Combat Scaling and Abstraction

Combat Scaling and Abstraction

Back in the day, I made a video about why I love crunchy tabletop RPG systems, where I explained why I enjoy such intricacies as weapon composition, partial armor coverage, optional hit locations, one-second turns, and other game mechanical intricacies that make GURPS so fun for me. However, I do understand that, in certain ways, granularity can limit you and sometimes even produce quite strange results that do not make much sense.

A couple of months ago, I found the Primeval Patterns substack with what is possibly the best explanation of what BrOSR is, but this is more or less irrelevant to what I’d like to talk about. Some other posts there caught my attention. One of them is titled Resolution Systems, Part 1 and the other Combat Breakdown: Mass-Action Design. Both are linked in the description. One of them contains criticism of conventional skill systems, such as the one GURPS has, and the other contains heavy criticism of highly-granular combat turns, and GURPS is the epitome of that.

I expected to get all mad reading these posts. After all, I’m one of those who called people criticizing one-second turns and wanting, for example, three-second turns stupid. I’m the one who says that GURPS has the best skill system. But after I was done, I instead went “Huh, he’s got some very solid points.” (Even though my IQ is too low to comprehend some aspects of the first post fully.) I realized the flaws of my views and how they impose limits on my games. I managed to find a previously unfound appreciation for abstraction. But let me explain what I mean.

The first example is an assassination mission. Even if you disregard the mess that is stealth in GURPS, this may require many skill rolls. Observation and/or Intelligence Analysis to plan, Climbing to get over the wall, Stealth to stay hidden, possibly rolled multiple times, Knife to attack, then all the rolls in a reverse order to get out. Even if you have high skill levels, the fact that you have to roll this many times makes assassinations almost impossible to pull off. I do remember some of my players trying to plan their actions to have as few rolls as possible just because statistics play against them. How do you fix this flaw? By abstracting things, of course.

To get an idea on how to achieve it, look no further than ACKS II Revised Rulebook. Well, I actually lied, AD&D 1e DMG also is a good resource. ACKS II treats assassinations as hijinks when used against unsuspecting NPCs (it’s an adventure otherwise), and such hijinks require several days of planning, and then a successful Hiding roll. Done. Things are a bit more involved in AD&D, but you get the point. How do you do that in GURPS? What would you roll against? That’s an interesting question that may have multiple answers. The first option is to treat assassination as a job, literally. GURPS Fantasy on page 116 has the assassin job that requires a roll against the worse of Holdout and any one attack skill (including Sleight of Hand), and only a critical failure makes you wanted by legal authorities. This is somewhat too binary, as there are only two outcomes, and one of the outcomes is very rare.

Another option would be doing something like combining all the points spent on typical assassin skills and devising a level of a “virtual” assassin wildcard skill based on that point value. Or you could adapt the procedure from ACKS II, possibly expanding it with more granular outcomes from AD&D. The point is to be able to condense a multi-skill operation into one or two rolls. While it can be used by PCs, it is the most useful when dispatching henchmen or hiring NPC assassins. You do not need the details – you need the result.

But anyway, that’s one thing that could reasonably be abstracted. But didn’t I mention combat? Imagine a typical combat scenario – a party of four player characters is fighting, let’s say, 5 monsters. All right, this is fine. Now imagine a party of four player characters fighting 20 monsters. This is where one-second turns begin to struggle, as every turn takes way too long to resolve. And what about a group of four player characters and their 15 henchmen and followers against a band of 40 orcs? One suggestion that you’ll hear is “don’t do such fights, the system doesn’t like it.” But isn’t is supposed to be generic and universal? Why should you artificially limit yourself as a GM and your players, telling them “please, don’t hire too many followers, and do not get into large fights?” Then you adjust all your encounters and encounter tables in a way that only a few monsters appear at a time, even when it doesn’t make sense. See what I mean by one-second turns restricting your options? And I say that as a proponent of one-second turns!

I’ve seen many times people proposing three-second turns, but that doesn’t fix the problem and even aggravates it. I believe that if you do that, you should go even further. Your turns should be at least 10 seconds long, and 1 minute sounds even better. But how would GURPS combat work then? Here’s the thing – it won’t. Combat needs to be scaled up and partially abstracted. Scaling should be done in two dimensions – size and time, and these two aspects are intertwined – it’s difficult to do one without the other.

However, scaling comes with some problems that you have to tackle. Of course, you shouldn’t roll 60 attacks for each combatant because the turn length is 1 minute now. In reality, much of this time will be taken up by maneuvering, evaluating, and trying to create an opening for an attack. Even GURPS Martial Arts says that realistic tournament fights should be conducted in a series of lulls and flurries. Of course, what I am talking about here is not tournament combat, but the point still stands. Active defenses definitely should work differently or be removed entirely when scaling up combat. I feel that a lot of this can be tied to Rapid Fire bonuses or Size and Speed/Range Table modifiers, but I’m just brainstorming ideas here.

Another thing to keep in mind is injury. GURPS Zombies suggests treating losing HP equal to the major wound threshold as being incapacitated when doing horde or mob combat. This is a good idea to keep in mind. However, do we care about the nature of the incapacitating wound in the midst of combat? No, not really. Although we do care about that when the battle ends. Thus, we can determine the nature of injuries only after the combat, if you survive, of course. How do you do that? With random tables, of course. While it could be just a hit location table, an interesting alternative would be a permanent injury table like something you’d see in ACKS or Rolemaster. Aside from HP, you should assess FP, ammunition, and other resource loss after the battle.

While these game mechanical aspects are important, another important thing to keep in mind is that the players’ actions must be meaningful – they have to be able to actually make some choices. On this scale, the choices are probably more abstract, taking form not of a maneuver, but of a strategy or general course of action, possibly with something like a risk modifier. I think now you might understand where I’m leading with all this – GURPS Mass Combat. It has: different strategies, risk modifiers, casualties, misfortunes of war, injuries assessed after the fact, and large-scale battles. I believe that if you tweak some parts of it, you can use it to resolve small-scale scenarios that would have been a slog otherwise.

If I had to place GURPS Mass Combat somewhere on the abstraction scale, it would be somewhere above Domains at War: Battles and even ACKS II Campaigns. With adjustments for small-scale scenarios, it probably would be about as abstract as Domains at War: Battles.

However, why stop there? I definitely can imagine a situation that wouldn’t be worth of resolving even using mass combat. Something like a party of NPC henchmen having a random encounter. For such situations, it should be possible to adapt the Abstract Dungeons and Abstract Wilderness rules from ACKS II that would let you resolve a fight or even an entire dungeon delve in a couple of rolls. That would land on the top of the abstraction scale.

Anyway, I’m just rambling here without providing an actual solution. I believe that certain GURPS tasks can and sometimes should be scaled up and abstracted, but I also feel that most people approach it from the wrong direction by just giving players more maneuvers per turn, which only makes things worse. I’ll probably give this non-mass mass combat idea more thought when I have some time. Maybe I should also read Chainmail. I’m preoccupied with some other major GURPS project currently.