Just a quick post about understanding combat. I’ve not played a huge amount of PbtA games and all I have played is Dungeon World.
Combat still has a distinctly D&D feel there I guess just with quick moves from both players and GM. With the Sprawl (and I guess AW as I’m currently reading the 1st edition) it looks a little different.
Basically it’s the Mix it Up move and this idea of claiming an objective. Could this move be used to have traditional ‘combat’. Could there be sections where there are lots of mix it up rolls in quick succession as they hurt, but not quite kill the goons in front of them?
I guess the question I’m confused about is I don’t quite know how combat should feel. With DW it was straightforward. Player makes a hack and slash move and deals their damage. I make a move putting another player in a spot. They defy danger and miss and are harmed. Another player tries to shoot with volley…..etc etc. Can Sprawl combat be played in basically the same way? Any great actual play examples of long combat?
Michael Barclay The point of combat in The Sprawl isn’t to kill the opposition, it is to achieve a goal. Likewise, NPC’s don’t all have full damage tracks. A 2’harm pistol is enough to take out a civilian or some security guards. If they don’t get treatment, than they may end up dead. If you take that same 2 harm pistol and put it to a persons head who can’t fight back and then you pull the trigger, they just got geeked. The narrative is the important factor.
You might mix it up with the goal of getting into position to kill a Corp exec. Then you might need to roll to act under pressure to get your kill shot off while under return fire from the guards. Finally, you might than need to mix it up again to suppress the guards while you make your run to the extraction point.
Even if you needed to damage a target multiple times to accomplish your goal, there should typically be some kind of secondary objective you want to accomplish each turn. Maybe you need to keep moving so that you don’t get flanked or the target keeps moving so you need to maneuver for a clean shot. Whatever the case, you shouldn’t have combats where each side is static and keeps shooting until the other side is dead. If you need examples, check out Cowboy Beebop. Spikes final confrontation with the syndicate is particularly good as an example of a gunfight in motion.
Can Sprawl combat be played in basically the same way? Not really – there’s a big difference between how DW and The Sprawl approach combat.
The D&D-inspired mechanics of the former favour extended blow-by-blow fight scenes, where a group of PCs take turns hacking away at a powerful monster (or groups of lesser monsters) until they stand victorious. Combat is the entire point of the scene, and PCs are tough, expected to be able to take a few hits without being too bothered.
In the Sprawl, combat is usually short. Partly because violence is dangerous – being shot in the chest with a rifle will really ruin your day. Partly because long combats only give your enemy time to call for better-armed reinforcements. But mostly, because violence simply isn’t the purpose of the game – it’s merely a tool used to achieve a goal. Remember, as the book says, “your objective when you mix it up should seldom be ‘kill everyone’ – you’re professionals on a mission, not sociopaths.”
So look at the example under Mix It Up. The PC isn’t trying to slaughter the security team, nor does he want to get stuck in a prolonged gun battle with them. His goal is simple – keep them busy while the other PCs go about their business. One roll, success, done… one security team pinned down, and his team free to continue with the mission.
There are a few questions in here! I’ll start by saying I’d also enjoy reading descriptions of people’s combat scenes. Then I will say this:
The Sprawl is not meant to have long combat scenes. That is on purpose, so you spend your time focusing on other things. It’s like how Urban Shadows doesn’t have a “roll Perception” basic move – the game wants to encourage you to get things done using other means (in that game’s case, talking to people and leveraging favors rather than searching rooms alone). It’s just trying to tell a different kind of story.
Sometimes, though, you are not looking to tell a different kind of story, but just do a familiar setup in a new setting (and I personally think that’s okay too). If what you want is a dungeon crawl that happens to take place in a skyscraper, with suited security guards instead of goblins, I see a few options:
1. Run Dungeon World but use setting elements from The Sprawl (and replace bows with guns).
2. Run the Sprawl but plug in a combat system from another game (like Dungeon World, or one with guns like Apocalypse World, Urban Shadows, Monster of the Week, etc.), or make your own.
