You now have a character. Now let's break it.
Combat… starts with a distinction between "narrative" and
"structured" gameplay. I think this is aimed at people coming from
D&D: it's the idea that much of the time you don't need to be tracking
people's specific actions moment by moment; sometimes you can just
talk about what's happening, and only when the details matter do you
move to initiative order and precision. (And there's no support here
for tactical maps and measured movement.) In other words, the sort of
thing most gamers I know tend to do anyway…
That initiative order is odd in itself. Everyone involved in a fight
makes a roll against their Cool (if they were expecting trouble) or
Vigilance (if they're surprised); all these rolls are sorted into
order based on the quality of that result, but they aren't the order
in which those specific characters will act. Rather, they're slots for
either any PC or any NPC; when a player slot comes up, the players
decide among themselves which PC will act in it (though you still only
get one action per character per round).
Within a character's turn, they can do three sorts of thing:
Incidentals, which are unlimited but generally minor in effect
(dropping a held item, speaking); Manoeuvres, generally one per turn
(though you can get another with help from your allies, by taking
strain, or by forgoing your Action), and by definition not requiring a
die roll (moving, aiming, diving behind cover); and Actions, one per
turn, which do require a die roll (shooting, picking a lock, doing
first aid). The order of these within the turn is up to the player.
This sort of formalism is probably familiar to modern D&D/Pathfinder
players.
This structure makes many complicated things simple. Aim and shoot?
Add one Boost die to your attack roll, but that's not an option if you
wanted to spend your manoeuvre on getting into cover before shooting
(which would give the enemy a Setback die to hit you), or on drawing
your weapon. Movement is in range bands (engaged, short, medium, long,
extreme) with the longest being "outside shouting distance", so
distances can matter without needing a map to show who's where. Smoke,
cover, high gravity, and so on add Setback dice to whatever's being
done.
Actual attacks use the universal resolution mechanic; each Success
after the first adds a point of damage to the weapon's fixed value,
and if you get enough Advantage you can also roll a Critical Hit.
Unhealed criticals, even if the immediate effect has worn off, are how
you can actually die rather than just losing consciousness. Some
complicated weapons can use Advantages to activate special powers
(such as Sunder, to break the target's gear).
Social encounters work basically like combat (I think I saw this
approach first in Lace & Steel), although much of the time they can
just be treated narratively (which is what I've been doing so far in
my own games) with an opposed roll. The more formal approach might be
used during a complex negotiation, in which each side is building up
Strain (mental fatigue) until one or the other hits their threshold
and concedes. To make this more interesting, you can use actions to
attempt to determine your opposition's Motivations (desire, fear,
strength and flaw), and then try to slant what you say to take
advantage of them; I like the idea, but I haven't felt a need for it
yet.
(to be continued)
- Posted by DP at
12:06am on
16 October 2020
Its a quite interesting system, though I haven't played it yet. Thanks for the review.
I don't own the game, but on flipping through another's rule book I had trouble understanding the movement system.
It seemed to have both a FATE-style "zone" system with discrete zones and a range band system, and I couldn't figure out how they meshed or how the concrete (if flexible) number of zones had to do with the range bands... Was this just an artifact of my quick skim and it's all fully explained if you get deeper into it?
Overall, I found the rulebook well written but rather more "conversational" than many. On the one hand, this was pleasant to read. On the other, I often found it did seem to take a quite long time to tell me things...
- Posted by RogerBW at
08:55am on
16 October 2020
The feeling I get from the rulebook (and I'll come back to this in later parts) is that the authors knew that FFG would produce a bunch of official setting material — so they also want to make certain that the prospective GM is aware that they can also build their own stuff, and they want to give them the tools for that.
I think range bands predominate, but because they're one-dimensional they don't necessarily tell the whole story. Much of the time there's basically just one fight going on, and that the only ranges people care about are their distances from the centre of that. But if two people are trying to get into the fight while shooting at each other, you need to know that you're (say) Medium range from the fight and Long from your counterpart; at that point the GM needs to determine whether becoming Short range from the fight will also put you at Medium from your counterpart, which might be the case or might not depending on their picture of the situation. (Obviously an actual tactical map with measured ranges would make this clearer, but it's also an administrative burden on the GM and I don't think I've used one this century beyond basic sketches.)
Compared with GURPS movement is much faster, so it can actually make a difference beyond basic jumping out of ambush. (I know people who talk about GURPS fights as "hermetically sealed", since if you're more than a couple of Moves away it'll probably be over before you get there; but these combat rounds represent a longer time and the characters are more robust.)
It takes two manoeuvres to get from Extreme to Long (rifle range), two more to Medium (pistol range), then one to Short and one more to become Engaged in melee; and if you give up your action or take Strain you can do two manoeuvres in a round.
- Posted by DP at
06:23pm on
16 October 2020
Is there any provision for different speeds being able to close faster in the same combat e.g., if party is on foot but someone is on a horse or bike, or your foe is a flying dragon? (I get that something like airplane vs. foot is a different system covered by the vehicle rules.)
- Posted by RogerBW at
06:49pm on
16 October 2020
It's not a core part of the rules. "Most" flying creatures can go from Long to Short in a single manoeuvre, and one of the example creatures has "Swoop Attack (after making a Brawl combat check, can move from engaged to short range of the target as an incidental)", but for the most part if you want to move faster than someone else you need to spend more manoeuvres; I think the idea may be that while you can go faster you also need to spend more attention on not hitting things.
When you get into the vehicle subsystem, which I suspect I might use even for combat on horseback, you do have speeds.
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