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Dramatic Finishes Make Games Better
🕑 Added 2023-09-08 14:09:53 +0000 UTC“This is the kind of problem I was hoping we wouldn’t find.” Matt and I have been going over feedback from our contract testing team after their first go at the RPG. The team gave us some incredible feedback on everything from armor to Threat to Skills. But there’s one significant issue with the design that I want to talk to you about in this post. How do we end combat?
Hey everyone, it’s me, your James Introcaso. If you’ve been following the development of this game for some time, then you know one of the big thematic elements of the game that’s important to me is, “Heroes keep going.” Luke Skywalker doesn’t head to the tavern to take a breather after saving Princess Leia from the Death Star™ even though he just saw Darth Vader whack his mentor. Nope. The heroic farm boy loses the robe, puts on a flight suit, then uses the Force to ‘splode the empire’s favorite not-a-moon. Captain America doesn’t run and hide to take an 8-hour rest in a barricaded room with three other Avengers on a watch rotation after Thanos breaks his shield in half and takes all his friends out of commission. Steve Rogers straps that half-shield to his arm, grits his teeth, and stares down Thanos’s army, because he can do this all day.
We want to be able to tell the same heroic stories in our game. We want to encourage heroes to press on and fight until the job is done despite their wounds and weary souls. That's heroic fantasy. In order to encourage that kind of play, player characters generate heroic resources, like Focus and Ferocity, at the end of every round of combat and at the end of every Dramatic Scene in an adventure. These resources carry over from battle to battle and scene to scene. This rewards the players if they choose to keep going. If the heroes Rest (capital R), then they get all their Health back, but lose all their resources. Resting isn’t the only way to gain Health, heroic resources and items can also help, so you’re probably only going to Rest if you’re really desperate.
Time passing isn’t the same as Resting. The heroes can sleep or have a nice sitdown meal without losing their resources. Days can pass narratively without the players deciding to take a Rest. A true Rest is a longer period of recovery—at least 12 hours in game—and it’s time spent recuperating, binding wounds, and the like. The kind of resting you do when you’re sick or injured. According to our rules, Frodo doesn’t Rest when he’s catching a little bit of sleep between his steps in Mordor, but he does when he’s at Rivendell.
Building heroic resources encourages the heroes to keep going. In our tests so far, that works … too well it turns out. Some of you may have already figured it out, but if the heroes build heroic resources at the end of each round of combat, then they might look for ways to prolong combat. This is something I had already thought about before we gave the game to the contract testers. I thought the answer lies in Threat. At the end of the combat round, the Director gains Threat, a resource they can use to power up monster abilities, just like the players gain heroic resources. If you prolong combat, you’re also making the monsters you fight later stronger!
Turns out that’s not enough of a stick to discourage players from abusing the carrot. In fact, one of the groups I ran a test for last week pointed out that Threat wasn’t effective at building tension because the players had no idea at any point in the game how much Threat I had built up. That may be a resource the Director needs to build and spend in the open. We’ll see! This could be a good part of the solution.
Even so, Matt and I saw that multiple players tried to extend combat in tests. They wanted to find a weak, mindless enemy, like a rotting zombie minion, and keep that foe alive as they built up resources, spent them to heal, then regain what they’d spent. The zombie never really surrendered or gave up, it’s not aware enough to do such things.
Now, I know some of you are screaming at your screens, “But the Director has the power to put the kibosh on that!” They absolutely do, and to the credit of our testers, they did! But, it’s still a bad thing if our rewards are encouraging degenerate play. As people play the game more and more, they’ll learn to extend the game in subtle ways. “Oh, I’m the last to act this round? I won’t do Damage. That dragon looks like one more Attack could do her in, but I’ll use a Maneuver to Move and another to Assist the next person to Attack instead … No, it’s not just to get some more Clarity. It’s because my character would do that!” We want to avoid encouraging those arguments at the table.
So, Matt and I had a long conversation about what to do. We discussed all manner of solutions from small tweaks to overhauling the entire system. We didn’t want to go to an overhaul for a couple reasons. First, it would be a lot of work, so we want to make sure an overhaul is necessary before we dig in and do it. Second and more importantly, the testers had a lot of fun overall with the system. They said their players really enjoyed building resources and all the options and power they afforded. That’s good!
Ultimately, we decided that we needed to give the Director the tools to end combat when it became clear that the heroes were going to win the day, but the players also needed the ability to make some choices within that system. We need achievable objectives that end a combat encounter. This is actually something we’ve talked about before the contract testers got their hands on the game because no one likes sloggy combat. There comes a moment in many D&D encounters when it’s clear the heroes are going to win, but you’ve still got a couple hundred hit points to grind through. You know if the enemies run away, the heroes will spend round after round chasing them down, prolonging the fight, and that a surrender in the middle of a dungeon puts the players in an awkward logistical and moral situation. Maybe we could solve all these problems at the same time.
