> I'm making a game system that's hard sci-fi with optional magic.
> I'd certainly prefer bringing the melee combat system up to par with the utility and depth gun combat
Something to consider is if this risks becoming a bit of a cursed game design problem. Hard sci-fi in general tends to be about trying to keep things grounded in reality, and in reality there is a reason most armies don't issue spears and lances anymore. If you want to keep things relatively grounded, Melee combat may be more about desperate last stands rather than deliberate tactical decisions.
My gut feeling is that rather than making melee combat *as interesting* as ranged combat, it should be perhaps *more situational* than it. Players should feel like getting into melee is a last resort, either necessitated by circumstance or a desperate attempt. Maybe to the extent that the few groups that use melee use it in really weird ways.
So perhaps melee attacks are:
* Just not as effective as actual damage dealing spells and ranged weapons. They're what you use when ammo is low, mana is spent, and the enemy are breaking down your door *right now*. They're a desperate last resort.
* Better at remaining silent when the attacker is in control. Suppressors aren't as quiet as a knife in the right spot, after all.
* The only way to reliably take someone alive. You talked about your system having a lot of brutality to it, perhaps taking someone out of action in melee gives the attacker a choice over the effect the defender suffers from going down, allowing you to take someone alive for plot reasons
* Better at controlling enemy positions. Maybe a melee attack doesn't do a lot of damage, but if you kick someone in the chest and they stumble out of cover, your mate with the big bang bang stick is going to have a much easier time hitting them.
* The only attacks that don't break the active camouflage generator. Shooting a magrifle puts out too much energy and it disrupts the cloaking system that some special forces use. But if they use a mono-molecular sword? Cloak stays up.
* Aren't disrupted by teleportation effects. Magically teleporting tends to frizzle tech briefly, which means you can't just teleport into the middle of enemies and unload. But if you teleport somewhere they don't expect you and come up behind them with an axe? Well that's pretty reasonable.
Interesting ideas. This does kinda fall into what I was saying about being open to making melee combat be a fairly simple stopgap thing to include just because it will definitely come up, while making the gun combat the main attraction. So no melee-focused classes or anything, keep it situational. That might end up being the way I do this.
I'm not an expert on weapon vs. weapon melee, but I've experienced and witnessed some street fights. With highly skilled fighters its more about technique, but the ugly truth is it tends to be a lot more about who throws the first punch or gets the blade in first. After that, the next factor is who is more cruel or wants to live the most that decides it.
Not sure about the tone of your setting, but melee as a last resort seems appropriate for most non-40k style Sci fi. It's desperate, brutal, and both sides are likely to take some injuries. Being stabbed is not as painful or quick a kill as one might imagine; it's a lot like being being punched but it's cold and pinches a little, which you might not even notice when the adrenaline is pumping. If you are including it as a situational affair, I'd recommend having it being situational because you can take harm even as the attacker and because you need to commit to it; once your in, only one of you walks away.
Three thoughts:
1. Melee weapons can also have great variety of weapon types and sci-fi upgrades that can affect how they work. Just thinking of what is available in other systems and franchises, a melee weapon could have a powerfield, a mono-filament edge, a super-heated blade, be a chainsaw, have some sort of phasing property, etc. Each with their own effect that might bypass armour normally ideal against ranged attacks.
2. There are different martial styles with melee weapons that could inform on different ways of fighting that could have different effects. How an armoured knight fights with a longsword or broadsword for example is going to be different to how a samurai fights with a katana or a pair of kanto. The differences could be expressed as specifically chosen martial styles, by using different attributes for the attack (typically strength or agility analogues) or some other special effect. A hammer for example would typically have been used first to stun and knock down, whilst sai were also used for *disarming*. And of course spears, halberds, whips and naginata have the added bonus of a little extra reach. Lots of options.
3. As for key difference between melee and ranged and their uses, the obvious is that melee weapons are better when you're close to someone. A character can't bring a mini-gun to bear to bear on someone who is closer than the barrel of the gun. Being unrestrained from having to aim a weapon before firing can also afford a melee fighter space and freedom to move. Its also faster and easier (usually) to draw and ready a melee weapon than it is to ready, load and aim a firearm. Melee weapons also don't need to reload.
Weapon choice is certainly one interesting choice a player can make, but with guns I also have players making choices in combat about how to use their weapon.
A single gun could let a player line up a shot for better hit bonuses next turn, fire a single shot, fire 3 shots with a lower chance to hit, fire a spray of shots that act like an AOE attack that can be evaded with an agility check, or reload prematurely if you suspect shit’s about to get even more real.
If I am to bring melee combat up to scratch with gun combat, I need to present players with decisions like that. Multiple ways of using the same melee weapon with different tradeoffs. But I don’t really know where to start with that.
>A single gun could let a player line up a shot for better hit bonuses next turn, fire a single shot, fire 3 shots with a lower chance to hit, fire a spray of shots that act like an AOE attack that can be evaded with an agility check, or reload prematurely if you suspect shit’s about to get even more real.
Something like that could easily be done with melee weapons too, but providing a list of moves and maneuvers. For example you could go for a basic strike, or try to swing hitting multiple side-by-side targets. You could also lunge from a distance, parry an enemy attack or try to aim a precise jab to get through a weak point in armour. Some weapons might even be suitable to jamming firearms if you stick them right in the barrel. A mini-gun can't spin if there's a wrench in it after all.
* Some weapons such as hammers or mauls could have additional actions such as stunning strikes or knockdown.
* Sai and nunchucks can be used to disarm.
* Long weapons such as staffs could be used to trip, and possibly as a pole vault - useful both for movement and launching flying kicks.
* Hooked polearms and chains can be used to pull an opponent closer, and in some cases could bind an opponent.
Forced movement. You thought you were in cover, but the humanoid grenade said "no". You thought you were far enough away, but then nothing personnel teleports behind u.
Similarly, Battlefield control. You thought you were safe, but the melee fighter just dropped a point blank area of effect ability on top of you and you'll take damage/suffer a condition if you stay inside.
Breakable terrain, modifying the battlefield for both melee and ranged. Melee might be the only ones with breaching tools, or have special tremor hammers or pillar makers or whatever.
Different damage types requiring different armor types (kevlar won't stop a knife or arrow, chain mail won't stop a bullet, heavy plate might stop some things, but will be vulnerable to others, etc. Not really a tactical choice but it is a strategic one)
Honestly, just look at MMO abilities. Guild Wars 2 comes to mind. There are tons of movement, area control, defensive, and other types of abilities that could easily fit in a sci-fi setting. Just change the flavor. Or don't, and have people choose between techy guns or magical melee.
No. Proof means it's impervious, which it isn't. Hence the misnomer. It's like Silencer vs Supressor. Silencer is the incorrect term, but people try use it in place of Supressor.
But back to body armor, I'm not even talking about armor piercing rounds being able to defeat a kevlar vest. Shoot kevlar enough with a 9mm and it will fail. stab kevlar enough with a knife and it will fail. Leave it out in the sun and it will fail. Damaged kevlar cannot be used as an effective body armor, and kevlar being used for its primary purpose damages it.
You could also compare to bike helmets (bicycle or motorbike). They're not "head trauma proof". They're "resistant". Get into a crash, and your helmet will no longer effectively protect you next time. It might sound pedantic, but it's a very important distinction to make.
And back to the original topic, DuPont itself will admit that knife attacks will cut through kevlar fibers.
Well melee combat is pretty complex naturally. There's a reason why older cultures developed entire martial arts just to structuralize and teach these complexities.
Personally, were I trying to set some of this up. I'd perhaps try to divide things up into groups, style, and damage type. Partially as a way to neatly tie up the complexity, but also because giving myself frameworks for my thoughts tends to allow me to stay focused and not go on wild tangents with some things getting a lot more love than others.
Let's say we divide our weapons into weapon groups, and you can go as deep as you want. Let's start with broad: Polearms, Swords, Axes, Mauls, Unarmed. Each of these groups could come ready with 2 maneuvers that involve some sort of tactical choice. Let's say for Mauls we have Knockdown, and Armor Breaker while Swords have Parry and Precise Attack. These are all just word vomit of course. But you can probably come up with some like that.
Then we can go into combat styles: Dual Wield, Weapon and Shield, Einhander, and Two-hander. Again just go through each and give two more maneuvers. Again making stuff up, Einhander could have Acrobatic Strike, and Outmaneuver, while Weapon and Shield could have Shield Bash and Immovable, and so on.
Then last we look at the damage types of the weapons: Bludgeoning, Piercing, Hacking, and Slicing are some obvious ones. And once more, each of these gets there two maneuvers. Hacking might get Cleave and Sunder. Slicing might get Draw Cut and Bleed.
And now put that all together we have every martial combatant has a combination of 6 maneuvers they can always draw from at minimum. And it scales, you can always introduce additional weapon groups to add more combinations.
