>want to climb a cliff
>Okay, roll your climb skill. You passed? Great, you're at the top of the cliff.
>want to fight a guy
>Enter a minigame that has dozens of pages of dedicated rules, takes 3-5 hours to finish, and isn't even exciting
Why, in this day and age, is combat in RPGs resolved differently from everything else? The Big Two of modern RPGs (D&D and Call of Cthulhu) both handle it this way instead of just having a "Fight" skill that's rolled once when in a fight to resolve the issue. Is this just an artifact of RPGs originally descending from wargames? Then people should play wargames instead, which are actually fun.
Your thoughts, /tg/?
Big two?
Go play your minimalist trash then.
The "fantasy" of most ttrps isn't climbing cliffs or lockpicking you willfully moronic cretin.
>"i wish i was just freeform wanking"
Go do improv then queerbo, which is somehow even harder to watch than either of the "big 2"
>The "fantasy" of most ttrps isn't climbing cliffs or lockpicking you willfully moronic cretin
It should be, since there are much better games out there for the fantasy of killing fantastic beasts
Okay, post one
Blades in the Dark works that way, although it's obviously not for foot by foot dungeon crawling. You roll for the final outcome and then fill in the details.
It cuts both ways though, one of the gameplay examples has a PC cornered on a ledge by a bunch of dudes with guns, so they try to jump over to a different roof, fail, and get their chest blasted open. If they have enough stress left (a limited resource), they can downgrade that to something less catastrophic, like landing funny and spraining their ankle, or only getting shot in the leg halfway through their jump.
Fighting all those guys was never an option for that PC since they didn't have anything to increase their "scale" to the level of a gang.
>Why, in this day and age, is combat in RPGs resolved differently from everything else?
Because you're moronic.
Spot on.
Why do you hate cliff climbing so much anon
The thing about CoC and DnD combat is they can very much be exciting if you know what to do and don't have 8 spergs at one table because Matt Mercer did it.
Honestly, I would prefer it the other way with more skill challenges to make ability checks less immediate then roll, outcome.
>and don't have 8 spergs at one table because Matt Mercer did it
I capped my player size at 3 specifically because 4 and up gives me a god damn headache
I think three tends to be about perfect too. Most games tend to have 4 strong niches in them, and 3 means no one has to double up, but you also don't cover every obstacle. You can get away with more in some games but 3 is easy to manage and gives players plenty of time in the spotlight each too.
sounds like a problem with players rather than the amount there of.
Ive experimented with the idea of general incremental checks. you have a goal, and you can either role a lower tn to decrease the difficult of the main goals tn (incremental progress), or you can role to achieve the goal. so you balance out advancement and completion of any given task. You can try to gun right for the goal tn, but you are unlikely to hit if it is a difficult goal to do. or you can go slow, but take up time. or most of the time you will do something in the middle.
Don't forget people who look up rules and descriptions between their turns.
>Is this just an artifact of RPGs originally descending from wargames?
Yes? Combat is relatively straight forward as a way to get everyone in a group involved. As opposed to most other tasks which reasonably should have specialists.
Admittedly I've always wanted to just play a small scale wargame with roleplaying elements. People get weird when you move to hard in that direction though(see D&D 4e). So we keep getting these weird hybrids, with relatively week wargaming rules.
Stuff like world of darkness could really use a shift towards resolving combat with a few rolls.
Combat is more interesting and fun than climbing a cliff, but nothing is stopping you from homebrewing a complex multivariate cliff encounter.
>want to kill thing
>Okay, roll your kill skill. You passed? Great, you've killed it.
There, solved your problem.
If your system thinks combat is more focused than climbing a mountain, you have to put the work into bringing the system up to par with combat. It stands to reason that more involved aspects of a game are what players come for in that particular system, so it's better to elevate everything rather than reduce anything.
Originated in wargames.
I expect that On The Shoulders Of Giants: The Mountain Climbing RPG might be set up in such a way that the cliff climbing is complex and involved with many variables and choices whereas fighting is a simple skill check for when you've been stuck in a cave for three days and your partner starts thinking your thigh kinda looks like a big hunk of ham. Be the change you want to see in the world.
>edmund hillary's draugr army being reduced to a check
Is that a kinojack
>He wants to be attacked while he's climbing
I'll keep that in mind for next session
LITERALLY the reason god invented pterodactyls
To make climbing a cliff into a minigame that has dozens of pages of dedicated rules, takes 3-5 hours to finish, and IS exciting (because you might fall off the cliff at any moment)? Hell yes it is!
>I don't like this thing. Why do other people like this thing? I know, it's because it's an artifact of an earlier time, and no other reason! People just thought they liked this but now we know better!
have a nice day.
I don't think strategizing and teamwork can be as fun in the ever-present turned-based combat systems.
In RPGs I've enjoyed chase scenes a lot more: there are multiple obstacles, there's pursuers/the pursued, there's potentially additional elements, and you have to be creative to overcome them all.
I always liked the mouse guard, torchbearer, & burning wheel systems the best. Everything is a basic skill roll. But climactic combat (or any suitable climactic conflict) has a bunch of preset "moves" that gain or lose points in the conflict based on opponent's "move" choices. The balance of points after a predetermined number of rounds determines what the resolution is.
>roll to grapple the stone outcropping
>the outcropping rolls a natural 20
>the cliff face turns to butter in your hands and shoves you off with a shriek HWEUUUURGHH!
>roll to hit the ground
>you miss and go into orbit
it's already hard enough to get people to try not playing d&d. how the frick are you going to get them to play a combat minimal/non-existent game?
It would be targeted directly to barehand rock climbing enthusiasts who are also big nerds, of which there are 5
You could actually create this system easily if you wanted to
generally another person doesn't want to die and will go out of their way to stop you if you're trying to make them unalive.
on the other hand, cliffs are generally indifferent to being climbed, making the process much simpler to represent through the game mechanics.
I want to climb a cliff
>Alright, (Checks three pages of modifiers pertaining to weather conditions, player encumbrance and local geological strata)
>Provide me the requesite roll, if you would
Six, I spend the luck points I got last smoke break to bring it up to ten, I'll also take an extra cycle to bring my roll up to fifteen
>You trigger a complication with your use of luck, I've rolled a six, which is a minor injury. Limestone tumbles down loose from the cliff face onto your shoulder, dealing three points of damage to your left arm and giving you the pain modifier. You sucessfully make it to the top.
Frick combat, take the modifier pill