For decades a satisfactory “single test” mechanic for combat has been something of a Holy Grail for me. Most RPG systems I’ve come across skew heavily towards having crunchier rules for combat than for expertise checks or social situations. Pages of rules are dedicated to things like initiative, movement, attacks, defenses, special maneuvers, injury, and recovery, while mental or social skills usually get a page if they’re lucky.
From my experiences, this is to be expected for two reasons. First, most roleplaying games focus on high adventure: exploring dangerous places, confronting violent villains, and protecting others from harm. Obviously, combat plays a large role in such situations and distilling confrontation to one test diminishes the drama.
Second, there tends to be little extended drama in using mental skills and players that like getting into social situations often rather “roleplay” (to use an emotionally-charged term) through the scenes rather than dice their way to success. Thus, even when the use of mental or social skills is prominent players rarely desire more rules to regulate them.
Still, it seems odd that investigative adventures can chug merrily along with judicious skill rolls only to bog down into an hour-long combat once someone pulls a gun. Shouldn’t this simply be resolved as a single test so the investigation can move forward? Or, if the mystery has been solved and the murderer outed, why does the game need to be dragged out for another half-hour or so if the culprit decides to resist arrest?
In campaigns where combat is to take a minor role it can be tempting to treat combat as just another skill roll. Over the years I’ve periodically tried to do that and was successful in some cases and not so much in others. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
All skills are not created equal. Just because you feel satisfied resolving an encoded puzzle with a single roll doesn’t mean that you’re going to feel that same level of satisfaction distilling a complex diplomatic situation or resolving a fencing duel with single rolls. Some skills simply need a bit more “crunch,” especially if one situation relies on one attribute while another involves several.
Sometimes it’s the mental or social skills that need to get crunchier. If the bulk of your adventures involves gathering and interpreting clues from crime scenes, then maybe all of that shouldn’t be covered by a single Investigate skill. Similarly, in a game of courtly intrigue, you may want the PCs to utilize a half-dozen different types of social interaction roles to make it clearer who specializes in seduction over negotiation or to make some characters better at resisting flattery than accusations.
Most RPGs make several attributes relevant in combat; reducing combat to one skill roll elevates one attribute above others. In most RPG combat rules one attribute is required to attack or defend, one affects damage, and one determines how injury affects a character. By contrast, a Diplomacy roll or Astrophysics roll requires a single attribute. If combat is reduced to a single roll using the attack attribute, then players aren’t going to put much stock in the other two unless they are tied to other important skills.
Some RPGs are weighted towards combat. Reducing combat to a single roll guts the game. I’d wager to say that most iterations of D&D/d20/Pathfinder would be torn asunder if combat was reduced to a single roll, as many feats, special abilities, and spells (not to mention armor class, depending on how you handle the single roll) would no longer be relevant. This may “nerf” some classes in relation to others.
Some RPGs already have time-reducing combat options; these may be enough. In ye olden days I always gave “mook” baddies in my AD&D adventures one hit point per hit die. I’ve seen many RPGs since that have mook/cannon fodder/henchmen rules that speed up combat. These rules are designed to work with the RPG and tend to streamline combats while retaining the flavor of the game. Don’t put in more work than you have to; if these rules do the job then use them!
Can all the variables of combat be adequately distilled into a single roll? So you beat the pistol-armed mook with a combat roll. Did you kill him or knock him unconsious? Does “winning” merely mean he ran away? Was he wounded? Were you wounded? How much did the fight take out of you? While it certainly is possible to resolve combat with a single roll, if you are constantly trying to weigh all of the previous questions whenever combat comes up then maybe it’s a bit more important to your campaign than you’d thought and shouldn’t be handled with a single roll.
If you’ve considered all of these things and still feel that your game can be improved by reducing combats to single dice rolls then here’s a quick and dirty way to do it:
- Make sure your players are on board. Seriously, there’s nothing worse than going through all this trouble only to find that your players aren’t interested and discarding it five minutes into the session.
- Use the core skill mechanic.
- Unless the various physical attributes play essential roles in other parts of the game, reduce them to a single physical attribute. This can be accomplished by averaging physical attributes together or simply by replacing them with one attribute and modifying character generation rules to compensate (e.g. reducing the number of points spent on attribute selection).