Well, Matt tried out a new solution during one of his tests, and it worked great. Once the heroes achieve an encounters objectives, the Director calls “Cut!” during a battle when it becomes clear the heroes will win the day. Then the Director gives the players a choice as to whether they defeat every last enemy narratively, but gain no extra resources while the Director gains some threat, or risk letting the enemies run away and perhaps returning as reinforcements in a future battle, but gain extra resources and the Director gains no Threat. The Director determines the end of combat, but how it plays out is up to the players.
This solution doesn’t need to be deployed in every encounter. During boss battles, when the heroes are likely going to not need their resources after, it’s fine to fight to the last point of Health. Many battles don’t include mindless enemies who can be so easily exploited or have foes too dangerous to try to leave alive to get a few extra Focus. Still other battles might have combat objectives that end them, such as “Kill the necromancer, and their undead army will fall” or “Grab the Orb of Creation, and the valok defending it will believe you are worthy of the treasure and lay down their arms.”
Anyway, I’ve already written up what this system would look like, and I thought I’d share it with you here.
End of Combat
While fights to the bitter end can be exciting with the starring villain of an adventure, many other encounters can become a slog if the heroes fight until every last enemy’s health is reduced to 0. Luckily, there comes a moment in many encounters where it becomes clear that the heroes are going to win the fight with minimal effort. To avoid the battle dragging on or the players extending the battle to gain more resources, the Director can call “Cut!” then let the players choose how the battle ends: with a Dramatic Finish or with a Retreat. The former is a safer choice that yields fewer rewards for the heroes, while the latter risks the enemies coming back, but yields the heroes greater resources.
Objectives: When to Call Cut
While planning a combat encounter, the Director can set one or more objectives the heroes can achieve for “Cut!” to be called. Some broad categories of objectives are described here, but the Director should feel free to create their own and call “Cut!” anytime it becomes clear that the heroes are going to win an encounter with minimal effort, even if they haven’t achieved all the objectives.
Diminish Numbers
Sometimes the heroes simply defeat enough of their enemies that the rest just don’t stand a chance. For instance, the Direct can decide that an encounter ends when the heroes have no non-minion enemies remaining, when the heroes outnumber their foes, or when the number of remaining enemies is half of what it was at the start of the encounter.
The Director can also use the following guideline to determine when it’s time to call, “Cut!” if one of the encounter’s objectives is for the heroes to diminish their foes. At end of a round of combat with no living solo or leader creatures, the Director should add up the levels of each enemy who opposes the heroes. Minions count as 1/6th their listed level for this purpose. Then the Director adds the levels of all the living heroes who aren’t Unstable together. If the combined level of the heroes is twice or more than that of their enemies, then the Director should call “Cut!”
Defeat Specific Foe
If a combat encounter includes one or more of the heroes’ enemies commanding the rest, such as a hobgoblin captain leading a group of mercenaries, or one or more particularly powerful foes among a group of weaker ones, like a pair of tusker demons in a gnoll war band, then the Director can call cut once those special creatures are defeated. These enemies are the stars of the encounter. If there are only weak foes left once these enemies are gone, the battle loses its challenge, and it’s time to wrap it up by calling “Cut!”
Get the Thing!
Classic heroic fantasy is full of important objects that the heroes must protect from the forces of evil: magic rings, royal birth certificates, dragon eggs, and the like. Heroes often find themselves at violent odds with their enemies as they race to collect such an item from a guarded temple or castle, or when the heroes need to steal the item from a group of enemies already in possession of it. Objectives in this category work well when paired with one from another. For instance, the heroes must get a ledger containing a record of criminal activity from an overmind and her lackeys, but the battle won’t be over until they also defeat the overmind because she won’t let the book go without a fight, but her lackeys might!
Destroy the Thing!
Combat doesn’t always have to be about destroying your enemies. Sometimes it’s about destroying their stuff! Burning a pirate captain’s vessel, closing a portal to the Abyssal Wasteland that lets in an army of demons, or shutting down a massive kobold trap made of spinning blades could so hamper the heroes’ foes that the battle is no longer worth fighting once the damage is done.
Save Another
You don’t earn the mantle of hero without saving a few lives. If the heroes rescue a powerful ally from the clutches of their foes during combat, the added strength of that ally might be enough to make the remainder of the encounter trivial. If the heroes save a griffon from a crew of poachers, the hunters become the … you know the rest.
