# You Don't Need a Feint Rule tags: #articles ![[you-dont-need-a-feint-rule (cover).png]] *Crossed swords icon © Lorc / game-icons.net (CC BY 3.0)* A conversation about advanced combat got long enough that it stopped being a reply and became an article. This is that article. What follows is the whole exchange, in order, from the seed on — [@vzenya](https://x.com/vzenya) wondering out loud whether advanced combat systems are an endangered species, me disagreeing that "advanced" even means anything, [@151Moo30018](https://x.com/151Moo30018) running interference from the Japanese side of the timeline, and the whole thing landing, in the end, on a feint mechanic that doesn't need to exist. Every post is here in full. The Japanese ones come with a translation, because I refuse to gatekeep behind a language. My actual answer about feints and fictive positioning is at the bottom, with the dice rolls that went with it, because those turned out to be part of the argument too. ## The Spark It starts with [@vzenya](https://x.com/vzenya), who, in the course of writing something else, stopped and asked the question the whole thread would orbit.  > "I was writing this and it made me think — are there really that many TRPGs with advanced combat systems these days? It depends on how high you set the bar for 'advanced,' but taking D&D 5th as your baseline, isn't that something of an endangered species?" ## The Survey I came in for round one with the obvious objection, which is that we're not even agreeing on what "advanced combat" means, and that if you go looking, the stuff is absolutely out there.  What are we defining as advanced combat systems? We have plenty of adventure wargames floating around, which have more focus on the wargame side than the RPG side of the experience, but we also have things which border the other way. - **Rangers of Shadow Deep** is fairly crunchy when you get down to it. - **[[Gubat Banwa]]** is deliberately inspired by **[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]]** 4E and deliberately crunchy combat mechanics. - **Draw Steel** is a deliberate move toward making **D&D** more tactical, though it's trying to make **D&D** 5E more tactical, which ends up just sort of moving back toward 4E, but with somewhat different mechanics. - **[[Twilight 2000]]** 2E is literally the epitome of an RPG with a deep tactical interest and approach given its post-apocalyptic military setting. - **[[ICON]]** is by the same guy that created **[[Lancer]]**, which is itself a very crunchy and tactical game. **ICON** is fantasy, **Lancer** is far future mecha combat. - **DAWN** is a game deliberately inspired by battle manga, anime, and tactical video games, which puts combat on a tight grid and carries its inspiration on its sleeve. Those are just things released in the last 5 years that I happen to have either in my collection or readily at hand. We're just scratching the surface of things that are actually out there, especially if we open it up to things that are also **D&D** adjacent, like **[[Pathfinder]]** and **Starfinder**. But there are things like **Beacon** from Pirate Gonzalez Games that were released in 2023, which is high fantasy turn-based grid tactics, or even the 2022-2023 rerelease of the **Rolemaster** Unified System from Iron Crown. Now, if we look at the things that are actively popular and discussed right now, either you're talking about **D&D** in the West or **[[Call of Cthulhu]]** in the East, and a whole lot of these games just aren't in the public consciousness, which is an absolute and utter shame, because even when I'm not in the mood for crunchy, high-detail combat, I like knowing that it's out there. My preference may be for the more abstracted, fiction and narrative-first game designs, but as I said, most of these are in my actual collection. You might need to start looking around a little more. ## Turn-Based Isn't Advanced [@151Moo30018](https://x.com/151Moo30018) pushed back on the term itself — if a system lets you act in parallel, calling turn-based "advanced" starts to fall apart, and he pointed at RuneQuest and Mythras as the places that thinking lives now.  > "Trying to argue that turn-based isn't 'advanced' because RuneQuest lets you act in parallel — like 'a barbarian flares at SR1, tries to swing at SR6, and gets his arm cut off at SR5' — what counts as advanced now might be Mythras, cycling through until you run out of action points." ## Complexity & Combat The whole exchange is about what we even mean by complexity, and it turned into one of those things where the example just kind of ran away from me — because man, I really love writing examples.  