COMBAT IN RPGS: LET'S TRY SOMETHING NEW
Combat in videogames is a funny thing. Since direct physical conflict is simple, exciting, and translates universally, it's been one of the staples of nearly all genres of game since the medium's inception. There are plenty of genres where you do little
but fight things. For every other genre, it's generally a question of whether you fight a
lot or a
little.
And it's kind of strange that we've decided that roleplaying games are one of the genres where a lot of fighting is expected--or even demanded. Because while there's nothing wrong with lots of fighting, there's also nothing wrong with not lots of fighting...which is something we almost never get.
For every minute RPG protagonists spend discussing current affairs with aristocrats, haggling over supplies, or trying to boink party members, they spend anywhere from twenty minutes to several hours hacking their way through hundreds of men, beasts, and monstrous creatures that all presumably wish their day had gone differently.
And sure--there's not a lot of wit in pointing this out. Obviously the higher volume of combat is a game abstraction, just like the inventory system doesn't really capture the sublime subtleties of keeping one's after-battle snacks in a different pouch from the harvested bloodpig gallbladders. It was never intended to be realistic. It's supposed to be fun. And while that's totally okay, what it simulates makes the player act and think in very specific ways that deserve analysis.
Let's try to look at personal combat from a realistic perspective for a second. Bear with me here, because I promise I have a more nuanced point than "this is how things work in
teh real worlds" coming up here.
As a fun exercise, imagine you round a corner and see two people with swords trying to kill each other. You don't have any prior information, and for the sake of argument the anachronism doesn't really register with you. Also for the sake of argument, you know they're not high, drunk, or insane.
Let's examine what assumptions you can draw about this scenario from a glance:
- This is dangerous. One of them or very possibly both of them are going to be killed. SO:
- Each of them must think they've got a good chance at winning. If either of them thought their chances of losing were as low as 49%, they would have either avoided this fight or run away instantly. THEREFORE:
- The actual odds of either party winning are probably in the ballpark of 50-50. Obviously one of them has a better assessment of their chances than the other, but reasonably speaking, if they're both still swinging away gamely a few seconds into the fight, they're about evenly matched.
These three very reasonable premises lead us to one conclusion:
they've probably been in very few fights like this before. In fact, they've probably
never done this before.
People who get into lots of one-on-one fights that they have a fifty-fifty chance of winning don't last very long.
This is why premodern battles were generally fought in formations. There's not a lot of future in having your soldiers square off with enemy soldiers one at a time; pretty soon neither of you have any soldiers left. For a semi-illustrative videogame example of this, watch any professional RTS match and count the number of times players allow their units to just walk up to enemy units and slug it out.
Any level of tactics is better than a crapshoot, and that's what balanced one-verus-one fights by definition are.
But there's one more conclusion you can draw about these two brave sword-swinging morons, and this is, I think, the one that should be extremely exciting to any roleplayer:
These two people must REALLY care about what they're fighting about.
Either whatever stake they're fighting over is extremely precious to them, or they really, really, REALLY hate the other guy. Because seriously, they could die here. One of them IS going to die here, and the
physics of sharp heavy pieces of metal plus the resilience of human anatomy means there really is an excellent chance that BOTH of them are going to die. Think about how much you'd have to care about something to wade into that kind of fight over it.
Now say you round a corner and see sane, sober people going at it with swords...and it's a computer RPG. Here's what we know about this combat:
- One of them is probably a protagonist and one of them is an enemy.
- They're about equally matched. Otherwise it'd be twenty guys versus the protagonist. As it is, the protagonist is probably only slightly stronger than the enemy.
- On average, the protagonist has done this dozens of times. Every couple of weeks, really. Why would he ever back down from a fight? He always wins them. Eventually.
- They both think they've got a good chance of winning. Or not. The enemy might be obviously outmatched. The fight might not even being going well. Honestly, he might not even really care about what they're fighting about. But he was there, and the protagonist was there, and, well, it was fight times. What else was he gonna do? Talk his way out of it? Flee his way out of it? As for the hero, he thinks he has an excellent chance of winning. Because he does have an excellent chance of winning. Because he always wins. Eventually.
- They must both...sort of...care about what they're fighting over. The enemy may have asked the protagonist for money and, upon not getting money, drawn his sword and attacked. Or the protagonist might be a member of a different faction. Or the protagonist might be an intruder who hasn't yet expressed hostile intentions. Or maybe the protagonist was in the neighborhood, and this enemy popped up who happened to be one of a larger enemy's friends, or financial supporters, or lovers, or political allies...or something. Really, anyone the protagonist wants to exterminate. "Exterminate" is a good word, because like killing cockroaches, there isn't any personal risk involved.
And of course, this is all meta. It's very possible for a game to make you treat these combats with a lot more respect than I'm implying is due. But they end up loading all of the work onto the characterizations, narrative, and context--none of the drama is emergent through the design. And I think it's time someone tried doing that.
This is what I'm getting at. With
Unrest, we didn't want combat to be daily, normalized slugfests that you go through over and over with no meaningful consequence for failure. We wanted violence to be--as it would be for our characters--rare, avoidable, and very dangerous. Fighting shouldn't be the thing you do to see the next part of the game. It should be the thing you do only when you really care about something.
That's why combat only exists in some chapters. That's why all fights are one-on-one. That's why you'll always understand why whomever is attacking you is willing to risk their lives to kill you. And that's why, when you die in combat, the game is willing to recognize your character's death as a valid end-state for the chapter. Because we want the risk to be meaningful.
So that's what we're going for in
Unrest. I'll be honest, this is probably the one feature of our game I'd most like to see catch on. I'm not saying it'd be right for, say, Skyrim, but I can't help but feel there's a lot of untapped potential in exploring violence with a higher degree of realism. Not "realistic" mechanics--just realistic consequences.
