Dirty Fighting (simplified combat maneuvers)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about my house rules, and I’ve had the chance to run a few sessions since then. I had to adjust the math regarding non-combat skills, so I'm going to update the character sheet and ref screen sometime this weekend (which, as you know if you’ve been following along, is all you really need to play). I also changed the ref screen’s monster panel to reflect my Brinewald: 1631 adventure.

I think that means I accidentally made a 5-page quickstart package. Well, minus the pregens anyway….

Anyway, an issue I didn’t quite expect came up during a solo game. Which is awesome, because learning is the best. The issue had to do with what 3.x called “combat maneuvers” and my house game calls “dirty fighting,” which is probably the most important house rule I use. This has been my most direct way of making fighters fun to play, and of making the combats themselves less abstracted and more interesting than “okay now it’s my turn to roll… shit, missed, your turn.” Basically, fighters of any level get 5e style advantage to any attack they make that changes the nature of a fight instead of doing HP damage: disarms, judo throws, grappling, anything else the PC can think of that would shift the odds in their favor.

So the issue was this: Ashley was playing as a solo fighter/thief type to help me playtest Brinewald. She ended up going after the bandit cave, which ended up with a one on one fight vs the bandit leader. According to my dirty fighting plan, this should have been awesome, but Ashley never chose to do anything but basic attack rolls. When I asked her why later, she told me that she would have been all about throwing this dude to the ground, but that a quirk of the mechanics would make this a pointless tactic.

As she saw it, the situation would be: BL attacks Ashley, rolls damage, Ashley throws BL, then it’s his turn and he stands right back up and attacks. Even if he doesn’t stand up until the next turn, that would only mean that he and she both lost a turn, rendering the dirty fighting technique completely useless. If this had been a group game, she would have gone for it, since it would have given all of her allies an advantage to their attacks, before their enemy could stand back up.

Had she decided to use a DF technique, I would have made sure that it made a legit difference in the fight (even in the solo game) with an on-the-spot ruling, but I guess that wasn’t obvious at the time. So the point of this post is to codify the mechanical effects of a few dirty fighting techniques in my game, which no one reading this is likely to be playing. Hooray!

Throw/Trip: I’ll start with this, mostly because all my players know at least a little bit of judo, which creates an expectation that I make it effective and realistic. Probably the easiest thing to do would be to simply declare that anyone who’s just been thrown also loses their next turn.

That’s sort of accurate, too, but not quite. You’d have to get pretty lucky to pull off an effective weapon attack while prone, but it’s easy to take down a standing opponent from the ground, as long as you can figure out how knees work.

This guy's a big dork but he's doing it right. See also Lesnar vs Mir (UFC 81) a.k.a the funniest fight I've ever watched. Except maybe for Quan Mi Bit from St Louis vs anyone....

So maybe prone characters still have options, but they’re limited. Mostly these will be common-sense judgement calls I make at the table, since there’s no way I’ll think of everything the players might, but some general guidelines would be helpful:

• Crawl at 1/4 normal speed or stand up. Either of these provokes a free melee attack from anyone in range.
• No attacks with melee weapons.
• Unarmed attacks (almost certainly kicks rather than punches, knees, or elbows) are okay, but they give the target a free attack. See Disarm, below.
• Missile attacks are fine. I’m pretty sure you could even use a bow if you were on your back instead of your belly, but I could be wrong on that one.
• While we’re at it, +1 defense bonus vs. missile weapons.
• -1 defense penalty vs. melee weapons.
• Some dirty fighting techniques can still be attempted with no penalty. Not disarms though, they usually involve footwork.

Also if you throw a person next to a volcano or something, you get to decide where they land (within say 10’, let’s not get crazy here).

I’m never going to remember all those, but I’m pretty sure they’ll seem just as obvious to me when they come up in-game as they do now. I really should figure out how to get all of this onto my DM screen, though. I’ll probably make a third panel for it, if I can figure out what else to even put on there.

Disarm: Oddly enough, this is actually kind of tricky. In standard D&D the advantage would be obvious, since damage is determined mostly by choice of weapon, and unless you’re playing as a kung-fu monk (even then in some circumstances), fighting unarmed is a terrible idea. I use class-based damage, going with the idea that someone with combat training/experience is more dangerous with a pencil than an untrained person is with a sledgehammer. The trained warrior looks at a person and sees a collection of vital areas, any one of which could be used to take an opponent out of the fight. The nerd with the hammer is just swinging more or less blindly at a human-shaped silhouette.

