Combat Engagements

A few weeks ago I promised to post some of my Asteria Rising work. The below is a snippet from my Game Master (GM) section dealing with how to build combat engagements. One of the few people I've gotten to do playtests with me on the game told me I needed to "bottle myself." What she meant was apparently capturing my GM style as both her and her husband were impressed and engaged by it.

This act of capturing a playstyle for others to use has always been an issue within table-top games. A GM has a lot of power and responsibility within a game. They must encourage the party, challenge them, reward them, aid them, create content, remove content, referee rules, and so forth. These items create a rather personalized and situational playstyle for anyone who GMs.

I cannot feasibly create a rules section that dictates how one must run a game. To compromise with reality and what my friend suggested, I have decided to make guidelines to consider. The main concept to look into are engagements: combat, exploration, and social. Most people look at combat as it has the clearest use of conflict, engagement, and the most rules in the majority of tabletops.

The below is the section on Combat Engagements, these guidelines don't involve hard coded mechanics for building a fight though. One thing I noticed playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) was that its method of building encounters [Challenge Rating (CR)] was arbitrary. There are just too many variables to assume a party of five low level people could easily handle a CR of 2.

Asteria Rising does not have anything like CR; the players are in a new environment and do not know how dangerous anything is. They simply need to have successful rolls to determine threat and remember what happened last time they fought a particular creature. This lack of CR for my game means that all three engagements work similarly by being a list of guidelines.

The engagement sections are all in early drafts yet I hope the Combat one should give you all an idea of how I am constructing the GM Section of the overarching document, and how I myself create combat engagements for players in all my games.

Combat

Building combat encounters is difficult as one never knows what the party will do nor what the dice will roll. Honestly, there is no hard-mathematical formula or well-planned method to create the perfect encounter. There are some general guidelines to follow though.

• Previous player behavior
• Action Economy
• Total hitpoints of party and opponents
• Likeliness for the party to be hit by opponents
• Total damage the party and opponents can deal to each other
• Terrain and Tactics
•  Balancing

The most important trait to consider is how your players have behaved in the past. If players prefer to fight in melee, then you know an engagement with enemies very proficient in melee or with anti-melee abilities would be more difficult.

Next is Action Economy, which refers to the number of actions the player parties and their opponents can take in a round. E.g. a four-player party can attack up to five times a round in an engagement. The more actions their opposition has in a round, the more difficult the combat will be.

Next comes total hitpoints of each side in the combat. You don’t have to have exact numbers but internally gauge what side has the most hitpoints. Typically, combat ends when the opponent losses all its hitpoints. The more hitpoints involved in a combat, the longer that side can last.

Next is the likelihood the opponents can hit the player party. If the opponents have a low chance of hitting, then the combat is easier for the players. High Combat Prowess for enemies increases difficulty.

Next comes total damage done by either side. Four players against one opponent can be made difficult by that opponent being able to cause large amounts of damage with its limited Action Economy. Higher damage increase difficulty for the players.

Next is Terrain, which is the layout of where the fight will be. Particularly weak enemies could thrive in a combat engagement by being out of reach from players. Tactics are the actions taken by opponents in a fight. Due the opponents attack as a single unit or separately? Do they try flanking or attacking the party directly? Terrain and Tactics can give the opponents serious advantages against the player party.

Finally comes Balancing, which is how these various methods are combined to be fair and engaging. You could make the player party fight a hundred opponents that do 1d20 damage each attach, with 5 attacks a round and a thousand hitpoints each. Or, you could try to keep things evened out.

E.g. have the players fight twelve opponents that does little damage, with little hitpoints, but use terrain and tactics to hit and run from the players. Or, have the players fight one enemy with a lot of hitpoints and high damage, but low chance of hitting them.

Do what you can to keep fights relatively fair and even, so the players always feel engaged. Don’t worry too much on the intricacies of it of course, but always keep the guidelines in mind when building an engagement.