Hold Them Off
Sometimes the heroes just need to buy some time. It might be that they need battle a conquering tyrant’s army to allow innocent villagers time to escape or that they need to hold off wave after wave of zombies while a group of priest completes a ritual to lay the dead to rest for good. To achieve this objective, the heroes need to stay alive and guard a particular position for a number of rounds determined by the Director.
Stop the Action
Sometimes combat is complicated by the fact that the heroes need to stop the villainous actions of their foes. It’s not just enough to defeat the warriors in a cult. The heroes must stop the zealots’ archdevil-summoning ritual! Or it might be that the heroes need to interrupt a wedding and make sure an evil mage doesn’t marry the heir to the throne. Despite combat, the mage forces the ceremony to continue! Objectives in this category could have a timer associated with them. If the heroes don’t achieve the objective in a certain number of rounds, the battle should change. For instance, if the cultists summon the archdevil, the heroes now have a different objective … defeat the devil!
Complete the Action
This is the opposite of the “Stop the Action” category. Instead of stopping an event, such as a ritual, the heroes must execute one. For instance, if the heroes are attempting to launch an airship while repelling a time raider boarding party, the encounter could be over the moment the heroes manage to activate the vessel and take off with just a few time raiders actually aboard.
Making Objectives Known
Encounters work best if the players have a good idea of what they are working towards. The Director doesn’t need to state objectives outright to the players at the start of the battle, but they can if they like. We understand that not all groups want to start combat with the Director saying, “Your objectives are to break the eldritch machine and destroy the vampire lord,” because it might take them out of the game’s narrative.
In many combat encounters, the objectives are obvious. For instance, in a battle against a necromancer controlling a horde of undead minions, the players probably don’t need to be told that defeating the necromancer ends the encounter because that is already the likely assumption. In an encounter against cultists performing a world-ending ritual, the heroes can guess that stopping the ritual is one of their objectives. In fact, they probably went on this adventure to specifically achieve that objective. They’re not there for karoke at the end of existence!
Not all objectives are so clear. In a battle against a goblin cursespitter, a kobold legionary, and three human knaves guarding the outside of a bandit fortress, it can be difficult to know what the exact objective of the encounter is beyond “defeat them all!” The objective could be to simply diminish the enemy forces, but it could also be that the cursespitter leads the group and defeating the goblin will cause the other forces to fall apart. In this case, it helps if the Director at least provides some hints at the start of the battle. The cursespitter could clearly issue orders and even call the other bandits “cowards,” demanding that they “not run away like last time!”
Dramatic Finish
If the heroes choose a Dramatic Finish, the Director assigns each hero one or more of their enemies then asks that hero’s player to describe how the hero dispatches the enemy. If there are more heroes than Director-controlled enemies, the Director can assign more than one hero to an enemy and ask their players how the characters work together to bring the enemy down. These are just descriptions of the heroes’ finishing moves. They don’t have to spend any heroic resources. After everyone gives a description, the battle ends.
When the players choose a Dramatic Finish, they kill or subdue every last enemy in the encounter, ensuring that all loose ends are tied. When combat ends this way, the Director gains extra Threat equal to what they gain at the end of a combat round.
Retreat
If the heroes choose a Retreat, then their foes flee in terror. The heroes let their foes run away as they catch their breaths. The Director should note each creature that fled. These escapees can cause trouble for the heroes by warning their allies that adventurers are afoot, preparing new defenses, or showing up as reinforcements in a future encounter. These creatures don’t have to appear later, but they could—that’s a gamble the heroes take if they let their foes flee.
When the players choose a Retreat, all undefeated enemies flee and live to fight another day (if they so choose). When combat ends this way, the heroes gain extra heroic resources equal to what they gain at the end of a combat round.
Narrative Trigger
The Director can also announce and narrate the end of combat by themselves when a specific objective in an encounter is achieved. For instance, if the heroes are battling a necromancer who controls a horde of undead, the undead might all crumble to dust when the necromancer is defeated. If the heroes are attempting to destroy an eldritch machine sapping the land of all its natural energy, the shockwave from the device’s destruction could vaporize the cultists attempting to protect it. The Director can pick a narrative trigger before an encounter begins or come up with one on the fly if it makes sense.
If combat ends this way in the middle of a round, the heroes each gain heroic resources and the Director gains Threat as if it were the end of the combat round.
Fight to the End
Sometimes it is dramatic for a fight to last until every villain or hero is dead. If this is the case, just play the combat out until everyone on one side is defeated or the heroes decide to flee. If combat ends this way in the middle of a round, the heroes each gain heroic resources and the Director gains Threat as if it were the end of the combat round.
