Crunch Friday - Personal Combat
Once a week, on a Friday, we will be releasing small discussion points covering an aspect of the game design, taking a look inside the thought process of the games designer Oliver Hulme.
This week, for our inaugural 'Crunch' discussion, Oliver will be covering personal combat. Over to you, Oliver...
Shooting/Melee/Fighting – the triangle of damage, attacks and debuffing
New players to the Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game (EDRPG) may look at the weapons table, then look at the character sheet and quickly choose to prioritise shooting combat. They might even ignore Melee and Fighting altogether. They would do this for the following reasons:
Guns do more damage
Guns attack at range
Both of these points are true but don’t tell the whole story. I made gun combat inflict the most damage because it just ‘feels’ right. Getting shot by a Submachine Gun should hurt more than being stabbed by a sword – that’s why the police use Submachine Guns when they raid armed drug compounds instead of swords.
However, real life is only one inspiration for EDRPG. Other inspirations include Star Trek and Star Wars. Captain Kirk often faces gun or laser armed opponents, but he’s much more likely to ultimately end up fighting them hand to hand. In Star Wars the lightsabre seems weirdly more effective than the blaster. Additionally EDRPG takes inspiration from martial art films and super spy fiction, where ninja-like opponents slay foes the old fashioned way in rejection of the modern world. Have these traditional methods been hosed by autopistols that inflict 3D10 damage?
Far from it. Let’s start with Melee weapons. The first thing Melee weapons benefit from is multiple attacks. Whereas a gun gets to fire once, a melee weapon benefits from the Parry rule – a successful Parry allows you to attack outside your turn, as many times as you wish. Of course you can only Parry another Melee or Fighting attack, and your opponents may wish to shoot you instead. Fortunately the Melee user has this covered.
Melee wielders get a free first attack if someone shoots them at point blank range or attempts to move away from them. Given that you have probably already attacked the target once already, this means that you effectively get to stab twice before an opponent moves away. Incidentally this also equates to two chances to knock your opponent over, effectively scuppering their next turn.
Besides, a Melee wielder who specialises in close combat soon begins to close, or even exceed the gap between gun users and sword wielders. Nanofibre blades do 2D10 points of damage, as do inbuilt cyberclaws – and these are just the basic models. Couple that with improved strength enhancements for a damage bonus, and the Slam, Riposte and Last Minute Deflection Karma Capability and suddenly Melee combat doesn’t look quite so weak a cousin to the gun.
Fighting is similar to Melee but more extreme. It does even less damage (1D10 halved), but messes up your opponent much more. Fighting includes wrestling, punching, pistol-whipping and indeed any point-blank thumping the human body can come up with. The headline ability is disarming – if you roll an even number on your fighting damage roll you disarm your opponent. So if the enemy was intent on blowing your brains out at point blank range with her shotgun she can just think again – that shotgun has now scattered well out of her reach and you are still coming at her fists flailing.
Naturally, rolling a 10 on the damage die (even though it is later halved) still knocks your opponent prone as well as disarming them. An enemy with no close combat skills has now been rendered useless, even if they were wielding a high spec assault beamer just moments before. Fighting benefits from all the extra attack capability of Melee weapons, increasing the chances of disarming your opponent even further. In the Elite: Dangerous RPG Captain Kirk might just knock the gun out of the Romulan’s hands in time – a move, ironically, very difficult to do against a Romulan in the Star Trek RPG in the 80’s!
The concepts here are damage vs debuffing. Damage is great because it ends a fight and terminates opponents. Debuffing is useful because it makes it hard for a still-living enemy to hurt you. The more damaging attacks, therefore, are balanced as the less useful debuffers, and the best debuffers do the least damage.
Overall guns probably still have the edge over other attack forms thanks to their range. But once you get up close to an opponent all bets are off!
