The Violent Revolution continues! Perhaps even more important to how a roleplaying game resolves whether or not a fighter strikes home at his foe is how his opponent reacts when struck. I’ve been reading +Jon Peterson‘s “Playing at the World” recently, a densely packed and quite informative history of games, gaming, and (most specifically) Dungeons and…
If one is to discuss combat in RPGs, one might as well start with the medieval fantasy genre that still dominates the industry. For many games, hand-to-hand (or hand-to-tentacle, hand-to-claw, hand-to-mouth . . . ) combat is a central point of the game, hearkening back to the origin of fantasy RPGs in wargaming. This Violent…
In the previous segment, Never Tell Me the Odds 1 and Never Tell Me the Odds 2, the basic combat mechanics for five RPG systems were examined with the idea that if you don’t know the rough probabilities of doing what you want, you can’t really evaluate what you can do. Using the power of…