The Black Campbell

Here’s a video of Operation Black Swan which effected the capture of “El Chapo” Guzman. It’s helmet cam footage and should give you a good idea of how to describe combat sequences in your game.

It’s chaotic even if you had a good plan. It’s loud and disorienting, even when you know what to expect. (It would be no different with swords and magic — fighting is loud and confusing.) If you want to get the feel of the thing, concentrate less on the number of 10′ squares in the room; no one is pausing to say “gee, this looks to be a 50×20′ room, I now know my fireball will do…”

You might even misdraw the map for the initial portion of the fight, then reapportion the dimensions as people move through and realize it’s bigger/small than they thought; drop things on them that “should have been visible” (really, what could you see in portions of that video that were well lit?) They blow a perception (or whatever you’re calling it) test and that guy/goblin/alien/whatever that was hiding pretty much in plain sight gets the better of you. Damn that wizard for flashing his damn light spell right in your eyes! Or crap, my large friend with the two handed-sword didn’t realize I was inside the arc of his swing when he cut that monster in half; or Johnny over on Team C was a bit out of position and you thought he was the bad guy…good thing he had kevlar on.

Make it murky, stressful, and confusing.

While working on the other post Blood on the Deck: Combat in RPGs, I had a paragraph I later pulled to tighten the focus of the article, but something about it stuck with me. Blood on the Deck talks about the centrality of combat in many RPGs and their adventures. That leads to the paragraph in question:

…[M]ost RPGs are analogous to action movies. There can be philosophy, and deep character growth, and political or social commentary, but in the end the monster is going to kill folks/the protagonist is going to throw down with the bad guy/the heroes are going to have to overcome the [pick your disaster]/or the crew is going to pull of that “one last job…” Depending on what the denouement is, that should be the focus of the rolling and the description in the game.

Action movies are about action. You dogfight the evil galactic empire. You find and kill the monster (and steal its treasure.) You find the big bad and throw down, preferably in a secret volcano base. But they’re not always about fighting, and neither do your games need to be.

If you are exploring, the big denouement can be climbing a mountain or escaping the avalanche. You could be navigating your ship through a particularly nasty maneuver near Jupiter. It could be the heist (with or without fighting) requiring climbing and sneaking and safecracking. It could be a car/horse/airplane/boat chase. This is the focus of the adventure

The focus is where the game should move in, get close to the characters emotionally, but also this should be where the most time is spent. The buildup to the focus can be interesting, but these are the things that — unless tied to the finale — can be glossed over with a “did you succeed or no” sort of roll. An excellent example of this in a movie is the recent The Man from UNCLE, which made some really intriguing choices in the action sequences. Most of the focus is on the character interaction, the action is mostly handled quickly unless it ties to the characters’ motivations. There is a sneak and peak scene at the Vinciguerra Yards. They need to find evidence of a nuclear bomb. Most of the action is to show the strengths and weaknesses of the skills and character of the two leads — Solo and Kuryakin. Once they find the bit of evidence, it’s a quick escape, followed by a boat chase/fight that we see mostly in reflections on the window of a truck after Solo has fallen off the boat and swam to shore. It’s funny and shows Solo moving from casual indifference to the people he’s working with to a grudging respect and desire to do the right thing. The fight is just there to help him get from Point A to B.

This might have been well emulated with a few tests to show the two PC’s skills: a stealth roll, a roll to defeat the fence, the door; a test to knock out the guard; a test to overcome the safe. A few tests to run away and exchange some shots with guards, then a some kind of discipline or willpower test for Solo while watching Kuryakin’s boat getting sunk.

By comparison, the raid on the bad guy castle is handled in quick, ’60s split screen that could have been handled with a single test to overcome the guards defenses. It’s not about the characters; they are part of a bigger action piece. It’s over very quickly, and the action slows and focuses of the two once they find evidence of the bomb and have to rescue Gabrielle, their MI6 partner. It’s about the people. In a game, you might run the basic raid as a contest of Tactics or a combat skill to lead the commandos, then slow down to do a few investigation-style tests, before launching on the bike/ATV vs. Jeep scene, where you would want multiple rolls to emulate the need to use the terrain to try and close on the escaping bad guy.

What’s the focus in your game or adventure? That’s where the players should be rolling to heighten suspense and give them chances to shine by doing things their characters would do. Is it a heist? A quick sneak test to climb the wall, get through the window, and past the guards unseen might do…but if the point is to rob the place, you should have tests that show that: a climbing test — oh, crap! the rain gutter is corroded!, another to open the window three stories up without falling, another to incapacitate or slip past the guard, another to crack the safe…

Is the character a “driver” — the final “fight” should be a car chase, using the environment to battle each other until the good guy escapes or best the other driver. Is the final objective for the character’s socialite to best her rival in verbal combat at a dinner and win the affection of Lord Stuffinpants? You get the picture — focus on the point of the story, and let the other stuff take a back seat.