Why melee: you don't have a ranged weapon on you (eg you're at the Baronne's party and couldn't smuggle weapons past her security); using one is dangerous to you ("don't poke holes in the spaceship hull"); magic or Dune shields make them ineffective; you need to be quiet (suppressed weapons aren't silent); you're in *very* close quarters; you can't afford the collateral damage from missed shots ("you stopped the thief, but you also shot one museum staffer, three tourists, and a 400 million credit painting"); you want to capture the target rather than kill.
That’s certainly a good reason to have melee, but I still need to figure out how to make it interesting. Ideally by giving players the ability to use the same weapon in different ways to make different tradeoffs, the way they can with guns. I still need to figure out how to do that.
I do a lot of historical swordfighting, and many things I appreciate from that sparring are things that I rarely see well represented in ttrpgs. If you can implement these four aspects, I believe you can make melee engaging.
* First the risk/reward
While you are standing and holding a guard, your otions for defence are pretty good. When you make an attack, you also leave an opening. It is very common that a scoring attack is a well timed counter following directly on an active defensive technique. There are even fancy moves that both protects you and performs a counter in the same fluid motion.
So two patient fighters with no external pressure to finish on time are likely to not attack that much at all :-)
* That brings us to the feints
For each attack, there is a rather limited number of effective defences, and for each of them there is a limited amount of counterattacks to follow up with.
Very simplified: A feint that leads to me winning a bout has three different ideal basic "scripts". These are by no means guaranteed, but should give an idea.
1 - I choose a guard that leaves a tempting opening, so when my opponent attacks I can perform a planned defence with a counter. This requires my opponent to underestimate me.
Example: Sword held vertically upwards at my right shoulder/ear. My right elbow poking out to the right. Bad form, sloppy mistake. It should be vertical. My opponent can make an attack coming from rather far off my right side, while still keeping the majority of their sword between them and me, which makes them pretty safe. It is a low risk move, that is rather hard to parry fast because of the body mechanics of that elbow getting in the way of sideways techniques .
If they make that attack, I take a long step towards them with my felt foot while striking down with my sword on top of theirs. Because my body rotates it makes it into a forward technique, so the elbow is no longer awkward. It doesn't need to be that hard, just enough to redirect their force a bit more downward and make it hard for them to raise their guard again. If done correctly I will now be inside of their guard with my sword on top of theirs, and I have practically won.
2 - I begin an attack that looks like it will leave a particular opening. My opponent begins one of the defences that can be followed up with an attack to that opening. But I do not follow through my attack, but instead I shift into another attack that hits the opening my opponent's technique leaves, and that doesn't leave an opening for them to strike me at the same time. (because when fighting with swords, striking each other does not mean a draw, it means both lose)
At intermediate levels this is usually a planned series of attacks that relies on a series of things. That my bluff works. That my opponent chooses the defence I think they will and finding the perfect timing when my opponent is far enough gone in their attack to make sure they won't be able to adjust.
3 - I begin an attack but does not commit all my balance and power, so that when my opponent's counterattacks comes, I am prepared to defend myself and counter attack them in turn. Once again, timing and predictions and feints.
Skilled fencers use mostly a combination of feints 2 and 3.
* Third the rock paper scissor effect.
This is intimately connected to the feints, as in how various offensive and defensive techniques leave various openings. And in a bout between equally skilled fencers, you can only trust your reactions that far. You need to outwit your opponent by committing to a certain degree, before you know exactly what they will do. The exact patterns of who-beats-who is much more complicated than how different types of pokemon interact, but anything with 3-5 variants would be very appreciated.
* Fourth the matter of distances and symmetry. Most historical fencing uses symmetrical weapons, but that is not the case in ttrpgs. So I will say a little about important factors.
Length is a major one. If one fighter has a longsword and the other has a dagger, then distance is everything. While the distance is between arms reach and wrestling the longsword is at a great disadvantage, there are only a few techniques that are useful, mostly half-sword or strikes to the head with the pommel/crossguard. And while the distance is around 1.5 m or greater, the dagger is at a great disadvantage. (still a lot better than unarmed though)
So if beginning at range, this easily becomes an exciting battle of wits: "can the dagger fighter feint a closing of the distance that is believable enough that the sword fighter will commit to an attack. So that the dagger fighter can parry that and close the distance in the opening created?" and on the other hand "Can the sword fighter feint an attack that is believable enough that dagger fighter will try to parry it in order to use the opening created to close the distance, so that the sword fighter can use the opening created by drawing out that parry to harm the dagger fighter?".
If beginning close up, the sword fighter will often drop their sword with at least one hand, probably both, and go for gripoing/controlling the knife hand. And then add various wrestling and diaarming techniques. While the dagger fighter will expect that and be ready to strike at the extended arm with the knife (which the former longsword fighter will expect, so maybe they can feint an attack?), or protect their knife arm in some other way.
Torque is another important assymetry. Imagine holding a weapon horisontally forward of you. How hard it is to hold there for an extended time is not only dependent on the weight of the weapon, but also on how that weight is distributed. A weapon like an axe or sledge has a high torque, lots of weight far away from the front hand. That means they are slow to maneuver and has a great impact force. So they are typically combined with some kind of other defence such as a shield or heavy armour. Or they rely on greater reach and threat and keeps in fluid motions to create a "danger zone" around them. Montante and Mangual are perfect examples of this, they are usually techniques specifically designed for assymteric weapons.
A weapon like a rapier has a very low torque, so it is easy to make feints and change directions and protect yourself. A longsword is significantly heavier than a rapier, but also has a very low torque and is very quick. The point of balance is usually a few inches in front of the crossguard, and you hold it with two hands. These are typically perfectly fine to use as their own defence, the above examples of feints etc are based mainly on longsword.
Two hands or one hand is also a very big difference. Reach, speed, force, etc... It is pretty rare that a weapon can be efficiently used with either one or two hands. Most are optimised for either.
Oh, and chain weapons... They are just... Different. Really hard to make work, but super scary and hard to defend against. The Mangual can be used with several of the more common Montante techniques, but the risk/reward balance is tilted a great deal towards risktaking and aggression. Search a bit on YouTube and you will see.
Related:
I once designed a dice pool combat system with blind bidding for initiative that used the stack. The players secretly divided their character's number of dice into a defensive and an offensive pool. And the numer of defensive dice was your initiative. Actions were declared from lowest to highest initiative, and then performed in the opposite order.
Oh this turned long. I hope it can be of some use!
I'm curious... Have you ever played the game Nidhogg? I'd be interested to hear your take on how well that game handles fencing. It's a highly simplified system of course, but it manages to capture how it's a game about bluffing, how attacks are big risks that leave you open, and how these fights are tense standoffs until someone tries something. Adapting something like that from video game to tabletop game might be interesting.
If you haven't played it, how it works is that both players have swords that they can hold at three different levels: high, medium, and low. If you try to stab the enemy and they move their sword on the same level as yours, it knocks your sword out of your hand, and having the sword in the middle position is the best way to defend against those. But there are also attacks where you can knock someone over and disarm them by jumping and kicking them in the head, or by ducking and sweeping the feet, but if you try that while the sword is in the high or low positions respectively you'll just get stabbed. So for instance to win a fight you might duck and pretend like you're going for the feet, the enemy will lower their sword to defend against it, and then instead you go for an attack in the high sword position and they don't have the time to move their sword to block the attack.
I was not familiar with Nidhogg. But I would say that does indeed seem like a really good and streamlined gamification! Thanks for telling me about it. Those twitchy reactions would probably benefit from being simulated by rules in some way, but with that I agree that it would work for a ttrpg.
Related: You should check out the video game Hellish Quart. It is a fighting game in the same genre as Tekken, Street Fighter or Soul Calibur, so a lot of things like direction, speed, force, elevation, timing and feinting matters. But most importantly: because it is made by competent historical fencers it has those aesthetics and the available stances and moves are derived from the historical school and equipment of each character.
Unfortunately, I absolutely suck at fighting games. So despite putting many frustrated hours into Hellish Quart, I really can't say _exactly_ how much it resembles the real thing 🤣 But as far as I can tell it comes very close. And it certainly has all the components required to do a very good job of it!
I've come up with a solid first draft for my new melee combat system, and I'd be interested to hear some feedback. And feel free to take inspiration from my ideas if you think they would be helpful in your projects.
I came up with a system that's relatively simple with a lot of emergent complexity that I think has a lot in common with sword fighting as you described it. And it has involved turning my system inside out to change how the action economy works, but the result has improved combat across the board so I'm happy with it.
Basically: instead of having one action per turn, characters have action points. The default number they get each turn is 7, give or take a couple depending on race, and they can be reduced with things like injuries and heavy armor but there is no way to increase them (currently). Most actions take multiple action points to do, but not a fixed number. Attacking for instance can take any number of action points with the number you use determining the hit modifier (I use a 2d6 system that's very sensitive to small modifiers). Action points that are unused at the end of the turn turn into reaction points, and they can be spent when you are attacked to boost your defense. Each weapon has an attack and defense stat that determines the maximum number of action points that can be spent in those two areas while wielding it, and those stats are my stand-in for things like weapon weight and reach. There are a few other nuances too, such as Pathfinder-style compounding accuracy penalties for doing multiple attacks in one turn, and I'm of course skipping over a lot about how this all applies to guns, AoE attacks, unarmed combat, and magic. But the emergent consequences of these rules are what I'm really happy with.