1 Last Health
If the players like always duking it out to the end with Attacks instead of calling “Cut!” the Director can use this rule instead. When it’s clear the heroes are going to win a battle, their enemies are overcome with fear, despair, and panic. In this weakened state, each enemy’s Health drops to 1, and each minion has a Damage Threshold of 1. The heroes will now be able to make short work of the creatures, and still get the satisfaction of total annihilation.
That’s It for Now
That’s everything I have for you in this update! But we got a lot of tester notes to go through, so there is a lot more coming. If you want even more MCDM RPG content, come check out our Discord, where you sign up to be part of a playtest the next time we release a packet for our contractors or volunteer coordinators, and talk about the game with other MCDM Patrons.
—James
Comments
If you think of it as Cut Them Down vs Let Them Go, it becomes more clear how you're supposed to feel about each result.
Chad Desrosiers
What if there was some kind of test to influence the likelihood of the enemy becoming a problem down the road?
KingGurke
It seems a little counterintuitive to me, that "Retreat" is not the safer option of the two.
Roman Penna
I really do enjoy the idea of Cut - makes it very cinematic.
GubDM
I also don't love this solution, but I understand the decision. I prefer situations like in League of Legends where you have a limited time to use your power advantage (numbers advantage in this game) because as the match drags on longer, it becomes more and more of a coin flip. Death timers get longer, Gold differences matter less as people reach full build, etc. I would prefer to see something like the God of Chaos choosing a champion from among the surviving creatures and making them suddenly scary if the players take too long -- buuuuut that wouldn't be the most robust solution for every setting. Or even every combat in a setting it did make sense in.
GubDM
"karaoke at the end of existence" would be a great adventure name
MCDM Productions
Hey Matthew! Thanks for your enthusiasm here. The game is being built with the idea that a group is using a grid and miniatures for combat. Movement, ranges, and effects are described in the number of squares they use and positioning matters a lot. We'd rather commit to one thing and do it well than try to do two things only okay. Since this is an explicitly tactical game, so we're committed to the grid in our design because we think it's the best choice overall for the game. We know that's not for everyone, but so we want to be upfront with folks about what the game expects and not try to hide the design. I am sure some folks will run it without a grid, but that won't be part of our design. -James
Decoy
Fantastic!
Eirik Hem
Hi, I'm quite new here so I might have missed a bit of the previous design choices. Most of what I read about this game sounds fantastic and I can't wait to try it, but this mechanic does noe quite do it for me. It sounds unfullfilling for the players and the dm. The tiny anticlimax after the last foe goes down feels great. How about building up threat instead so the last few enemies can use it to hurt the players long term resources (like health insead of stamina), so the last two goblins are actually desperate, cornered and very dangerous. This could balance against how many resources the characters have buildt up, so if the battle is even and the characters are scraped for resources the two remaining goblins would not be that dangerous either. In a way it would make the last enemy a mini-boss even if they are just a goblin.
RGMD
Where do we sign up to get a playtest packet on the discord?
Robin Baggett
This is hugely inspiring. Upon first glance I was skeptical and thinking "well this feels like GM fiat" and "what about players who might feel robbed of not being able to play our their cool next turn?". But adding objectives to combat just completely elevates combat as a whole. "The duke's son has hired you to steal an artifact from his father's chambers. But don't kill anyone, I beg of you!". "You have to survive 5 rounds/waves if enemies and hold the line for reinforcements or the castle gates will be breached!". Adding objectives sounds super fun. Great examples provided.
Brandon Bates
This makes me think of the parts of warcraft 3 where the cool cut scene takes over after you finish all objects in the level. Awesome!
Arash - Game Narrative 101
I don't know what, if anything, this means but It's fascinating how even these early pieces of this development are making my current 5e campaign and games better, especially given that this game is not being made with any consideration given to 5e. I designed my players' next adventure with objectives at its heart before learning about this part of development, and now the design and adventure is so clear to me just because I'm looking at this through this system's design and... it just works! The system does a great job providing robust design that actually covers all types of objectives that evolve from storytelling naturally (at least all that I can think of). So stoked.
hadnerfaln
Sounds like this is definitely headed in the right direction. Calling "cut!" and divvying up the results sounds like an excellent tool. I do however wonder if the dramatic finisher/retreat choice has to be binary? I can definitely picture situations where my players would like to tie together one or two loose ends but don't mind others routing. If the reward system is based on how many creatures flee or die, couldn't the choice be more granular? (That might be a question for a later date, of course, once the main idea is sure to stick.)
