Demon Crawl - Gothic, and Realtime Combat

I feel like the name Demon Crawl — Gothic does a good job of explaining the tone and style of the game, so I will instead focus on its inspirations. As a table-top strategy RPG, it was inspired in part by action games like Diablo and Doom.

If those sound like strange inspirations for an RPG, I understand the instinct. As I’ve explained before, being inspired by computer games is not exactly uncommon among RPGs, but the kind of inspiration that Demon Crawl has taken from Diablo and Doom is not exclusively their tone or setting. Instead, they’ve taken inspiration from the action-based nature of the games themselves.

Video games are obviously a different medium than tabletop, and by necessity, all TTRPGs are most likely some form of turn-based game. Each player has time to think and plan their move before locking in their strategy and rolling the dice. Not exactly shocking or surprising, is it? I mean, what would a real-time RPG even look like?

Well, it would look an awful lot like a LARP, and LARPs aren’t easy to pull off in your basement with just you and a couple of friends. Besides, most LARPs still tend to stop and start a bit when conflict comes into play.

Video Games have no such limitations. Real-time RPGs are quite common in the digital space, and it was only a matter of time before the lovers of Diablo, Star Ocean, and Vagrant Story tried to bring their passions back to the Tabletop.

While some might think of this as a heresy, I personally think there is a great opportunity here to answer a question that has long gone unaddressed.

Most RPG combat has a fairly common issue; what I will call the “not-my-turn” effect. As I said above, most action in RPGs is turn-based. Even exciting moments are really more suspenseful, centered on whether or not the dice will favor the party.

For rules-light or narrative games, turns can pass quickly; but for complex or detailed systems, turns can be complex affairs involving special rules, math, looking up tables and debating specific wording. A single player’s turn might take minutes before the dice are finally rolled and the results officially tabulated. Rulebooks are usually filled with quiet urgings for all players to know their characters and their abilities, and to consider their own turn early to keep a steady flow of gameplay.

There are some GMs who champion a “know your own character” rule, where it’s the player’s responsibility to keep track of and promote their abilities and assets. If the player doesn’t remember they get a bonus on a roll, they don’t get the bonus. If they don’t know the finer points of an ability then the ability doesn’t apply. If you cast a spell to do something that the spell can’t do, you wasted the spell. Have you been forgetting to add your backstab damage? Too bad, that damage is lost.

While that’s a little harsh, in my opinion, I understand the instinct. When it is “not-my-turn,” players find themselves with nothing to do except stare at their character sheet, twiddle their thumbs, and listen to the discussion of rules being had by other players. In a four-person party, there are three other characters and all the monsters who have to take turns in-between your own. That takes time.

How do you keep your players engaged when they have nothing immediately practical to do?

One solution I’ve seen is akin to speed-chess: giving characters a five second window in which to state their chosen action before their turn is “sacrificed” because they hesitated. An interesting idea, but also limiting: everyone is now chained to the tick of the clock. This biases successful combat in favor of quick thinkers rather than strategic thinkers. Thinking quickly and thinking deeply are different skills and require different levels of gameplay balance; and that’s even without asking the question “what happens if the GM hesitates?”

HackMaster is an RPG with combat that happens in a modified form of realtime, where every action you take costs a certain amount of seconds. As each second passes, anyone who is free to act can choose to take an action. Attacking could take five seconds. Jogging one space takes only one. Characters can run across the map while other characters are fighting or casting spells. It is, in brief, a kind of simultaneous-turn-based game. In many ways, it’s similar to Exalted’s tick system, only adding movement and a battlemap to the process.

Where HackMaster falls short in its proclivities towards realtime, in my opinion, is a complex combat system that still requires a lot of number crunching to resolve. There is definite excitement in running towards a cackling necromancer, hoping you can reach them with your axe before they get their spell off, but once the axe is swung, everything screeches to a halt while rules are judged and math is performed.

Couple this with its urging for the GM to cut off player’s turns if they think too long — a subjective measure at best — and we have a game that is, in my opinion, in a bit of a muddy middle ground.

Demon Crawl, on the other hand, has embraced an asymmetrical ethos and given the players a raft of actions and options that can be taken on the monster’s turn. Healing, attacking, moving, almost anything you can do on your turn can also be done on your opponents’; the difference being it costs Blood, a semi-limited resource. Dice rolls are simple and quick, and monsters are represented with real dice, representing their health and strength.

Everything is sped up. Attacks, movement, special abilities; combat is fast not only because everyone is always on guard for the chance to do something, but also because anything they do doesn’t take too long to resolve.

Some players are wincing already. People love Pathfinder for a reason, and simplistic combat or easy-to-learn rules are downsides for some. If you’re used to Germanic-strategy board games, playing a game with only five pages of instructions can feel patronizing.

I understand that. I love crunchy games too, and simple can sometimes mean inflexible. Fiction-first combat is a whole other monster, requiring everyone to constantly be involved in the narrative to ensure they properly fit their character into the action — but in a system-first game, if “attack” and “move” are your only options, the simplicity can certainly feel limiting.

Is there a space for realish-time combat in RPGs? I very much think so, and I think there are a plethora of ways to handle it. Just look at the myriad ways of handling initiative in turn-based combat; I have a hard time believing there are fewer effective ways of handling real-time. It’s just a question of how.