Why do fight scenes take four hours of real time with hundreds of rolls, endless accounting, and an overly anal obsession with detail… while seducing the barmaid is just one single roll?
Obviously, such rules were written by virgins.
But seriously…
I said at the beginning of this whole thing that HotB was designed to address what I felt was missing from the world’s most famous RPG. In most RPGs, fighting is obviously very important. After all, what takes up the bulk of nearly every rule book? Fight scenes. What takes the most amount of time? Fight scenes. What do adventures focus on? Fight scenes.
Nothing is more dangerous than putting life and limb on the line, and like that old Cerebus joke, there’s nothing that builds character more than CONFLICT!!!
But does a fuukin heeeuuuge combat system make fight scenes more important… or less important? Think about it.
In a way, presenting a fight scene as a rigorous, highly regimented, highly organized point-by-point, second-by-second exercise of tactics and strategy really doesn’t do fighting any kind of justice. The fact is that fights are messy, uncertain, brutal events. Not only that, but a fight is over before anyone anticipates. They don’t go on for hours and hours. Fights are decided in seconds, and usually, nobody involved “wins.”
Sun Tzu based his treatise on a single principle: defeat your enemy before it comes to blows. Walk into a fight with the absolute certainty that your enemy cannot win. He was successful because he knew that once the fight starts, all bets are off. If you get in a fight without a plan (and seven different contingencies for when, not if but when, your plan goes wrong), the cost of fighting will overwhelm the reward of victory.
Turning fight scenes into tick-tock excercises of hum drum mathematical equations doesn’t even approach the reality of a fight. Just like the barmaid, such systems look like they were written by people who have no clue what a real fight looks like. More importantly, what a real fight feels like.
I direct the reader to two movies. The first is David Fincher’s Se7en. Watch the chase scene in the second act when the two detectives race after a potential suspect in the movie’s brutal murders. The scene is dizzying, difficult to follow, and feels dangerous. This is deliberate. Fincher hated chase scenes where you always knew where everybody was, always had a clear field of vision and saw all the scenes from every point-of-view. And thus, the beautiful, lyrical mess of a chase scene.
The second film is Oldboy. There is a fight scene in that film that perfectly captures what I’m talking about. It feels like a fight should feel. Not a choreographed rhapsody of movement that feels like an opera, but a bloody and brutal battle. (Sorry for the illiteration.) And the protagonist’s weapon is a hammer. Just a hammer. I will say no more.
Clint Eastwood was asked about the realism of his films. He said he wasn’t interested in being realistic, but authentic. To make the viewer feel the truth of the piece. My goal with the fight scenes system in HotB isn’t to present a “realistic” combat system, but an authentic one. To make the players feel like they’re in a real fight. A dangerous situation that could take an unexpected turn any second.
This is the system I want. I’ll be working slowly toward it. Later on tonight, we’ll take the first step.