Make Your Tabletop Combat Better | How to RPG

hello sobs i'm jared logan with stream of blood and this is gm toolbox in this series we're going to show you how to take ideas from one tabletop role-playing game and use them in another kind of like you just have a box full of tools for a game master are we sure we want to call this gm toolbox i have clearly never owned a toolbox today we're going to talk about combat many tabletop role-playing games based their combat rules on dungeons and dragons which in turn was based on an old tactical war game called chain mail which is why it's not surprising that anytime you're playing any tabletop role-playing game you'll have one player who's like i use a minor action to unsheath my war scythe and i want to use a move action to sneak up along the enemy's right flank out of line of sight of any archers i want to use a maneuver to slice crosswise across his throat with the war site and you're like dude we're playing tales of equestria tactical war games and role-playing games are two different things and the difference i think is that a tactical war game is a battle you play out versus other people whereas a tabletop role-playing game is a story you play with other people neither of these things is bad the problem is is when you mix the two together it doesn't quite work out it might seem like role-playing games and war games or peanut butter and jelly but they're really more like peanut butter and regular butter both are delicious but you wouldn't make a peanut butter and butter sandwich you're gonna have bowel problems in your cholesterol it's not gonna be good when these two things get mixed together you end up with combats that take over the entire story your players were excited to explore a new world solve a mystery live out their fantasies but suddenly everything stops so that you can all sit down and play out a two-hour tactical war game you remember that that scene from the avengers the 2012 film where hulk punches loki and then captain america punches loki and then iron man punches loki and then thor punches loki and then black widow punches loki and then hawkeye shoots at loki and then loki punches hulk and then a chittari alien punches hawkeye and then a chitari alien punches hulk and then a chitari alien punches captain america and then a chitari alien punches thor and then a chitari alien punches black widow and then a chitauri alien punches iron man neither do i because that scene would have sucked hulk it's your turn here are four rules from various systems that will make your game feel less like a tactical board game and more like your favorite book or movie number one morale rules morale rules come from mulvay basic d and d the rules decide whether an enemy creature surrenders and runs or keeps fighting they use two six-sided dice an enemy with a morale score of two won't fight the heroes at all it's a coward it immediately surrenders or runs an enemy with a morale score of 12 will never stop fighting it will fight until the death goblins might have a score of 6 a dragon might have a score of 10. to see if an enemy surrenders or keeps fighting you make a morale check you roll 2d6 and if the result is equal to or less than an enemy's morale score it keeps fighting if the result is over the enemy stops fighting it surrenders or it runs here are three instances when you might make a morale check when the first enemy in a combat gets incapacitated when half of the enemies in a combat have been incapacitated and i like to add a third one whenever one of the heroes one of the pcs does something really badass like it's a critical hit now you might say but i'm the gm i can make the enemy surrender whenever i want and you're right you are powerful you are the god of this world you are daddy's favorite and daddy believes in you but it can be very hard to strike the balance of when enemies should surrender and when they should keep fighting if you make them surrender too much your combats start to seem easy if you make them never surrender your combats become these endless slogs where pcs and enemies just trade blows back and forth for three hours if you use morale rules the game decides it for you and players always feel like they got a fair victory you can apply this rule as is to any game just using the two six sided dice and making sure you give a morale score to all your enemies or you could apply it to a game and adapt it to that game for example in call of cthulhu maybe ghouls run away when they fail a pow chat in vampire maybe you roll a 10-sided die and you see if it gets under the enemy's will power it's important to note that enemies don't have to just lay down and surrender and wait to be executed when they fail a morale check they can do all kinds of things they might run away and suddenly the combat turns into a chase offer to bribe the pcs with loot or information they might set off some sort of last-ditch evil plan like activating the self-destruct mechanism or killing all of the hostages or they may even ask to join the players like wow you guys are way better at hitting things with swords than we are will you teach us rule number two mook rules tons of books and movies feature scenes where the heroes mow down literal legions of two-bit thugs with one punch or one bullet when you want your players to mow down a horde of enemies john wick's style in a massive battle scene you want to use mook rules the specific mooc rule that i like comes from a book by pell grain press called 13th age and they define mooks as any monster that travels in a group is not meant to be a threat on its own and is sort of considered cannon fodder moocs move and attack just like regular monsters with a couple key differences the first thing is that they share one large hit point pull and whenever you do enough damage to kill one mook any extra damage anything beyond what was needed to kill that mook carries over to the rest of them so instead of fighting 20 separate monsters your heroes are really just kind of fighting the entire mob you can use this for literally any game that has a hit point system for example in cyberpunk red the booster gangers the most low level thugs in the game each have 20 hp i might cut that down to 10 hp maybe they haven't been eating regularly and then just make one big 200 point pool of them so that my cyberpunks can have a massive battle where they're mowing down tens of booster gangers at a time if they kill one hit him for 12 points those two points left over go to the next booster gang and if they crit and do 30 damage in one round they just killed three guys roll for morale rule number three three two done an important thing to remember about combat and tabletop role-playing games is that the characters aren't beating people up just to beat people up i mean the players might be the players often are the characters have a goal and the people that they are beating up are in the way of that goal so just like