Press The Beast

Zero-sum Combat & Designing Incentive

Recently I play-tested Fantasy Violence with a group of pals, old and new, and found it succeeded in my main design goals. The rules themselves are based on Luke Gearing's Violence at the Street Level. I first thought about developing a "Fantasy Violence" when Gearing talked with me and some others about how to develop a more involved melee combat system for the original Violence, which is more focused on gunplay than dust-ups. While folks had talked through Pseudohistorical Violence (included with the Violence write up) I found its reliance on weapon vs. armour and weapon vs. weapon tables to be cumbersome and contrary to my knowledge of martial arts and medieval combat. So, I spent some time hacking up my own take and giving it a whirl. It rocked!

Generally speaking, the games I'm interested in playing resolve combat as:

Systems modelling the latter have never satisfied me. What I like (in theory) about these games is that combat is less zero-sum than D&D type games. Higher risk combat is more appropriate for games that are less focused on an attritional loop to drive gameplay—intrigue, investigation, and other scenarios become more appropriate. While I think there are lots of reasons for why D&D combat tends to become zero-sum, the biggest is that combat is rather easy to "solve" mathematically: as HP increases linearly so to does the capacity for the player to make "safe bets", and calculating damage per round is very trivial.

The RuneQuests of the world go some way toward resolving this issue with fixed HP pools. However, the use of HP at all still leaves combat "calculable" and the HP pools themselves are often too high in the first place. Mothership, for instance, intends to have lethal combat but has player characters that are extremely tough to take down. In the "Violence" family of games death is mathematically on the table any time player characters get in a real fight. While the probabilities can be measured out by savvy players, there is no room for a sure thing.

This changes the dynamic quite a bit: after each combat exchange the question of whether to fold or ante up becomes more compelling. Ironically, by making violence more lethal, the test session I ran had much less death than my typical sessions in other systems. While this has more to do with scenario design and referee methods than the particular system, I found it easier to get the "rhythm" of combat that I've been looking for for a while by using Violence. It doesn't get bogged down like Mythras or GURPS, and it doesn't have D&D's problem of linear HP that—while effective for dungeon crawling—doesn't square well with scenarios with more individual stakes (I.e, the mayor having 7HD in an adventure focused on political corruption is fucking stupid).

Violence is purely a tool to help resolve combat, and has no formal advancement system at all. Luke provides some suggestions, but nothing concrete. While I designed the scenario I used for the play-test I found this extremely refreshing. Gearing's Against Incentives discusses the effect of formal advancement systems on player behaviour and table dynamics; what I had not thought of before was the effect of incentives on prep. It was a relief to not have to think for a second about treasure XP, monster XP, the rate of Character Point gain, etc. Incentives figure into design and end up manipulating the referee as much as the player; whether in big ways, like how D&D functions markedly better with a certain pace of treasure acquisition, or small ways, like how the pace of advancement in Mythras, GURPS, FATE, or other games where you assign rewards at the end of sessions or arcs, implies an escalation alongside that growth.

Instead I got to focus purely on writing the fiction, which could then be processed through Fantasy Violence where relevant. I wrote up stats for a single monster, and otherwise did not ever engage with any elements of system in all of my prep. No NPC needed HD, or a strength score, or whatever—instead, natural language determined the fighting ability of a given character.

For my current game, Gold Horizon, I had fun incorporating some cottonmouth elements into the game—basically, I'm running fairly typical D&D but have tried to represent abstract "game units" like a Strength score or HP in the fiction itself. Some of this has been neat—I especially enjoy having objective measures for attributes—, but it hasn't actually changed the game a whole lot. Fantasy Violence, on the other hand, did more to provide the strong sense of immediacy I had hoped incorporating cottonmouth elements would do for a "D&D-type" game. There are a lot of reasons for this: I have not been fully committed to some of the cottonmouth elements I've incorporated (E.g, I've written that HD corresponds to the amount and potency of blood contained in a creature but have not actually emphasized this in a meaningful way during play), and I'm so used to running D&D in a particular style it's hard to run it any other way.

The immediacy of Violence is refreshing, and I intend to run more. I'm thinking of moving Gold Horizon over from a D&D-type to Fantasy Violence. The campaign has only gone on for 2 Sessions so the time to do it is soon or never.