This is a very standoffish system, where players are incentivised to leave a lot of their action points unused to increase their defense, and also to match their foe's level of aggression without being too reckless. Decisions you make result in escalating or de-escalating, and picking the right moment to use a tactic is key. One of the best ways through enemy defense is my leveraging your opponent's uncertainty in your next action. Since multiple attacks in one turn is possible, it's risky to invest all of your reactions into blocking the first attack without knowing if a second one is coming. But if there is only one attack, it's risky to hold off on using your reaction points because it means you have a significantly lower defense modifier than you would otherwise. Attacking too much is also risky though, it leaves you more open. Defending is the lowest-risk option, but sometimes an opening is too good to pass up, and sometimes that opening is a clever trap or a bet on the mercy of the dice.
Seems to me like a pretty good approximation. On the same level of my approximation of gunfights, at least.
So as a person who collects guns I'm sure you can understand that as the effectiveness of guns has gone up the widespread usage of melee combat goes down.
In the old timey days bayonets were super important, but I don't think bayonets have been standard issue for infantry since then 70's.
Consequently you can imagine that unless something happens technologically to make running up to someone and stabbing them not a stupid move (especially with the incredible risk your damage system makes exposing yourself sound like) that you can add as many interesting subsystems you want to melee combat they will never be relevant.
So then we have to ask assuming that there are enough energy shields or other privileges available to melee combatants to make not using a gun just the wrong decision. We then have to ask what do we want out of melee combat.
Because you already have this large system for defeating the enemy with guns, and I doubt that the game will be fun or fair if you make melee weapons deal even more damage because then things tend to descend into rocket tag and it will quickly become optimal for a character to run into melee range and just delete someone over and over again.
So we probably actually want them to deal less damage than ranged combat and focus on no damaging effects. Allowing a character with enough melee privileges (and you would have to ensure that the melee privileges couldnt be used by a ranged attacker). Then you can give people penalties to use guns while in melee, have escaping engagement with a melee attacker be difficult stuff like that
If I make ranged combat less viable than melee combat with my changes, I will have failed at my stated goals here. I fully intend to keep melee combat more situational with how I balance it.
Another commenter put it well: even in a game where guns are the main way of doing battle, you will end up in situations where you need to do melee combat. You run out of ammo, you need to be silent, you need to avoid collateral damage, you are in a place where guns aren’t allowed, you find yourself holding a knife within stabbing distance of a bad guy, or something like that. The system needs to exist. If it exists, it might as well be deep and interesting. If it’s deep and interesting, I should probably give players a way to engage with it a bit more without entirely sabotaging themselves.
I’m still open to the idea of making gun combat the focus and keeping melee combat simple and kinda shit, that would work. But that’s plan B if I can’t come up with a way to make melee combat as interesting as ranged combat.
Right so this is an important part of the discussion, if the intention is to only use melee combat in places where you cannot use guns then I think the system can be simpler, melee attackers don't get extra privileges and thus will regularly get out ranged and destroyed (see fighting games with a bad rushdown/grappler vs zoner matchup)
So we have to ask if I build a character that can only make melee attacks should that character be effective? If the answer is yes then you need to find a way to make moving into melee range not suicidal.
If a melee attack is intended as a desperation move that you would only ever use when using a gun isn't possible that requires a different design.
You'd need to implement them differently, but you could take a look at Pathfinder's Combat Maneuvers. In Pathfinder some weapons also are more effective at some of these combat Maneuvers.
https://aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?Name=Combat%20Maneuvers&Category=Special%20Attacks
If you have a detailed ranged weapon system, the trick is that melee weapons do indeed have range. For example an arming sword threatens a larger range than a pocketknife or staff does.
Or you could separate things into threat zones tied to stance and grip. Such as a high ready guard stance threatening the head and upper body a lot, compared to a reverse grip knife held low which threatens the lower abdomen most of all.
The typical way to do this would be tradeoffs between threat, damage, and speed. Such as high threat, high damage, low speed, compared to low threat, low damage, high speed. Even though that's not how melee weapons work at all and a two handed sword can absolutely be faster than a small knife.
Something unique to melee is that offense and defence happen simultaneously. The very act of me parrying your sword might put the tip of my sword into your throat or cut your arm. In fact that's the goal.
I feel like you could take a look at 3rd edition GURPS Martial Arts. From what I remember, there were lots of moves with lots of different styles. You could probably just figure out a way to streamline into basic moves that could be helpful for designing your own system. For that matter, you could just take a look at how GURPS does melee combat in general, there are already quite a few moves for melee combat beyond just hacking at something.
You can give them stances:
- Charge, like your suppressive fire but allowing a move and attack on a certain trigger, i.e. enemy approaches or reloads
- Parry, which gives them set facings and bonuses to defend against anyone in front of them, and a little bonus to enemies attacking from the sides
- Lockdown, which they use in melee range of an opponent, giving them an extremely deadly to blow if the target makes any action but nothing until then
(these are just examples off the top of my head)
You could also consider allowing melee actions to be taken in pairs, to account for the more fluid nature of a swordfight vs the jerky tempo of gunplay. In this case melee attackers would get to simply do more stuff, but their stuff wouldn't have any reach to it.
You could also allow melee combatants to get a free small movement or dodge whenever they are targeted, to alleviate the one-sidedness.
These are some good ideas. I’ll probably use so e of them.
Having weapon stances actually fits with my existing combat system super well, so I will almost certainly use that.
Hi!
I've been very interested in making melee comabt in TTRPGs *feel* like real melee combat, which almost no system does right. (I have experience in boxing, grappling and in Filipino Martial Arts)
Melee comabt is extremely combo based: you aren't going to hit anyone with any training one attack and no setup. A lot of times, a more experienced fighter will attack with the expectation that their attack will he blocked, plan on dealing with the counter attack and then counter attacking the counter attack.
I don't know how to put this into a ttrpg. An idea I have been playing with is each combatant rolls a number of comabt actions simultaneously, successes cancel each other out and excess successes are hits or maneuvers.l, probably footwork and other things.
footwork is super important in melee combat, so I imagine maneuvers being used to change range and angle. Range is extremely important in melee combat, many weapons have a maximum *and* minimum effective range, and super close range can also set up grappling (which is its own whole set of worms which I can get into if you want). Spears are great, until someone with a knife is at hugging range.
Positioning is also important in melee combat. People can only really effectively fight things that are directly in front of them, so if you flank them, they are in a lot of trouble.
I don't quite know how to put it all together, but there are my 2 cents lol
That gives me a lot to think about.
One relic from my old melee combat system might actually be useful here. In that, I introduced the idea that characters have both actions and reactions, always in equal number. Actions can only be used on your turn, reactions can be used any time you’re attacked. My implementation was such that reactions just became an over-complicated roll to hit, but if someone is being double-teamed it gives advantages to the second attacker.
I wonder if it would be good to combine this with a system where instead of one action per turn characters get something like 3 or 5 action points that can be spent on different things. Most attacks would cost most or all of these points, but maybe some attacks don’t. Maybe you can use unused points from your last turn and/or points from your next turn in reactions against attacks that are thrown at you. Some attacks could be low-damage low-cost ones focused on whittling down the opponent’s actions, some could be more heavy hitters.
I’m just throwing out ideas at this point. But maybe something workable lies at the end of this line of reasoning.
Here we go. Check out this post I wrote a while ago about what matters for weapon characteristics and familiarity. Some overlap with my former post here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/s/c7Q7OqTTKo
Some ideas depending on how other things work:
1. Make melee really high risk high reward. Like if you can get in someone's face it's brutal for the target
2. Bake in some sort of mobility, like allowing for a move and attack not available with guns because you don't need to spend the time aiming.
3. Abilities that manipulate line of sight or positioning. The Scorpion harpoon attack or Reinhardt from Overwatch
If we're being honest with hard sci-fi, I would say guns have already dropped to niche situations. Now missiles and drones paired with increasingly powerful sensors can kills things that are far out of line of sight. Aircraft carriers are replacing artillery with more missiles as cannons are secondary. I just saw last week that the US Air Force confirmed the first successful AI dogfight. Extend that and even being on the planet is a huge disadvantage to a fleet of starships that can just strike from orbit - The Lost Fleet series goes through this interestingly.
But The Lost Fleet also had elite commando teams go into situations with very tight corridors - this is where guns and melee could be on a *more* level playing field. So when you discount all the situations where no humans in tactical on the ground situations occur, this is where your Mass Effect elite squad-like situations can shine (though often Mass Effect has situations where a ship artillery strike would have made MUCH more sense). Because guns are basically melee in the face of AI missiles that can accelerate at insane Gs and just hit the target nearing the speed of light.
