Violent Resolution – The End of the Revolution

This marks the end of the Violent Resolution blog series here on
Castalia House. I’d like to thank Jeffro for recommending me, and Castalia
House for giving me a shot at publishing this series on the different facets of
combat mechanics in my chosen systems.

What did I take away from it all?

Narrative
Games Run Like TV Shows/Movies

One of the biggest things that comes out of looking at games like
Night’s Black Agents and Fate is that if you approach them from the background
and mission of tactical simulations, you’re probably not going to have much
fun. “All guns are the same” doesn’t please the set of people that
expect their gaming experience to reflect a move-by-move environment, or a
gear-intensive experience such as that found in first-person shooter games such
as HALO or Borderlands 2, or even Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, where kitting out
your troops and yard-by-yard careful advances is part of the game experience.

Oh, sure – you can say you’re doing such a move, and even
declare that such tactics are part of (in Fate) Creating an Advantage to allow
you to get the drop on a foe, or even Overcome an Obstacle to prevent anyone
from getting the drop on you. Night’s Black Agents assumes such behavior from
the PCs, since they’re all Jason Bourne clones anyway!

No, these games are about screen time, and should probably be
played and approached as such. Your store of metagame currency drives spotlight
time. Fate Points, stunts, and free invokes for Fate Core, and your pools
of Investigative and General Skills for Night’s Black Agents (and any game run
off of GUMSHOE). The dominating advantage spending a point for a +2 brings,
however, is why you only do them a few times per “show.” Thor does
not call lightning and blow everyone up every single scene. Voltron Forms
Blazing Sword! once during the big fight. At the end. Because it’s cool.

As far as combat goes, it can – and will – be as exciting and
detailed as you let it in a narrative sense. That the mechanics are
often coarse doesn’t mean that it’s not engaging. But you won’t be depending on
the rules to provide the engagement. It’s up to the players and the GM to work
within a deliberately limited set of game-mechanics, and that’s not a bad
thing! One is more likely to have the kind of fast-paced thriller emulation
when the mechanical approach requires little differentiation to adjudicate.

This is not for everyone.

While I have not played Fate, I have played Trail of Cthulhu,
which is based on GUMSHOE, the parent engine of Night’s Black Agents. Until I
sat down for an interview with Ken Hite, the author of NBA, I can definitely
say I was approaching the game wrong. I was – it’s not too far wrong to say offended,
though ‘yanked out of the moment’ would be a better fit – disappointed to find
out that after a few uses of my medical skill, i was no better at being a
doctor than anyone else. I’d really approached the job and general skill pool
as training, rather than moments in the spotlight.

I very much want to try both games out, with experienced GMs and
players, to see how things “should” be done. I’d also like to try
them out, after that, with less experienced GMs and players,
possibly with me being GM, to see if I can swing it. I get the feeling that
these games run with the maxim of film in mind: “Nothing appears on film
unless the director places it there.”

So when playing narrative games, the details that will make or
break the game are placed there by the GM and to a certain extent, the players.
If you’re used to tactical simulation games, this might rub the wrong way.
Since I personally am quite steeped in that style of play, I would like to see
how the other side lives, so to speak. I found enough to like in my breakdown
of the combat systems that it made me want to try them out.

Despite the Column, It’s
Not All About Combat

One of the nice things about both of these games is that the
common mechanic is really, really common. There isn’t much out there that
privileges combat over chatting with folks. If you want to “win” an
argument rather than a gunfight in Fate, you use the same mechanics. Car chase?
Same. Gymnastics routine? Yep. You pick from the same menu of four basic
choices, which are broad enough to make a basis set similar in tone to the Seven Basic Story Plots.  For Night’s Black
Agents, the game is tightly focused around a specific background and tailored
to the kind of challenges found therein. And since the genre is about my
favorite mashup (guns and monsters), this is a very good thing.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the true glory of
Night’s Black Agents – and if I seem a Ken Hite aficionado (or raving fanboy:
your call), it’s because I have become so – is not to be found in the combat
rules. It’s in the fantastic story and plotting advice found within the book.
How to make a “Conspiramid” (or Vampyramid, for that matter) in a way
that the players can work their way slowly up not-obviously-related plot
elements to eventually reach the top dog? That’s story gold, and I’ve mined it
for my GURPS games with wild abandon and thankful glee.

Tactics,
Tactics Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink

The drinking thing is really just to make it all Rime.

