Dramatic Finishes Make Games Better

“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