A Gentle Introduction to Roleplaying Games - Part 2

At some point, your player-character will find herself involved in combat — perhaps not willingly (ambush, brigands). When combat ensues, the old addage may well apply: "I'm don't start fights, but I definitely finish them."

Truth to tell, depending upon the chosen personality and predilections of your player-character, s/he may indeed start a lot of fights.

In a roleplaying game, fights may be mortal, i.e., to the death, or they may be broken up by bystanders or what passes for law enforcement (bar fights, etc.) Regardless of the type of fight in which you find your player-character, your objective is usually to win.

When it comes to physical combat, not all player-character (i.e., PCs for short) are created equal. In many roleplaying games (Dungeons & Dragons being the most widely known), your player-character will have a vocation. In many game systems, this is called your character's class.

In Scarlet Horizons, the author's self-created setting and rules system for fantasy and far-future roleplaying, there are quite a few of these classes. The best combatants are those PCs (i.e., player-characters) who concentrate of the Fighter class —and its subclasses. These characters tend to hit the hardest and most accurately in combat.

New players who've never played a tabletop RPG may want to take the Fighter class. It's tendencies and modus operandi are well-reflected in literature, television, and movies (The Count of Monte Christo, Vikings, Bruce Lee movies, Blackhawk Down, etc.)

The thing about combat is, your foe(s) is/are trying to hurt you without getting hurt in turn. So, combat is a dance of martial skill — feints, lunges, haymakers, thrusts, slashes all interspersed with ducking, dodging, blocking, evading.

In many roleplaying games combat is simulated using dice rolls. Because dice introduce randomness, they lend themselves to combat, in which there is rarely a 100% chance of landing a sword stroke — or avoiding one.

In Dungeons & Dragons, and in my own Scarlet Horizons system and setting — which uses Kevin Crawford's Scarlet Heroes as a starting point for its mechanics — a twenty-sided die is used to determine if a combatant's attack successfully hits its intended target.

I wrote yesterday about the ongoing adventures of Aury and Mattie in the Scarlet Horizons setting. I ran that battle with the hunting party of a dozen lizardmen. Jasyn the dungeoneer naturally gave a good accounting of himself. He is, after all, an expert whom the PCs are paying handsomely to guide them to the Barrowmaze and, once there, through it.

It really is robbery, what Brother Jasyn is charging the two Seekers — not the 3 chroma per day: his expertise is worth that. But seven additional chroma for any day on which he sustains injury, and another seven if he must engage in combat.

Still, if this dungeoneer proves equal to his reputation, he'll be well worth the expense. Brother Jasyn sucked up 60% of the experience gained from the lizardmen encounter, but this proportion will shift, because the Seekers will level up more quickly than he will. Besides, his presence prevented the Seekers from significantly more serious injury.

You could read about this particular encounter, but if you haven't been following the story, you'd likely be better off starting at the beginning.