I was thinking about the phases you posted, and it reminded me of the ‘Burning Wheel’/'Burning Empires’/'Mouse Guard RPG’ combat systems. There is a first, ‘positioning’ phase, which essentially determines your ‘health track’ for the combat ahead. Next there comes a series of combat exchanges in simultanous volleys, and the thing is the player doesn’t know what the opponent is going to do next until the exchanges are revealed and resolved, simultanously.

I have experience only with MG, but I think something along those lines may be what you’re looking for…

Regards,

ZOOROOS

You should get your hands on the First Law stuff in non-kindle form. They’re good enough and definitely right in your wheelhouse.

Joe Abercrombie HIZZOWNSELF posted on his blog just last Wednesday about how he loves playing Dragon Age because it’s right up his gritty-brutal alley. He’s talking about the video game – but since Rob has been blooging a lot about Green Ronin’s upcoming tabletop version, wouldn’t it be cool if the Dragon Age rpg turned out to be the perfect vehicle for emulating Abercrombie-style brutality?

Just sayin’.

http://www.joeabercrombie.com/2009/12/dragon-age.html

But now that you mention it… I see an option there too.

Damn.

As a reader… I think I’ll give these books a miss. Rosemary Sutcliff did a fine reversal in Eagle of the Ninth and is far more my style. Kenneth Brannagh’s Henry V with the muck and grime did work for me. So did Parke Godwin’s Firelord. But, all of them have characters that are sympathetic (though I’m very mixed on Prince Hal) and that don’t have the world constantly kicking them yet again to remind them and the reader that life is not fair.

But, I’m an old fashioned Tolkien fan, so, of course, I would say that.

I totally want to play that game. Please feed me pain.

Negotiation has to go because it kills the surprise. Instead you need combatants to make *secret* Fallout-type rolls right quick at the end of a conflict and abide by them. (You roll your own fallout. Now you know if you’re maimed and living or maimed and dying.) As a first pass, every time your opponent wins an advantage die, it’s a Fallout die for you. So at the end of combat, both of you could be rolling Fallout.

UA could get there, but I think you can do it easier by tweaking In A Wicked Age. Add some FATE-style phased character generation, scale up the die size mechanics so that there’s more room for crunchy exhaustion/maiming/shaming, and maybe expanding the Owe List to define the particular stressful experience or consequence that the player is owed for…like Scars in DRYH.

Has anyone tried making a The First Law oracle?

Now, I’m no expert on either game, so perhaps I’m missing something.

It’s not perfect, but I feel that a lot of the moving parts of BW work really well towards a brutal game. Wounds don’t magically go away, Fight! combat is bloody and because you choose three actions at a time, you can really get messed up. Putting Superficial wounds on an opponent is quite debilitating, which lends itself to figuring out how to work things to your advantage. Especially within a fight, playing to your and your friends Beliefs and Traits help both mechanically (in terms of added dice and artha) and emotionally (because you’re hitting parts of the characters you know the players specifically said they care about).

*shrugs* But I’ve not read these books, so I don’t know if Burning Wheel is right for it. If I do ever read them though, I’ld like to try it out.

Noah

Is this Zargon or Ulu?

Oh, and I think the brutal game you’re looking for is called UNKNOWN ARMIES.

Like Runequest without magical healing however, this often results in a sensible avoidance of combat. We didn’t nickname the game “Limbquest,” for nothing. Which may not be in the spirit of the game you are trying to emulate.

[Although the game you are describing seems to follow the extended challenge rules for Heroquest/Hero Wars (although I haven't looked at the second edition yet), with the addendum that the winner also takes consequence from the lost AP. Mechanically speaking anyway; personally I found the Heroquest system too mechanically abstract to be satisfying.]

From what I’ve experienced with playing this type of brutality, the most important element has been player trust. Trust that people won’t think you’ve got an inner serial-killer in your soul. Trust that boundaries can be pushed but not shattered. Trust that everyone can pull back from the brutal when it is clear that someone is being taken too far beyond the comfort zone.

I have been incredibly brutal in playing the Naomi Bishop character in Lady Blackbird. I’ve gone places I could never have gone with most other groups. The other night Naomi beat the living daylights out of Kale Arkham (played by Daniel Perez) and everyone was all “wow, that scene went dark! but it was magnificent!” And I think I’ve just realized that really, all I was doing was allowing my character to be a Joe Abercrombie character. I was channeling Ferro and Daniel was being VERY Bayaz in his portrayal and I just went ahead and acted on it. Beat the manipulative prick to within an inch of his life, then walk away. Naomi will suffer consequences for it, I have no doubt. But it felt real, in much the same way that Abercrombie’s world feels real. And by the way, I’m firmly of the opinion that there are FAR worse consequences for a character than mere death. Death is easy and kinda undramatic compared to many of the things that the First Law characters went through, and the same has always been true of characters I’ve played.

Similar stuff has happened in our GenCon Star Wars sessions, and that’s PTA-driven. As Paul Tevis likes to say, “Every episode is Empire Strikes Back”. It gets pretty brutal. And I suspect before it is over, that’ll ramp up even further.

But all that is to say, for me, it is about who you’re playing with and how much trust permeates the room.

That way while a bar fight MIGHT be a threat, it isn’t necessarily a threat.

But, that potential breeds one of two responses in most gamers. Some gamers will become cavalier about death, and will refuse to become connected to their characters. Because those characters likely won’t be around long enough to actually accomplish anything. Others will become overly cautious, and will avoid combat, and by extension any risk, as much as possible. Craven cowards rarely make for good gritty fantasy.

What you need is a case where the players care about the characters enough to feel the impact of their deaths. But, also care enough about what the characters are trying to achieve that they are willing to risk death to get it. If you can nail that, then the rest is just a matter of setting the dials and flavor text. Unfortunately, all the system in the world can’t make players care.

(Though, in all fairness, the “generate the prequels” chargen method in SotC is definitely on the right track. You have some investment in both your own character and a couple of the others at the table before you actually start play.)

I might enjoy playing something like this.

And I wonder if the Beast Hunters system (with it’s back-and-forth of advantage before someone attempts to land a blow) would be a interesting starting point for creating something like this.