Heroic Combat, Timescale, Abstraction: Outline

Heroic Combat, Timescale, Abstraction: Outline

I cannot stop thinking about the question of scale and abstraction in combat. If you are reading this, you probably already know that GURPS has very granular combat with one-second round, where the exact way you attack, move, or defend matters. This is one of the strengths of the system, something that allows for plenty of tactical decisions and detail, but also one of the weaknesses of the system. While I do love GURPS combat, I cannot disagree with the fact that it takes too long when there are many combatants (many claim that it takes an unbearably long time even in 1-on-1 combat, but this is a skill issue), and it forces you to artificially scale down the engagements to prevent fights from taking hours.

Just imagine your four PCs and a couple of hirelings entering a dungeon, bashing down a door, then fighting 8 goblins. All right, that'll be an hour even if you do morale rolls. Let's see... how many rooms does this megadungeon have? Ah, right, 895! Maybe we'll get to the third level by the time your kids go to college. This forces the GM to scale down everything - the number of combatants per fight, the number of fights, the number of levels, the number of rooms. Yes, the PCs may be breaking into an evil overlord's castle, but they will only have 2-3 fights against no more than 4 enemies at once, and they definitely cannot take hirelings or mercenaries with them.

In addition to artificially scaling down the game, the referee also has to remove "filler." Sure, there might be lowly goblins living in the dungeon, but only the dungeon "boss" is on par with the PCs when it comes to combat capabilities. The regular goblins have an incredibly small chance to hit and/or wound the PCs, but there are supposed to be many of them. So, the referee simply removes all the weak goblins from the dungeon to avoid wasting a lot of time, even though they really should've been there. Thus, the game and the game world not only feel small, but also artificially "leveled" to the PCs, like in certain video games. And this is not just due to a different mindset - this is a reasonable result of having such fine timescale in combat!

Why don't we use GURPS Mass Combat instead? It does indeed work well for large-scale engagements, and while it can be used with small-scale engagements (see my attempt here), but it requires some additional calculations and does not provide you with a lot of tactical options, which may be unsatisfying to many. And it doesn't feel like GURPS. GURPS Action 7: Mercenaries also has the BATTLE system that is even more barebones.

I didn't even see this as a problem in the past, but that's probably because the detractors of one-second turns were presenting dumb arguments. So far, only one blogpost managed to convince me, a die-hard GURPS fan, why one-second turns are a problem in many situations (Combat Breakdown: Mass-Action Design from the Primeval Patterns blog). I understand why GURPS has one-second turns (it help making it generic and universal), but now I also understand why an approach that allows scaling the round length and the level of abstraction up is necessary. Ironically, if there were such an approach, it would make GURPS truly universal. Mr. Wargaming also has an interesting post on this topic.

So, I'd like to patch up this gap in the ruleset. However, it probably will require me to tackle the very fundamentals of the system and kill some sacred cows on the way, which is something I usually avoid doing. Dire times call for dire measures, and if you want to the job done right, do it yourself, so I have no other choice but to do it. Before I do, I have to clearly outline what I actually want.

1. I want to have a system with one-minute turns, as they allow to abstractly resolve plenty of actions and play well with other timekeeping conventions, such as dungeon exploration turns. The loss of fidelity is expected. Many people believe that being detailed is the same as being realistic, but this isn't really true. One could argue the opposite, that being able to take calculated, optimal actions every second in such a stressful and chaotic situation as deadly combat is very unrealistic (see the posts I linked above).

2. I want it to handle group vs. group fights, individual vs. individual fights, and group vs. individual fights. For this purpose, it might be reasonable to separate "characters" and "troops" a la Domains at War, HellMarch, or similar wargaming rulesets.

3. It must play well with magic and area attacks. This is always difficult to get right in mass combat, as you are used to single-target spells and hex grids, whereas here you're likely to fight squads in the theather of the mind combat (although, grids may still be applicable, but scale would have to change). GURPS Zombies has some guidelines for that sort of stuff.

4. It should use existing statblocks without the need of extra calculations - I do not want to have separate mass combat and single combat statblocks for all monsters. Ideally, spells and similar abilities would remain the same as well. However, I still expect there being at least small tables with new values for stuff like "how many projectiles per minute different ranged weapon will fire."

5. You should be able to "zoom in" and deabstract previously abstracted effects, such as major injuries. This might be necessary when switching out of this heroic combat to your regular atomized scale for major characters. This is something like quantum mechanics: for example, in heroic combat, you know that you took 6 HP of injury, but once you "zoom in," you find out the exact details of your injury, collapsing the wave function. Or something like that - I'm no quantum physicist.