Since the early days of role playing games, fighting has been a central theme or the specific purpose of play. This is no surprise for a hobby that grew out of wargaming — the simulation of warfare through the use of maps, dice, and complicated rules regarding the various elements of combat. Look at any game book pre-1990 (and even a few today), and you will often see combat takes up more pages in the rules than the basic mechanics of play: modifiers for range, for being prone, for fatigue or injury, for ammo or blade types, explosives and other area weapons, environmental condition, and on and on… Even in games that are oriented more toward social activities, you eventually get into verbal jousting. Some games go so far as to have mental “damage” you can take from a harsh word or brilliant insult.

In a game, in the end, it’s usually easier to search a room, drive a car, negotiate a price, or hack a computer system, than it is to pull a knife on a guy. Complexity ramps up the instant the fight starts, from the use of initiative (you don’t tend to have to throw dice to decide if you got the last box of Klondike Bars in the supermarket…but that kinda sounds fun, now that I think about it.) Some games look to limit this disparity in complexity. In Fate, you can have a simple challenge between players or players and GM — one roll to beat the two mooks guarding the door. You win the roll, they’re down and you’re in; you lose, take a complication or get “taken out” in some way. some are even more abstract.

The keys to a successful fight scene can be summed up by looking at the difference between two (recent) movies — Quantum of Solace and John Wick. Both have great action sequences…or should. QoS follows the Greengrass “Jason Bourne” style of close shots, quick cuts, and shaky camera action to heighten the sense of danger and confusion of a fight. It is a great way for a guy who doesn’t know how to shoot fight scenes to get a fast-paced, seemingly vicious scene on the screen. The choreography could be excellent, but you wouldn’t know it; your experience of the fight is truncated to claustrophobic space and frenetic movement — not unlike a real fight, where you are tripping over things, missing when you throw punches, bouncing off of people and things.

This method of description in an RPG is best handled by not using more than the most basic of maps, if that Descriptions of the space the fight occurs in should be short, pointed, and designed to either increase peril (that floor-to-ceiling window with the ten story drop outside, for instance), or for use by the character (“you land on the coffee table next to the heavy-looking brass lamp…”) The environment and the actions come into the character/player’s perception as needed to keep the action flowing. It is particularly good for certain kinds of large-scale combat, as well, where the character doesn’t have a complete view of the field, lacks a complete understanding of the objectives, and is being pummeled with the sensory input of war — explosions, smoke, dirt, blood, screams, panic — to the point where they focus too tightly on certain things. (The excellent initial scene of Saving Private Ryan does this very well.)

A game system that does this well is Fate: where fights happen in “zones.” Zones aren’t necessarily consistent in their scale, but are instead defined by a few bits of scenery (aspects) to give the environment character. Here, the players can use the aspect in ways that give the fight the quality we discussed above. Say your intrepid police are staging a raid. Two PCs are involved, and enter a large warehouse from different directions with their teams. Player A goes through a side door into Zone 1: “Cavernous warehouse” while Player B goes through the front door into Zone 2: “Small, cramped reception area”. While A might engage in a firefight with badguys on the ubiquitous “second story catwalks” and “sparsely located crates”, B must get past the tight doors and furnishings of the reception room to Zone 3: “tight corridor with small offices on either side” in which bad guys lie in wait. the ranges are tight and personal, and the details might be lost in the action.

The other end of the spectrum is the surprisingly good John Wick, which was made by stuntmen and film makers tired of the Greengrassian shaky camera fight scenes. All the fight scenes are beautifully choreographed, but still look fairly realistic. They are shot medium frame, so you can see what the hell is going on, and only dive to close shots to show injury or characters grappling. The environments are there to be used for the fight: the rack of something you can knock over to stall your opponent getting to you, or to distract/injure; the pool that you can fall into for the grappling underwater schtick; the stairs — so nice to toss (or get tossed) down your enemy; columns or crates to hide behind. The fights show the character thinking his way through the fight — prioritizing the closer or faster moving enemies for a quick, non-fatal gunshot, to slow them while he takes out the guy at the end of the hall, then returns to the closer baddie. Similarly, the famed hallway fight in Daredevil (the Netflix one, not the…shudder…) does something similar.

In doing combat this way, you’ll want to either give an excellent description of the fight space, or have a solid map for the characters to use, so that they can strategize their actions. This is the traditional Dungeons & Dragons approach: battlemap, minis, well-estabilshed scale. This would work particularly well for the above example of “Zone 1” — the massive interior of the two-story warehouse lets the character find a place to pause and assess before they leap in. A better map, showing the I-beam supports, the locations of crates or vehicles parked inside, the catwalks overhead, the stairs up, the location of the  tilting windows on the upper floor, etc. could be filled in to allow this player to have a more clear picture of what is going on than Player B in the dark, tight corridor with people spilling out of the offices on either side.

The key to describing combat in your game is to decide what the emotional and stylistic beats you want or need.