Fan Club “Blog” #20: A Combat Conversation

Hello folks! I've got a blog post of a rare sort for you today.

Remember in my big Mythic Bastionland review I made some criticisms about combat balance and structure? Afterwards, designer Chris McDowell made an appearance in the Quinns Quest Discord server in which he was replying to my criticisms, saying things that were altogether too intelligent and generally running the risk of making me look like a cloddish simpleton. So I decided to ask if he'd like to join me for a longer, conversational back-and-forth about the whole affair.

My hope is that this will be a valuable resource for folks playing Mythic Bastionland, or just running TTRPG combat in general. Also, because it's only fair that I give Chris the option of sharing this post with his community, too, I've made the decision to make this the first blog post on Quinns Quest that's open to the public.

Let's GO!

Quinns: Hi Chris! Thanks for agreeing to this conversation. You’re the best. 

Let me start by paraphrasing the criticism I made in my review. In the video I explained, at length, that I love the combat system in Mythic Bastionland. You give players so many interesting options regarding how to fight tactically, or riskily, or just express themselves. Also, I didn’t mention this in the review, but I love how you honour dice in the system. Everyone get to roll a lot of dice, but it’s never... self-indulgent? Each roll always has heft and drama.

So on the one hand, you’ve designed the best combat system that I’ve ever encountered on Quinns Quest, and I’d love to hear more about your design process.

But in my review I went on to say that I wished your game’s minimalist ruleset had just one more page on how to design and structure these combats. Because what I found during my campaign is that by itself, a great set of combat rules doesn’t make for great combat. Instead, our fights were only truly fantastic when they had a great context that elevated the fight beyond two sets of stat-blocks lining up against one another.

That context could be the story behind the fight, or the stakes, or the environment, or sub-objectives, or... what else am I forgetting, I wonder?

Chris: Sure, I get that! Because the game leans heavily into high-player-agency sandbox play it can be tricky to anticipate where, when, or even if a fight is going to take place. If the players are dealing with the Wyvern Myth then there’s a good chance they’ll fight “that foul twisted reptile” at some point, but the objective of the fight and the battlefield situation depend on a context that is developed through play. As with other parts of the system, this is going to call for some Referee improvisation! The Combat page in the Spark Tables section can help here, (see pic below) but I also think that the combat itself doesn’t need to carry all the weight of responsibility. 

A motif of Old School Revival-style play is often that combat should be about whether you fight, rather than how you fight.

That might sound obvious, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking all monsters exist to be fought, and are balanced around being an entertaining, but reliably defeatable, challenge. I like to focus on the buildup and aftermath of the fight as much as the turn-by-turn sword swinging. Going back to the Wyvern example, I’m thinking of the knights learning the creature’s weaknesses from a Seer, hunting down its nest with a local guide, and setting up an ambush to kill it while it sleeps. The tactical play of how that fight actually happens sits alongside those elements as equals, to me, so the combat is designed to be resolved pretty swiftly when it happens.

As you pointed out in the review, this can lead to moments where well-prepared knights make short work of a big scary monster, but I’m not really looking for lengthy set-piece boss battles. The slaying of the dragon is only as important as the quest to get there, the decision to fight, and the glory received afterwards.

With that in mind, I touch on the idea of Dynamic Combat a little in the Oddpocrypha section, but for those looking to wallow in the tactical side of things a little more I’d recommend checking out Index Card RPG which has a load of great advice for making interesting combat scenarios. Oh, and watch my blog, because all this has spurred me on to start drafting a post with a few extra combat tricks you can bring in to spice up an otherwise straightforward encounter. [Editor's note: That post has since been published and can be found here.]

Quinns: Yes. I know we’re both fans of the section on combat in comedically avant-garde adventure - and amazing read - Silent Titans, which I’ll post below.

To be clear, this is an inexplicably grounded set of tips published inside the Silent Titans adventure, which outside of this little strip of practical advice is so unhinged as to be almost unplayable.

I feel like I need to print out all of these little sets of combat tips from different games to have nearby when I’m GMing... but also, I know how I GM, and I feel like I’d never take the time to look at them mid-game. Maybe I need to blu-tack them to my bathroom mirror so I read them when I’m cleaning my teeth, or something.

It occurs to me that maybe combat in TTRPGs really benefits from things like “fighting next to objects with stored kinetic energy” or “having sub-objectives like keeping an NPC safe” because fundamentally, the inescapable thing in TTRPG combat is that any given player spends most of their time waiting. You’re waiting for other players to make their decisions, for the GM to make rulings, for numbers to be crunched. So a combat needs to have so many layers for players to think about when it’s not their turn.

Anyway, okay, I agree with you- the lead up to the fight in Mythic Bastionland should be considered part of the fight itself. The way you designed the Myths mean that players catch all of these ominous glimpses of the being threatening the realm before they draw their swords, and my players and I definitely had fun with that.

On the subject, while I was running Mythic Bastionland I was also fetishistic about how, in real life, it was a serious effort for medieval warriors to get into their armour, string their bows, keep their blades sharp and so on, so I made sure to have plenty of roleplaying and tactical complications whenever my players did the busywork of transforming themselves into killing machines in a hurry. Just as you, Chris, designed a game where unwieldy weapons are terrible in corridors, I had lots of fun attacking my players in the middle of the night when they were in their tents with only a dagger to hand, or creating complications after my players told me that their larger weapons were being carried by their squires.