This also means that fighting unarmed isn’t too different, mechanically speaking, than fighting with a weapon. You can kill a man by punching him in the throat just as surely as by stabbing him there. So how do I maintain this realism without making weapons and disarm attempts useless? By thinking about reach. When fighting unarmed against an armed opponent, not being injured becomes a much larger priority than causing injury, and their striking range is wider than yours. Unless you happen to knock out your target in a single strike (which is never a guarantee, I don’t care who you are), you’re opening yourself up to get stabbed. Unless of course you disarm your attacker first.

So mechanically speaking, unarmed attacks do just as much damage as attacks with weapons, but they also give your target a free attack (only if they're armed though).

Your opponent also gets a free attack if your weapon is on the ground and you try to retrieve it. If you're hit, you're prevented from picking up your weapon this round.

Example: Your thief is fighting a duel with Sir Asshole, who wins initiative and successfully disarms you on his first turn of combat. Now it’s your turn, and you have a couple of options. You could use your turn to scramble for your weapon, but you won’t get a chance to attack during this round, and there's a chance of failing to retrieve it. Alternatively, you could roll with it and try an unarmed attack. You hit, but you only roll a 2 for damage, and Sir Asshole gets to attack you back during your turn, hitting you for 3 damage, then gets to attack again on his own turn, possibly doing even more damage, before you get to attack again. Essentially, he gets two attacks to your one every round, until you get your weapon back.

Of course, a third option would be to disarm Sir Asshole and level the playing field.

Grapple: The only times this has been used so far in my game were attempts to tie up NPCs for torture enhanced interrogation techniques. My players are terrible people, which is probably why we get along so well.

If you successfully initiate a grapple on your turn, your opponent can’t do anything but try to escape or reverse positions on their turn, for which they need to make their own grapple check. If you’re still in the controlling position when your next turn starts, then you’ve got a few options, and all of them require another grapple check.

• Tie up or put manacles on your opponent.
• Cause 1d12 damage to your opponent by performing a joint-lock or chokehold. You decide whether the enemy is killed, choked unconscious, or has a limb broken.
• Take something from them; backpack, something they’re holding, jewelry, etc.

Okay that’s all for now go read my older stuff.

Keeping it Real

Most people reading this probably understand that hit points are meant to represent some abstract combination of physical health, stamina, resolve, and some other vague factors. I’ve even seen them referred to as “don’t-get-hit points,” implying that only the killing blow is an actual solid hit. I get that, but I don’t like it.

Hit points and damage are inextricably linked, and the abstractness of HP implies that the damage needs to be equally abstract to make any sense. It’s ludicrous to imagine a human warrior being impaled by multiple spearmen and fighting on, so those spearmen must not actually be stabbing the warrior when they keep rolling 6s for damage. That's why the don't-get-hit justification was needed in the first place.

Just one arrow and Conan is hurt. You are not tougher than Conan. Art by John Buscema

It makes sense in theory, but the way it plays out at my table, it’s pretty clear that damage specifically represents physical injuries. (“Shit, I rolled a 2. I just barely nicked him.”) Therefore, at my game table, hit points don’t actually represent anything other than physical endurance. How much pain can you take before you die or pass out? That’s what hit points are. Which means two things: hit points are way too high and always have been*, and I need something else to represent everything about them that isn’t physical endurance (the don’t-get-hit part of hit points).

One of the few ideas that’s remained consistent across every edition of D&D is the notion that armor keeps you from getting hit, but that doesn’t model reality particularly well either. What armor actually does is keep those hits from doing as much damage as they usually would.

Here, take a look at what bayonet training in the army looks like:

There's more to it than just the pugil sticks but this is the part that's relevant here.

In game terms, those guys are wearing padded armor. +1 AC. Maybe +2 depending on how you handle helmets. Does it look like the padding is making it easier to avoid attacks?

The idea that AC keeps your character from getting hit implies a couple things. One is that all armor, when struck, absorbs all force perfectly and completely. No armor made by human hands does that, but if you accept it anyway, the next logical conclusion is that a better AC just means that more of the body is covered. Which makes sense for the difference between a breastplate and full plate armor but that’s the exception.

So, to avoid having to say things like “The spear tip bounces harmlessly off your leather jacket,” AC means damage reduction at my table. Plate mail doesn’t keep you from getting hit with a hammer but it’s not gonna hurt as much.

Now that I’ve addressed what doesn’t keep you from getting hit, I can talk about what does. It’s exactly the same thing as what helps you hit your own target: training and experience.** Which, in D&D, mean class and level. There’s a number for this that’s been called attack bonus or base attack bonus depending on which edition you’re looking at. For me it’s just combat bonus.

