Bringing Combat to Life Part 1

         While conflict is central to any good story I find that combat can really bog down a game. Each turn usually only represents seconds in game time but it can take minutes to roll the dice and record the results meaning that this is the one place where action slows down. In my experience, too many epic battles tend to end up like this

Player: I’m shooting that guy. *rolls dice* Did I hit em?

GM: You got em by three points, roll damage

Player: *rolls dice*

GM: Okay, looks like you did five points of damage

And this repeats several times until the fight is over. If that sounds boring and repetitive it’s because it is. Just telling your players the mechanical portion of combat is what makes this process drag on. However, combat doesn’t have to be this way. It should be way more exciting; this is the scene in the action movie where all the action happens.

The trick is to narrate the mechanics behind the game. This involves translating the numbers on the dice to describe how the scene looks. If a player just barely manages to score a hit then it’s best to describe how the opponent put up a struggle before the blow landed or if they beat them by a wide margin then it’s best to describe the total lack of skill and defense of the opponent. Listen to the difference between “You beat his defense by three points” and “You fire at your opponent, striking him through the shoulder”, which sounds more interesting? The second option sounds much better and all I had to do was translate the marginal success to mean non-vital area. Had they been more successful I would have just changed the placement. The trick is to show rather than tell.

Same can be said for damage. The above example of lackluster combat tells the player how much damage they did mechanically but overall that doesn’t really tell the players much. If he has ten hit points then it’s a lot of damage but if he has seventy then that is nothing special. It doesn’t explain how much further the players have to go to slay the man, how effective it was in bringing them down, or contain any story elements to it. It’s best to translate the damage with descriptors like how the blow landed and how terrible of a wound it left. To keep with the above example of the shoulder shot if the damage is minimal in total when you can mention that “the bullet just grazed his shoulder, leaving a small trickle of blood” or if more grievous you can say “the bullet blasted through his shoulder, causing him to cry out in pain as it shatters bone and rips through muscle”; now that is an action scene right there.