But I do want to talk about combat balance a little bit. Sure, the build up to a fight can be just as exciting as the fight itself, and I’m certainly not saying that fights have to be long. Also, I remember one of my players telling me about a year ago that because danger mostly exists in the players’ imagination, a fight where the players steamroll their opponents might feel like a failure to the GM and at the same time feel like a glorious victory to the players.

All the same, the fights in my campaign of Mythic which felt truly amazing did all have some real jeopardy to them, with players triumphing over an enemy after first fearing for their lives. And as I say in my review, Mythic Bastionland simply doesn’t seem interested in balancing the strength of enemies to the strength of players.

Do you have any advice for GMs trying to balance combat? Do you truly not think it’s particularly interesting? Or are you so practiced as a GM that on some instinctive level you can do it without thinking?

Chris: The type of combat that gets me excited doesn’t really focus on balance in terms of creating an even fight that’s nudged generously in favour of the players. Of course a matched contest can be fun, and they do exist in this game, but I like playing in a world that embraces the mismatched fights in the same way.

You’re right about Mythic, though, a well-rested group of Knights can make short work of many of their opponents when push comes to shove.

For my previous games, Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland (see below), the characters are generally a bunch of losers who get in over their heads, and you can easily run into situations where some monstrosity eats half of the group in a single combat.

In those games it’s meant to encourage outside-the-box strategies or finding a way to avoid the fight altogether. For Mythic it’s a different proposition. Of course I want the Knights to face adversity, but it also felt like an opportunity to gift players that feeling of power, where the Knights can be at times like an unstoppable force (see below, again).

There’s a passage that describes how Knights live between two worlds: one of rank, oath, and rule of the worthy, the other of chaos, brutality, and rule of the strong. Giving the Knights a lot of raw martial prowess really lets the players explore that and hopefully begin to consider their place in the world. 

A nice side-effect of all this is that as the Knights grow in Glory they’re going to get more involved in court and inter-realm politics, where crises aren’t so easily solved just by spilling enough blood. Make them long for the days when their biggest problem was riding out to stab an Ogre!

For those looking to increase the deadliness of enemies, creating a world with even more bite, I think there are a few options. The most straightforward would be to allow more of the strange creatures found in Myths to use Feats as if they were a Knight. 

Quinns: Okay then, last question. It’s a bit more philosophical, I’m afraid, but I’m sure you can hack it.

Combat obviously plays a large role in the TTRPG community because roleplaying grew (and still grows to this day) out of the popularity of D&D, which was originally a wargame and today that’s still a big part of the brand.

In 2008 we even saw D&D 4th edition try and return to these roots, with grid-based combat and an rigid framework for balancing encounters, as if this was a videogame. But then alongside this, in the last forty years we’ve seen generations of RPG designers who have successfully uncoupled their TTRPGs from any combat of any kind.

Alongside this, I can’t help but see you, Chris - alongside large parts of the old-school revival community - as a bit of enigma? Mythic Bastionland has this profoundly intelligent and well-thought through combat system... but you also just told me that you’d take joy in a table full of players becoming regents and transitioning away from even using it.

What is combat in TTRPGs, to you? It’s like you couldn’t imagine designing a game that doesn’t have fighting at the heart of the rulebook, while at the same time you don’t want it front and centre of the stories you tell. It feels like you’re excited by it and bored by it at the same time!

Chris: It’s interesting to look at that connection to wargames. In those very first experimental wargames that pushed into what we’d recognise as an RPG, such as Braunstein, players immediately began to explore the space outside of combat. You had players who were civilians, but reports note just how much players wanted to talk things through with other characters, all while pursuing their own objectives. It’s like RPGs grew out of wargames, but couldn’t wait to explore the non-war elements of play!

I don’t for a minute expect anybody to pick up Mythic Bastionland and then avoid the combat system entirely, but I like the idea of a campaign that changes over its course. Zero-to-hero isn’t that interesting to me but warrior-knight to general-knight to monarch-knight to dead-knight feels much more exciting, while still giving the players plenty of other paths they could follow. It nudges things in a certain way so that session 5 of your campaign feels different to session 15 and session 50. 

It’s the same as how travelling in Winter is really bad in this game, so players will often use that season to hunker down and deal with in-house problems, rather than wandering the wilderness like normal. I like those changes of pace to occur in a way that feels true to the world. 

But am I bored by combat? In many games, yes! I often joke that 99% of my game design comes out being impatient. Rolling a character? Make it faster. Rolling to hit? Get outta here! Monster stat blocks? Arghh just give me the gist of it. I think we’ve all been in those sessions where you notice that two hours have passed and you haven’t really done anything. That’s what I’m always trying to avoid. 

I’m also not precious about my little subsystems. I love how combat turned out but there’s so much more to the game than that.

It’s a cliche, but I think of it like a toolbox. Perhaps those older knights use the mass combat system more, perhaps they get really involved with managing crises in their domain and building great projects, or perhaps the group reaches a point where they’re hardly using the rules at all, and just resolving things with conversation and the odd luck roll. Each table’s game of Mythic Bastionland is going to be different, which is why I think tone-setting and referee guidance are just as important as getting all the mechanical cogs to spin a certain way.

Quinns: Amazing. Thanks so much, Chris.

Chris: No worries, thanks for the chat!