Design
Here is a cool link to some ideas about various economic types.
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/12/economic_stages.html
I've been thinking a lot about combat for RPG's and Games. Here are a few of my initial ides.
1) I want combat to be deadly. I've seen games tone down the destructiveness of modern weaponry. This has always bothered me. I want a character or an adversary that gets pugged 3 times by a modern day assault rifle to die. I want the character to die (that is, if the character is unprotected). So, RPG's, in my opinion need to keep the lethality of modern weaponry (or future or past weaponry) intact.
This brings up some interesting problems. Why would you want to play a game where your chances of getting killed in action are pretty high? You probably wouldn't. Yet I think games are more compelling if there is always somewhat of a reasonable threat of dying. So, if we keep the lethality of weapondry hi in our games, how can we keep characters (who generally will be in a lot of combat) alive and interested in continued game play?
a) I've seen some games like Paranoia (which I never actually played, but people seemed to have fun with it) get around this much like computer games do. You have multiple lives/clones/avatars, whatever. If you get killed, you check off a tick somewhere, and start again. I can see the merits of this approach, but for some reason I'm not drawn to it. Maybe because it lessens or cheapens the threat of death, which in RPG's I think is crucial to keep hi inorder to make gameplay challenging. But again, the players need to survive. So let's look at other approaches. For computer games, where your character is more of an avatar then almost an alternate ego of some part of your id as it is when you play a more open and less structured roll playing game, the multi life/clone option I think is a great option though.
b) Here is my favorite approach. I've never been, and hope to never be, in sustained combat. From what I hear though it seems like there are some people who just for what ever reason for a time they seem to be immune to death and serious injury. Mortar rounds fall randomly and indiscriminately, yet these individuals are never hit, nor are expected to be it by those around them. Again, this might be a temporal thing, where their immunity defies the odds for a while, then at one point the "aura of protection" seems to depart from them and they are just as invulnerable as everyone else. This is an approach in my games I think i will attempt to approximate with some kind of point system. Lot's of games do that now (here points from James Bond, action points from D20 modern, to name a few). I like that. By giving players these points to spend to get out of jams the game mechanics can remain lethal and do not need to be toned down. And, depending upon how these points are rationed, you can control whether the characters are truely super human or just seem to be favored by God to make it though the quest. I dig it.
c) Creating decent defensive technology. What has been frustrating to me is that in approximating a modern combat system up until recently the lethality of weapons seems to outweight defenses against them. Nuclear weapons being the ulitmate example. Personal body armor being a more practicle one. I think body armor now is good enough to give players a reasonable chance of surviving a firefight with foes armed with pistols. But again we are plagued with the fact that the armors of today protect only certain regions of the body, and then even then the more powerful long arms with go right through even the most durable of today's body armor. So for modern campaigns you probably want to keep the combat sort of lopsidded in the players favor, more like cop on street thug rather than soldier vs soldier. In the future the problems here can be alleviated by better medical technology to heal wounds that if sustained now would render a character a cripple and useless. Also advances in materials and shield technology might make full on combat in a future setting doable. I general combat military comat in the 20th century would be hard to accurately model and keep the characters alive.
d) As a game designer some of these issues could be resolved by making the games we create more challenging and captivating in the non-combat arena. Easier said then done, and a lot will rest on the game master for pulling this off. Exciting campaigns that maybe have 1-2 minor skirmishes and one grand final combat. I think this is actually a good way to go. As designers we can maybe offer starter plots or a plot generation engine to help out less experienced GM's generate exciting combat. We can also maybe broaden the combat out to include things like psychic duels, stair down challengers, test of skill, persuasion techniques, etc.. And as GM's to incorporate those outcomes as signifigant aspects of the game.
Another problem of combat is that it gets tedious. The more realistic a game is, the more factors need to be taken into account, and the slower combat goes, which is exactly the opposite effect that we want. Thus a lot of time needs to be spent in figuring out short cuts to help combat move along. Here are a few ideas.
1) Let's not design games where we tick off hit points as much. Games where monsters have 120 hit points and each character blow at best does 10-20 points of damage. Multiply this by 4 players and 5 monsters, and the fighting becomes an accounting exercise. That sucks. We can alleviate that as GM's to limiting the scope of the encounters (a few tough things or a lot of easy kill things, avoiding the 5 medium tough things that I've got to keep track of combats). That is ok. As a GM I typically will kill horses or friendly creatures that escort players around just because they add more paper work for me. Limiting the scope of combat is a good approach, but I maybe reducing the hit points from 10-20 per shot of damage to 1-2, and then giving the adversay 12 hit points instead of 120 might be easier on the number crunching. Just a though.
2) Let's cut down on the number of dice we roll. Currently it can get as bad as Roll to hit. Enemy roll's to evade. Roll where hit occures. Roll damage. Roll some sort of enemy trait that might end the damage. Do over. Let's cut that down to maybe 2 rolls. How, we can add in a lot of the mechanics of armor, evasion, hit bonus, etc... before we make our die rolls. We want to therefore loose a little reality in how we create our systems here. It will be a give here in order to move things a long. More thoughts on this one later.
3) Treating some combat differently then the I shoot, I roll, I hit. Some things are pretty hard to approximate in modern combat, especially automatic weapons fire at multiple targets. I was pleasantly suprised to find out that D20 modern did this one thing right by making automatic weapons fire almost like a spell that enemies have to save against. Depending upon if they are successful or how badly they fail determines how many hits they take. This cuts down on player rolls to zap each adversay. Things like this, though they threaten to loose the credibility of the game, need to be explored more.
Well, those are my thoughts. As I plan to develop a role playing game that comes as both a stand alone game and as a D20 combatible game I wanted to get these thoughts down.
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