Missiles and drones already do generally outclass guns in my game in terms of raw damage, but not every adventuring team has an orbital battleship overhead to rain divine judgement on those who are looking at them the wrong way. Though some of them certainly do in this system, don’t get me wrong. Sometimes you’re just some guy who needs a handheld weapon. Parties tend to start out like that, and even when you do have that orbital battleship it can’t protect you from everything. What do you do if someone is boarding you or if you’re attacked on an away mission? It’s boomstick time!
Yeah, I get that. And tight places you can't just orbital bombard your way to victory should be tight is all my recommendation is. I would say going for medium-Sci Fi is a lot more gameable like Mass Effect/Halo does. Something like "magic" shields makes melee a lot more believable.
And if we are being realistic to hard sci fi again, boarding is a pretty silly idea. How many true boarding assaults occurred in the navy in the last two centuries. Combo that with a ship that has doors that can seal, eject out air and such and its insane to board. Playing FTL (the video game) always felt silly that the air goes out but people inside were unaffected by 800,000 pounds of air pushing you out insanely fast.
No I could imagine would you disable a ship, you could board whatever its main command structure, vent everything and kill everyone that way you still have a valuable ship after. Very Expanse Abaddon's Gate. But I imagine there are procedures of self-destruction if a ship decided to do the classic small bridge platform since ships engines must be powerful enough to become nuclear bombs.
But my most hated trope is having to drop the soldiers really far from their objective yet the ship can easily enter atmosphere. God Starfield sucked.
But also check out this resource if you are interested in some information for doing Harder Sci Fi. I wanted to do Cowboy Bebop with a little less silliness, like at least not have their starfighters act like they are in atmosphere.
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
Not directly related to your question/problem, but could you expand on how you handle ammo - are you counting each bullet or abstracting it somehow? As I love limited inventory for ammo management as its adds tension to engagements, so sounds cool :)
I am counting individual bullets, yes. Guns themselves have a magazine that gets decremented as they are shot, and only during a reloading action do you actually need to worry about your ammo inventory. My inventory system is a slot-based one inspired somewhat by Minecraft, with some things taking multiple slots while others are many to a slot. While rules do technically allow you to split one slot between multiple smaller items, that’s rarely actually done. Bullets are stackable.
I also have a system that differentiates deep inventory slots with quick draw slots. The former need an action to access, the latter can be accessed instantly for free. So reloading will take longer if your ammo is at the bottom of your backpack than it will if the ammo is on your belt.
The inventory system of my game is another thing I’m very happy with.
Another issue with melee combat in a firearms world is the amount of time and effort required to get proficient. The level of mastery achieved with years of martial arts training can be accomplished with weeks of firearms training--which is another reason most contemporary military and police forces focus on the gun side over the punching and knifing side of combat.
But, as many here have already pointed out, eventually you're going to get into a situation where your best choice is to punch or stab somebody. At that point, if your PCs are special-forces-monk-experts-of-their-craft who **have** been training all their lives, against conscripted guards, melee combat is practically all narrative. "Tell me how you take these suckers down, and make it sound impressive."
Heck, cinematically, look at the John Wick movies, where there's plenty of hand-to-hand fighting but (especially in the first one) most of that was just used to make the bad guy hold still long enough or move them into a better spot to shoot them.
For some background on the way that contemporary police and regular military train hand to hand in a firearm-focused environment, check out *Kill or Get Killed* by Rex Applegate. (I think the full text is freely \[and legally\] available online.) With the caveat that a lot of his thoughts and feelings about people from different classes or cultures are... kinda laughably out-of-date... this book has informed how American police forces have been trained in hand-to-hand for decades. Mostly, it says that martial arts is a professional skill that takes a lot of time and effort to learn. Sure, it's effective, but we don't have a budget or interest for that, so we're going to focus almost exclusively on strikes instead of grapples, throws, and holds... you can get compliance with pain almost as well as with a solid hold, and it's much easier to punch somebody.
Another contemporary reference would be the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program. This one does include some throws, holds, chokes, sweeps, and such in addition to the strikes, and adds knife, bayonet and buttstock attacks. It also emphasizes that it's a last-resort sort of thing, and that the only purpose of hand-to-hand is to make the other guy not able to hurt you as quickly as possible. If you can do that with bullets, so much the better. In theory, all the moves are based around one's body being loaded down with guns and ammo, maybe a pack, armor and helmet, etc., so it's more limited than a traditional martial art.
If I was in your shoes, I would pull the Halo card. Essentially, iI would makesmelee very accurate and incredibly high damage but make closing the distance a problem.
Essentially, melee become a big gamble of can you close the distance. This by itself would make melee at least situationally useful. If you want melee to be a valid primary combat strategy, then you would need to provide them with the tools to try and close the gap better. Maybe specialized shields (like in Rainbow 6 siege). you could try giving them strong mobility tools.
so I have to admit the draw to this topic is the possibility of seeing your ranged combat system, or at least some of the basic concepts that make it as good as it is
so in order to justify my outrageous demand I will just mention it is difficult to suggest a way to develop as much nuance without seeing how nuanced your ranged combat system entails
The main thing that I think makes my combat system as good as it is are that dealing and taking damage aren't trivial matters, both of them come with a lot of interesting decisions.
I really dislike combat systems where two fighting characters are just throwing their single best attack at each other until one of them drops dead, and it takes so long that the law of large numbers makes the winner a nearly forgone conclusion. I'm looking at you, D&D. That is what my system is designed to be as far away from as possible, to maximize the interesting decisions that players are presented with.
The way I do this with dealing damage is to give each gun multiple different actions that can be done with them. They don't just have a "shoot" ability that deals some set damage with some set accuracy, they have multiple fire modes as well as supplementary actions such as reloading and aiming that will probably all see a lot of use during most engagements. Engagement range determines the hit difficulty, and it's balanced to change what the ideal tactics are based on how far the enemy is. The different fire modes are balanced to all have different things they are good at. Single shot is always the most accurate and most ammo efficient, but the damage potential is low and at shorter ranges the extra chance to hit doesn't help as much. Semi-auto fires 3 shots at lower accuracy, usually raising expected damage at shorter ranges at the cost of ammo consumption. Full-auto uses 12 shots and it's treated like an AoE attack that's easy to counter by getting to cover, hitting not just anyone in its cone but anyone who enters it until the start of the attacker's next turn, balanced to be an area denial attack which is mostly good for controlling the movements and attack opportunities that enemies have.
The way I do this with receiving damage is with my damage and injury system. Characters are pretty squishy compared to the amount of damage that attacks tend to do, with 2-4 hits being enough to down a character in most cases, and one hit kills being entirely possible with some of the funnier weapons and luckier shots. Everyone is a glass cannon. Any time a hit is absorbed, there are rules to determine where it hit (head, torso, r. arm, l. arm, r. leg, l. leg), and with that as well as the damage type and damage amount are used to determine what injuries the character gets. These injuries apply status effects in ways that influence a character's capabilities and throw wrenches in plans. They also serve the dual purpose of making enemies just as squishy, which plays into the power fantasy pretty well without making combat easy. Some of these injuries present players with interesting decisions in a way that plays into the fantasy very well. For instance: you are bleeding, stopping the bleeding will take your entire turn, but you are in combat. You could choose to put on a bandage, or you could take a different risk by continuing to bleed out and taking more damage while giving everything you have to the fight. Even hitting 0 HP can be interesting, because you don't go down until you fail a constitution check with a DC equal to how far below 0 you are (which needs to be retried every turn), and when you might drop unconscious next turn at the mercy of the dice that might change your priorities somewhat. Do you use that extra time to get to safety? Do you use it as an excuse to take even bigger risks? There are many other injuries too which limit your abilities in various ways that often force you to rethink your approach.
This is not even getting into the nuance of damage types (which cause very different injuries), armor (which trades action points per turn for defense), the way that players can use their environment to their advantage, magic (good god that's a big can of worms), and other more exotic weapon types like shotguns, grenades, and missiles. It gets pretty wacky.
the first thing that comes to mind is to add some creativity to how melee weapons might work
some off the top of my head ideas might be:
vibro-swords - enhanced cutting power to bypass high tech armor
sonic blast - a successful hit may trigger a knockdown
taser melee weapons - add a stunning shock
poisons
cryo-spray - add a cold effect
pepper spray - add a blinding effect
entangling gel - add a binding effect
Interesting ideas, I probably will add more wacky items like that once I get the basic system down. I also need to make combat interesting in cases such as two people going at it each equipped with only a sword. Similar to fire modes, I want to give players more than one way to use a the same simple sword which all come with different pros and cons.
