Crises as combat scenes
When is a combat scene not a combat scene? When it’s a crisis. I’m going to assume that most anyone reading this blog has played in a role-playing game, and that if you’ve played in an RPG, then you’ve rolled your way through a combat scene. For some systems, groups, and/or campaigns, fighting monsters might be 80% of what goes on. So I’m not going to spend time talking about what a combat scene is. You know about those.
But if you’re not familiar with our posts and books, then you might not know what a crisis scene is in a role-playing context. Some gamers or systems might call them skill challenges or extended rolls, but a crisis is a multi-stage non-combat scene. Do you watch courtroom dramas? Medical shows? Is nailing a witness to the wall with a killer cross-examination awesome? Is frantic emergency surgery dramatic? Yes! Turning a skill check into something tense and charged is what a crisis scene is all about.
But the title of this post is Crises as combat scenes. What gives? Ordinarily, my crises are things like staredowns, car chases, or infiltrating an enemy base. That kind of thing. But sometimes a crisis can stand in for combat. Why would you ever want to use a crisis instead of a standard mapped combat, though?
Well, in the Tydalus game we featured in From Dream to Dice, one chapter involves heavy combat as a lighthouse is besieged by a horde of crustacean monsters. The characters must run from one part of the tower to another to fight the invaders off. But for me, at least, too many combat scenes in a row swiftly gets repetitive and boring. So instead, I turned one of the combats into a crisis! The player party rappelled from the top of the lighthouse to knock mutant crabs off the wall while dangling from ropes — a scene that would have been really difficult to map and play out as a regular combat. But it worked out perfectly as a crisis!
With Erica, I’ve also begun playing some text-based RPGs (TBRPGs), writing back and forth through a story campaign. All the chases, puzzles and social standoffs were, of course, crisis scenes — but mapped combat doesn’t always work so well making one roll at a time over a chat program. So we turned our combat scenes into crises!
And then there was one of my more recent game sessions, in which my players decided to take a shortcut through the spirit world in broad daylight, when all the evil spirits are out to play. Well, I hadn’t planned that, and I didn’t have a battle map of the spirit world or tokens for enemy entities ready. So I gave the group a roll to navigate safely through areas of spiritual taint, but I sat there while the dice tumbled and waited to see if they were going to run smack into a combat that I hadn’t planned. The players rolled well and avoided the nasty spirit beings, but if it came down to a fight for which I had nothing prepared, my backup plan was turning the race through a spiritually corrupted landscape into a crisis scene!
So there are any number of reasons and situations when a crisis might make for a better fight scene than a conventional combat. So what does a combat crisis actually look like?
Each stage of the crisis is like a round of combat, and you can decide what that involves. Each player gets to make their usual attack roll and you can either take their degree of success on the attack to determine how the stage went, or base it on the damage roll of those who succeeded. Then the next stage moves over to the enemies and each player makes a roll to defend against their attack or else take damage as usual. That’s pretty close to a regular combat, so it’s not much of a stretch for people unfamiliar with crises, and pretty standard for non-mapped fights.
But instead of having the crisis function like a normal combat, you can also opt to make the combat more like a crisis. What does that actually entail? Well, let me grab an example from a TBRPG Erica and I did. Erica came upon a group of monsters blocking a road and attacked them to make the path safe for travelers.
Here’s the crisis that I gave her. (This example uses rules from Snake Eyes.)
- Initiative check. For each point of success over 6, the PC gains a reaction pool which she can assign during the scene.
- The PC gets the first strike because the goblins and ogres have no idea she’s coming. If they somehow don’t meet the initiative threshold, then they have a 2-point penalty to defend.
– Attack Value + combat skill of their choice.
– The PC whittles down the group fire bonus by 1 opponent per 3 points of success. - The goblins and ogres are shocked by the PC’s appearance, but then they hurry to react once the first few die. The ogres and goblins pull enchanted blades and hack away. Defense Value + Dodge or Melee (dagger or sword specializations apply) with a 10-point group fire bonus reduced by the previous stage.