Example: Grok the fighter is attacking Alita the thief. Based on class and level, Grok’s combat bonus is +4. He rolls a d20 and gets 13, 17 total. Alita doesn’t roll anything, just adds her combat bonus of +2 to 10, ahead of time, calling it her defense bonus. So Grok’s 17 beats Alita’s 12 and he rolls 1d8 damage, getting a 4. Alita is wearing padded armor (AC +1), so she takes 3 damage.

There are two things I’ve noticed about what this means in actual play. For one thing, armor isn’t as important as it used to be. It has an effect, but only if you get hit, which warriors are better at avoiding just because they’re warriors. My character sheets make encumbrance pretty easy to avoid in much the same way the LotFP sheets do, so I enforce it pretty strictly; this means that the pros and cons of wearing any armor at all are pretty situational and often end up being a wash. So Conan can run around in a loincloth and get along just fine. Which is awesome.

I might as well also mention that I nixed armor restrictions while I was at it, since armor doesn’t matter as much (especially since I use early firearm rules that ignore the armor entirely anyway). It hasn’t actually come up in play, possibly because mages and thieves with low strength are taking a bigger hit on encumbrance. I could see a mage using armor to become less a glass cannon and a little more of a tank, but that doesn’t feel like it breaks anything to me. Aesthetically speaking, I see magic users as less Gandalf and more Elric anyway.

John Picacio

So, to summarize the house rules I’ve discussed so far:
1. Class based damage, no weapon or armor restrictions.
2. AC = Damage Reduction.
3. Hitting and not getting hit are both based on Combat Bonus, which is based on class and level.

See? The rule changes aren’t complicated, just the reasoning. Bear in mind that I’m not arguing anywhere that these changes would improve your game, just that they do a better job of modeling reality. Many players and refs prefer to revel in the abstraction. My group has more fun with combat with the changes in place, measured by how into the narration we get and how much time we spend laughing maniacally.

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*I re-wrote the class progressions, too; my version works as a single table that covers all the classes I use. I’ll type it up and post it at some point and you can see from that how I addressed absurdly high HP totals.

**There’s also a natural ability component, but my take on ability scores is probably a whole other post so let’s ignore them completely for now.

If Merlin Can Swing A Sword Why Can’t I

Weapon lists aren’t a bug, but class-based weapon restrictions sort of are, at least in my games. These restrictions get in the way of letting the players be awesome, which makes them a no-go. (Waitaminute, you’re telling me I have the power to command the underlying forces of the universe through sheer intellectual domination but I can’t figure out how an axe works? I’m gonna go play Stormbringer.) On the other hand, I like to have fairly clear divisions between what each character class is capable of, so I need another way to address that.

Weapon lists come from wargames, where they make sense completely. Your untrained peasants armed with farm tools are probably not going to do well against my untrained peasants with halberds and crossbows. When D&D came along, these lists made for a convenient way to differentiate classes in combat. Clerics are restricted from using sharp weapons in old editions, not because of some holy oath, but because no blunt weapons do as much damage as a two-handed sword.

In D&D, I like the ability to deal damage to be tied more closely to training and experience than to either choice of weapon or inborn advantage. It matches what I’ve learned in both the martial arts and the military a lot more closely that way; knowing where and how to strike an opponent is more important than brute strength or even what you're armed with. A lot of the people I play with have at least some martial arts experience too, so house-ruling the combat to work more realistically removes a layer of abstraction that doesn’t add anything to the game for any of us.

uhhh nipple...?

I can boil most of this reasoning down to two general statements:
1. There’s no good reason my wizard can’t use a sword to kill people.
2. There’s also no reason he could do more damage with it than your fighter can with a dagger, because your fighter should be better at finding, say, my spleen.

My answer is class based damage. Fighters do 1d8 damage regardless of what weapon they’re using, thieves do 1d6, mages do 1d4. This also applies to unarmed combat and improvised weapons, because it is both A) realistic and more importantly B) awesome if your first level fighter is able to throat punch a man to death or take him out with a ladder.

Jackie Chan would've been too obvious. Photo by Laura Johnson.

Sure, my games lose an element of tactical granularity that the weapon lists provided, but it’s like amputating an infected limb; you end up cutting away some of the healthy bit along with the part that’s oozing weird colored pus.

I started to look for an image for that but decided against it. You're welcome.

Yes I know that none of this addresses the point of the “weapon lists are a bug” rant in any way. That’s because role playing is an extremely subjective term and coming up with a universal definition seems not only really really difficult but also without much benefit.