Balancing combat and story | A Gnome's Ponderings (2024)

The gist of it is that the more focus combat has, the more time it ends up taking up and the weaker the focus is on story and character development. Mind you, having said that, we both like the war game end of the RPG experience and we like it when miniatures hit the grid.

However, combat can sometimes completely take over a session. When I was in an epic level, third edition campaign, there were combats that took three weeks to resolve. Looking back, it was almost like we were taking a page from Dragon Ball Z. In situations like, you don’t just lose sight of what your own character’s personal journey is. You lose sight of what the plot is in general. (Why are we fighting these demons again? Is it just because they’re evil.) I have seen combats where someone could go make and eat a sandwich in between their turns.

Long player turns is an issue that is often discussed with board games. (Java, the third game in the Masks Trilogy, is an almost classic example of this. When we played it, we didn’t mind because we couldn’t imagine playing Java any other way!) However, long player turns can become a surprisingly big thing in RPGs. And I’m not talking about one player hogging the scene (That’d be another blog. Games should come with a rule that monologues can’t go over a minute ) I’m talking about long, drawn out combat turns. If a player has multiple characters, that just makes it worse. Sometimes far worse.

In many respects, this was actually one of the things we liked about fourth edition, although I think everyone in our group felt like fourth edition had lost the feel of being D&D. In many ways, 4ed played like a small scale war game with the option of a story if you felt like it. Sometimes, you want a deep and meaningful story. I’d have never gotten so much out of Polaris or Apocalypse World if I didn’t feel that way. However, sometimes, it’s just fun to beat stuff up.

That said, in one of our recent conversation, I had an idea that I felt might ‘solve’ the story versus combat issue. The long player turn issue is one that seems insurmountable

Amongst the roughly billion odd supplements for third edition and 3.5 was Heroes of Battle. One of the core ideas of it was that battlefield was the dungeon. You didn’t play out the whole battle. Instead, you played out the localized action of the heroes. How well the heroes did was reflected in the course of the overall battle. Were you stomping faces, kicking names and still had bubblegum to chew? Your side was winning. Were you running off the field of battle with one arm hanging by a flap of skin? Yeah, your side wasn’t winning that one.

It occurred to me that, in many games, the combat serves the story. We need to rescue the princess? Well, we have to fight through the orcs and slay the dragon to do that. (Purely theoretical example. In more than twenty years of gaming under I have no idea how many game masters and systems, I have never even come close to doing that) The combat takes place in between the story elements and can slow the story down. (Don’t even get me started on wandering encounters What? We just spent the evening fighting a bunch of mutant tree sloths who just happened to be in the area?)

What if you had a campaign that was centered around a war and used the Heroes of Battle idea that your localized fights determined the course of the battle? Each session would be an individual battle and how it went would determine the overall course of the war and the story of the campaign. Instead of combat serving (or even hindering) the story, the story would revolve around combat. Combat would drive the story.

The depth of character might not be great. Heck, my first thought is that folks would base themselves on WW I moves and comic books. (“Okay. I’m Nick Fury. You’ve got the barbarian so you’re Dum Dum Dugon. The bard will be Gabe and the elf is Pinkerton.”) And there is a limit on exactly what the story might entail. However, if you want a campaign that’s all about combat but still has a story, this might work.

Mind you, I’m in no position to be in a campaign, let alone run one. Still, as an intellectual exercise, I think it’s interesting.