this is part 2 of a series that began with ‘goblin dice’.
we are playing dungeons and dragons. i open the rulebook.
everything is fighting.
yes, you can play a lot of D&D without fighting. some people even make their careers out of playing a lot of D&D, and still fighting with shocking irregularity. if your table is a finely honed improv machine and the person running your game is always on point, you can create lots of fun-to-experience drama that doesn’t involve fighting. that’s what happens on your favourite D&D podcast! and those people are doing a lot of hard work to achieve it!
they deserve our respect for accomplishing that. because the rules are all about fighting.
your character sheet? mostly fight moves. the spells section? mostly spells for hurting living beings. the skills section, which handles almost everything you do outside of combat? suspiciously small. most of the guidance given to the DM is on making good fights. much of the discussion around the game online revolves around the balance of the fight mechanics, or the class mechanics (which are about fighting).
obviously, fighting is cool. that’s why a lot of popular media is absolutely chock full of it. however, sitting around a table with my friends to tell a story has a strength that these media don’t have: we’re able to improvise and decide how the story will go ourselves. we’re able to envision how cool moments will go and make them happen. we’re able to outmaneuver a fight by the skin of our teeth, avoiding a confrontation that surely would have made everything worse.
but there are no rules for cool moments that don’t involve the list of Conditions in combat, or the mechanics of specific spells, or asking the DM ‘please can i use this skill to avoid this conflict?’ meanwhile, in combat, the sheer number of rules to engage with defeats, or at least hinders, my capability to improvise. the prevalence of fights, and the depth of their rules, works against one of the coolest things about RPGs: the fact the players are in control of them and can envision anything. why do we keep having to envision the same thing?by defining what possibilities there are, the possibility space narrows.
rules, in my view, should encourage creativity and not restrict it. by over-defining how fighting should look and what you can and can’t accomplish, D&D makes what happens during a fight linear and confined. If you like improvisation and unexpected coolness and also like fights (for instance, if you’re a shonen anime fan), you likely won’t have fun during the fights even though they’re what you’re here for. i don’t have fun during the fights, and i love fights.
some of you will be thinking: my DM just uses the rule of cool. the rule of cool says that if something would be awesome, we can just ignore the rules and make up a new ruling on the spot to have that awesome thing happen instead. “okay, you can kick him through the window of the tower, if you succeed a DC 18 Athletics check.”
i think that if the rules need to be ignored to make the game fun, or you need to add new rules to make the game fun, the rules aren’t helping you; they’re an obstacle. there are a lot of tabletop games where people get kicked through tower windows all the time, and the rules don’t need to bend or change to accommodate it. in those games, the rule of cool doesn’t exist, because what’s happening is already cool without it.
there’s something else that bothers me, and it’s subtler. having all the rules be for fighting makes fighting feel like the most important thing you do. which it is in D&D; that’s the design. only, i don’t think that fighting is the most important thing my favourite characters do. when i have the chance to create a work of media myself, with my friends—that’s what playing a tabletop game is, after all—fighting isn’t my top priority in terms of things i want to see. i do want to see it, because it’s awesome, but to me, it doesn’t deserve the space D&D gives it.
and that’s why rpg fights suck. if an rpg fight sucks, it’s because it’s been squeezed into a sterile mold that ensures nothing unexpected, frightening or awesome will happen, one that replaces uncertainty with math. having more rules makes this more likely, not less.
you may be thinking that this is bullshit, and that i am presenting a problem without providing a solution. therefore, i am adding nothing but negativity to the discussion. you would be right! here are some games i like and the problems they solve:
“I like tabletop RPGs, but I think fights need to be less common and more dramatic when they happen” — play Night’s Black Agents or Trail of Cthulhu for thriller-paced action where the fights really can kill you. didn’t do enough investigation beforehand? hope you can deduce a vampire’s weaknesses while it’s charging at you. turns out its weakness isn’t bullets? you aren’t dead yet, but you’d better hope you can outrun a creature of the night through the backstreets of Bratislava. and there are rules for the investigation and the outrunning. good ones.
“I like tabletop RPGs, but I don’t like fighting, only drama” — play Good Society, which is set in Regency England and is solely about social dynamics. what if instead of rules for combat, we had rules for social expectations and angst? what if you ‘win’ not by killing everyone who opposes you, but by self-actualizing in spite of their opinions about who you should be?
“I like tabletop RPGs, but I don’t like fighting, only mystery” — play Call of Cthulhu, and enjoy going mad. when you can’t fight and you know nothing about your adversary, there’s no chance the dice will save the world for you. you have to do it yourself, leveraging your character’s skills to genuinely outmaneuver cosmic evil.
“I like fantasy, questing, and magic, but Dungeons and Dragons spends too much time on combat.” — play Shawn Tomkin’s Ironsworn, which is free, and explore a slower-paced world where violence is a choice, a challenge, and a consequence, not a colorless guarantee. fighting is draining and killing your enemies comes with a price. not only are fights rarer and scarier, they mean more.
red-headed android 