GURPS, Savage Worlds, and D&D are tactics focused. To a
greater or lesser extent, they are turn-based tactics games where you deploy
and exploit game mechanics to defeat your foes.

This is not a bad thing.

Combat in D&D is more or less the default from which all
other concepts need to be compared, because something like 80-90% of the market
is D&D of one form or another (and according to Steve Jackson, if an asteroid were to hit WotC,
please let it hit elsewhere than the collectible card game department that
keeps so many gaming stores running!). The latest version of D&D runs
fairly smoothly and has some nice mechanics – I’m particularly fond of the
advantaged/disadvantaged system, which nicely disposes of a huge number of
modifiers and does nice thins to the probability curve of a 1d20 roll. Tactics
are important, and how and when to deploy your abilities make up part of the
fun of the game. On the down side, fighting can take on a slogging-through-mud
feel for those averse to the ablative nature of combat. A high hit-point
monster is a war of attrition – your party and their abilities vs. a giant bag
of HP (our party a while back went up against a 110HP fighter; an epic battle,
but wow it took a while). There are alternate rules out there, such as variants
on Massive Damage, which can address this, but it’s built into the game pretty
hard.

On the other end, we have GURPS, where one or two hits can
usually incapacitate any human, whether this is melee weapons or guns. The
trick is getting an effective hit, which means a successful
attack where the defender fails to parry, block, or dodge, and any
armor worn is penetrated or bypassed. GURPS combat can be done simply – roll
3d6 vs adjusted skill, eschew the optional rules from various books (and even
from within some of the Basic Set) for fine-tuning your action, your foe rolls
defense, and then damage if you score.

Or, you can turn it up to 11 and resolve an exchange that
happens so fast that you need time-lapse video to catch it, and resolve every
blow and trigger pull. When you finally make contact, extreme satisfaction.
Tune it to taste, as well, with a very strong Dungeon Fantasy sub-line with a
lot of support (and more coming). When you want a game where if you can dream
it, you can probably exploit existing mechanics to give those choices weight,
you can find it in GURPS.

Make no mistake here: I write for GURPS semi-pro, in that I’ve
published a bunch in Pyramid and written one book on grappling. Also was lead
playtester for a few books. So I come at GURPS with a 25-year history with the
system. I like it, I like modifying it, and I like both playing it and running
it. The game can and does reward some level of system mastery, but that mastery
is about knowing when to hold ’em, and when to fold ’em more than it is about a
certain combination fo skill, weapon, and kewl powerz that provide an
unmatchable damage level. The options available to an experienced player are
the nuance of choice. Attack the leg and go for a crippling blow to a
less-armored target? Accept a defensive penalty to lunge in an extra yard and
also get a bonus to hit? Take the fight to the ground because you’ve invested
in the Ground Fighting technique while your foe has not? The possibilities are
nearly limitless, though that comes at a price in (usually pre-game) tracking
of the things you expect to do.

Savage Worlds is a bit in the middle here. It’s a roll-and-shout
system that’s got a tactical focus, but not too much. It’s got Edges and
Hindrances with mechanical effect that aren’t as wide open as Fate’s Aspects,
but are far fewer in number than GURPS’ list of Advantages and Disadvantages.
Combat is pretty broad brush – Fighting and Shooting rather than Broadsword or
Guns (Pistol) – and the somewhat lower differentiation pushes the resolution
more towards the narrative style while still remaining a tactically-driven game
explicitly meant to play out on a mapboard.

Finish
Him

I do play D&D and GURPS. I would like to play – or at least
try – Fate and Night’s Black Agents.

Savage Worlds doesn’t hit my sweet spot; the very middle ground
that proponents tout doesn’t inspire me to play based on the rules alone. Of
course, the giant pile of well supported game material with what looks to be
very good production values helps the Savage Worlds case rather a lot . . . and
the (original?) Deadlands setting that spawned the rules is quite cool. Plus .
. . while I’ve not entirely decided on it, exploding dice are an elegant way to
get a large maximum roll without precluding a minimum one. Ultimately, while my
interest is less, how it plays at the table is the ultimate test, one which I’d
like to try.

I’m glad I took on this project – it got me familiar with games
in ways and with a level of depth and focus that were a lot of fun
(and a lot of work, I must note).

But when push comes to shove, it’s all really about whether the
rules and the game help you have the fun you want to have.

Thanks for playing!