LW Battle System: thoughts?

[zipp]

You all know I wasn't ever in love with the LW combat system. Granted, it was simple, and that made the books more accesible, but I still feel things could've been done better.

Anyone have thoughts to add to this? Disagreements? Suggestions on how it could've been better?

I know I wrote the rehashed boss fights (well, a couple of them). I've been thinking of trying my hand at a brief Magnamund adventure that uses a modified version of the LW combat system. I'm still playing around with ideas, but I'd defenitely be open to incorporating any ideas anyone else has.

[Beowuuf]

I find any combat system a nightmare to design, at the end of the day the LW one managed to have a large range of CS still produce a decent fight, it's just then the book combats and controling long term versus new characters never got balanaced. Having the two blows happen at the same time was fine. I personally liked to imagine the fight and what was happening as indicated to the numbers. I didn't need the book dictating to me the fight in my head, or inflicting it on me if I just wanted to get back to the story as fast as possible. The bonuses etc for small tactics and skills was fine. At worse, aa section or two before hand devoted to coming at a fight a different way as other matters were handled. And even then this already happened (bow shot or sneak attacks determining CS of opponent)

Like d20, while combat is the biggest thing that happens, it shouldn't dominate too much. Alredy there's nice stealth etc in some areas before a fight, or instead of a fight. Too much and you miss the rest of the fun exploration and get bogged down in combat options

[zipp]

I agree with everything you've said, but it still doesn't quite do it for me. I guess for the little fights it was fine. But when I got into big fights or large scale battles (like fighting the Chaos Master or being in the battle of Cetza) it fell apart, I felt. The epic nature of those fights wasn't well represented by a stat compare and roll of the dice.

I'm still playing around with ideas for how I would improve upon this in my LW series.

[Beowuuf]

True, that required ALOT of imagination since it did go right to dice rolls for things liek the Chaos Master. There something a little more might be nice. Same with Kimah.

I guess some basic tactics like roof versus tree versus ground, and some choice of physical versus psychic attac kfirst might have been cool for the Chaos Master. Then again, JD was always up against that 350 sections limit... be interesting to see what could have been dropped to make room, or what expanded rules could be snuck in without extra sections required

[Maerin]

At least one other part of the challenge is also an outgrowth of the limitations of gamebooks: the inability to truly describe combats due to the wide variety of weapons possible for use. Granted, there are some combats, such as the Chaos Master or Darklord Gnaag, for whom the very limited weapon possibilities may have permitted some degree of embellishment. But most cases, that just was not possible. Interestingly, one of the rare cases where we do see a good "combat narrative" in the Lone Wolf books is in the fight with Darklord Haakon if Lone Wolf lacks the Sommerswerd (I say "interestingly" mainly because I have such a dislike for that particular fight in almost every other respect).

RPG sessions should make such narratives A LOT more possible and enjoyable, but generally don't simply due to some combination of participant laziness and shyness regarding expressions of creativity (the exact mix in that combination varies from player to player, GM to GM, and group to group). The unfortunate consequence of that is that a lot of game designers feel the need to "compensate" by overly elaborate combat systems intended to replace such narrations (not a few of these compensations manage to rise to the level of metaphorically using a sledgehammer to tap in a finishing nail for a painting).

[Agrarvyn]

Well, I thought the system was simple and it was very obvious to see who was outmatched in combats. Before I ever played Book 2 (and thus never had the Sommerswerd), I remember all the incredible "rnadom" numbers I needed to legitimately win combats. The best (or worst!) of these situations was vs. Darklord Gnaag in Book 12 - I would have needed 11 0s in a row to win!

[zipp]

Well, I've got some ideas for my gamebook. I think for the big fights I'll probably end up going the route of my boss fights, with choice heavy battles. And for little battles, I think I'll focus on extra modifiers being given.

To comment on Maerin's response, I think that the variety of weapons in LW was ultimately dissapointing. For one thing, as has been discussed, the Sommerswerd blows EVERYTHING out of the water. For another, there simply wasn't enough sections that relied on you to have a certain weapon or changed things if you did.

The bow was nice in this regard, in that it let you end some combats before they'd even started and let you attack from range. I thought he had it right with the bow.

Maybe less weapons but more effect would've been nice. Like daggers are easily concealed but do less damage. Quarterstaves do less damage, but also have you take less damage due to the range you gain, making them really good at higher CS levels, but not so good for lower CS.

