Jens has ideas.
simultaneous actions in RPG combat
tl;dr: Streamline RPG combat mechanics by doing all the die-rolling and hit-counting simultaneously.
(This is one of the two RPG combat ideas I led up to in my previous post.)
If it takes too long to go around the table letting each character make actions and roll dice for each round of combat, then could you collapse it all into one simultaneous process? After all, most rule systems already state that combat actions happen simultaneously.
Well, no. You can’t do movement that way, because players’ hands will bump into each other moving their minis/tiles/pawns, and characters might end up occupying the same positions. So that’s still got to be turn-based. But it’s generally the quicker part of a turn, anyway.
But the attacks and die-rolling! Let’s say everyone does this simultaneously:
I came up with this three years ago, in a blog post called “The Gnostic Argument For Agnosticism”, and I still think the idea behind it is it a fairly interesting one that I haven’t seen spelled out elsewhere in this form.
It’s obviously a play on Arthur Clarke’s Third Law, but about God instead of magic. The conclusion it leads to is that there are absolutely no phenomena, however unusual or “impossible”, that anyone can take as proof of any particular deity.
It’s easy to look down on “primitive” peoples being fooled by armored conquistadors on horseback, or by cargo planes and radios, but the kinds of phenomena it takes to awe us are just different in scale, not kind. Parting the seas? Healing the sick? Descending hosts of luminous angels transforming deserts into gardens and smiting the sinful? All possible through advanced-yet-secular means. Taking any of these as a reason to convert puts you on the same level as the pre-technological, just with a higher threshold of gullibility.
It gets worse, too: the gold standard of convincingly-divine experiences tends to be the inner, mystical experience of divine insight, the revelation, the ecstasy. The sort of thing that is so intense and incontrovertible that it leads to unshakeable faith. Unfortunately these phenomena are simulatable too, even with the crude tools we already have like transcranial magnetic stimulation. (And it’s long been possible to induce them via psychedelic plant extracts, or by suffering from psychosis, epilepsy or brain tumors.)
The weirdest thing is that, advancing down this line of reasoning, the agnostic paradoxically finds him/herself with ideas that are very similar to those of the Gnostics, an early unorthodox Christian sect who were pretty much polar opposites in a religious sense. Which is a tension that was exploited very well by Philip K Dick’s science fiction.
(The blog post goes into more detail and has links with more info.)
more efficient “encounters” in tactical RPGs
tl;dr: Are there ways to streamline the combat/conflict systems in tabletop roleplaying games to keep encounters from slowing down the game, while still keeping enough realism to satisfy players who like tactics?
Traditional tabletop RPGs put a lot of emphasis on tactical simulation of combat; not surprising since Dungeons & Dragons began as an offshoot of a miniatures-based wargame called Chainmail. Lots of RPG systems are still like this, with half or more of a typical session being spent in what D&D sort of euphemistically calls “encounters”.
A lot of players like this; but a sizable number don’t, and there are by now a lot of rule systems that focus more on roleplaying and storytelling, and streamline the combat rules to make fights shorter and less complicated. In most of these, the traditional square or hex grid map is gone, and there’s either a simple linear notion of “range” or none at all. Sometimes an entire fight can be reduced to a single die roll.