Next, I'd like to list some existing GURPS sources that can be useful in this regard:

1. GURPS Action 2: Exploits has a cinematic combat system that is intended for theater of mind combat, including such things as simplified range, sneak attacks, etc.

2. GURPS Zombies has plenty of rules on horde combat and similar stuff.

3. GURPS Spaceships and GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars may seem out of context, but they do have combat systems with different turn lengths in mind, so some kinds of abstraction can be borrowed from them.

4. GURPS Supers, or more specifically, One-Man Armies on page 118 has some rules that may be useful.

5. GURPS Martial Arts has some rules for tournament combat and quick combat that also might come in handy.

After investigating these existing rules and things like ACKS Domains at War, AD&D 1e, etc., I saw that there are some considerations that will need to be addressed:

1. Movement. We are gonig to have 1-minute rounds, it is unlikely that the combatants will move at their Move x 60. Movement will have to be reworked to assume moving in formation and/or doing other stuff at the same time. However, a proper Move x 60 is probably possible during a full-on retreat and/or charge.

2. Ranged combat and groups of combatants

Imagine firing an arrow into a tight formation of soldiers. Do you target a specific individual? You definitely are not. Even if you miss the intended target, you are likely to hit some other guy. Thus, ranged combat has to be reworked somewhat to take this into account, possibly assuming targeting a hex (at +4) by default.

3. Attaching/detaching

I mentioned that I want both groups and individuals participate in the same combat. Thus, I must have rules for said individuals moving around and acting independently and as part of units. I'll probably borrow some mechanics from Domains at War: Battles for this.

4. Rapid Fire

Many mass/skirmish combat systems require you to roll multiple dice when groups fight. GURPS, however, suggests treating group attacks as Rapid Fire attacks in GURPS Zombies, condensing them into a single roll. This seems like a good idea.

5. Active Defenses

Adding to what is written above, active defenses for groups are treated as defenses against Rapid Fire attacks. However, as it is still was written for one-second rounds in mind, we may want to go even further. What if we remove active defenses entirely? After all, if we have one-minute rounds, it doesn't really matter how many blows were exchanged and how many of them were parried or dodged. What matters is the result. What if we turn the attack roll into a Quick Contest of weapon skills? After all, parries are derived from weapon skill and hence are already sort of taken into account here. But do we make it a single QC that dictates the result of two groups fighting, or will it be a QC to resolve attacks of one groups against another, and then we'll have to roll another QC for when they decide to strike back? While the former would speed things up, the latter makes initiative more important. Perhaps, the defender, i.e. the one who doesn't have the initiative, takes a -X penalty to skill in these Quick Contests. I'll have to think about this.

6. Maneuvers

Obviously, maneuvers will have to be reworked. What does an All-Out Attack mean in the context of a one-minute round? 60 turns of All-Out Attacking? Thus, I'll have to consider this carefully. The first thought that comes to mind is to borrow certain rules from A New Take on Grappling.

7. Engagement

With movement and scale being more abstract, certain options, such as Retreat, would be silly, as will groups of units simply running around their enemies to attack from behind. The engagement rules, where two combatants/groups are locked in combat and cannot retreat unless a specific withdraw maneuver is performed are necessary. Looks like I'll have to cannibalize ACKS/Domains at War again.

8. Spellcasting

Oh boy, this is going to be a difficult one. Since spells have a casting time that usually is 1-2 seconds, how does one resolve spellcasting on such scale? You really can't have the character cast 60 spells a turn - he'll die from exhaustion. What does a single-target spell that, for example, paralyzes a character, do against a group? How to calculate damage from area spells? What do you do with spells that have a duration shorter than the round?

9. Status Effects

How will status effects/Afflictions work? For example, if a group or individual gets knocked prone, what does that mean? One thought is to keep it as is and think that the character was in this condition during the part of the round that mattered, or something along this line.

10. Scale

Even though this is supposed to be used with theater of the mind, it could also be used with a battlemap, be it a hex map or a gridless one. If that's the case, I'll have to define how big everything is both in terms of physical size and number of combatants per typical group!

With all this outlined, now I understand just how big of a project this is going to be, but I firmly believe that this is abolutely necessary even though it goes against some default GURPS assumptions. Also, now I do understand what Gary Gygax meant when he wrote "It would be no great task to devise an elaborate set of rules for highly complex individual combats with rounds of but a few seconds length." Doing the opposite is a much more difficult task. Here's hoping that I will actually finish this and not give up like a wuss.