- Eliminate extraneous character options unless you can rework them to influence the single test mechanic.
- Whenever combat comes up, first determine the desired outcome. While this may involve “defeating the opposition” it could mean other things like “evade the mooks so I can get to the boss” or “hold off the guards long enough so I can dive into the ocean and escape.”
- Determine what a failure means. If you’re trying to evade the mooks, maybe a failure is getting pinned down behind some crates long enough for the boss to escape. If you’re fleeing the guards, failure could mean that you were captured.
- Determine what can modify the roll. These include any environmental or situational modifiers.
- Determine the minimal success by answering the question “You’ve achieved the outcome, but…” The “but” is a complication thrown your way. To continue with the above examples, you evaded the mooks but spent your pistol cartridge, or you held off the guards but you were shot in the leg, leaving a blood trail for nearby sharks.
- Determine what you need for a solid success. This is an outcome with no complications.
- Determine what you need for a critical success. A critical success enables you to answer the question “You’ve achieved the outcome and…” You evaded the mooks and managed to run the fleeing boss into a dead end. or you were able to trap the guards in a fishing net, enabling you to continue to search the ship rather than flee.
- Determine the minimal failure by answering the question “You failed, but…” The “but” opens the door to success with another roll. The mooks have you pinned down but the boss remains behind them yelling into his smartphone for a helicopter extraction. The guards cut off your escape route to the rails but there’s a staircase nearby – maybe you’ll have better luck on a higher deck?
- Determine the critical failure by answering the question “You failed and.” The “and” is something catastrophic. Not only did you fail to evade the mooks but you’re unconscious and bleeding from a bullet wound. Not only did you fail to escape the guards but you twisted your ankle before being captured.
While these seem like a lot of questions to ask for a single roll, remember that you only have to predetermine the ranges for the various levels of success or failure. With each individual roll, you just need to announce the desired outcome. Everything else can be determined on the fly as necessary.
So what say you? Do you use single combat tests in your campaigns? What issues have arisen? How did the single roll help/hinder your campaign? If you’ve never used it, would you consider it? Have you had any situations where you think a single combat roll might have helped?
I think one need to rethink what skill rolls are to be able to do this. Combat is for many people excitement and investment combined. You put your character at stake. Perhaps a skill roll shouldn’t do that? Perhaps it should instead just open up ways for new rolls, like the “Yes/No…but/and” that you suggested.
(I personally don’t like “No…but/and”, because I prefer “No, because” as a fall forward mechanic. [Notice how I used it in this sentence.])
Another way to achieve this is to make all skill rolls chained to each other. A roll for Lockpick may be followed by a Seduction roll or perhaps Arcane? The same goes for combat rolls.
I tend to see similarities in the structure of playing roleplaying games with a conversation. In a conversation, one person has the initiative, and anyone may chip in to break that initiative. We all build on what each other says, and by doing that the topic of the conversation mutates. If we implement this in roleplaying games: a Lockpick roll may be followed by a Combat or Seduction roll. The topic mutates.
I tried the single combat roll in FATE and found, while it could certainly speed play, it deemphasized not just combat itself, but the perceived danger of combat in the game. (Especially with the ideas of “stress”, rather than “wound” or “injury.”)
I’ve found the best way to deemphasize combat, if that’s your goal, is to place more focus on other skill tests. So while a lock picking roll might be a single test (if successful), social “combat” often involves a few rolls in my games — so a dinner party involving political figures you need to convince of a policy might require an initial charisma test (or similar) to get their initial disposition toward you, and then while role-playing it out as needed, another test to present your idea and convince them of its efficacy.
Since this could entail different aspects of the character, you might consider a normal charisma test, followed by another or an intelligence test to lay out the pros and cons. It’s one of the reasons I like classic Cortex so much, you could reconfigure the attribute+skill mechanic to more accurately represent what you’re after: a Willpower+Influence for the initial test, then an Intelligence+Influence for the argumentation.
The real issue is whether the moment you are playing through is tense enough to require a few tests to heighten the sense of import and danger. You could have a simple hacking test to subvert the target building’s security while the other players go it to collect [insert here]. But perhaps there’s a security sysadmin in the building, and he’s noticed something is wrong. Instead of simply failing to protect the team, it could turn into an attempt to lock each other out, or distract the guy with other computery subterfuge. This makes the hacker’s actions more relevant to the action and heighten the sense of danger — will you be found out in the middle of the action? Getting in…that’s the easy part; getting out is another matter. (say that with a gravely voice. It’ll be much more fun.)
