@Printdevil Poisons, door-forcings, and to a certain extent weapon durability.

But then the table could handle combat and was never allowed to so I think the approach to combat began to seep into the other sub-systems.

Why compare poison score to con when you can do con x 5% rolls with buffs.

@Printdevil @Taskerland The great thing about it compared with opposed rolls is that it's self-balancing. If I have 100% attack and you have 100% parry, we're just waiting for someone to fumble. If I have STR 20 and you have SIZ 20, it's the same 50-50 as if we were 3 vs 3.

@Printdevil Poisons, door-forcings, and to a certain extent weapon durability.

But then the table could handle combat and was never allowed to so I think the approach to combat began to seep into the other sub-systems.

Why compare poison score to con when you can do con x 5% rolls with buffs.

@Taskerland I think combat has always been very ill balanced in games, it should feel sudden and terrifying, a punctuation. Prolonged violence is a war or something. Games model everyday life as war with the environment which I find quite stressful, particularly as it's usually a war of attrition.

@Printdevil I've always been of the view that violence in games should be 'we followed him home and stabbed him when he came out of the toilet' rather than 'We lined up in an open-field and took turns hitting each other until one of us fell over'

@Taskerland I allow for military type arrangements in a military type game, but I think they are quite specific, and often emotionally exhausting games to GM. I would find a combat encounter lasting an entire session quite distressing, let alone two.

@Printdevil There's an OSR podcast where the GM is really quite good but they get to this point where there's a set-piece battle and you can feel him being crushed by the stress and cognitive load. I certainly couldn't run the two-session combats that people on here talk about

@Taskerland the combat set pieces in games always remind me of films from the past were there "had to be a car chase" or "there must be a comic relief sidekick" a set of rules some beardlord invented one day and everyone takes as gospel.

@Printdevil RPG combat is a very weird construct because it's not like film or book combat and certainly isn't like real-life fighting.

Pathfinder and games like that are a bit like anime or pokemon in that you are stood in a line and you have dozens of potential weapons you can use against your enemy but it isn't like silly martial-arts stuff because those fights are often really short 'I can tell from his toes that he is using a crab defence, so I shall deploy rising python'

@Taskerland That's why I think of it as a minigame. It's so divorced from the modelling-sim aspect of improv RPG play that it might as well be a match 3 game you do when the fighting starts.

@Printdevil The granularity of RPG combat compared to every other system is intensely weird