https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2025/04/i-hate-combat.html
The grognardia post on hating D&D combat got me thinking about my dimensions again. He spends a lot of time talking about how how he views combat as a tax and that combat is a series of rolls and mechanical tax on hit-points. Taken as the pure beats in the book, yes, that's what combat can devolve down into but it doesn't satisfy me as an inditement of D&D combat as a whole. Any mechanically defined system taken to that extreme can feel that way. Speech and dialogue? Just speech checks to mind control people. Shopping? Haggling and deducting money. Collecting treasure? Just incrementing your money upwards. Exploration? Listing doors and items in square rooms.
What's missing in all those examples is situation, incentives, and engagement. The context that they take place in. Exploration is fun because there is novelty in finding new places, learning about them, navigating their dangers, and discovering their secrets. Treasure is fun for the potential it holds in magic items, spells, and potions; the troubles of having to move awkward but expensive loot; of discovering strange but valuable jewels or icons; and the different ways to obtain it like theft or bargaining. Dialogue? The characters matter, the situations matter, their dispositions matter, and how you go about it matters. Players will INVENT their own incentives out of nowhere. Shopping? ...Well, shopping is always a bit boring tbh, but you can't win them all.
In my combat dimensions I identified that the importance of combat as a play is not about raw mechanical numbers, steps, or rolls, but about creating context, nuance, and incentives. When a character gets involved in a discussion the GM is often considering their history, their goals, their tropes, all manner of context clues for how they might react that may-or-may-not have tangible effects on any roll or outcome. To simply say "this man has 15 Charisma. Let's roll persuade checks back and forth until one side gives up," is on its face boring, if succinct.
Combat can benefit from the same when you consider the arena, the combatants, their situation, the sides present, and what goals both the players and NPCs might have: their Incentives. A fight where the players can steal a jewel from a clumsy ogre and escape with it can feel very different from a fight where they must defeat the ogre in order to get the jewel. A jewel exists as an incentive because its Treasure but you might identify lots of incentives.
Players want to not risk losing health, want to get temporary buffs, permanent buffs, want to build alliances or get favors, want to learn secrets, want to feel smart, feel strong, feel clever, want to interact with fun or exciting characters, want to help or cheat those characters, want to earn glory, fame, want the thrill of exciting combat opportunities. It's not all xp and gold!
Commonly you'll also see players want more Options: more attacks, more spells, more special abilities, more modifiers, etc etc until it turns into a tactics videogame. This is the other half from incentives: method. When the players identify what they want, they want to identify how they might obtain it and weigh different methods of doing so. Some actions might be more costly but achieve victory quicker or safer. Others might be capable of building towards multiple objectives at once. Others still might be context dependant based on health, equipment, resistances, or environment. In all cases, players are going to be looking for options that accomplish their incentives as effectively as possible. A player would not pick a combat action with worse damage that is less exciting, but they might do a more exciting one if they value that excitement. Simply "removing to-hit rolls" is only stream-lining and that's nothing more than a race towards the bottom; the removal of potential depth instead of adding it.
So how might you create more Options without simply making them better than attacking normally, and without adding other incentives to the combat? Well, my dimensions offer a few: context, situation, behaviour, tactics. I created a simple battle which was a party enters a room and sees 4 orcs. Stick-thwacking and looting would be the obvious result so how to make it more interesting? I rolled:
- The combatants are skilled/lazy/disorganised. They act as individuals.
- A combatant's usual abilities have be removed or diminished. Perhaps a severed limb.
- Mounts or vehicles are involved.
Based on this, I decided that the players have stumbled onto a small troop of orcs that were trying to tame a Warg as their mount - and promptly had their hand bitten clean off! The result is the orcs are in a mad panic; raging and fearful, while the Warg is furious and will attack whomever is closest.
I've added no incentives and no new combat actions, but just with this we have a wholly different 'combat' encounter. The players might just slay all sides but they would probably look to finish either the fearful orcs first (guessing them to be weak while panicked) or the dangerous Warg first. If they slay the Warg, perhaps the Orcs might be relieved and actually not attack the party, which is a valuable benefit for Survival, and perhaps even a way to Indebt the orcs to them if the DM can be convinced. They may also just laugh and wait for the Warg to tear them apart, or just walk past the whole thing!
What this illustrates is that the enemies having behaviour, lived-in context, and their own set of incentives (that guy really wanted to ride a Warg, even above Survival), creates richness in the application of combat rules. The previous one may not have even become a combat; but even if it did, there are things to consider beyond just to-hit rolls. It's true this doesn't deliver on making combat a rich tactical experience, but that was the limitation of the scenario: tactical combat is just having lots of options to weigh against incentives and threats, which when applied to a ttrpg can lead to rules-bloat instead. D&D combat is simple and can be expanded from there; much harder to do with a tightly balanced tactical wargame.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown can be seen as a series of risk-mitigation decisions, which is why people kept cover-shuffling: low-cost, high-value, repeatable action. It's the default action to move up in cover - you make it interesting by interacting with that baseline: distant cover, grenades, aoe attacks, units that cant take cover, units that ARE cover. It's no secret every videogame jumps at the "bull-rush" boss; it's a very basic addition to any combat system to have a high-damage attack with a lot of tell, which is followed by a short period of high-value exploitation potential. THAT'S how you make Dodge and Block actions valuable.
I imagine the reason why a lot of people don't jump to this as an idea whilst having no problem embellishing dialogue, exploration, and other parts of the game with extra context is down to three big factors:
1. Combat is one of the most strictly defined part of the rules (compared to exploration or dialogue at least),
2. Combat is one of the most lethal parts of the game so mistakes are high-risk,
3. Combat is where competitive D&D and programming is easiest so is the easiest to run by pure numbers.
And all three of these are intertwined. The lethality means people will be upset if you don't play it strict and they fail or die as a result. The programmatic nature means rules needed to be very defined or else it breaks and needs human intervention. And because there's a need to make combat absolutely crystal clear for fairness, it ends up making people obsessively by-the-book about it.
So, I'm not sure what the solution is other than telling people to "add more context" to encounters; to see combat as a method OF encounter but not the purpose of an encounter. To consider incentives, and use them to provide value to other options than stick-thwacking. Stick a fragile gem on your monster's face; make the leader's mount irritable or scared of fire; pose a crisis of morality or take hostages. Use ambushes; use red barrels that explode; make the floor able to collapse; plunge the arena into darkness; add a time limit.
Or hell, just throw in a bull that rears back and roars, then charges the players, and gets its horns stuck in the arena wall for a round or two. That always seems to work.
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