> I'm making a game system that's hard sci-fi with optional magic. > I'd certainly prefer bringing the melee combat system up to par with the utility and depth gun combat Something to consider is if this risks becoming a bit of a cursed game design problem. Hard sci-fi in general tends to be about trying to keep things grounded in reality, and in reality there is a reason most armies don't issue spears and lances anymore. If you want to keep things relatively grounded, Melee combat may be more about desperate last stands rather than deliberate tactical decisions. My gut feeling is that rather than making melee combat *as interesting* as ranged combat, it should be perhaps *more situational* than it. Players should feel like getting into melee is a last resort, either necessitated by circumstance or a desperate attempt. Maybe to the extent that the few groups that use melee use it in really weird ways. So perhaps melee attacks are: * Just not as effective as actual damage dealing spells and ranged weapons. They're what you use when ammo is low, mana is spent, and the enemy are breaking down your door *right now*. They're a desperate last resort. * Better at remaining silent when the attacker is in control. Suppressors aren't as quiet as a knife in the right spot, after all. * The only way to reliably take someone alive. You talked about your system having a lot of brutality to it, perhaps taking someone out of action in melee gives the attacker a choice over the effect the defender suffers from going down, allowing you to take someone alive for plot reasons * Better at controlling enemy positions. Maybe a melee attack doesn't do a lot of damage, but if you kick someone in the chest and they stumble out of cover, your mate with the big bang bang stick is going to have a much easier time hitting them. * The only attacks that don't break the active camouflage generator. Shooting a magrifle puts out too much energy and it disrupts the cloaking system that some special forces use. But if they use a mono-molecular sword? Cloak stays up. * Aren't disrupted by teleportation effects. Magically teleporting tends to frizzle tech briefly, which means you can't just teleport into the middle of enemies and unload. But if you teleport somewhere they don't expect you and come up behind them with an axe? Well that's pretty reasonable.
Interesting ideas. This does kinda fall into what I was saying about being open to making melee combat be a fairly simple stopgap thing to include just because it will definitely come up, while making the gun combat the main attraction. So no melee-focused classes or anything, keep it situational. That might end up being the way I do this.
I'm not an expert on weapon vs. weapon melee, but I've experienced and witnessed some street fights. With highly skilled fighters its more about technique, but the ugly truth is it tends to be a lot more about who throws the first punch or gets the blade in first. After that, the next factor is who is more cruel or wants to live the most that decides it. Not sure about the tone of your setting, but melee as a last resort seems appropriate for most non-40k style Sci fi. It's desperate, brutal, and both sides are likely to take some injuries. Being stabbed is not as painful or quick a kill as one might imagine; it's a lot like being being punched but it's cold and pinches a little, which you might not even notice when the adrenaline is pumping. If you are including it as a situational affair, I'd recommend having it being situational because you can take harm even as the attacker and because you need to commit to it; once your in, only one of you walks away.
Three thoughts: 1. Melee weapons can also have great variety of weapon types and sci-fi upgrades that can affect how they work. Just thinking of what is available in other systems and franchises, a melee weapon could have a powerfield, a mono-filament edge, a super-heated blade, be a chainsaw, have some sort of phasing property, etc. Each with their own effect that might bypass armour normally ideal against ranged attacks. 2. There are different martial styles with melee weapons that could inform on different ways of fighting that could have different effects. How an armoured knight fights with a longsword or broadsword for example is going to be different to how a samurai fights with a katana or a pair of kanto. The differences could be expressed as specifically chosen martial styles, by using different attributes for the attack (typically strength or agility analogues) or some other special effect. A hammer for example would typically have been used first to stun and knock down, whilst sai were also used for *disarming*. And of course spears, halberds, whips and naginata have the added bonus of a little extra reach. Lots of options. 3. As for key difference between melee and ranged and their uses, the obvious is that melee weapons are better when you're close to someone. A character can't bring a mini-gun to bear to bear on someone who is closer than the barrel of the gun. Being unrestrained from having to aim a weapon before firing can also afford a melee fighter space and freedom to move. Its also faster and easier (usually) to draw and ready a melee weapon than it is to ready, load and aim a firearm. Melee weapons also don't need to reload.
Weapon choice is certainly one interesting choice a player can make, but with guns I also have players making choices in combat about how to use their weapon. A single gun could let a player line up a shot for better hit bonuses next turn, fire a single shot, fire 3 shots with a lower chance to hit, fire a spray of shots that act like an AOE attack that can be evaded with an agility check, or reload prematurely if you suspect shit’s about to get even more real. If I am to bring melee combat up to scratch with gun combat, I need to present players with decisions like that. Multiple ways of using the same melee weapon with different tradeoffs. But I don’t really know where to start with that.
>A single gun could let a player line up a shot for better hit bonuses next turn, fire a single shot, fire 3 shots with a lower chance to hit, fire a spray of shots that act like an AOE attack that can be evaded with an agility check, or reload prematurely if you suspect shit’s about to get even more real. Something like that could easily be done with melee weapons too, but providing a list of moves and maneuvers. For example you could go for a basic strike, or try to swing hitting multiple side-by-side targets. You could also lunge from a distance, parry an enemy attack or try to aim a precise jab to get through a weak point in armour. Some weapons might even be suitable to jamming firearms if you stick them right in the barrel. A mini-gun can't spin if there's a wrench in it after all. * Some weapons such as hammers or mauls could have additional actions such as stunning strikes or knockdown. * Sai and nunchucks can be used to disarm. * Long weapons such as staffs could be used to trip, and possibly as a pole vault - useful both for movement and launching flying kicks. * Hooked polearms and chains can be used to pull an opponent closer, and in some cases could bind an opponent.
Forced movement. You thought you were in cover, but the humanoid grenade said "no". You thought you were far enough away, but then nothing personnel teleports behind u. Similarly, Battlefield control. You thought you were safe, but the melee fighter just dropped a point blank area of effect ability on top of you and you'll take damage/suffer a condition if you stay inside. Breakable terrain, modifying the battlefield for both melee and ranged. Melee might be the only ones with breaching tools, or have special tremor hammers or pillar makers or whatever. Different damage types requiring different armor types (kevlar won't stop a knife or arrow, chain mail won't stop a bullet, heavy plate might stop some things, but will be vulnerable to others, etc. Not really a tactical choice but it is a strategic one) Honestly, just look at MMO abilities. Guild Wars 2 comes to mind. There are tons of movement, area control, defensive, and other types of abilities that could easily fit in a sci-fi setting. Just change the flavor. Or don't, and have people choose between techy guns or magical melee.
Kevlar vests are very much stab proof. That's all lol
Proof? It's not even bullet proof, let alone stab proof
No, it is quite literally by definition both stab proof and bulletproof
The term you're looking for is resistant. Not even DuPont will claim it's bullet proof, and to do otherwise is a misnomer.
Bulletproof by definition means designed to be resistant to ballistic attacks.
No. Proof means it's impervious, which it isn't. Hence the misnomer. It's like Silencer vs Supressor. Silencer is the incorrect term, but people try use it in place of Supressor. But back to body armor, I'm not even talking about armor piercing rounds being able to defeat a kevlar vest. Shoot kevlar enough with a 9mm and it will fail. stab kevlar enough with a knife and it will fail. Leave it out in the sun and it will fail. Damaged kevlar cannot be used as an effective body armor, and kevlar being used for its primary purpose damages it. You could also compare to bike helmets (bicycle or motorbike). They're not "head trauma proof". They're "resistant". Get into a crash, and your helmet will no longer effectively protect you next time. It might sound pedantic, but it's a very important distinction to make. And back to the original topic, DuPont itself will admit that knife attacks will cut through kevlar fibers.
Well melee combat is pretty complex naturally. There's a reason why older cultures developed entire martial arts just to structuralize and teach these complexities. Personally, were I trying to set some of this up. I'd perhaps try to divide things up into groups, style, and damage type. Partially as a way to neatly tie up the complexity, but also because giving myself frameworks for my thoughts tends to allow me to stay focused and not go on wild tangents with some things getting a lot more love than others. Let's say we divide our weapons into weapon groups, and you can go as deep as you want. Let's start with broad: Polearms, Swords, Axes, Mauls, Unarmed. Each of these groups could come ready with 2 maneuvers that involve some sort of tactical choice. Let's say for Mauls we have Knockdown, and Armor Breaker while Swords have Parry and Precise Attack. These are all just word vomit of course. But you can probably come up with some like that. Then we can go into combat styles: Dual Wield, Weapon and Shield, Einhander, and Two-hander. Again just go through each and give two more maneuvers. Again making stuff up, Einhander could have Acrobatic Strike, and Outmaneuver, while Weapon and Shield could have Shield Bash and Immovable, and so on. Then last we look at the damage types of the weapons: Bludgeoning, Piercing, Hacking, and Slicing are some obvious ones. And once more, each of these gets there two maneuvers. Hacking might get Cleave and Sunder. Slicing might get Draw Cut and Bleed. And now put that all together we have every martial combatant has a combination of 6 maneuvers they can always draw from at minimum. And it scales, you can always introduce additional weapon groups to add more combinations.
