Combat: Dominance, Maneuvers and sacrificing HP to succeed

Game Design Log #46

Lately, I have been testing “No Peace for the Heathen” (NPFTH) and making adjustments to the combat mechanics. Nothing major, except that I added a new set of actions that you can do when sacrificing HP/Blood in combat, which I called Maneuvers.

These Maneuvers were born from the necessity of allowing PCs and NPCs to interrupt the turns of their enemies, as in NPFTH, turns run indefinitely, until the active PC/NPC gets hurt (you can get hurt when attacking) or they decide to do something that does not hurt anyone. In the former case, the turn goes to the perpetrator of hurt, and in the latter, the turn goes to the next PC/NPCs on their side.

So, in principle, a PC could decide to do something that doesn’t hurt anyone, and then another PC goes, and they decide to do something that does not hurt anyone, and another PC goes, and like that to infinity.

Although this “infinity-loop” didn’t happen often, it allowed PC/NPCs to move around the combat terrain, to better position themselves, or run away (although running away triggers a chase, which has other rules).

So the first Maneuvers that was born from this problem was:

• Interrupt turn (1 HP): After an enemy attacks, even if they haven’t been damaged, you act.

But then, this first maneuver made me think about how to use this concept together with a concept I had already introduced in the game, Dominance, and I realized that both represented mechanics that were expressing two different types of narrative actions.

• Dominance represents the strategic, psychological, and violent dominance that a character has in combat. And it increases when characters do things to better their “position” in combat.

• Maneuvers represent actions you do that affect an enemy when they or you are attacking/defending. They are expressed as a change in the enemy, but require an effort from you.

The idea of both Dominance and Maneuvers is to increase the possibilities that PC/NPCs have in combat. Making combat more dynamic, and giving options different from “I just attack”, but with a simple expression on the mechanics of the game.

Today, I want to share both of these small mechanics in their current state, written in a simple, more “system-agnostic” way so you can use them in your OSR/NSR-like games. Perhaps they may help you give mechanical weight to those amazing narrative moments that you and your players have in combat.

Here in Maneuvers there is no “interrupt turn” as this is a translation of the mechanics of NPFTH for systems that uses a more standard initiative order. If you want to experiment with an initiative that jumps from character to character, depending on whether they get hurt in combat (or perhaps depending on whether they succeed in their attack), you can include “interrupt turn” as a maneuver.

See you next week!