Attitudes and Approaches to Combat?

[Archedius]

As a DM I find myself tending towards a few extremely brutal combats in between story. What I was wondering was how you guys make your combats special- how you keep the mood going and even darken it. What techniques do you have for hiding mechanics or what new ones you've added? How do you keep the horror going when the anticipation and tension break with an actual confrontation? A vague question I know but any thoughts would be nice.

[Hallow]

I've been wondering the same thing for awhile now..
How i handle combat is simple, each combat is sort of a puzzle to the game. You can do it the hard, long way by killing each opponent the mundane way, Or, you can use the surroundings or a weakness to a particular creature to make the combat ten times easier, though my players dont often figure this out, because they're still getting used to not being in a fantasy campaign.

[Bloody Morgan]

You could use the old chestnut of keeping track of the PC's hit points yourself, and describing the effects of each wound to them. It's a bit more bookkeeping, but it makes the players think about each wound as the horrible event that it is, rather than coming from a generic pool of "health".

This is especially nice if foes have attacks which cause pain disproportionate to their damage*, either higher or lower. A creature with a pain attack will potentially be a serious threat - or at least, the players will think it is and be as cautious as their characters should be. Likewise, a serious (or infected) wound with little immediate pain can lull the player into a fall sense of security, only to haunt them hours or days later.

I'd personally let player roll damage against foes themselves, as the joy or frustration of a high or low roll is part of the fun of D&D combat.


*There are some of these, but nothing comes to mind. Damn faulty memory.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

My Mantra is "Memorable Combat happens in Memorable places." Think of your favorite movie fight scene. Did it take place in a featureless 50' x 50' room? Probably not. Whenever possible, I like to put combat in places with lots of background features, like a working textile mill, or the innards of a clocktower, or a burning village on a snowy mountainside, or a church in the middle of a ritual that must not be interrupted. Make it rain, make it snow, start a fire in the middle.

Then, encourage the players to use the contents of the location in the battle. How? By having the bad guys do it first. Push bookcases over on people, have dying foes fall into a vat of boiling dye, or into a moving gear. Have the foes attack with long ranged weapons from accessible, but precarious places, to force a choice between pulling out the crossbows, or climbing up on a thatched roof or theater balcony to get in melee range.

I try to follow my own advice as much as possible, although I don't do so as much as I'd like. But despite the horror setting, I like my battles to be more like a Jackie Chan movie.

[HuManBing]

Rare and brutal is the way to go. Make your PCs use extreme caution before they go into combat. Make them afraid of permanent injury. Make them view combat more as a good way to get a terrible lifelong wound, rather than the ideal way to gain experience points for levels.

That's not to say that they should NEVER fight, but Ravenloft is much more about survival (social, emotional, political, mental) rather than mowing down minions.

[kottakinge]

Attitude: u must have an agressive attitude.
Approaches: u must approach carefully to the ennemy one step closer and he can AOO if he had a reach weapon of course.
That's the only things that came in mind for the moment

One thing i dislike in ad&d game is that even with 1 HP someone is still dangerous and can kill you!
Combats in 3.5 ed are very long and somewhat very "tactical" if u play with a grid and figurines, so they become less imaginative than when u had to describe all the combat scene.
To counterbalance that, add a lot of furnitures of the grid so that the combat ground match the description u did to the players.
I also use a lot of descriptions to the wounds the player and the npc receive (it's hard to see in ad&d if someone is in full health or dying because even with 1 HP he still have all his capabilities).
I use the optional rules found in feast of goblyns for important NPC or Darklords (when the player miss him he lose confidence in himself and have a -1 to hit because he think the darklord is too much for him).
Of course when someone is below 0 HP but above -10 HP he cannot do anything but dying with cursing words or crounching, that add some tension, i love to add gory scene because fighting with steel weapons cut the flesh, crush the bones and the such (beware to not succomb to horror scene in each combat) so the players when they enter combat know that blood will be splitted and that combat is the only last option.
Music is important too, and i suggest to speed things (see the site of wotc they have advices for that, like rolling the "to hit" and "degats" dices in a same roll).
Don't allow players to make long term tactics during combat, that must be something in which u have to react quickly, i dislike when others speaks with them during combat or giving advice of how to move their figurine to have maximum effect or said" can u move 2 step right u're in my area of effect", and use a counter of time, if a player doesn't know what to do after the end of the counter then consider he does nothing except protect himself (full defense stand).
That was my 2 cents.

[WolfKook]

As far as the mechanics go, I've implemented the "Armor as DR" variant, and a certain kind of "Base Defense Rating" (Both ideas from Iron Heroes, though I guess they also appear in Arcana Unearthed, but the execution is not as good), combining them by making Armor Check Penalty apply to this BDB, thus making the choice of armor an important decision between getting hit less often or shrugging off some of the damage from each hit.

The combined variants, however, end up making combat less threatening. To counter that, I've also reduced the players hit points by half (They gain hps each odd level), so as to make each combat more life-threatening for them. Needless to say, what is true for PCs is true for NPCs and monsters. With such a change, the players (And thus the characters) are aware that they face certain death if they don't act with caution. They always on their toes, and tend to make their homework before facing the big bad guy. I tend to encourage the fact that mine is not "kick-in-the-door-and-defeat-the-monster" kind of game, but one that rewards a little investigation on their part.

Off course, combat is a very rare happening IMC, and I -as a DM -always try to give them opponents they can defeat, by might or wit.

[HuManBing]

As far as the mechanics go, I've implemented the "Armor as DR" variant, and a certain kind of "Base Defense Rating"

Good call! I have always disliked the AC bonus that armor gives, preferring to see it as DR against certain types of weapons. Base Defense Rating is another Arcana Unearthed thing that I've been looking at, but it's harder to implement as it seems to be quite arbitrary.

I've toyed with the idea of allowing my PCs to sacrifice BAB bonuses on a given level to add to their defense instead. I'm not sure how this would work but it seems like it would be the logical thing for spellcasters to do, if they don't envision ever going into combat.

[Kessler]

I put in much description, otherwise the combat is too much roll play. Starting with the area, then expressions and outlooks of enemies, emotions and occasionally detailing various hits, adding charcter moves, dodges etc., and always detailing critical hits (from my own system based on Combat and Tactics from 2e), like brutally descripting what happens to the bone that got hit (ribs got broken and the top of it pierced the left lung, coughing blood etc.). Also giving random bonuses-penalties for different positions.

But descritions shouldn't be the main part, then combat takes way too much time.

And if I have good players I let them describe their character fighting and result as well.

[WolfKook]

Aside from mechanics, the second tip for good RL combats is to build anticipation. With most important encounters, the characters should have some information about their enemies before they face them, and those details must not only give them clues as to how to defeat them, but must also make them worried about their powers. I remember my first encounter with a wight as a player. We were still at low level; we have read through the manuals, and we knew that the wight had a drain energy attack (Well... It was not the right approach, but it got the right effect). The result was that we all tried to attack it but to keep our distance at the same time. Long combat, but I still remember it after some 12 years.

That is not to say there should not be surprise encounters. On the contrary. Still, they have to be anticipated. Remember those movies in which you knew something was about to happen to some character, but you didn't know when, and even though you knew, you jumped in your chair when it finally happened? It takes a great DM to do that (I haven't done so, but my old DM was a master at that), but it's worth trying.

In short, keep your RL DMG / HoH handy, and use the tips provided to create the appropriate atmosphere when building up to combat in your game.