at the base line.  It's just that they have options that can be dialed up to make things more cinematic for heroic individuals.

GURPS was deliberately dialed down to make it less deadly.  From the Man-To-Man (GURPS Combat System) Designer's Notes in The Space Gamer #76:

QuoteFor instance, the first couple of drafts of the combat system followed strict reality on "hit points." An average man swinging a club could incapacitate another average man (if he was unarmored) with a single good blow, and kill him with two or three. That's the way it really is. And edged weapons — or guns — are far deadlier!

But a combat system that lets one blow decide the battle isn't much fun. Especially considering the time it takes to design a char- acter. Even if you bring him back to life to fight the battle again, one-blow combats are a drag.

So, at every little decision-point that went into making up the combat system, we chose in favor of less damage. Thus, no individual subsystem is wrong — but, added all together, they give a combat system that makes player characters a little harder to kill than "real people" are. Just because it's more fun. However, you'll never see Gonad the Barbarian running around with 80 hit points. No way. A super-hero, maybe — but no natural person is that tough in real life, or in MTM.

I disagree to the extent that I do think that battles being decided in one blow can be fun, but if the game designers want to avoid the PCs being killed with one shot, then I would prefer them to give the PCs script immunity through some sort of Fate Point (Warhammer FRP version) or Fudge Point mechanism rather than nerfing the entire combat system so that nobody, PC or NPC, ever dies with one blow.  Making one-attack kills impossible makes surprise attacks and ambushes that count on one-attack kills impossible, too.  Just call it what it is -- "script immunity" for the PCs -- and give the players points to limit it, if you want.

Quote from: David Johansen;579332Similarly in Hero, joe average has ten Body and a pistol does 2d6 killing damage.  Which is a 7 in 36 chance of an instant kill on any hit.

I ran a science fiction game using the Hero System that had heavy weapons with 4d6 killing attacks.  It's very easy to make Hero a very deadly system by making killing attacks the norm.

Quote from: Panzerkraken;579305Using Sword's Path: Glory, Phoenix Command, and Living Steel as extreme examples of the Simulationist side, and heavily abstracted or loose-representational systems on the Abstractionist side (I'm looking at you, VtM), what are the general thoughts about using avoidance theory to promote roleplaying and non-combat solutions to conflict?

Never had a impact for us (used Book of Mars for a while, a system related to those 'extreme examples' you mentioned).

The ratio of combat to non-combat remained the same. The setting, goals of the characters and needs of the adventure determined when there is battle- risk avoidance had nothing to do with it.

Quote from: David Johansen;579332I think lumping GURPS and HERO in with D&D is pretty unfair.  Both are pretty brutal at the base line.  It's just that they have options that can be dialed up to make things more cinematic for heroic individuals.

Or dailed down, and even ignoring the dails you can change things greatly just by building stuff to a different standard than the examples given in the book and their settings (which I find to be very bland for the most part).

Quote from: deadDMwalking;579343If death is too common, you don't really role-play your character because he's seen as expendable.  Mike 1 through Mike 8 are basically the same character.  Further, if the situation is really 'believable', characters will walk into an ambush; even if it happens once every six or seven sessions, the likelihood of one (or more) deaths when the bad guys open fire is pretty high.  Again, realistic, but not very satisfying if you want to do heroic things.

Is the best way to handle this to make the combat system less deadly for everyone in the setting or is it better to handle this by simply acknowledging that the PCs are special and have script immunity and providing some way for them to avoid death where reality suggests they should die?  There are games that do this.  D&D, of course, also provides a way to raise the dead, thus fixing the problem after acknowledging that a death has happened.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;579343To that end, you're best with a good chance of incapacitating someone, but a much smaller chance of death.  Assume that anybody you get to Walter Reed gets basically better.

In the real world, there are things that people can recover from and things that they don't recover from, which also raises the fairly gruesome possibility of characters dying slowly, something most RPGs avoid.  Of course another thing that many role-playing games gloss over are scars and worse, such as the loss of limbs, eyes, permanent brain damage, and so on, which is a very real problem in the real world after incapacitating injuries.

And if incapacitation or slow death applies to everyone in the setting, then leaving the battlefield covered with wounded bad guy NPCs that are not dead yet can raise some troubling choices for the PCs.  Do they leave them to die slowly, slit their throats to finish the job, or do they try to heal them and take them captive?

Quote from: deadDMwalking;579343If you take enough damage to 'die' or 'death' is the result, roll a die (d20?).  If you roll under your Body (or Con or Toughness or whatever) you can recover with medical care (treat as critical condition for 2d6 days).  If you roll a 1, you recover, but you're left with some permanent disability from the wound (ie, you step on a landmine which results in death.  You roll a d20, aiming for less than a 13.  You roll a 1. You survive, but you lost a leg).

Do you imagine that applying to NPCs as well as PCs, or only characters that the players and GM want to extent script immunity to?

Quote from: John Morrow;579366Do you imagine that applying to NPCs as well as PCs, or only characters that the players and GM want to extent script immunity to?

As I think you're well aware (being perhaps the one person in the whole world who read at least part of Age of Heroes), I'm perfectly fine with having a lower threshold of death for common NPCs compared to PCs and important NPCs.

Think of it as a limited version of "script immunity through some sort of Fate Point" that's skips the additional rule overhead and is just directly applied post-combat.