Hi folks! Just picked up Uncharted Worlds and I’m, by and large, absolutely loving it. Especially the character creation.
I am, however, bouncing off of how combats are resolved HARD.
My main PbtA experience is Dungeon World which resolves combats pretty quickly, but a) lays out more regimented guidelines as to what you can do in a fight (especially as far as resolving 7-9 results goes), and b) doesn’t resolve in a single roll. I found that combats in Dungeon World went by amazingly quickly, but because there was more than one roll involved there was an ebb and flow to the fights as people could react to what was happening to their companions, and I fear that single roll resolution might lose some of that.
Do any of the community have and similar feelings, counterpoints or suggestions?
Thanks in advance, and may the dice be ever in your favour!
I found this to have made the intent of the rules much clearer for me. Hope it helps!
youtube.com – Uncharted Worlds – Combat
That video above is a great explanation.
I find that it is important to realise that you will need to have a different approach towards combat in this game. I find that D&D combats cause the narrative to halt due to the lengthy encounters. Uncharted Worlds lets you keep the momentum.
For a bigger fight you can also split things into mini encounters. Take the escape from the Deathstar in StarWars: A New Hope. The heroes are running through a huge facility and have many brief encounters with stormtroopers. Since each run in with the enemies is resolved in a single roll, you can have huge sprawling and cinematic combats.
I also find it helpful to start describing the fight before rolling. Whether they succeed or not there are going to be people diving for cover, laser bolts piercing doors, and plasma explosions all about. I find that this helps establish the fiction clearly which helps with deciding on the resolution.
Remember that when you roll to Launch Assault / Open Fire, there is still a limit to what can be achieved. A scientist with a scalpal won’t be able to take on three ultramarines with a single roll – so the GM needs to tell them this. “You’re just a scientist. You could probably stab one in the throat, if you want, but it won’t go well for you with the other two… Maybe you can find some way to disable them for a second so you can flee?”
To add further: the fun and tension in single roll resolution is in building up a series of choices until they finally decide to roll. The GM should be telling them the consequences before every roll. If you do that, then X will happen. And if you do that, Y will happen. Eventually you’ll get to a point where they accept the risks, and you’ve built tension into the roll.
Seconding what Aaron is saying: combat rolls let you handle a single threat at a time. What constitutes one threat depends on the fiction, though: maybe this two man fireteam and that two man fireteam, and that commanding officer, and that sniper and their spotter are all different Threats.
This can be adjusted to suit your tone. If you’re playing something pulpy like Jupiter Ascending, a room full of grays may be one threat; in a Star Trek game, pretty much everyone with a phaser is their own unique threat and combat is to be avoided.
And this can be modulated further, if really necessary. If you really need your game to be about combat, then you could give enemies very low damage output across the board as a rule in the campaign, and treat them as individual threats and let your players fight their way through them with relatively little risk.
At its heart though, UW just isn’t a game about fighting. I’d say this is pretty honest, because most space opera isn’t about violence, despite the prevalence of a certain franchise. Violence happens, of course, but space opera is more sweeping than the nitty gritty of counting HP and making tactical moment to moment calls, all of which UW elides over. Combat is fast, whiz bang, and moves you through to the emotional, political, and physical consequences of your actions. What did you win, what did you lose, and how have things changed? Combat happens, but it’s an obstacle, and a risk, rather than the main attraction.
Alfred Rudzki oh man, I never considered the idea of lower damage output to make combat longer and more roll intensive. Give all your players some meshweave clothing for free, and boom.
Thanks for all the feedback, everyone! As it stands I think I’m going to rip the combat moves out of Apocalypse World 2e and use them, because they’re a) free and b) a little more defined, while still heavily focused on a minimal rolling, narrative first approach.
To put my thoughts in a little more context, the three IPs I’d want to use Uncharted Worlds for are Traveller, Starfinder or Star Wars. 🙂
I treat the “fast” combat in UW as an optional tool. Absolutely possible to “zoom in” on the action, and some players really enjoy that. And, like a movie, sometimes you want a drawn out fight scene and sometimes you don’t.
I get that Chris! =) I think just, as a GM and someone who likes but is still newish to PbtA I prefer some more hard written options for the moves. It helps me ensure I’m staying ‘on genre’ which is big for PbtA games as I understand them. So I get that with UW being a broader game the moves need to be broader, so I’m not saying “BAD FIX IT” just that it’s not quite to my taste. =P
Daniel Weichman fair enough! I guess I mostly wanted to reassure you that the game works fine even if you run combat in a more DungeonWorldy style.
