Pillow Fighting in RPGs - Better Combat Rules

Spacing, in general, has always struck me as problematic in RPGs.  The 5' square standard in 3.x is, in my opinion, an absurd figure, albeit one building upon the game's earlier editions.  Having several years of hand-to-hand sparring experience, and a fair amount of stage combat and boffing practice, I feel like I know at least a bit about fighting with medieval weapons, and on a practical level, 5' is a humongous amount of space.  Looking at how the sizing works out, it seems like combatants are like electrons attached to separate nuclei - they are somewhere within a huge area and occasionally collide at the edge of their respective areas.

Part of the problem is that I don't think a lot of people understand how large a 5' x 5' square is - it's about the size of a queen sized bed.  So a typical combat in 3.x features two queen-sized beds next to each other with a single person standing on top armed with a weapon of choice swinging at each other, but not allowed to step onto the other person's bed.  Since a lot of us RPGers may not have a lot of experience swinging swords about, instead imagine that everyone has pillows instead of swords and you are embarking in an epic pillow fight on top of these two, side by side, queen beds (a standard pillow is about 2' long, which could be the length of a dagger or short sword, but the way in which one uses a pillow during a friendly pillow squabble gives you about the same reach as you would have with a longsword or katana).  Think about the mechanics of a pillow fight (or, better yet, go find someone to fight with for a little while).  Chances are, you'll just have one bed (although it could be a slightly larger one, but still far smaller than two adjacent 5' squares), and you'll probably also find that two pillow fighters can have quite the rousing fight on top of that one bed, advancing, retreating, and running all around.  On a queen bed, two combatants standing on opposite corners could stand quite comfortably in a combat stance without being able to engage, unless someone moves towards the center.  So, two combatants can share a 5' square and fight fairly well, being able to move around and shift positions.  In fact, if each fighter were confined to a single queen bed, the space in which both fighters could engage is relatively small.

I'd like to see fighting in RPGs play out like it does in the real-world, with advancing, retreating, side-stepping, and the like.  By hand-waving all of that motion away into the massive empty space of the 5' square, combat loses a great deal of the strategic elements that make it appealing, at least to myself.  Think of this another way - as a spellcaster in combat, you are evaluating the spacing of opponents across the battlefield combined with an analysis of the terrain to find the place where your spells with have the most impact.  In the actual world, a fighter is doing the same thing but with their body - placing themselves in the area where they have the most control of the battlefield.  Again, by using a 5' scale, fighters lose the finesse of their movement, since one cannot be halfway in one square and halfway in another.

Now, to make all of this happen, we need (straight-forward) rules for these maneuvers - reasons why a character might advance, retreat, sidestep, or hold their ground.  Ways for characters to control the area around them (moving away from the paralyzing 3.x 'Attack of Opportunity').

Our first step, though, is to reduce the size of combat spacing.  I use 1 yard hexes in Prodigy.  I'm almost 5' 10'', and a 1 yard square is slightly larger in every direction than my typical sparring stance.  If I'm unarmed, my attacks have to leave my hex and travel into my foe's, but if I have a weapon, that weapon is already poking into the hex in front of me.  Let's talk about the implications of this scale.  First, if two fighters each have weapons and are adjacent, their weapons are engaged - they are each within striking distance of each other, so they have to be actively dueling to keep from dying.  They have enough room within the hexes to shuffle around a little bit, but any change of positioning requires stepping into an adjacent hex.  This brings me to the next reason why I like the 1 yard hex - the average stride is a little less than 3'.  So, stepping in any direction places you in a new 1' hex, and a lunge allows you to temporarily step into an adjacent hex to strike someone beyond it.  Going back to how much room someone takes up inside the 1 yard hex, my fighting stance takes up almost the entirety of the space, so adding another person would make fighting incredibly difficult for both people sharing the hex.  At least in my mind, changing the scale of combat already solves a number of the problems I have with the 5' square.

For games dependent upon the 5' square, just say each 5' square correlates to 1.5 1-yard hexes (or 2 hexes if you want to do slightly less number crunching).  If counting, say the first 5' counts for 2 hexes, the second 5' counts for 1, the 3rd for 2 and so on (just like the diagonal rules in 3.x and 4th Edition).