We're going to have to start being a little more precise in what we're talking about when it comes to complexity and combat systems. There are some games which started as ridiculously complex and then got pared down a little bit as they went, streamlined and smoothed out. There are others which started as ridiculously crunchy and complicated in their presentation and have been streamlined over multiple editions until they are much more direct and better flowing. **Mithras** is still turn-based. It just means that the turns are broken up into phases, and those phases are triggered when certain actions are taken, rather than when the intention is initiated. Though what you've described is really just turn-based with interruptible actions, which I'm trying to think of too many RPGs that don't have interruptible actions if they have timelines or sequences within which player actions are distributed. What do we say about systems which dispose of timelines altogether? What do we say about a combat system like **[[Ironsworn]]**, in which there is no established initiative in terms of turn order or sequence? Combat isn't initiated to knock down a target's HP until it hits zero. Instead, it's a greater context in which taking out an enemy might be part of achieving the goal that you set at the beginning, but it doesn't have to be. --- As an example, let's say that you are exploring a dungeon in **Ironsworn** (referred to as a delve in the text). You're generating the map as you go with the Delve the Depths move, so you turn up a barracks. Your exploration roll was bad, so you end up stumbling on a hostile denizen, one of the dungeon guards: an orc grunt. You ask the Oracle and the guard's not aware of you yet, but you're in danger. Now you need to decide what you want to do about it. If you have other people playing with you in a co-op or guided form, you all need to decide what you're going to be doing about it. Odds are good that you collectively decide that what you really want to do is get across the room without alerting the guard. You ask the Oracle and find out that the guard is not particularly attentive. Maybe he's taking a bit of a nap. Doing so sounds like a **Dangerous** scene — not too hard, but it could get messy. But **Ironsworn** doesn't run this as a turn-by-turn fight. It's a **scene challenge**: you name your objective, set the rank, and flip on a **four-segment countdown track** to hold the pressure. > [!abstract] **Begin the Scene** > - Objective: get the party across the barracks without alerting the guard. > - Rank: **Dangerous** — you're ready to act. > - Establish a **progress track** (dangerous: 2 per mark) and a **four-segment countdown track**. > - Take action with **Face Danger** or **Secure an Advantage**. Now everybody gets to act. It doesn't matter who goes first because the GM never rolls. Most of the time there is no GM. In most games, in fact. Let's say your party thief goes first and is helping lead everyone across because they're the sneakiest. He gestures to everyone to get down, stay down, and move quietly, and begins to lead them across the barracks, along the edge of the room. The fiction he describes triggers the **Face Danger** move as the in-scene action. The thief is sneaking around, so he's using **edge** to work out the results. > [!done] **Strong Hit** > - 💡 *choose by approach (+edge/+heart/+iron/+shadow/+wits)* > - 🎲 Action **6** Stat **+3** = **9** · Challenge **7** · **4** > - your action score beats both challenge dice. > - **Strong Hit (Scene Challenge):** you are successful and **mark progress**. > [!abstract] Scene Challenge — Progress & Countdown > - **Progress** ⬛️ ⬛️ ⬜️ ⬜️ (2/4) — *dangerous · 2 per mark* > - **Countdown** ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ (0/4) That's great. We have forward motion. The party is partway across the barracks, and the guard is none the wiser. Great. Now we just need to make it the rest of the way. We'll have the thief continue on since he's done pretty well so far. He's out there making hand gestures like a Special Forces soldier, doing his best to keep the usually quite loud and raucous party quiet enough to finish this sneak. Maybe he can, and maybe he can't. He makes it past the midpoint — and then, halfway, his luck runs out. A foot finds a loose plank, a buckle ticks against the stone, and the guard's slumbering attention starts to turn. The fiction triggers the **Face Danger** move again, still sneaking, still **+edge**. > [!fail] **Miss** > - 💡 *choose by approach (+edge/+heart/+iron/+shadow/+wits)* > - 🎲 Action **3** Stat **+3** = **6** · Challenge **8** · **10** > - your action score beats neither challenge die. > - **Miss (Scene Challenge):** you fail, or a momentary success is undermined by a dramatic turn of events. **Mark a countdown segment** and Pay the Price. > [!abstract] Scene Challenge — Progress & Countdown > - **Progress** ⬛️ ⬛️ ⬜️ ⬜️ (2/4) — *dangerous · 2 per mark* > - **Countdown** ⬛️ ⬜️ ⬜️ ⬜️ (1/4) · the miss > [!info] **Pay the Price** > - 🎲 **61** / 100 → **It is harmful.