One of the best single roll combat systems I know of is the skill test version of conflict from Burning Wheel. The full game has a awesome fight system, but it is complicated. To help new players the designers and rules recommend using basic Sword vs Spear tests to see who wins.
To make it more dangerous, armor and weapons grant advantage dice to those involved, and different levels of damage can be dealt. However, it is still just a single roll.
The forums even support failure meaning success at a cost “I use my sword to cut through guards to get to the evil baron before he flees” [Fails by 1-2] “The baron leaps into his carriage as you finish off the last guard.” Now the player needs to decide how to handle the baron being closer to fleeing. Or the player would receive a minor wound and succeed, getting her blade under the baron’s chin as he puts his first foot on the carriage.
Being that I primarily play D&D/Pathfinder mooking combat to a single roll would not work for most players. I’d be far more interested in seeing a subsystem for social combat – to make social encounters more crunchy, rather than making combat a single roll like most social encounters.
Right now, in social situations, my players roleplay the bulk of the encounter. Based on their presentation and logic of “in-character” discussion, I give a +/- modifier which I add to their tied in skill check, plus any additional modifiers based on class features, items, special skills, etc, sometimes as an opposed roll by the opposition for especially challenging encounters(sometimes not). Then resolve the situation.
One could also create a social encounter that might require multiple skill checks to achieve levels of success, in combination towards an overall success. In other words a skill check could work like a combat attack, where a ‘win’ only gains an advantage to a point in discussion, not overall success. Then require multiple successes (the number varies from encounter to encounter) for the overall win. Kind of point/counterpoint method of social resolution.
Isn’t the multiple skill checks similar to the skill challenge system 4e used? It seems like it. To convince the Duke to gather an army to confront the goblins (who so far posed no threat) bluff can be used to make the goblins seem a more urgent threat, diplomacy can be used to sway the Duke to the PCs side, sense motive can be used to detect what the Duke is hiding or feeling about the goblin threat, intimidation may be used (probably not a good option) to bully the Duke into helping [intimidation is probably better used on a subordinate to have the subordinate agree to everything the PCs say, giving a circumstantial bonus].
After, say 4 successes, the Duke will be convinced to engage the goblins. But if the PCs fail, he is think they are warmongers and withdraw his support in even patrolling the frontier at full staff.
Well, I never obtained 4e, so I don’t know for sure. But I am aware of the 4e skill challenge as discussed in some forums. The 4e version seems so formulaic with 3 successes equals overall success – why 3? I think every combat encounter is potentially different, so too social encounters are each different. A simple challenge might require a single check, whereas a complex encounter might require 4, 6, 10 successful checks to succeed – it depends on what is going on, what is intended to be accomplished. I mean 3 successful sword swings doesn’t equate a dead dragon. There is no set number of successful attacks, rather however many it takes to get the dragon to zero hit points which vary from encounter to encounter, so too does it make sense that not every social encounter should be the same with 3 successes as a win (that makes no sense to me.)
Again, I don’t play every system, so I couldn’t possibly tell you what 4e, M&M, DCC (or really any game that’s not D&D/PF) handles anything mechanics wise.
I’m sure it’s partly based on other systems, but Star Wars Edge of the Empire by Fantasy Flight Games has a brilliant single combat roll mechanic that utilises the “yes and”, “yes but”, “no and” and “no but” narrative you mention. It’s the system I’m GMing currently, and my group love it.
Given that I’m going to be running Star Wars Edge of Empire again, I’ll have to check it out (I skipped it since it was optional).
How reliant is it on the special dice?
Entirely reliant, though you can print the symbols out onto adhesive paper and make your own (there’s a PDF at the FFG site). I was sceptical about the dice at first, but they make the system what it is and work brilliantly to build narrative into dice rolls.
Another option might be something like the “fallout” mechanics from Dogs in the Vineyard where each side rolls its attack dice once. The higher side wins but the losing side still inflicts consequences based on how well it rolled.