3. Run a different cyberpunk game that is more designed to accommodate extended action scenes as a focal point of play.
Please do let us know how it goes, whatever to choose!
So I guess the complicated bit for me is combining the Harm rules with the Mix it Up move and all the tags that are going on. Some examples,
Players are in a hallway exchanging shots whilst the driver is jacked into his hovercraft for evac. Objective is just to hold the line with one player Mixing it Up and one player Helping with covering fire. The Mixing it up player is just using a pistol so no area tag. After the resulting roll I guess only one member of the opposing side has been killed? If it was something with area than multiples would be down right? Either way a hit means players achieve their objective and get evac?
Second scenario. Player is running through a hallway trying to get to a door swinging his sword like a maniac. Once again this is not a +area weapon but the player is thematically describing how he is cutting people down? On a hit I let them get to their destination but how much harm is established? It’s not an area weapons so presumably again only one bad guy goes down.
Third – gangs. Apocalypse world had rules for dealing harm to gangs but the Sprawl doesn’t. 2 or 3 harm to a gang would cause many fatalities. However, once again the +area tag becomes important. Without that tag are players essentially only capable of killing one dude at a time?
I know this are quite specific and fiction always comes first. I had a player dispatch two guys with a single sword attack in our session last night. Neither had weapons raised and the player had synth nerves so it seemed sensible they could do that even without the +area tag.
Jason Tocci Cheers for the advice. I don’t really want to do a dungeon crawl in a cyberpunk world though to be honest. I think the purpose of my original question is to make sure I avoid doing this and end up giving the games combat the quick and gritty tone it deserves.
The Sprawl strikes me as more similar to Leverage than to dungeons and dragons. Violence is a means to an end, and people can get hurt. Where the game varies from a D&D is that it is far from the only means to an end. Like leverage, you might have a character based around being the violence guy, but you are there to support the mission/heist instead of killing people. Unless you are running some kind of revenge plot or wet work mission, killing is likely non-essential to the mission as a whole. In fact, it might be counter to your goals. You are less likely to have the Corp out for revenge if you kill less people. Also, it takes two people on average to haul off an injured man. Thus shooting someone non-lethally could remove three combatants from your path.
In general, guns have almost never turned out to be a solution my players don’t later regret. It’s very easy to make threats out of people my shoving a gun in their face or wounding them. It is almost always better to pursue other options before resorting to violence.
The main point here, Michael Barclay, is the objective of mix it up.
Why are your players shooting the security team?
– To escape? If they succeed on the roll, they escape but some guards might get killed.
– To take out the competition? Competitors are dead or running away.
Always have an objective in mind. Or ask the player’s. How you handle the results of the rolls is up to you (and the fiction, don’t forget it). Sometimes I rolled extras “Mix it up” because the players choose to use violence many time in a row.
Let me try to explain:
The driver is waiting the infiltrator outside the buiding. Suddenly, the infiltrator comes running and shooting and screaming and bleeding. Security officers are behind her (the infiltrator). She rolls “Mix it up” because she wants to get away from the danger and to make them run away from her (or take cover, at least).
The driver rolls “Mix it up” because he wants to ram his car through his enemies and kill many as possible, this way protecting the infiltrator.
The players always have an objective for that violence.
I don’t if it is clear what I described.
Fernando Gomes That was very clear thank you. I guess my only concern is that the objective could remove the importance of harm in some situations? The objective is to escape so on a hit the players do escape….the amount of harm dealt and remaining bad guys left is unimportant because the players have got out of there.
(I guess of course that’s great ammunition to bring those NPCs back later on perhaps as a fully fledged threat 🙂 )
“the objective could remove the importance of harm in some situations”
Yes, well said – and that is the point! “Harm” is more a pacing mechanism. If the scene ends because PCs escape, you follow the fiction – you no longer need harm to help you track how long the scene should go.
Jason Tocci
I think you made a very important point on pacing.
