Notes from the Aleph: Combat x3
August 3rd, 2010 by Imperator
Notes from the Aleph will be our ongoing series of game-design notes from the Sanguine authors.
As role-playing games have evolved, they have become richer and more complex: more options in combat, more special abilities to use. What characters can and cannot do becomes more and more refined … and the books get bigger and bigger, with more and more rules. Since tabletop games are turn based — each player gets a chance to do something, and they get all the time they need to think about it — they will want to plan, they will want to know what options are available to them, they will want to read the rules. Is it any wonder that many table-top games will take three or four hours to play out a simple fight sequence that a movie, TV show, or video game could’ve handled in five minutes?
When we wrote the combat rules for IRONCLAW: Squaring the Circle, we had three primary goals:
- Combat should be expedient.
- Combat should be expressive.
- Combat should be exciting.