In one round a lifetime

How many things can one do in a round, and how does it change the feel of the game?  I am playing OD&D this week, running through Thracia with the amazing d4 hp magic-user, and I love being able to attack twice from range (if I don’t move).   The OD&D rules for actions, fresh from wargaming, are odd and a touch fiddly.

If we look at the action economy of a few different games, trad games tend to have more actions per round, and OSR games have fewer actions (for B/X based games like Shadowdark, 1 action and 1 move).  I originally assumed this was a simplicity/aesthetic thing: OSR games made combat simpler so that less of the game was spent doing it.  Combat is a fail state, yadda yadda. 

By contrast, trad games have 2-3 actions (bonus actions, reactions, pre-actions, alteractions, underactions, etc) because acting more often is fun (for the individual) and “heroic” because one person can make a bigger difference!  Yawn.  Let me know when your turn is over and I will stop playing Candy Crush or something.

But this post over at Fail Forward made me realize that simpler combat had its origins in hireling and henchman play.  In B/X and OSE, unlike in Shadowdark, you are expected to hire help in the dungeon.   You are supposed to surround the monster and wail away on it as a crowd in D&D and AD&D 1e.  And if every PC and NPC with a sword has an action, bonus action, reaction, free action, etc. it gets unmanageable quickly.   Instead, each individual is simple to run (1 attack/spell, 1 move), and smart/rich/charming players manage multiple NPCs alongside their PC starting at level 2. 

So rather than see the old-school action economy as distinct from the trad action economy, it’s really the same.  Nimble gives each player three actions.  If a player has one henchman, Old School Essentials gives the player four actions!   Individually, each PC and NPC has a quick set of actions in OSR games, but collectively, I suspect turns in Nimble 2e are comparable in speed to those of an OSE PC with 1-4 henchmonkeys. 

Trad heroes are really two to four kobolds in a trenchcoat.

Where some games drag in terms of the combat action economy, I believe, is when the action choices are complicated.  D&D 5e has the worst of both worlds here, with a fragmented action economy that is hard to remember for both PCs and DMs: actions, attacking twice, bonus actions, reactions, opportunity attack, movements, free actions.  Players go down that list of action-boxes, ticking them off and often forgetting one each combat.  Similarly, DMs do the same for monsters, all the while trying to select from a menu of monster options a page or more in length.  It’s stressful, and increasingly slow as the number of choices balloons at higher levels and monster difficulties (parallel-processsing initiative can only do so much). 

This is why Nimble 2e combat works nimbly, I think, with:

•        three standard actions and freedom to choose from a simple menu of choices (it’s a lot simpler to count to three actions then go down a list of 6-7 action types). 
• radically simplified monsters, to B/X levels of complexity (every monster has only 1-3 special things it can do). 

Complicated action choices are not the only things that can slow down games, of course.  There’s a lot to be done, system-wise, in terms of speeding up action resolution (limiting which spells/powers require saving throws, making it easy to run the game without looking at hit-location or weapon-armor tables, simple spells that don’t need to be looked up, etc).  But simple action choices and simple monsters go a long way towards speeding up combat. 

What this means, I think, is that Shadowdark (and other OSR games without minion rules) are overly optimized for combat speed.  With 1 action and 1 move and no minions to slow things down, they are American pronghorns leaving wolves behind in their 55 mph dust.   We could restore a few interesting combat options and the game would still be quick enough, as long as we kept the options simple.

I personally want more options than the standard:  Move, then either Attack (sword or spell) or make something crazy up.  The last is good fun, and can be the best fun, but sometimes you want to just be defensive, or guard a friend, or heck, attack twice because you didn’t move this turn.  I want tactical choices, and while fast combat is great, I think Shadowdark has room for choices that don’t slow things down too much.

Which is why I am making a drop-in combat system for Shadowdark and other OSR games, once inspired by both Nimble 2e and Perils and Princesses.  The goal is something fast, easy to remember, and easy to run at any reasonable party size.  I have been playing it with my weekly group, and they like it very much.  Stay tuned, folks—it’s not a three-action economy, it’s neater than that imho.  If you are not familiar with Perils and Princesses, go check it out!  It’s a good teaser—and I will update this post once my system is out.

So, next time someone tells you that a PC in an OSR game can only have two actions per round, at most, and they have to be 1 action and 1 move, ask them—what about henchpeople?