** The thief, doing his best under relatively trying circumstances, not because of the environment, but because of the rest of the party, works his way carefully across the rest of the room and finally makes it to the other side, only a closed door between him and everyone else, simply slipping through. But then the door sticks because of the humidity in the dungeon, and he has to wrestle with it a little more than he'd like, because once it pops open, it slams into the chest of the fighter who's standing just a little bit too close behind him. Nothing wakes up a guard like the sound of a door smacking into plate armor. This just went from a bit of casual sneaking to having to deal with a very startled guard. That four-segment clock just bought itself a serious problem. Things aren't completely off the rails quite yet, but now the guard is aware and startled. Since the party is on the other side of the room, let's ask the Oracle if the guard has figured out they're there yet. > [!abstract] Ask the Oracle (Likely) > - 🎲 **42** / 100 → **Yes** *(Likely: yes on 26+)* He's not just aware — he's figured it out. The party has gone from a clean sneak to a scene with a guard who knows exactly where they are. This changes the situation entirely. It's no longer a scene challenge. We've moved on into combat with the party versus a single guard. Now, I could run this as a complex co-op thing right off the top, but this is **Ironsworn**. I don't have to do that. I can just assume the rest of the party and use the thief's rolls to resolve the rest. Sequence doesn't matter after all, only the consumption of character resources. If this was a multiplayer game with a full party, there would still be no real initiative sequencing, but players would make a decision about whether they wanted to act or not based on the fiction and whether or not the character has resources (health/spirit/momentum) to be able to afford blowing a roll which might cost them. Since, however, we are here doing our thing and combat is about to start, let's figure out what our situation is. It's time to pull off the Enter the Fray move. A single guard versus a four-man party is really not much of a threat, so challenge rating troublesome. Then we roll to figure out who is in control of the situation. The thief has already had a **+3** in edge, so that can't be his shadow. Sensibly, it thus must be **+2**. The party, having startled the guard awake, starts dodging through the double layer bunk beds toward the guard who's trying to get himself together. > [!abstract] Guard — Progress Track (Troublesome) > - **⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜** (0/10) — *troublesome · 3 per mark* > [!warning] **Weak Hit** > - 💡 *+heart/+shadow/+wits* > - 🎲 Action **3** Stat **+2** = **5** · Challenge **1** · **10** > - your action score beats one challenge die — success with a cost. > - **Weak Hit:** choose one: > - Bolster your position: Take +2 momentum. > - Prepare to act: Take initiative. This is where **Ironsworn**'s particular language kicks in, because we are going to talk about initiative, but initiative really just defines your narrative position in the fiction, whether you're in control of the situation or being reactive. This does matter to a few moves that you might trigger, but that's all that matters to. It's not about who's moving before anyone else, because in **Ironsworn**, the NPCs don't move. They don't take actions. They only act in response to what the players do. Here we're going to sensibly prepare to act, which gives us initiative. The party spreads out, closing in on the hapless guard before he can really get a handle on the situation. The thief has leaped up on top of the beds and is jumping from one to another to get behind him while the fighter charges straight up the middle row into his face, and the wizard and the cleric split the difference, moving around to flank. We're in a pretty good situation here, so the thief takes an opportunity to throw a couple of daggers in mid-leap, upside down, at the guard's back as the fighter keeps him wide-eyed and terrified by a man in full plate stomping toward him at full speed. That's going to trigger a **Strike** with edge for our cheerful thief here. > [!warning] **Strike — Weak Hit** > - 💡 *+edge/+iron* > - 🎲 Action **5** Stat **+3** = **8** · Challenge **5** · **9** > - your action score beats one challenge die — success with a cost. > - **Weak Hit:** inflict your harm and lose initiative. > [!abstract] Guard — Progress Track (Troublesome) > - **⬛⬛⬛⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜** (3/10) — *troublesome · 3 per mark* The guard's leather hauberk is relatively unscathed by the thief's thrown daggers, but the fighter in his face is much harder to ignore. With a grunt, he gets to his feet and raises his mace, ready to go toe to toe with the big man. Who now has the initiative and is planning to lay the smackdown on a blond guy wearing plate armor? It's the guard. The wizard is not having any of this and decides to throw up a quick shield spell in front of the fighter as the mace comes crashing down. Technically, the thief isn't involved here, but since he is the controlling character, being the only player-driven one, we'll use his stats anyway because they reflect the inclination of the story in general. We've used one **+3** and one **+2**, so we'll use the other **+2** on wits and resolve this by triggering a **Clash** using **wits** to represent the wizard's intervention (non-standard — the move normally rolls +edge/+iron). > [!warning] **Clash — Weak Hit** > - 💡 *+wits (non-standard; the move normally rolls +edge/+iron)* > - 🎲 Action **5** Stat **+2** = **7** · Challenge **7** · **6** > - your action score beats one challenge die — success with a cost. > - **Weak Hit:** inflict your harm, but then Pay the Price. Your foe has initiative. > [!info] **Pay the Price** > - 🎲 **99** / 100 → **Roll twice more on this table. Both results occur.