– The PC takes 15 damage on a failed check. - The clearing where the monstrous gang was lurking is on a rocky ledge overlooking a small pond. A stream forms a small waterfall that splashes into it. The PC can try to maneuver the ogres and goblins back up against the drop with a Body-Mind + combat skill check.
– Every 2 points of success reduces the group fire bonus by 1 the following round. - A goblin scrambles through the brush and wraps itself around the character’s leg. She can pry it off or kill it, but an ogre seizes her moment of distraction and tackles her over the ledge and into the pool below. She must make a Body + Athletics check with bonuses from the Jumping trait (if applicable) to break her fall.
– Boxcars (critical failure): The character lands badly, and with the ogre on top of her. She takes 15 damage direct to Health from the fall and then 5 damage per round they are underwater, until she succeeds in a Body + Athletics (swimming) or Brawl (grappling) check as a free action.
– Failure: The character lands badly, and with the ogre on top of her. She takes 10 damage direct to Health from the fall and then takes 5 damage per round they are underwater, until she succeeds in a Body + Athletics (swimming) or Brawl (grappling) check as a free action.
– 1 or 2 points of success: The character lands hard and takes 5 damage direct to Health from the fall, then 5 damage per round they are underwater, until she succeeds in a Body + Athletics (swimming) or Brawl (grappling) check as a free action. The ogre isn’t on top of her, so she has a 1-point bonus to get to the surface of the water.
– 3 or 4 points of success: The character turns the fall into a dive and suffers no damage. She takes 5 damage per round, though, until she succeeds in a Body + Athletics (swimming) or Brawl (grappling) check as a free action, but rolls with a 2-point bonus.
– 5+ points of success or more: The character lands on top of the ogre, taking no damage and without fear of drowning. - The PC can attack the ogre who tackled her with an AV + combat skill check.
– The ogre does 15 damage to the character before it dies, minus 5 per point of success. - The goblins on the ledge pull bows and fire down at the character while the ogres heave stones at her. DV + Archery or Dodge (bow) with a 2-point bonus because she can dive under the water for cover.
– The character takes 20 damage on a failed defense. - The goblins and ogres jump down into the water or slide down the little hill after the PC and she can meet them with weapons ready. AV + combat skill.
– The character reduces the group fire bonus by 1 per 3 points of success.
– When the bonus drops to 0, the remaining monsters flee.
We haven’t released Snake Eyes yet — it still needs some more play-testing, which has been difficult during the pandemic — so the exact rule system may not make perfect sense to you, but you get the idea. Instead of each round just being an attack or defense, I imagined a cinematic fight scene and paired each shift in the battle with a set of rolls, either offensive or defensive. Damage is the price of failure, and each success reduced the size of the enemy group.
As with any crisis scene, the skill rolls aren’t set in stone. Maybe a player has an idea to throw a rock over the monsters to get them looking the wrong way before charging into battle — give them a bonus on that initiative check so they can build up a bigger pool of bonuses for use later on. Maybe a player wants to hit and run, firing an arrow from the tree line and then fading back into the brush. Instead of backing the monsters against the ledge, replace it with a Stealth check to disappear after attacking, but the rewards and consequences of that stage of the crisis can remain the same.
If my players hadn’t done well on their spirit world shortcut last game session — or if they just decided that hordes of evil spirits weren’t to be avoided, they were to be confronted (violently) — then I would have had to create a crisis on the spot: rolls to avoid airborne spirits, a stage to avoid a surprise attack as a spirit materialized out of thin air, rolls to avoid their strange powers. It might not have been the best crisis that I’ve ever written up, but a crisis scene would have kept the cinematic drama high — and would have lost us a lot less time than me trying to throw together last-minute stats and a map.
A combat crisis can make for a really wonderful change of pace — especially if there’s lots of fights — and crises are wonderful stand-in for combats that don’t work well on maps. Like someone throwing the only parachute out of the plane while a character and a villain both jump after it, fighting in freefall as they try to grab the parachute first. And a crisis can always cover your behind if you get caught with your pants down by an unexpected fight scene. Experiment with it and have fun!
