Is there an ideal frequency with which characters or monsters hit one another in an FRPG?
“I’d seen him fight before, but it never got old. He was captivating. He never stopped moving. Every action was graceful and lethal. He was a dancer of death.” – Richelle Mead
How Random Is Your Game?
I was inspired by a recent discussion of armor in Dungeons & Dragons to expound on a question that is frequently asked by new game designers: how much randomness should be in a game?
The answer depends on the audience you are making the game for. Three-year-olds can enjoy an entirely random game (such as Candyland), while adults will likely have a variety of preferences. I’ve seen adults enjoy playing Left-Right-Center (another entirely random game), while “serious” adult gamers might hate it.
In tabletop role-playing games, randomness matters a lot where dice rolls are concerned, which is why combat is a frequent test of how much randomness is inherent in the game. Is there an ideal frequency with which characters or monsters hit one another?
The Ideal Frequency of Combat
There’s no definitive answer to ideal frequency, as this will largely depend on an individual’s taste in gaming and their comfort with the pace of how fast the game moves. But there are definitely elements of a game that can dictate the pace of combat. It’s more instructive to focus on what is the ideal frequency of a successful attack for your game.
The answers will change the style of play. If everyone hits everyone, or no one hits everyone, the consequences change the game’s pacing. Rarely hitting corresponds to the old soccer saying, “One Nil to The Arsenal” (a saying about typical outcomes given a very strong Arsenal defense.) It can feel boring even as it resulted in success for Arsenal.
Conversely, hitting all the time can also be boring, as combatants slug it out, lowering each other’s hit points (or other metrics) until one of them falls.
Either of these can be unsatisfactory, and most role-playing games try to find a happy medium between the two extremes.
Pacing a Game
Pacing a game is not new to sports, and over time some very popular pastimes have altered their style of play to try to find that perfect balance.
NASCAR, for example, has struggled because the races take so long. Baseball faced a similar problem, so they added a pitch clock. When there are so many electronic pastimes vying for our attention, “hitting” (e.g., a goal, a shot, a home run) keeps the game lively and interesting over long stretches of time.
But fantasy role-playing games are not sports (though they can have sport-like elements). Combat can be frequent, unpredictable, and lopsided. In that case, should combat pacing favor the player characters or the monsters?
The answer isn’t always obvious. Critical hits are emblematic of a system’s pacing: if you decide a natural 20 is a critical hit, the more monsters (who frequently outnumber the PCs) get a swing in, the more likely the monster will get a critical hit. For those who prefer optimized systems where it’s possible to one-shot, one-kill someone with a crit, if the monsters have the same option it’s quite possible a low-level critter might take out a character with a series of lucky rolls. And this is all due to monsters hitting more frequently than PCs.
Conversely, if the PCs are supposed to be heroes, more frequent hits with dire results means the PCs are going to die rather unheroically at times. To avoid this, some games remove crits from certain opponents, or restrict them to special circumstances, or don’t allow the opposition critical hits at all. Otherwise, your protagonists (the PCs) might drop dead just from a poor roll.
A Good Defense
The other factor to reduce lethality from frequent combat is a better defense. That is, while the monsters and foes may hit more frequently, PCs have better defenses to withstand the assault.
If you’re a team sports fan you’ve probably heard the maxim “defense wins championships.” A GM can arrange that the PCs usually have much better add-on protection (armor, etc.) than the bad guys, so that the bad guys end up successfully hitting far less often, or hit often but rarely inflict much damage. In game terms that could be interpreted to mean the player characters, at least, might be hit often but may not feel it as much (thanks to armor, damage reduction, or other rules that mitigate the damage if not the hit itself).
Combat Methods
Dungeons & Dragons has evolved on this topic over time. Frequency of hits, critical hits, and damage resistance have all been tweaked between each edition with the understanding that the more monsters there are, the more any rule relying on percentages favors the mob.
This is why Advanced Dungeons & Dragons had a rule that fighters could attack a number of times equal to their level against opponents with less than one Hit Die. That mechanic built on the original Chainmail framework that D&D used as its combat system: heroes attacked four times, and superheroes attacked eight times.
The challenge of one vs. many goes both ways, and for epic monster fights, they can end very quickly with large parties. Fifth Edition introduced lair and legendary actions, with the understanding that with enough PCs, any monster is going to go down quickly (and the odds are high that one of them will roll a critical hit that accelerates the conclusion even more). The goal is to find that sweet spot between foes so that even though there may be more of one side or the other, the fight feels like it could swing either way without it being a foregone conclusion.
While D&D has a single defense system (Armor Class) and damage reduction system (resistance or invulnerability), other tabletop games may have armor or skills that reduce the ability to be hit (that is, your level doesn’t make you harder to hit, though it may give you abilities or bonuses to existing armor system to reduce the chances). The focus is primarily on hitting, not defending.
When put into action, it can be fun to have armor that blocks blows, critical hits that slice off opponents’ heads, or critical fumbles that cause your opponent to fall off a cliff … until it happens to your character. Having different rules for monsters and minions, PCs and heroes, can mean the difference between an epic battle that will never be forgotten … or an ignominious end because of the right (or wrong) roll.
Your Turn: How do you handle one vs. many combat in your games so that they feel balanced?
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