** > - 🎲 **87** → **It wastes resources.** > - 🎲 **76** → **It is stressful.** > [!abstract] Guard — Progress Track (Troublesome) > - **⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬜⬜⬜⬜** (6/10) — *troublesome · 3 per mark* The shield spell goes off and deflects the mace to the side, momentarily toppling the guard's center of mass out of an ideal position. The fighter lowers his shoulder and charges the guard, knocking him back and getting a little room while simultaneously putting him in a better position for the thief to follow up. The wizard, however, feels his stores of magical energy being depleted by wrestling with that much kinetic energy. There is also stress that resulted. So what we're going to do is **Endure Stress** twice, equal to the challenge rank of the guard, which is troublesome. > [!done] **Endure Stress — Strong Hit** > - 💡 *+heart/+spirit* > - 🎲 Action **6** Stat **+4** = **10** · Challenge **5** · **2** *(spirit 4 — after the first −1 stress)* > - your action score beats both challenge dice. > - **Strong Hit:** Choose one: > - Shake it off: If your spirit is greater than 0, suffer -1 momentum in exchange for +1 spirit. > - Embrace the darkness: Take +1 momentum. > - *Embrace the darkness — take **+1 momentum**.* > [!done] **Endure Stress — Strong Hit** > - 💡 *+heart/+spirit* > - 🎲 Action **5** Stat **+3** = **8** · Challenge **7** · **2** *(spirit 3 — after the second −1 stress)* > - your action score beats both challenge dice. > - **Strong Hit:** Choose one: > - Shake it off: If your spirit is greater than 0, suffer -1 momentum in exchange for +1 spirit. > - Embrace the darkness: Take +1 momentum. > - *Embrace the darkness — take **+1 momentum**.* > [!note] spirit & stress > - Entered at **5/5** spirit; the two Troublesome stress hits each cost −1 → spirit is now **3/5**. > - Rolls made at the reduced spirit (+**4**, then +**3**), per Endure Stress. > - **momentum:** in at **+2**; both Embrace the darkness (+1 each) → **+4**. The wizard is a true badass, reaching deep into his reserves and almost grinning at how much power he has left, even as it gets harder to draw from the well. Everyone is a little concerned about how much fight this guard is putting up against all four of them. Something's going on here. They're starting to get worried. That said, he's in a perfect spot for the thief to drop down on him and shove a couple of shivs right into the sides of his neck, beneath his ears. Or at least he would have been in a perfect position if the guard hadn't caught the motion out of the corner of his eye and started to turn to intercept him with a big mace swing. That triggers a **Clash**. > [!fail] **Clash — Miss** > - 💡 *+edge/+iron* > - 🎲 Action **2** Stat **+1** = **3** · Challenge **6** · **5** > - your action score beats neither challenge die. > - **Miss:** you are outmatched and must Pay the Price. Your foe has initiative. > [!info] **Pay the Price** > - 🎲 **79** / 100 → **A surprising development complicates your quest.** That's really not good, but we're going to need a little more information to figure out how this plays out. Let's ask the Oracle for an action and theme roll. > [!info] **Action** > - 🎲 **90** / 100 → **Reduce** > [!info] **Theme** > - 🎲 **16** / 100 → **Innocence** Bloody hell, the cleric recognizes the guard finally as he turns back toward him. He's a member of the town guard from a few villages back. He was a good guy. He has a family, and on the side of his neck he has the sigil of the Dark Army, burning and glowing. "Mind control," the cleric screams out. "Don't kill him." This just got a lot harder. To represent trying to take him without actually killing him, we're going to bump up the Challenge Rank of the encounter. > [!abstract] Guard — Progress Track (Dangerous) > - **⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬜⬜** (8/10) — *rank bumped to dangerous · 2 per mark going forward* The thief winces at needing to change to more non-lethal, or at least less lethal, means and leaps away as the guard finishes his swing, with less than an inch between the heavy iron head and the thief's only marginally less heavy head when the mace reverses to come down. The thief swings wide and darts through the double bunk to the left, hoping to get clear, turning to throw 2 more daggers, aiming for the guard's head with the intent of hitting with the blunt pommels. We'll see how that goes. > [!warning] **Clash — Weak Hit** > - 💡 *+edge/+iron* > - 🎲 Action **2** Stat **+3** = **5** · Challenge **5** · **3** > - your action score beats one challenge die — success with a cost. > - **Weak Hit:** inflict your harm, but then Pay the Price. Your foe has initiative. > [!info] **Pay the Price** > - 🎲 **90** / 100 → **It wastes resources.