Now, to differentiate advancing, retreating, sidestepping, and holding one's ground.  These rules are still in rough draft form as I need to iron out the kinks.  Suggestions would be welcome!

Advancing: if you advance on an adjacent character's hex, you are making a driving attack into their area.  If they do not repel your assault through skill of arms, they will need to move in order to not be wounded.  The easiest movement is a direct retreat in the same direction as the aggressor's advance, but this also allows the aggressor to continue advancing until the defender retreats to a wall or off of a cliff.  Alternatively, the defender can step to the side, allowing the attacker past them.  Fairly straight-forward.

When the aggressor advances upon the defender, they have a couple of possible responses.  They can hold their ground, which is a Fighting Style test made one step harder than normal (in 3.x, the DC would be +5, in 5th Ed, they'd be at disadvantage, etc.) and if they fail they take damage or fall prone.  If they retreat from the assault, which is a Fighting Style test made one step easier (DC -5, check made with advantage, etc.) and if they fail, they take damage, are driven backwards a number of hexes equal to the damage taken (damage is usually between 1-3 points), and the attacker may immediately make another advance if they wish.  Their last option is to sidestep the attack, which is a standard Fighting Style test, and if they fail they just take damage.

Retreating: Fighting is hard.  It is exhausting work.  There's a reason boxing matches are divided into rounds with breaks in between.  And boxers don't even wear armor!  There are also tactical reasons to take a break while fighting - to size up your opponent and look for weaknesses.  So to make retreating an important tactical choice, we have to add a combat fatigue system.  The basic way this works is each character has a fatigue limit for actual fighting, and going beyond that begins to impair their ability to fight well.  I'd probably use poker chips or something for this.  Each round your character either attacks or is attacked, take a chip.  If the chips you have exceed your character's limit, you start to underperform - maybe a cumulative -1 penalty to everything (so -1 the first round over, -2 the second, etc.).

Looking again at boxing, we see 2 minute rounds for professional women and amateur men and a 3 minute round for professional (male) fighters.  Using the shorter time will probably make a better baseline, since we want rules that start with a reasonable expectation for fighters with a minimum of training and extend from  there.  Now, I claim little experience with boxing apart from hearing other people talk about it, so I went to the interwebs to see some boxing matches.  Looking at this video, we see that they aren't actively engaged every second of every round - they spend a great deal of time maneuvering around the ring. They are only actively trading blows for maybe 3-6 seconds at a time before breaking apart and reevaluating.  This maps to my sparring and boffing experience as well.

So, my simple fatigue rules are that a novice fighter can fight for maybe 2 rounds (my rounds are 3 seconds) before getting fatigue penalties.  In Prodigy, the Athletics discipline represents a character's general level of physical fitness and can have from 0 to 15 notches (notches are representation of the time and effort spent improving that discipline with quantized skill tiers at 0, 1, 3, 6, 10, and 15 notches), so I'll add one round per notch.  A professional boxer likely has 3-6 notches in Athletics, so the could all-out fight for 5-8 rounds or 15 to 24 seconds.  Every round spent fighting after that limit incurs the penalty.  Now, spending a round out of direct combat allows the character to reduce that fight count by 2.

Sidestepping: This is easy.  As part of a standard attack, you have the choice of moving 1 hex in any direction as long as you end adjacent to your opponent.  This becomes important when you apply facing rules.  I assume that a character in a hex is always facing one of the edges of that hex.  That edge and each edge adjacent to it are in the character's full view.  Each edge adjacent to these is hard to see, making tests relating to those edges one step harder (+5 DC, etc.), and then the edge directly opposite the direction in which the character is facing is their blind spot and tests relating to that space are two steps harder (+10 DC, etc.).

Standing One's Ground: If you choose not to move, you are focusing more on defense than offense, so defensive actions you take are one step easier (+5 to AC, etc.).

Magic in Prodigy

Probably due to the fact that magic does not exist, the interface between magic and reality is one of the most consistently glossed-over aspects in fantasy, especially when people try to feature classic wizard-y types shooting fire and lightning.  There are two problems that I see happen, fairly frequently.

