Emulating movies and television

This "essay" doesn't have a strong conclusion. But it's been stewing for three weeks, and it's about time to throw it out on the blog and forget about it for awhile. It's keeping me from blogging about anything else because I feel like I have to "finish" this one before I talk about anything else.

If you've read my blog for very long, you probably know that I use movies and television as examples for how I want combat to flow in my games. I want my combats to look like those in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Die Hard, and all those cool movies starring Chow Yun Fat, Jet Li, Jackie Chan. So when I talk about the issues I'm having with trying to run a more freeform, fast-flowing combat, it's to this source… moving pictures… that I turn.

So, the other night, Karen and I were talking about combat, the "Buffy model," as I call it, and the "big fist-fight scene model," as I dubbed the point Karen brought up ("Can you tell, at any given point, who is winning the fist-fight?"). I want to talk about these a bit and compare it to the "hit point model." Maybe once I've set that ground work, I might be able to figure out a better direction to pursue the kind of combat I'm after.

It goes like this…

The Hit Point Model

The hero and the villain stand toe to toe and duke it out. The first one to run out of hit points loses. It's an over-simplification, but essentially what happens in many games… both the hero and the villain have a fixed resource representing their ability to stay in the fight, and it is reduced more or less linearly as the fight progresses.

The Hit Point Rule: Fights last until someone runs out of hit points, regardless of how excited or bored the players are.

Model analysis: Most of the time, you can, at any given point in the fight, look at the characters' abilities and their current hit points and know who is going to win. The story or cinematic influences don't matter, and "minor" fights can take too long proportional to the rest of the story.

The Buffy Model

Before Buffy (the Vampire Slayer, ya know?) can dust a vamp, she has to "soften him up." Knock him around until she can catch him off-guard and then stake him through the heart. But if you watch the show for awhile, it quickly becomes evident that the more vampire opponents Buffy has, the faster she can kill them. One vampire, a ten minute fight. Six vampires, a ten minute fight. (A generalization, but still a valid point.) Why is it that Buffy is a more capable warrior when fighting against a group than against a solo opponent?

The Buffy Rule: Fights last as long as the story says they need to last.

Buffy dusts the vamp (or vamps) when the story says it needs to happen… not because of her specific strengths, or the vampires' specific strengths. Usually, the more important the opponent, the longer they'll last, but that's still for story reasons. Nobody wants to see the main villain get dusted in a three-second match. Yet some moderately tough vamps have been dusted with a distracted, back-handed blow for comedic effect. This being a television show, the length of a fight is driven by cinematic and story needs.

Model analysis: You know Buffy is generally going to win because she's the heroine of the story. But most of the time, it's not immediately obvious that one or the other has the upper hand, or the upper hand passes back and forth, until Buffy suddenly ends the fight with the decisive blow. (Or, once in awhile, she loses but doesn't get killed.) Until that final blow, the whole fight could go either way. Story and cinematic influences are big players.

The Second-Wind Model (i.e. the big fist-fight model)

The big bad and the hero square off, and the punches, kicks, broken chairs and other implements of destruction start flying. At first, the villain gets the upper hand and starts beating the crap out of the hero. But at some point, usually just when we think the hero can't take any more, the hero gets his second wind and, usually without explaination, sometimes with a "magic potion," comes back for more and turns the tables on the villain. His blows become unstoppable, and the villain must fall under this sudden onslaught of newly-found strength and endurance.

They don't all go that way, but there is a general pattern. The villain gets the upper-hand and seems to be winning, and then the hero turns the tables, usually without any explaination as to why, and rallies for a win. Some anime follows this model… Team Big Robot fights as a group of individuals until they are nearly beaten, then they merge into SuperHyperSwordHaxorRobot and kick the villain's butt handily.

As in the Buffy model, the length of the fight is driven by cinematic and story needs. But in this case, the mode of the fight is to make the hero look like he's facing a real challenge, and give the viewer reason to doubt the hero's chance of success.

Model analysis: Here, it actually looks like the hero is going to lose. Nothing about the villain or hero indicates that the hero might suddenly find an untapped source of strength and turn the tables. When the tables are turned, it's usually obvious that the hero is winning, but it comes late in the fight.

A Gunfight Model?

I've been talking primarily of hand-to-hand combat, and find myself wondering if there's any kind of a "gunfight model" to be found in movies that can inform our situation. In Christopher Kubasik's [[http://www.rpg.net/oracle/essays/itoolkit1.html|"Interactive Toolkit"]] [1], he essentially argues that in reality, combatants are basically in one of three states… unhurt, inconsequentially wounded, or out of the fight. And he says fights should be dramatic because either combatant can deliver the final blow at any moment. And up to a point, I can kind of buy that.

But I do think that cinema tends to portray gunfights much the way Kubasik does… either the combatant hasn't been hit, has been minorly wounded with not-terribly-significant effects, or has taken a wound that takes them out of the fight. I think gunfights fit the Buffy model better than the Second-Wind model. (Although the protagonist might be hampered by a bullet wound, and later shrug it off.)

I'm going to lump gunfighting into the Buffy model. I think, for my purposes, they're effectively the same.

Observations

Now here's the deal. In all the cinematic models, a fight lasts as long as it needs to. It's almost a dumb thing to say, because that's the nature of cinema… scenes last as long as the writer or director feel that they should. But if we're to emulate the Buffy/gunfight model in a more traditional system, who wins becomes hard to judge at any given point in the fight.

And I don't think I want that in my game, exactly. If the combat really can go either way up until the deciding blow or bullet, then everything that preceded it… all the punching and throwing and smashing faces into brick walls… how did it matter to the outcome? And while it may be more "dramatic," I don't know many players who want to play in a game where death can come swiftly and suddenly, and they never got a chance to change tactics or retreat when things started "going badly"… because it never went badly until it was too late. Realistic, maybe, but not very popular from where I sit.

Now here's where my tinkering with non-simulationist, meta-world mechanics comes in… they do not correspond to anything actually in the game world, but provide a certain cinematic style by making the world work more like a movie.

My first thought is that the characters should have some meta-world resource that gets consumed as the combat progresses… basically, every thing I've worked on in this area ends up looking like D&D hit points. :) Except that "Cure Light Wounds" doesn't work on them… they don't represent any "in-world" feature of the character. They represent his position, ranking or somesuch within the story; the need for the combat to last as long as it needs to last, and no more.

So let's say it's as simple as a pool of points like hit points. Attacking and defending consume these points in some manner that allows for tactical use. Maybe they act mechanically as "ablative armor"… yeah, you "hit" mechanics wise, but these "hit points" turn it into a near-miss at the cost of losing some of the points.

Darn, it really starts to sound like the usual explanation of how D&D's hit points don't really represent the capacity for physical wounds. And maybe that works. It would be some real irony if I spend years trying to refine my style of play, just to settle for using traditional D&D hit points. :)

There's more to say here, but I'm going to call it quits for now and start fresh with another post later. Check out that second footnote for a hint about where the next post is going.

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Footnotes:

9 A series of articles published in Inphobia magazine ten years ago. It's a very, very interesting and inspiring article. Problem is, Kubasik tells us what to do, but he ultimately fails in telling us how to do it. The "how" is what I've been trying to figure out for, off and on, the past few years.