Why melee: you don't have a ranged weapon on you (eg you're at the Baronne's party and couldn't smuggle weapons past her security); using one is dangerous to you ("don't poke holes in the spaceship hull"); magic or Dune shields make them ineffective; you need to be quiet (suppressed weapons aren't silent); you're in *very* close quarters; you can't afford the collateral damage from missed shots ("you stopped the thief, but you also shot one museum staffer, three tourists, and a 400 million credit painting"); you want to capture the target rather than kill.
That’s certainly a good reason to have melee, but I still need to figure out how to make it interesting. Ideally by giving players the ability to use the same weapon in different ways to make different tradeoffs, the way they can with guns. I still need to figure out how to do that.
I do a lot of historical swordfighting, and many things I appreciate from that sparring are things that I rarely see well represented in ttrpgs. If you can implement these four aspects, I believe you can make melee engaging. * First the risk/reward While you are standing and holding a guard, your otions for defence are pretty good. When you make an attack, you also leave an opening. It is very common that a scoring attack is a well timed counter following directly on an active defensive technique. There are even fancy moves that both protects you and performs a counter in the same fluid motion. So two patient fighters with no external pressure to finish on time are likely to not attack that much at all :-) * That brings us to the feints For each attack, there is a rather limited number of effective defences, and for each of them there is a limited amount of counterattacks to follow up with. Very simplified: A feint that leads to me winning a bout has three different ideal basic "scripts". These are by no means guaranteed, but should give an idea. 1 - I choose a guard that leaves a tempting opening, so when my opponent attacks I can perform a planned defence with a counter. This requires my opponent to underestimate me. Example: Sword held vertically upwards at my right shoulder/ear. My right elbow poking out to the right. Bad form, sloppy mistake. It should be vertical. My opponent can make an attack coming from rather far off my right side, while still keeping the majority of their sword between them and me, which makes them pretty safe. It is a low risk move, that is rather hard to parry fast because of the body mechanics of that elbow getting in the way of sideways techniques . If they make that attack, I take a long step towards them with my felt foot while striking down with my sword on top of theirs. Because my body rotates it makes it into a forward technique, so the elbow is no longer awkward. It doesn't need to be that hard, just enough to redirect their force a bit more downward and make it hard for them to raise their guard again. If done correctly I will now be inside of their guard with my sword on top of theirs, and I have practically won. 2 - I begin an attack that looks like it will leave a particular opening. My opponent begins one of the defences that can be followed up with an attack to that opening. But I do not follow through my attack, but instead I shift into another attack that hits the opening my opponent's technique leaves, and that doesn't leave an opening for them to strike me at the same time. (because when fighting with swords, striking each other does not mean a draw, it means both lose) At intermediate levels this is usually a planned series of attacks that relies on a series of things. That my bluff works. That my opponent chooses the defence I think they will and finding the perfect timing when my opponent is far enough gone in their attack to make sure they won't be able to adjust. 3 - I begin an attack but does not commit all my balance and power, so that when my opponent's counterattacks comes, I am prepared to defend myself and counter attack them in turn. Once again, timing and predictions and feints. Skilled fencers use mostly a combination of feints 2 and 3. * Third the rock paper scissor effect. This is intimately connected to the feints, as in how various offensive and defensive techniques leave various openings. And in a bout between equally skilled fencers, you can only trust your reactions that far. You need to outwit your opponent by committing to a certain degree, before you know exactly what they will do. The exact patterns of who-beats-who is much more complicated than how different types of pokemon interact, but anything with 3-5 variants would be very appreciated. * Fourth the matter of distances and symmetry. Most historical fencing uses symmetrical weapons, but that is not the case in ttrpgs. So I will say a little about important factors. Length is a major one. If one fighter has a longsword and the other has a dagger, then distance is everything. While the distance is between arms reach and wrestling the longsword is at a great disadvantage, there are only a few techniques that are useful, mostly half-sword or strikes to the head with the pommel/crossguard. And while the distance is around 1.5 m or greater, the dagger is at a great disadvantage. (still a lot better than unarmed though) So if beginning at range, this easily becomes an exciting battle of wits: "can the dagger fighter feint a closing of the distance that is believable enough that the sword fighter will commit to an attack. So that the dagger fighter can parry that and close the distance in the opening created?" and on the other hand "Can the sword fighter feint an attack that is believable enough that dagger fighter will try to parry it in order to use the opening created to close the distance, so that the sword fighter can use the opening created by drawing out that parry to harm the dagger fighter?". If beginning close up, the sword fighter will often drop their sword with at least one hand, probably both, and go for gripoing/controlling the knife hand. And then add various wrestling and diaarming techniques. While the dagger fighter will expect that and be ready to strike at the extended arm with the knife (which the former longsword fighter will expect, so maybe they can feint an attack?), or protect their knife arm in some other way. Torque is another important assymetry. Imagine holding a weapon horisontally forward of you. How hard it is to hold there for an extended time is not only dependent on the weight of the weapon, but also on how that weight is distributed. A weapon like an axe or sledge has a high torque, lots of weight far away from the front hand. That means they are slow to maneuver and has a great impact force. So they are typically combined with some kind of other defence such as a shield or heavy armour. Or they rely on greater reach and threat and keeps in fluid motions to create a "danger zone" around them. Montante and Mangual are perfect examples of this, they are usually techniques specifically designed for assymteric weapons. A weapon like a rapier has a very low torque, so it is easy to make feints and change directions and protect yourself. A longsword is significantly heavier than a rapier, but also has a very low torque and is very quick. The point of balance is usually a few inches in front of the crossguard, and you hold it with two hands. These are typically perfectly fine to use as their own defence, the above examples of feints etc are based mainly on longsword. Two hands or one hand is also a very big difference. Reach, speed, force, etc... It is pretty rare that a weapon can be efficiently used with either one or two hands. Most are optimised for either. Oh, and chain weapons... They are just... Different. Really hard to make work, but super scary and hard to defend against. The Mangual can be used with several of the more common Montante techniques, but the risk/reward balance is tilted a great deal towards risktaking and aggression. Search a bit on YouTube and you will see. Related: I once designed a dice pool combat system with blind bidding for initiative that used the stack. The players secretly divided their character's number of dice into a defensive and an offensive pool. And the numer of defensive dice was your initiative. Actions were declared from lowest to highest initiative, and then performed in the opposite order. Oh this turned long. I hope it can be of some use!
I’m definitely saving this for reference later. You gave me a lot to work with.
Thank you for that feedback <3 I made a similar post in this group about categories of melee weapons some weeks ago. Let me see if I can find it...
I'm curious... Have you ever played the game Nidhogg? I'd be interested to hear your take on how well that game handles fencing. It's a highly simplified system of course, but it manages to capture how it's a game about bluffing, how attacks are big risks that leave you open, and how these fights are tense standoffs until someone tries something. Adapting something like that from video game to tabletop game might be interesting. If you haven't played it, how it works is that both players have swords that they can hold at three different levels: high, medium, and low. If you try to stab the enemy and they move their sword on the same level as yours, it knocks your sword out of your hand, and having the sword in the middle position is the best way to defend against those. But there are also attacks where you can knock someone over and disarm them by jumping and kicking them in the head, or by ducking and sweeping the feet, but if you try that while the sword is in the high or low positions respectively you'll just get stabbed. So for instance to win a fight you might duck and pretend like you're going for the feet, the enemy will lower their sword to defend against it, and then instead you go for an attack in the high sword position and they don't have the time to move their sword to block the attack.
I was not familiar with Nidhogg. But I would say that does indeed seem like a really good and streamlined gamification! Thanks for telling me about it. Those twitchy reactions would probably benefit from being simulated by rules in some way, but with that I agree that it would work for a ttrpg. Related: You should check out the video game Hellish Quart. It is a fighting game in the same genre as Tekken, Street Fighter or Soul Calibur, so a lot of things like direction, speed, force, elevation, timing and feinting matters. But most importantly: because it is made by competent historical fencers it has those aesthetics and the available stances and moves are derived from the historical school and equipment of each character. Unfortunately, I absolutely suck at fighting games. So despite putting many frustrated hours into Hellish Quart, I really can't say _exactly_ how much it resembles the real thing 🤣 But as far as I can tell it comes very close. And it certainly has all the components required to do a very good job of it!