Can someone explain how combat works in this scenario. The campaign is set in the ‘Dark Matter’ universe and the PC’s are playing a group of mercenaries. The mission involves them breaking into a compound to retrieve some stolen tech plans. Unfortunately one of the characters rolls a 5 at a most inopportune moment and alarms sound. This leads to a group of 8 guards charging out of a barracks towards the characters. All the characters are armed with automatic weapons. What happens now? Does just one of the characters engage the guards and hose them with automatic fire? Do all the characters roll for combat? The UW book implies that anyone rolling a 10+ kills, drives off or otherwise route their opponents. So who goes first in this combat instance if all 4 characters want to engage in a firefight with the guards?
Adrian Coombs-Hoar depends entirely on how much of a challenge you want it to present. Say they roll and mow down eight guards – cool, ok, they looked awesome and now they move on.
Or maybe three guards duck behind crates and five charge in. You give them a choice: assault the five in front or the three behind crates. Maybe they divide their forces and get two rolls out of it.
Or maybe you go hardercore and say “after he first few shots, you can see the ablative force shields they all have… You’re gonna have to concentrate fire and will only be able to take out one at a time”. Now they got eight rolls to get it of it with combat.
You can wing it however you want, but it’s best to think about how many rolls straight combat will produce.
Also: be aware that single roll combat resolution can make for a really engaging and fun game if you just trust it and let it happen. If the alarm is going off, they’re gonna get confronted by a few groups of guards on the way out, right?
As for who goes first… Ask them! “Which one of you would be most prepared or best positioned to open fire first?”
1) break the enemies down into Threats. Are all 8 assault weapon wielding enemies one threat? Or are they each individually a threat? Are they in paired off fire teams? Are they standing in the hallway like dummies? Are they using cover? Figure out all the fictional details to break down how many Threats there are. Maybe the 8 guys split off into pairs who alternate shooting at the PCs with reloading, or maybe four of them form a forward firing line while three of them hang back and pot shot stragglers, and one is the leader organizing them, or whatever. Figure this out, split them up into Threats.
2) acknowledge the fiction and determine what is going on. Were the PCs surprised? Are they off guard or unarmed? Does someone have cyberjacked reflexes and they’re super fast? Did the hacker know the guards were coming and warn everyone? Is your Hard Move making the enemies show up? Or show and attack? Follow your fiction, respect the reality of the game. Figure out the fiction to know what you need to do next: do the enemies have the upper hand and immediately attack and make a Hard Move, or do the PCs react and get to make moves.
3) every Threat not addressed acts freely. If the enemies are made up of four Threats, any not involved in a shootout act freely and you make a Hard Move with them. Maybe the PCs automatic weapons let them shoot all the NPCs… it depends: is this a narrow hall? A wide warehouse floor? What is going on, where are the enemies, what’s the scene? That tells you if automatic weapons are any good… are the PCs clustered? Are the NPCs clustered? This tells you who can be targeted by automatic weapons fire. So, generally, one PC targets a threat and those who target the same threat use the Aid move to help them. If PCs target multiple threats, then they each individually make the Assault move.
Thank you all for clearing this up, think I get it now 😊
This example does raise another interesting problem I’ve run across: how to handle more than two players trying to do the same thing at the same time? With two players, it usually makes sense to have one lead and one “get involved.” With more players, “get involved” doesn’t really work that well. I’ve tried. 🙂 The RAW don’t really cover this situation well.
There were a lot of good answers already, but sometimes you really just want to be able to make a “group roll” for one task everyone is involved in and get on with it. My own preferred approach in that situation is to just pick someone (doesn’t matter how if all else is equal, “whoever has the highest bonus” or “whoever needs a turn in the spotlight”) and have them roll, then make sure everyone gets a piece of narrating how the encounter went and how they epicly kicked butt.
Chris Wilson single roll combat assumes a drawn out fray, not a single action by a single character. Bill might be rolling, but he can suggest John is firing too, or similar, as part of the roll.
I wouldn’t say “I fire too” is Getting Involved. That’s just participating in the action. Getting Involved is more like “I shoot out the lights because Bill has night vision goggles and they don’t” or similar.
Sure. The key is probably making sure that players part of a group action feel like they’re in on the action, whether they’re rolling or not.