Kuroshi
I love the way you are continuing to put good GMing principles into the rules of the game. I think it will really help new GMs as they learn.
Marc Schelske
A great and fun strategy to get rid of 5E combat slog. I love it and am looking forward to trying it out.
Michael Skelly
Requesting that some section of some adventure, or some interlude somewhere be officially named "Karaoke at the End of Existence."
Kwint
Hi, I love the way things are going and the refreshing ideas. Amazing job, MCDM ! For the greedy-players-trying-to-slow-fights problem : what about capping how much resources player can carry over a fight and increasing that threshold alongside their levels ?
NealSig
I believe in the last q and a livestream they mentioned there are certain titles you can get from coming back from the dead that mark you in some way. I could easily see there being similar titles for harrowing experiences that a hero survives.
Tony Sladky
I'm excited about how I envision this system naturally impacting Encounter design. And about how it might create interesting choices between "Slug it out with the monsters" or "Go for the noncombat objective" which is something that feels pretty lacking in D&D.
Temple Pate
I'm still curious to know if there's still a way to "kill" the player. Going back to the Captain America reference even he died in a heroic and awesome way, or perhaps a super dramatic way that also reminds the players that there can be consequences. Perhaps a permanent injury or something, or just an actual death. I do agree that too much of it can be bad but I think using it as a tool for inspiration and dramatization would be a neat thing to have in this system. (Apologies if I've just overlooked this discussion already) Secondly, can we have a post about people using this system in their own worlds? I'll be honest many DMs have said they won't be able to use this system in their worlds because it'll be too linked to Matt's, even though I've mentioned otherwise. It would be nice to have something to send to them and be like "look they mentioned here that it can be done!"
Gogo M
I think the problem is that then the players have no reason to choose Retreat! If Dramatic Finish kills everyone AND gives you resources, then it becomes the best choice in every situation. Narratively speaking, I guess you could say that the players used those resources they would have gotten killing the enemies, instead of letting them get away.
Gogo M
I think this is a good way to put written rules to what is ostensibly common sense. I already do something like this in my DnD 5e games ever since I started using minions in earnest. Being able to freely design fights with more enemies without slowing the game down (something that was basically not possible before minions, in my opinion) means that sometimes, the players will "complete" a fight before all the individual actions have been taken to mop up the field. I haven't done it in the other objective based ways described here, but those kind of situations just haven't come up as much. The extra scenarios here are honestly good little writing prompts for creating more dynamic encounters as well.
NealSig
I love objectives for combat. They can really make combat more dynamic. I am a bit confused about Dramatic Finish vs Retreat, though. It almost feels to me like the rewards should be reversed? If we've established in the fiction that doing things in combat builds up resources, then wouldn't dispatching all remaining foes reward the same? And likewise for the Director, if the foes retreat (and they can come back later), to me that seems like a more natural place to give Threat. Of course I am not a designer and am not suggesting changes, but I wanted to voice my bit of confusion with an otherwise great post.
Caleb Plehn
That "1 Last Health" solution is brilliant! I love having a small, simple alternative to appease certain player types that this approach would otherwise annoy. Being able to sometimes throw this option in is really neat. Nice job.
Matthew B
I love this. Gotta find a way to use this to in my current game. Still feeling tactical combat fatigue though so I hope the game isn't too hard to run off the grid.
MCDM Productions
Check out the #playtest_info channel for information on how to join the Playtest Pool. There are no tests at the moment, but there should be more soon! -James
Akri
This seems like a fantastic solution. And having the players choose between generating Threat or possibly having bad guys come back later (but getting their player resources) sounds like a really fun way for players to impact the game. I've lately been playing a system where the GM gets "Doom points" and it can be a lot of fun to strategize with the other players over whether to take options that help us but give the GM more doom. And I imagine as a Director it will be fun to hear "No don't do that! He has enough Threat already!" from a panicking player :D
Rhys Cottle-Vinson
Does anyone know where on the discord we can sign up as volunteer playtesters? These rules sound awesome, and I want to try them out with my table.
Richard Miller
I wonder if there is a circumstance where the players could call cut. I'm reminded of Harrison Ford pulling his pistol on the swordsman instead of the fighting out like the script called for. I also wonder if this might be an opportunity to build in the opposite condition--the Director call's Cut because the PCs are going to loose. Give them a similar choice Cut and Run or Get Captured.
David Russell
I really like how elegant this solution is for a party complex issue. I was wondering about resource buildup and this does seem like a great way to both prevent the players from being degenerate do to the rules encouraging it. And it can cut down on game time