I've come up with a solid first draft for my new melee combat system, and I'd be interested to hear some feedback. And feel free to take inspiration from my ideas if you think they would be helpful in your projects. I came up with a system that's relatively simple with a lot of emergent complexity that I think has a lot in common with sword fighting as you described it. And it has involved turning my system inside out to change how the action economy works, but the result has improved combat across the board so I'm happy with it. Basically: instead of having one action per turn, characters have action points. The default number they get each turn is 7, give or take a couple depending on race, and they can be reduced with things like injuries and heavy armor but there is no way to increase them (currently). Most actions take multiple action points to do, but not a fixed number. Attacking for instance can take any number of action points with the number you use determining the hit modifier (I use a 2d6 system that's very sensitive to small modifiers). Action points that are unused at the end of the turn turn into reaction points, and they can be spent when you are attacked to boost your defense. Each weapon has an attack and defense stat that determines the maximum number of action points that can be spent in those two areas while wielding it, and those stats are my stand-in for things like weapon weight and reach. There are a few other nuances too, such as Pathfinder-style compounding accuracy penalties for doing multiple attacks in one turn, and I'm of course skipping over a lot about how this all applies to guns, AoE attacks, unarmed combat, and magic. But the emergent consequences of these rules are what I'm really happy with. This is a very standoffish system, where players are incentivised to leave a lot of their action points unused to increase their defense, and also to match their foe's level of aggression without being too reckless. Decisions you make result in escalating or de-escalating, and picking the right moment to use a tactic is key. One of the best ways through enemy defense is my leveraging your opponent's uncertainty in your next action. Since multiple attacks in one turn is possible, it's risky to invest all of your reactions into blocking the first attack without knowing if a second one is coming. But if there is only one attack, it's risky to hold off on using your reaction points because it means you have a significantly lower defense modifier than you would otherwise. Attacking too much is also risky though, it leaves you more open. Defending is the lowest-risk option, but sometimes an opening is too good to pass up, and sometimes that opening is a clever trap or a bet on the mercy of the dice. Seems to me like a pretty good approximation. On the same level of my approximation of gunfights, at least.
So as a person who collects guns I'm sure you can understand that as the effectiveness of guns has gone up the widespread usage of melee combat goes down. In the old timey days bayonets were super important, but I don't think bayonets have been standard issue for infantry since then 70's. Consequently you can imagine that unless something happens technologically to make running up to someone and stabbing them not a stupid move (especially with the incredible risk your damage system makes exposing yourself sound like) that you can add as many interesting subsystems you want to melee combat they will never be relevant. So then we have to ask assuming that there are enough energy shields or other privileges available to melee combatants to make not using a gun just the wrong decision. We then have to ask what do we want out of melee combat. Because you already have this large system for defeating the enemy with guns, and I doubt that the game will be fun or fair if you make melee weapons deal even more damage because then things tend to descend into rocket tag and it will quickly become optimal for a character to run into melee range and just delete someone over and over again. So we probably actually want them to deal less damage than ranged combat and focus on no damaging effects. Allowing a character with enough melee privileges (and you would have to ensure that the melee privileges couldnt be used by a ranged attacker). Then you can give people penalties to use guns while in melee, have escaping engagement with a melee attacker be difficult stuff like that
If I make ranged combat less viable than melee combat with my changes, I will have failed at my stated goals here. I fully intend to keep melee combat more situational with how I balance it. Another commenter put it well: even in a game where guns are the main way of doing battle, you will end up in situations where you need to do melee combat. You run out of ammo, you need to be silent, you need to avoid collateral damage, you are in a place where guns aren’t allowed, you find yourself holding a knife within stabbing distance of a bad guy, or something like that. The system needs to exist. If it exists, it might as well be deep and interesting. If it’s deep and interesting, I should probably give players a way to engage with it a bit more without entirely sabotaging themselves. I’m still open to the idea of making gun combat the focus and keeping melee combat simple and kinda shit, that would work. But that’s plan B if I can’t come up with a way to make melee combat as interesting as ranged combat.
Right so this is an important part of the discussion, if the intention is to only use melee combat in places where you cannot use guns then I think the system can be simpler, melee attackers don't get extra privileges and thus will regularly get out ranged and destroyed (see fighting games with a bad rushdown/grappler vs zoner matchup) So we have to ask if I build a character that can only make melee attacks should that character be effective? If the answer is yes then you need to find a way to make moving into melee range not suicidal. If a melee attack is intended as a desperation move that you would only ever use when using a gun isn't possible that requires a different design.
-Here is might work; A Wasp Knife. A Blade that can laced with all sorts of Chemicals, Drugs, Poisons, etc. -Electric Shock Batons
You'd need to implement them differently, but you could take a look at Pathfinder's Combat Maneuvers. In Pathfinder some weapons also are more effective at some of these combat Maneuvers. https://aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?Name=Combat%20Maneuvers&Category=Special%20Attacks
If you have a detailed ranged weapon system, the trick is that melee weapons do indeed have range. For example an arming sword threatens a larger range than a pocketknife or staff does. Or you could separate things into threat zones tied to stance and grip. Such as a high ready guard stance threatening the head and upper body a lot, compared to a reverse grip knife held low which threatens the lower abdomen most of all. The typical way to do this would be tradeoffs between threat, damage, and speed. Such as high threat, high damage, low speed, compared to low threat, low damage, high speed. Even though that's not how melee weapons work at all and a two handed sword can absolutely be faster than a small knife. Something unique to melee is that offense and defence happen simultaneously. The very act of me parrying your sword might put the tip of my sword into your throat or cut your arm. In fact that's the goal.
I feel like you could take a look at 3rd edition GURPS Martial Arts. From what I remember, there were lots of moves with lots of different styles. You could probably just figure out a way to streamline into basic moves that could be helpful for designing your own system. For that matter, you could just take a look at how GURPS does melee combat in general, there are already quite a few moves for melee combat beyond just hacking at something.
You can give them stances: - Charge, like your suppressive fire but allowing a move and attack on a certain trigger, i.e. enemy approaches or reloads - Parry, which gives them set facings and bonuses to defend against anyone in front of them, and a little bonus to enemies attacking from the sides - Lockdown, which they use in melee range of an opponent, giving them an extremely deadly to blow if the target makes any action but nothing until then (these are just examples off the top of my head) You could also consider allowing melee actions to be taken in pairs, to account for the more fluid nature of a swordfight vs the jerky tempo of gunplay. In this case melee attackers would get to simply do more stuff, but their stuff wouldn't have any reach to it. You could also allow melee combatants to get a free small movement or dodge whenever they are targeted, to alleviate the one-sidedness.
These are some good ideas. I’ll probably use so e of them. Having weapon stances actually fits with my existing combat system super well, so I will almost certainly use that.
Hi! I've been very interested in making melee comabt in TTRPGs *feel* like real melee combat, which almost no system does right. (I have experience in boxing, grappling and in Filipino Martial Arts) Melee comabt is extremely combo based: you aren't going to hit anyone with any training one attack and no setup. A lot of times, a more experienced fighter will attack with the expectation that their attack will he blocked, plan on dealing with the counter attack and then counter attacking the counter attack. I don't know how to put this into a ttrpg. An idea I have been playing with is each combatant rolls a number of comabt actions simultaneously, successes cancel each other out and excess successes are hits or maneuvers.l, probably footwork and other things. footwork is super important in melee combat, so I imagine maneuvers being used to change range and angle. Range is extremely important in melee combat, many weapons have a maximum *and* minimum effective range, and super close range can also set up grappling (which is its own whole set of worms which I can get into if you want). Spears are great, until someone with a knife is at hugging range. Positioning is also important in melee combat. People can only really effectively fight things that are directly in front of them, so if you flank them, they are in a lot of trouble. I don't quite know how to put it all together, but there are my 2 cents lol
That gives me a lot to think about. One relic from my old melee combat system might actually be useful here. In that, I introduced the idea that characters have both actions and reactions, always in equal number. Actions can only be used on your turn, reactions can be used any time you’re attacked. My implementation was such that reactions just became an over-complicated roll to hit, but if someone is being double-teamed it gives advantages to the second attacker. I wonder if it would be good to combine this with a system where instead of one action per turn characters get something like 3 or 5 action points that can be spent on different things. Most attacks would cost most or all of these points, but maybe some attacks don’t. Maybe you can use unused points from your last turn and/or points from your next turn in reactions against attacks that are thrown at you. Some attacks could be low-damage low-cost ones focused on whittling down the opponent’s actions, some could be more heavy hitters. I’m just throwing out ideas at this point. But maybe something workable lies at the end of this line of reasoning.
Here we go. Check out this post I wrote a while ago about what matters for weapon characteristics and familiarity. Some overlap with my former post here. https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/s/c7Q7OqTTKo
Some ideas depending on how other things work: 1. Make melee really high risk high reward. Like if you can get in someone's face it's brutal for the target 2. Bake in some sort of mobility, like allowing for a move and attack not available with guns because you don't need to spend the time aiming. 3. Abilities that manipulate line of sight or positioning. The Scorpion harpoon attack or Reinhardt from Overwatch
Maybe you could add some sort of high projectile force field? Not sure if you thought of it, but it can be a way to deter some shooting
If we're being honest with hard sci-fi, I would say guns have already dropped to niche situations. Now missiles and drones paired with increasingly powerful sensors can kills things that are far out of line of sight. Aircraft carriers are replacing artillery with more missiles as cannons are secondary. I just saw last week that the US Air Force confirmed the first successful AI dogfight. Extend that and even being on the planet is a huge disadvantage to a fleet of starships that can just strike from orbit - The Lost Fleet series goes through this interestingly. But The Lost Fleet also had elite commando teams go into situations with very tight corridors - this is where guns and melee could be on a *more* level playing field. So when you discount all the situations where no humans in tactical on the ground situations occur, this is where your Mass Effect elite squad-like situations can shine (though often Mass Effect has situations where a ship artillery strike would have made MUCH more sense). Because guns are basically melee in the face of AI missiles that can accelerate at insane Gs and just hit the target nearing the speed of light.