So if the heroes rolled a modified 20 and the villains rolled a modified 15 then the heroes win but have 15 points of consequences to absorb. Then just offer them difficult choices about how to absorb those points.
You can set it up any way you like. Maybe 15 points means either (a) everyone in the party is lightly wounded applying appropriate penalties to the next fight, (b) the wizard used all his combat spells for the day dealing with this threat, or (c) a single party member is gravely wounded. Take your choice.
A game is a series of interesting decisions. Part of the fun is learning from your mistakes and adjusting your strategy. Plus, multiple rolls before the outcome can build up tension.
For this reason, I think that truly single-roll combat is generally less fun and should only be reserved for easy and/or inconsequential fights that you really just want to blow right past. A full-on combat scene should usually have multiple rolls. In my experience, most of the time a complex or important social encounter will require multiple skill checks, and an investigative adventure will feature a series of skill checks (just spread out a bit more). Plus we have “skill challenges” and similar to actively turn what could be single-roll checks into several checks. These things help the player feel like they are the ones playing, rather than their dice.
By far the best “nearly-single-roll” combat rules I’ve seen are in Apocalypse World. These rules hit every one of your guidelines above, plus an additional one: they don’t strive to be strictly single-roll-per-combat. Instead, they strive to make every roll decisive, meaning, the roll has a large impact and COULD end the combat by laying one side out flat or making them want to surrender. So in a one-on-one fight or quick brawl, the single roll usually ends things, but in a large or complicated fight you often need to make several rolls per player before things resolve.
How do you feel about single-roll combats to show how awesome the PCs are? Something like “The cardinal’s men outnumber you 4 to 1 and charge” [roll] “A few moments of intense fighting later and you all stand unharmed among the score of the cardinal’s men. Only Porthos’ feather in his hat has been damaged.
Of do you think this is best done without a role?
Doesn’t an out of ordinary roll threaten to skew results quite often?
When you do multiple rolls over the course of a combat your rolls will average out (usually). Meaning the encounter will probably go about as planned. There are times when it doesn’t but they will be exceptional and probably memorable.
By only rolling once you greatly magnify the effect of a critical hit or miss. Run in’s with routine enemies could spell disaster for the characters if someone happens to flub just one roll.
When I’m on the player side of the table I really don’t like contests that are super high stakes with only roll involved. I don’t feel like my choices matter at that point. Just my luck with the dice.
This is an interesting point. I didn’t think about the stats averaging out in multiple rolls vs a single roll.
However, I think that fail forward mechanics can be really good for removing this. Rather than having a single roll determine if there is success, the roll can determine the level of success.
Resolving significant scenes in one roll is disturbing; while you can adjust to it, it tends* to resolve things quickly and without detail. If that’s perfect for the circumstances (like Razjah’s “seconds later, 20 men lie felled around you”), go for it… but in PTA, we found that single rolls provide a lot less context, leaving them prone to a quick summary instead of engaging description.
Hi Walt,
HeroQuest 2 by Robin D Laws allows for contests to be scaled according to the needs of the story and the engagement of the Players. Thus, a simple or unimportant combat can be resolved as a Simple Contest with a single roll by each side. The results are graded in five degrees of victory or defeat.
Alternatively, for a more engaging contest, there is the Extended Contest option. This is likely to involve multiple rolls, and creates more of the back-and-forth expected of combat.
HeroQuest 2 is very much a narrative-style RPG. I have been running it for over 100 Sessions and I still love it!
Happy Gaming
Phil
After decades of GMing mostly crunchy combat, I find when I run fast combat systems, I find my game prep crazy different.
I don’t need to learn 27 special attacks, work up stat blocks, and obsess over terrain. Tons of game prep vanished.
I do need to add a lot more scenes and more interesting NPCs to a session. New game prep appeared!
More scenes because I don’t have hour long fights. Or two hour long fights. 🙂 Or even 30 minute long fights.
A big fight might be 10 minutes, most over in 5 or less (I’m running Gumshoe (Ashen Stars) atm).
More interesting NPCs because you want dramatic tension and if you aren’t relying on combat die rolls to make it for you, you need to add it in the game.
Going to a single roll would push the game prep even further down that path.
— Nojo
PS. For those running d20 who want to cap those mega fights, think about stealing the Escalation Die from 13th Age.