I have been chugging away at making my own fantasy ttrpg for several months now, and a decision I made early on has been bugging me as possibly being misguided.
I really want a fast combat system. However, there are two ways the interpret “fast” here. The one I committed to early on was to make each round one second long, so on your turn you only have time to either move or act or do nothing. This does mean each turn feels really fast, since the amount of choices you need to make each round are extremely small, and this also make spellcasting seem way more risky and expensive than it actually is since you need to commit multiple rounds to the casting. It feels fast, but combat can take hours.
The other option I did not pursue is to compress each scene into one big roll, creating a system similar to the Narrative Dice system of Genesys where you spend several minutes gathering a pool of dice which represent the chaos and misfortune of the scene, roll them once, augur the bones, and then combat is done. Usually the entire combat scene will take less than 5 minutes, but it’s a long 5 minutes filled with details, debate, and checking your work.
The reason I was attracted to the more granular first option was mainly because it’s ironically the less crunchy option, since your options each round are to either Move, Fight, Defend, Aim, or do a quick Skill Check. However, as the system is growing it’s becoming more clear to me that my game is fundamentally not about the fighting, its about the journey there and back to the community you call home. So, I’m starting to think I should have taken a more zoomed-out approach to combat, maybe starting with wargame rules and then working backwards to derive 1-person combat, maybe trying to make my own narrative dice system using the normal polyhedral dice.
In the end, my priority is to avoid what most DnD-likes end up doing, which is combat that feels slow and also takes hours, but I gotta go in one direction or other. I’m curious what y’all’s preferences are. When you are playing a TTRPG, would you rather play combat that feels fast but actually takes hours, or combat that feels slow but actually takes minutes? What’s more important to you?
I disagree. Apart from choice-paralysis (do I do nothing again or finally go now?), this approach can either be slow or fast.
If you slap into each action a bunch of modifiers, temporary modifiers, dice counting (large pools), reaction roll, detraction, comparison, etc that will in the end make that one game-second take ages in play time.
I did take that into account, and opted out of all of that. In the current draft, the only way to get temp. modifiers, reaction rolls, dice pools, etc. is to be a monk. Aiming also gives you a +1, but you can’t do it multiple turns in a row without a feat. So unless you’re a monk, you dont have many decisions to make. In theory this should make combat really fast.
This also means that since the monk class is the only class that is really tightly woven into the combat system, changing the combat system means having also also rewrite the monk class. Ugh.