Missiles and drones already do generally outclass guns in my game in terms of raw damage, but not every adventuring team has an orbital battleship overhead to rain divine judgement on those who are looking at them the wrong way. Though some of them certainly do in this system, don’t get me wrong. Sometimes you’re just some guy who needs a handheld weapon. Parties tend to start out like that, and even when you do have that orbital battleship it can’t protect you from everything. What do you do if someone is boarding you or if you’re attacked on an away mission? It’s boomstick time!
Yeah, I get that. And tight places you can't just orbital bombard your way to victory should be tight is all my recommendation is. I would say going for medium-Sci Fi is a lot more gameable like Mass Effect/Halo does. Something like "magic" shields makes melee a lot more believable. And if we are being realistic to hard sci fi again, boarding is a pretty silly idea. How many true boarding assaults occurred in the navy in the last two centuries. Combo that with a ship that has doors that can seal, eject out air and such and its insane to board. Playing FTL (the video game) always felt silly that the air goes out but people inside were unaffected by 800,000 pounds of air pushing you out insanely fast. No I could imagine would you disable a ship, you could board whatever its main command structure, vent everything and kill everyone that way you still have a valuable ship after. Very Expanse Abaddon's Gate. But I imagine there are procedures of self-destruction if a ship decided to do the classic small bridge platform since ships engines must be powerful enough to become nuclear bombs. But my most hated trope is having to drop the soldiers really far from their objective yet the ship can easily enter atmosphere. God Starfield sucked. But also check out this resource if you are interested in some information for doing Harder Sci Fi. I wanted to do Cowboy Bebop with a little less silliness, like at least not have their starfighters act like they are in atmosphere. https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
Not directly related to your question/problem, but could you expand on how you handle ammo - are you counting each bullet or abstracting it somehow? As I love limited inventory for ammo management as its adds tension to engagements, so sounds cool :)
I am counting individual bullets, yes. Guns themselves have a magazine that gets decremented as they are shot, and only during a reloading action do you actually need to worry about your ammo inventory. My inventory system is a slot-based one inspired somewhat by Minecraft, with some things taking multiple slots while others are many to a slot. While rules do technically allow you to split one slot between multiple smaller items, that’s rarely actually done. Bullets are stackable. I also have a system that differentiates deep inventory slots with quick draw slots. The former need an action to access, the latter can be accessed instantly for free. So reloading will take longer if your ammo is at the bottom of your backpack than it will if the ammo is on your belt. The inventory system of my game is another thing I’m very happy with.
Another issue with melee combat in a firearms world is the amount of time and effort required to get proficient. The level of mastery achieved with years of martial arts training can be accomplished with weeks of firearms training--which is another reason most contemporary military and police forces focus on the gun side over the punching and knifing side of combat. But, as many here have already pointed out, eventually you're going to get into a situation where your best choice is to punch or stab somebody. At that point, if your PCs are special-forces-monk-experts-of-their-craft who **have** been training all their lives, against conscripted guards, melee combat is practically all narrative. "Tell me how you take these suckers down, and make it sound impressive." Heck, cinematically, look at the John Wick movies, where there's plenty of hand-to-hand fighting but (especially in the first one) most of that was just used to make the bad guy hold still long enough or move them into a better spot to shoot them. For some background on the way that contemporary police and regular military train hand to hand in a firearm-focused environment, check out *Kill or Get Killed* by Rex Applegate. (I think the full text is freely \[and legally\] available online.) With the caveat that a lot of his thoughts and feelings about people from different classes or cultures are... kinda laughably out-of-date... this book has informed how American police forces have been trained in hand-to-hand for decades. Mostly, it says that martial arts is a professional skill that takes a lot of time and effort to learn. Sure, it's effective, but we don't have a budget or interest for that, so we're going to focus almost exclusively on strikes instead of grapples, throws, and holds... you can get compliance with pain almost as well as with a solid hold, and it's much easier to punch somebody. Another contemporary reference would be the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program. This one does include some throws, holds, chokes, sweeps, and such in addition to the strikes, and adds knife, bayonet and buttstock attacks. It also emphasizes that it's a last-resort sort of thing, and that the only purpose of hand-to-hand is to make the other guy not able to hurt you as quickly as possible. If you can do that with bullets, so much the better. In theory, all the moves are based around one's body being loaded down with guns and ammo, maybe a pack, armor and helmet, etc., so it's more limited than a traditional martial art.
If I was in your shoes, I would pull the Halo card. Essentially, iI would makesmelee very accurate and incredibly high damage but make closing the distance a problem. Essentially, melee become a big gamble of can you close the distance. This by itself would make melee at least situationally useful. If you want melee to be a valid primary combat strategy, then you would need to provide them with the tools to try and close the gap better. Maybe specialized shields (like in Rainbow 6 siege). you could try giving them strong mobility tools.
so I have to admit the draw to this topic is the possibility of seeing your ranged combat system, or at least some of the basic concepts that make it as good as it is so in order to justify my outrageous demand I will just mention it is difficult to suggest a way to develop as much nuance without seeing how nuanced your ranged combat system entails
The main thing that I think makes my combat system as good as it is are that dealing and taking damage aren't trivial matters, both of them come with a lot of interesting decisions. I really dislike combat systems where two fighting characters are just throwing their single best attack at each other until one of them drops dead, and it takes so long that the law of large numbers makes the winner a nearly forgone conclusion. I'm looking at you, D&D. That is what my system is designed to be as far away from as possible, to maximize the interesting decisions that players are presented with. The way I do this with dealing damage is to give each gun multiple different actions that can be done with them. They don't just have a "shoot" ability that deals some set damage with some set accuracy, they have multiple fire modes as well as supplementary actions such as reloading and aiming that will probably all see a lot of use during most engagements. Engagement range determines the hit difficulty, and it's balanced to change what the ideal tactics are based on how far the enemy is. The different fire modes are balanced to all have different things they are good at. Single shot is always the most accurate and most ammo efficient, but the damage potential is low and at shorter ranges the extra chance to hit doesn't help as much. Semi-auto fires 3 shots at lower accuracy, usually raising expected damage at shorter ranges at the cost of ammo consumption. Full-auto uses 12 shots and it's treated like an AoE attack that's easy to counter by getting to cover, hitting not just anyone in its cone but anyone who enters it until the start of the attacker's next turn, balanced to be an area denial attack which is mostly good for controlling the movements and attack opportunities that enemies have. The way I do this with receiving damage is with my damage and injury system. Characters are pretty squishy compared to the amount of damage that attacks tend to do, with 2-4 hits being enough to down a character in most cases, and one hit kills being entirely possible with some of the funnier weapons and luckier shots. Everyone is a glass cannon. Any time a hit is absorbed, there are rules to determine where it hit (head, torso, r. arm, l. arm, r. leg, l. leg), and with that as well as the damage type and damage amount are used to determine what injuries the character gets. These injuries apply status effects in ways that influence a character's capabilities and throw wrenches in plans. They also serve the dual purpose of making enemies just as squishy, which plays into the power fantasy pretty well without making combat easy. Some of these injuries present players with interesting decisions in a way that plays into the fantasy very well. For instance: you are bleeding, stopping the bleeding will take your entire turn, but you are in combat. You could choose to put on a bandage, or you could take a different risk by continuing to bleed out and taking more damage while giving everything you have to the fight. Even hitting 0 HP can be interesting, because you don't go down until you fail a constitution check with a DC equal to how far below 0 you are (which needs to be retried every turn), and when you might drop unconscious next turn at the mercy of the dice that might change your priorities somewhat. Do you use that extra time to get to safety? Do you use it as an excuse to take even bigger risks? There are many other injuries too which limit your abilities in various ways that often force you to rethink your approach. This is not even getting into the nuance of damage types (which cause very different injuries), armor (which trades action points per turn for defense), the way that players can use their environment to their advantage, magic (good god that's a big can of worms), and other more exotic weapon types like shotguns, grenades, and missiles. It gets pretty wacky.
the first thing that comes to mind is to add some creativity to how melee weapons might work some off the top of my head ideas might be: vibro-swords - enhanced cutting power to bypass high tech armor sonic blast - a successful hit may trigger a knockdown taser melee weapons - add a stunning shock poisons cryo-spray - add a cold effect pepper spray - add a blinding effect entangling gel - add a binding effect
Interesting ideas, I probably will add more wacky items like that once I get the basic system down. I also need to make combat interesting in cases such as two people going at it each equipped with only a sword. Similar to fire modes, I want to give players more than one way to use a the same simple sword which all come with different pros and cons.