I feel like the reason that weapon/armor numbers aren’t completely abstracted out in the Sprawl is because pacing during violent encounters should matter in a cyberpunk game (otherwise only have tags on weapons like in Uncharted Worlds).
Perhaps violence in the Sprawl should not be especially quick but also not arbitrarily long either.
Combat that isn’t simple gives meaning to some types legwork, preparation, and violent gear choices as well as actively avoiding violence (the reason to avoid it becomes because it’s a non-trivial set of resolutions).
Killing a group of enemies very quickly should mean something when trying to achieve an objective (it buys you more time versus letting an enemy escape to bring back immediate reinforcements as one example).
If violence is one tool in the toolbox it should be just as meaty as the rest of the options…
Another PbtA game that makes a good reference in this conversation is A Storm Eternal. The combat move basically has 3 options to choose from (and lets you choose them more than once each), depending on how well you roll: Do extra harm, suffer less harm, or invest more in winning. You can thus take more damage but still achieve your objective. It’s kind of a neat example of how to separate “winning” from “killing everybody,” but still make harm dealt and sustained important and consequential.
Michael Barclay
“The Mixing it up player is just using a pistol so no area tag. After the resulting roll I guess only one member of the opposing side has been killed?”
Not necessarily. The absence of that tag doesn’t mean that the player fired a single bullet, fatally striking a single enemy. He might have killed one, forcing the others to take cover. Or he might have fired off an entire clip, non-fatally wounding several of the enemy. It’s possible that nobody suffered any harm… forcing them to retreat to avoid a flurry of gunfire counts as “using violence to seize an objective”, even if nobody gets hurt.
The point is that if he succeeded on the roll, then he succeeded at his goal of securing the evac route, or whatever he was trying to do. The exact body count doesn’t matter… that’s why the move says nothing about inflicting harm on the enemy. It’s just description, the MCs responding to how the player described his actions.
Remember, this isn’t turn-based combat, where attention rotates strictly between players every six seconds of in-game time. A single “action” might consist of a character holding a choke point for several minutes, during which time he might have killed dozens of guards, and fired and reloaded many times. But that’s just flavour, just the description – what he did, what he rolled for, was securing the choke point. One single action.
A note on flavour – that’s as much about the style of your own game. If you want the players to look awesome, mowing down armies of guards like a scene from the Matrix, describe it that way… instead of a couple of guards, let there be hundreds. The system doesn’t care, but the way you choose to present it makes a big difference to the game.
It might be important to note that the Harm move is only used by players. You don’t have to roll (ever) for the npcs. If they get shot, you decide the consequences of that.
Michael Barclay
Oh, and to address the matter of the “area” tag, let me quote from the book – “The weapon harms everyone in the area of effect.”
Note the word “everyone”. The absence of the tag doesn’t mean that characters can’t fire multiple shots with their weapon (that would be “reload”). But the presence of “area” tells you that the weapon isn’t particularly discriminating – which is why it’s found on things like grenades, assault-cannons, and the ever-popular monofilament-whip.
This is a good thing if the players are trying to clear a troublesome security team out of an area. Not so good if other players, or the executive they’re rescuing are in the area. Firing a missile launcher into a crowded space? Everyone gets hurt… and hurt bad.
One of the things that took me a long time to really wrap my hands around in the PbtA system was how combat operates and it was largely according to what you’re asking about.
As stated, combat occurs because there’s a goal that needs to be accomplished and there are forces in the way of the player characters. Whether or not they decide to outright kill them, disable them, or just hold them hostage while someone else goes to work, there are moves for that.
I think of combat occurring in the system like a Mexican stand-off…everybody’s real tense and at the drop of a hat, it can go very badly…for either party. It can happen in an instance and it can be very violent. It’s a pretty close model to how a gunfight or a real fight occurs in “real life”.
Fights should occur to progress the story.
steven swezey Exactly! I’d say in a lot of situations the npcs have “1 hp” and are taken out of the equation with one successful attack mainly because the fiction dictates it. Also harm clocks could be established for major villains or npc’s if desired.