I’ve been working on this TTRPG called Swords & Shields (or Armor and Axes). It’s given me occasion to think about what combat is really all about in RPGs.
After about a thousand different rolls with made up characters at different levels in mock battles, I’ve come to the conclusion, which might seem hilariously obvious, that so long as combat relies on the roll of a die, it’s not really about skill. And there’s no way to make it so.
I know.
But I guess I was proceeding from the premise, or the idea, that you could turn a die based battle system into something tactical.
But the truth of the matter is, that RPGs, and I’m including TTRPGs, are not really games of skill.
Meaning, they don’t work like games such as Fortnite, or Street Fighter, or chess, or even golf. In those games, the satisfaction of playing the game comes from pitting your skill against an adversary, in the case of golf it is the course, and overcoming that adversary, or bettering your personal scores. So as your real world skill increases, so does your performance, and that’s the payoff.
When you’ve won a game of Fortnite, you have pitted your real world skills, even though it’s a virtual battlefield, the skills are real, against someone else.
When you master the fireball technique in Street Fighter, you can use that skill against your opponent in real world matches. The skill you possess is real, even though it’s being expressed virtually through a controller.
You’re not doing that in RPGs, or TTRPGs. When I cast fireball in D&D, I don’t do anything. There’s no series of tricky controller maneuvers that I have to do to throw a fireball in D&D. I just decide to do so. There is no skill involved.
Then what is the satisfaction of playing this type of game?
This reminds me of something I once heard Jim Butcher, the fantasy author, say at a writing seminar. It was an AMA session (ask me anything) and someone in the audience asked him if there were any tricks to coming up with a good ending, and he said that the most important thing was that it felt emotionally satisfying, or emotionally real, to the reader. That’s all.
And this was years ago, so I’m trying to remember exactly what he said, but he used the movie Jaws as an example. At the end of Jaws, if you remember, they kill the shark by shooting a scuba tank with a gun, and the tank explodes on the shark.
This isn’t possible. You can’t kill a shark this way.
But Jim Butcher said that doesn’t matter. You don’t have to come up with an ingenious solution to the problem, because by the end of that movie, we wanted that shark dead.
It doesn’t matter whether you can kill a shark by shooting a scuba tank, it feels emotionally satisfying and earned, and the audience was where they needed to be for that to work.
So, and this is me now, I think a movie like Rocky, for example, works, because we feel like we’ve been in training with Rocky the whole time. We feel as if we went on all those early morning runs, drank all those raw eggs, went all ten rounds with Apollo Creed. That’s why the movie ending works, because it feels emotionally satisfying and real to us.
But we actually haven’t done any of those things. We just sat in a chair watching.
I think this is the key to understanding how to build a TTRPG. Or any RPG for that matter. You don’t have to make it tactical or anything like that, it’s never going to be Fortnite. But you do need to make the journey or the ending, emotionally satisfying or real to the players. They have to feel like they earned the victory.
That’s why leveling up is so compulsory in video game RPGs, because it makes the victory seem satisfying. Even if all you did against the boss was cast the same spells in the same order it still feels like you beat them because of all that leveling up. It’s a victory you earned.
And this is why dice are important. Because the dice are neutral. It wouldn’t feel earned if you, as the player, decided you won against the Big Bad. It also wouldn’t feel real or satisfying if the GM told you you won. But it does feel real and satisfying if the dice do, because the dice are neutral, and they reflect in meaningful ways the effort you put into getting to that point. The dice themselves change depending on your level or weapon or skills. You have abstracted all of your abilities or skills into the dice.
But that means the “game” has to include satisfying ways of progressing, and that doesn’t only mean through combat and XP. It could be resource management, or like in Suikoden, through recruiting more and more characters until you have formed a literal army to fight with you. That’s what makes an RPG playing experience satisfying.
Anyway, you still need combat mechanics at some point anyway, and I’m pleased to report that the mechanics for my game seem to be evolving towards a good system. I have changed things substantially after all this play testing, but it’s definitely an organic evolution from the original concept, and seems to work. I just need to figure out how magic fits into the changes now.
And of course, endless balancing through testing. I don’t have the math skills to do complicated probabilities, but I have been playing RPGs my whole life, so I’m just going off whether everything feels like it makes sense.
But now I’m considering ways to make the game satisfying to play that have nothing to do with combat, or, at least, are related to combat or the effects of which show up in combat, but that are not necessarily related to any skill of playing the game. Because I’m not sure how well you can do that.
Nimble is a game I backed on Kickstarter. It bills itself as a tactical TTRPG. I actually haven’t spent much time playing it, because I am more of a physical book kind of person and the physical books haven’t shipped yet, but I do have some of the PDFs. I’m going to check out what they did there.
Thanks for reading.