The first is the conflict between the magic available and the setting itself - Alexis talks several times about how the existence of magic destroys the circumstances required to proliferate gunpowder technology.  The low-level availability of fire magic means that most 1st or 2nd level magic-users can destroy any centralized power depot.  That is a failure to acknowledge the effect of magic on normally functioning historical processes.  The other major issue I see with regard to settings is in settings that over-emphasize the effects of magic - placing mills in the middle of nowhere under the logic that the watermill runs off a Barrel of Everflowing Water or somesuch nonsense.  The economics of powering most mills with minor artifacts does not work out, and it ultimately makes magic feel cheap because objects of great power are intentionally buried beneath a couple feet of cow dung to power the watermill.

The second conflict is between magic-using characters and characters who don't use magic.  This was 'solved' in OD&D by creating rigid character roles based on class - fighters fight, thieves do thief things, and magic-users manipulate the minds of others and bend time and space... (although this was definitely mitigated by the relatively few number of spells known by any individual M-U).  In 3.x, well, everything went a little crazy and there were ways for spellcasters to be better fighters than fighters or thieves than rogues, and it turned into a big bundle of DM-dependent crap (as in, depending upon DM style this might be a huge problem or a nonexistent one), and then 4th edition tried to make everyone a spellcaster.  I think the problem stems from trying to recreate the magic of lore into a game system - this seems to have brought with it the belief that 'if something is interesting, it can be done with magic'.

My solution to both tines of this problem, setting-wise and character-wise, is to keep magic small and significant.  If most people have no access to magic, then it can't have a dramatically derailing impact on technological development, and if each magic=using character can do incredible things but only in a limited sphere we allow magic to be a potent and interesting character choice without it being strictly superior from either a character's or player's perspective. 

In Prodigy, there are 4.5 paths to magical power.  The first is through devotion to culture-specific higher concepts, and each concept grants a small number of boons (no more than 4) appropriate to that culture.  So, mediums of the Order, a religion devoted to peace and nonviolence, psychically emanate an aura of peace that forces everyone nearby to cease any forms of aggression.  More powerful boons are unlocked as the character becomes more devout and more fully understands the intricacies of their chosen faith.

The second path to power is in studying the maddening magics of the Sidh.  This grants mastery over the minds of others but comes with two considerable costs.  The first is that every single society but two (and they are the most marginalized and least powerful of all the societies) will instantly put to death practitioners of this form of magic.  The second is that as the character becomes skilled in this magic, their bodies transform into that of a Sidh, making detection much more likely.  Also, silver completely blocks this power from working, so most powerful people wear some kind of silver jewelry.

The .5th route is that of ritual magics which are utilitarian and wholly static - a ritual functions for one person in exactly the same way it functions for another.  They also require costly components.  Their effects range from creating magical wands that shoot fire to granting the ability to breathe water or levitate.  They are useful, but serve to enable the party rather than supplant an existing character.  They are also (in an OD&D fashion) limited - most characters will only know a scattered few of these rituals.

The 3rd and 4th paths involve embedding what is believed to be a shard of solid magic directly into the potential adept and hoping that the process does not drive them criminally insane and begin a magic-fueled murder spree.  Those who have these shards are understandably reluctant to hand them out to anyone, and they too have limited powers.  There are two kinds of shards, Energy & Matter and Time & Space.  Energy & Matter is very war magic-y, allowing the adept to throw bolts of lightning or rearrange the earth while Time & Space governs magical healing, alternate dimensions, and rapid transit.  Each shard grants access to half a dozen powers and while they are cool, they also come with a considerable physical cost - every power used after the 3rd starts draining health.

As I've mentioned before, skill in any discipline is increased by spending both coin and years of training - at least 6 months of training.  What that means is that most characters don't have the time to master any of these pathways, much less two of them.  At least in theory.

Here is where playtesting will stand me in good stead.  I've only had players pursue shard magic, so while I've a pretty good idea how that plays out, the other two are currently just dreams in my brain and words in my rulebook.  Whenever someone decides to try these things out, I'll know a lot more about how they work in practice.