I'm going to play around with this sort've thing in my gamebook, see what I can do.

[Beowuuf]

The gamebook rules set I made, to try and make some flexibility into all actions, and combat, was probably overly complex (it's still linked on aon somewhere)

I ended up with attack and defense properties for weapons and blunt/sharp damage, so that a warhammer and mace and axe were all different flavours of each other. A sword was a better balanced weapon between all these. Spears and quarterstaves were two handed weapons that each had a different bonus ability to balance that, while two handed swords and axes did far more damage to make up for the lack of second hand.

I trired to combine the fighting fantasy d6 dice rolls rolling a skill to hit, versus the combat ratio concept of Lone Wolf to create a better spread for fights.

To do this, the difference between a combat number for the enemy (that was compared to a combination of skills numbers depending on the situation) was called the advantage. This number was then intelligently divided by the player (with certain stipulations of in the monster's favour) betwee nthe attack rools and damage numbers. Basically, a player could tactically control the situation by assigning points to either his own hit roll or boost damage, or to his opponent's hit roll or damage.

As Maerin points out, a convuluted system to give the player some control to make up for the lack of narrative interaction possible in a gamebook!

[zipp]

May 5, 2008 13:34:23 GMT -5 Beowuuf said:

The gamebook rules set I made, to try and make some flexibility into all actions, and combat, was probably overly complex (it's still linked on aon somewhere)

I ended up with attack and defense properties for weapons and blunt/sharp damage, so that a warhammer and mace and axe were all different flavours of each other. A sword was a better balanced weapon between all these. Spears and quarterstaves were two handed weapons that each had a different bonus ability to balance that, while two handed swords and axes did far more damage to make up for the lack of second hand.

I trired to combine the fighting fantasy d6 dice rolls rolling a skill to hit, versus the combat ratio concept of Lone Wolf to create a better spread for fights.

To do this, the difference between a combat number for the enemy (that was compared to a combination of skills numbers depending on the situation) was called the advantage. This number was then intelligently divided by the player (with certain stipulations of in the monster's favour) between the attack rools and damage numbers. Basically, a player could tactically control the situation by assigning points to either his own hit roll or boost damage, or to his opponent's hit roll or damage.

As Maerin points out, a convuluted system to give the player some control to make up for the lack of narrative interaction possible in a gamebook!

That sounds interesting, I like the whole adding points to one stat or the other to give some control over the random element of the combat.

But I'm trying to maintain the lack of stats that LW has. Assigning each weapon various statistics seems overly complicated to me for what I'm trying to do.

Care to go into more detail about your system, though?

[Beowuuf]

projectaon.proboards30.com/index.cgi?board=open&action=display&thread=1121 is the aon thread. The combat rules section is way too much writing. Especially the part about actions before combat, I would drop the involved guidelines on doing things before engaging in combat.

The newer rules were not uploaded yet, and are on my computer that isn't on the net

[zipp]

May 5, 2008 13:52:18 GMT -5 Beowuuf said:

projectaon.proboards30.com/index.cgi?board=open&action=display&thread=1121 is the aon thread. The combat rules section is way too much writing. Especially the part about actions before combat, I would drop the involved guidelines on doing things before engaging in combat.

The newer rules were not uploaded yet, and are on my computer that isn't on the net

Interesting. Defenitely too involved for what I'm looking for, but I really like that different enemies challenge different statistics.

[Sarra]

Do you have my Gamebook Guide, Zipp?

[Al]

I think maybe you need to remember both the target audience of GBs and the requirements of publishers. I am fairly confident that the target audiance of GBs (especially in the 80s), was 12-16 year old males - not ones who would want a great deal of complexity. Publishers may also balk at having pages and pages of description for battles - you need to balance out the costs of producing a gamebook with the profits.

I think that no system is perfect, but for what it is worth, the system used in the LW books is fine. The only problem I have with it is that LW's CS is actually 4 points higher than it should be - look at the results for LW going up against someone with the same CS score

[Beowuuf]

That's is deliberate I think - if you have the same CS, as the hero, you need to have the rules balanced against you. Your enemy of has one fight, you have many in the bnook. IF it's a 50/50 chance each combat, then you will be dead quite soon. And you don't want LW to see like he's too good either, by always towering over opponents' psychologically that's just weird if he's supposed to be the same strength

[Al]

Oh I know it is deliberate, but it is an interesting aspect of the LW action chart - you could not use it player vs player