in many maybe even most books and movies why not play out the first few moves of a combat narrate who won and then move on to the interesting part the objective this rule comes from vampire the masquerade fifth edition but it can be applied to any game using three two done after three rounds of conflict the gm and the players should ask have we reached the conclusion will anything change dramatically if there are more exchanges if the answer is no you should just together narrate the end of that conflict there will be conflicts that come up sometimes where the players and the game master don't agree on who won on who came out on top and in that case a concession can be made a concession is a negotiated outcome and it basically says that the players and the gm negotiate a solution to the conflict not the characters in the game and their enemies and the gm gives the players something the players give up something maybe their health points or their willpower or some loot you and the players might agree okay you guys escape the catacombs but you all take five damage getting out because you all know the story is more interesting if they escape not if they keep trading blows for an hour and then it ends in a total party kill i also think it's really good when you plan an encounter and then once you start running it with your players you suddenly realize that it's way too easy or way too hard and you kind of just need an escape hatch but this rule can feel a little bit like gm fiat so be sure to let your players know that you're using it before you suddenly drop it into a game of 5e dungeons and dragons rule number four it's actually a big bucket of different rules uh you might call them layer actions legendary actions a devil's bargain doom points danger points whatever you call them these are rules that allow you permission to screw over your players and who doesn't like to do that doesn't it make you feel strong in d5e monsters who are considered boss monsters have layer actions and legendary actions to make the battle more climactic on initiative count 20 this monster can suddenly unleash a devastating layer action something happens to its layer that screws over the players rocks fall tidal waves splashes in something horrible happens to them that makes the battle more complicated during the player's actions the monster can do a legendary action another devastating attack they weren't expecting it gives the monster more actions because everything in d d is action economy and it makes the combat more interesting it's very different in blades in the dark which is you know a totally different type of game but it's still the same thing it's it's a rule that gives you permission to do something nasty to the players in that game it's called a devil's bargain when the players want an extra die on their die roll you the gm can go you can have that die but you have to give me something you gotta let me add a complication an obstacle that i'm gonna put in your way to make the story more difficult in the future in 7c it's called danger points basically anytime a player has extra dice that they're not kind of using on a roll the gm can buy them from him the gm gets danger points the players get hero points the gm can use danger points to give his villains more dice or to make the difficulty of completing a task much harder in an upcoming scene but my favorite comes from modiphius's excellent conan game and it is called doom i mostly just like it because it's called doom but essentially any time the players want extra dice on an action or anytime they want to act on your turn against your enemies to parry or dodge and attack they have to give the game master doom and doom can be spent like danger points to give enemies more dice when they attack they can really be spent on anything that's what's so awesome about doom you can spend doom to suddenly make a sandstorm whip up in the desert to suddenly make the entire temple start crumbling around the heroes in a recent conan game my players were hanging out on a mountain monastery and they were making a loud racket so i just spent a couple doom points and i activated an avalanche as with morale rules you might say well jared why do i even need this rule i mean i'm the game master i'm the god of this world i can make an avalanche happen at any time and of course you can but i have done that kind of thing in games that don't have a doom mechanic that don't have a danger point mechanic i have been in the middle of a combat that's kind of slogging along and i've said you know what guys suddenly an avalanche activates and i have seen sometimes my players roll their eyes like oh we were winning so he decided to hose us and sometimes it's hard to say i wasn't trying to hose you i was trying to make it more interesting well phooey the secret to all of these mechanics is that they're not really trying to make combat harder for the players they're trying to make combat more interesting but with the devil's bargain mechanic the players benefited in some way you didn't decide to make the game harder they did plus every game master has been in a situation where the encounter is just like not really working uh maybe the scene isn't really working and you're sitting there flailing and wondering what can i do to make this more interesting and you look down and you see that doom token and you realize oh i have the ability to change all of this whenever i want sometimes you do need a reminder you can easily port a devil's bargain mechanic into any game that doesn't have one and it's so simple it works like this the gm gives the players something maybe it's a re-roll maybe it's an automatic success maybe it's recovery of some hp maybe it's loot or an item and then the gm gets something later an environmental hazard that suddenly appears an enemy pc comes back to life a pc's attack miraculously misses the important thing to remember here is that you're using the benefit that you get as the gm to keep the game suspenseful or to keep it moving not just to defeat the players or you could just do with the walmart slash mcdonald's of tabletop role-playing games dungeons and dragons 5e has done and remember that big climactic combats should probably be full of surprises because that's why we play these games and read books and watch movies to be surprised that's it for this episode if you liked what you saw you can help us and support us in making more of these videos by subscribing here on youtube and if you'd like to see some of these techniques in practice please check out our games on twitch we stream three times a week if you use some of this stuff in your own game or you did something totally different we'd like to know please tell us in the comments below until next time i'm jerry logan for the stream of blood let the blood flow [Music]

Channel: Stream of Blood

Views: 17,116

Keywords:

Id: R8y9e8LMMBs

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021