** > [!abstract] Guard — Progress Track (Dangerous) > - **⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬜⬜** (8/10) — *dangerous · 2 per mark* The two pommels crack against his skull and rock him back a step — that's the guard now at **8/10** — but the daggers are gone and the throw left the thief exposed for that next swing. The guard, still locked on, keeps the initiative. We'll reduce supply by one to represent how quickly the thief is going through his useful tools. We've made some progress, to be sure, but it's far from over. > [!note] supply > - **5 → 4** — Pay the Price (wastes resources): the thief's tools are running low. The party knows they need to get this over with as soon as they can, but the guard is being remarkably resilient, and they really don't want to kill him. The thief backs off, flipping back to the top of one of the bunks further away, just as the guard begins reaching for his horn, as if all this noise probably didn't attract the attention of anybody within 4 or 5 rooms, perhaps even the entire wing. We're going to risk it all to trigger Turn the Tide on the next Clash. The thief is going to toss 2 more daggers from his dwindling supply to try and knock out the guard, while the fighter leaps forward and tries to get his arm around his neck to choke him out, and the cleric prepares to drop healing, though it's not exactly sure on whom yet. > [!quote] **Turn the Tide** > - 📜 *Once per fight, when you risk it all, you may steal initiative from your foe to make a move (not a progress move). When you do, add +1 and take +1 momentum on a hit. If you fail to score a hit on that move, you must suffer a dire outcome. Pay the Price.* > [!warning] **Clash — Weak Hit** *(Turn the Tide +1)* > - 💡 *+edge/+iron* > - 🎲 Action **2** Stat **+3** Adds **+1** = **6** · Challenge **3** · **9** > - your action score beats one challenge die — success with a cost. > - **Weak Hit:** inflict your harm, but then Pay the Price. Your foe has initiative. > [!abstract] Guard — Progress Track (Dangerous) > - **⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛** (10/10) — *dangerous · 2 per mark — track full* > [!info] **Pay the Price** > - 🎲 **15** / 100 → **You are separated from something or someone.** The cleric's face says it all as she sees the fighter going for the guard's neck. Eyes huge, mouth round in a loud no. There's a flash of light, and the thief watches as the fighter flies backwards several feet to sprawl across the floor, unconscious for the moment. The guard lowers his head just as the pommels of the daggers strike him above each temple, causing his eyes to roll back in his head. That's a good time to end the fight. By that I mean trigger the **End the Fight** move. > [!warning] **End the Fight — Weak Hit** > - 🎲 Progress **10** · Challenge **5** · **10** > - your action score beats one challenge die — success with a cost. > - **Weak Hit:** this foe is no longer in the fight (out of action — non-lethal, as intended), but you must choose one: > - It's worse than you thought: Endure Harm. > - You are overcome: Endure Stress. > - Your victory is short-lived: A new danger or foe appears, or an existing danger worsens. > - **You suffer collateral damage: Something of value is lost or broken, or someone important must pay the cost.** > - You'll pay for it: An objective falls out of reach. > - Others won't forget: You are marked for vengeance. > - *(progress roll — momentum cannot be burned)* **Collateral damage.** The guard is down — out cold, not dead. But in that last flare of the mark as it leaves him, the sigil brands itself like an infection on the one who touched it — the fighter, flung unconscious across the floor. The same burning Dark Army sigil that marked the guard now glows on the fighter's neck. Whether it means he's mind-controlled now, none of them can say — and that's a victory that's just handed them a question nobody wants to answer. (Why, yes, I do have automated systems that let me generate this stuff on the fly and insert it in a formatted way.) --- Is this an advanced combat system? It doesn't have traditional sequencing in the sense that there are numbers attached to action links and static response times, but it does allow for advanced interleaving of character actions, whether playing solo or multiplayer. It also puts the fiction forward and makes that carry a lot of the mechanical impact. Personally, I consider **Ironsworn** a mid-crunch set of mechanics. Certainly not incredibly crunchy, but not nearly as straightforward and minimalist as **[[Loner]]**. I hope you'll excuse the fact that I put it in an extended example because, man, I really love writing examples. It's one of my favorite things in the world. ## S&V's Abstraction [@151Moo30018](https://x.com/151Moo30018) took the Ironsworn beat and steered it toward a system with a lighter footprint — noting that the whole "whoever holds the initiative acts, the enemy only reacts" abstraction is exactly what **[[Scum and Villainy]]** already does.  > "The abstraction where whoever gets the initiative acts and the enemy only reacts really is similar to Scum & Villainy. The original 'advanced combat' seems to need the element of managing position and distance with maps. Mythras can use maps and is still turn-based, and RuneQuest's multiple-simultaneous-parallel combat is an unresolved idea. Maybe simultaneous declaration, Diplomacy-style, is the remaining frontier." ## We've Done It Which is where I got to dust off the part of the shelf I enjoy the most. If you want simultaneous, programmed, matrix-resolved combat, the genre has been chewing on it since before most of us were born.  Yes, it does have some similarities to **Scum and Villainy**. S&V is a descendant of **[[Blades in the Dark]]**, as is **Ironsworn** through a different branch. They are siblings after a fashion. Do we really need to have specific map manifestations in order to have advanced combat? That is, I understand that detail suggests advancement, but detail can be communicated in different ways. For instance, there's the way that **[[Fate Core System|FATE]]** has characters able to affect the tags on environments and the environments affecting tags on characters, which can lead to some very interesting but spatially abstract things, making the interplay more complicated. I think what I'm getting at here is that "advanced" implies something is at a higher level or over things that are less advanced, which means that it's probably not the right term to use here. It doesn't really have meaning in context when you look at the broader spectrum of game designs. I would say that the multi-simultaneous parallel combat of **[[RuneQuest]]** is not just a resolved idea, it's been resolved in about a thousand different ways, each of which serves a purpose to the game that uses it. No more or no less. But if you want simultaneous declarations, we certainly have RPGs that have done that for quite a long time too. **[[the Burning Wheel]]** came out in 2002, a solid 24 years ago, and its Fight! subsystem is a pretty heavy example of programmed combat. Players write down what their next three action selections are, and then everybody reveals their action sets simultaneously. The mechanics decide who goes when, interrupts what, or goes simultaneous with something else. It's chunky, a bit over-designed, but it is simultaneous action selection. If you want to see a streamlined version of it, you can check out **Torchbearer**. Want something a little more complicated but actively avoids maps? You can always check out **Spellbound Kingdom**, which basically has you put a token representing your current maneuver on a sheet and secretly choose your next maneuver from the ones that are connected. Everybody reveals their choice simultaneously, then you resolve things through the mechanics. I think it's a little bit clunky myself, but it definitely does the job. (Man, did that really come out in 2009? It feels like forever.) **The One-Roll Engine** used in **Godlike** and **Wild Talents**. A whole combat round is done with one simultaneous action reveal. Then everybody rolls at the same time and you figure out when your actions occurred by looking for match sets of results in the dice. Want something released this year? **Sealed Stories**, which I have not picked up because it doesn't actually fit my collection in terms of structure and theme, uses simultaneous revelation during combat. The game is intentionally focused on tactical combat, so it'll be happening a lot. Frankly, I think it's a bit overproduced, but it does have an interesting setup from a mechanical point of view. But if you really want to go back to the progenitor, we need to roll back to 1975 for **En Garde!**, which was one of the incredible games published by GDW back in the day. It's got programmed sequences of maneuvers, simultaneous resolution. The moves cross-reference one another on a big matrix table in order to resolve which one takes priority and what the outcome is. Plus, you've got to manage your endurance and plan for your opponent's positioning. So what I'm saying is we've done it. The frontier has been explored, exploited, and multiply manifested for over 50 years. Simultaneous parallel combat is not just resolved, but it's been fertile ground that has been trod many times and raised many crops. If you want to understand game design and why things are as they are, you have to understand what has been and how these things have existed up until now. Don't get me started chasing down the "emotional passions as resources" mechanic, because that has a fairly long and established history within game mechanics as well. I could probably chase the inspirations back before **[[Pendragon]]**, which is the system that most people think of when they go looking for the origin of character emotional states being made something that is noted mechanically directly on the character sheet. There's a long history. ## Turn-Based Is Still the Mainstream [@151Moo30018](https://x.com/151Moo30018) came back with the nice observation that, from where he's standing, the rest of the world's turn-based orthodoxy is mostly a Japan thing, and that overseas exploration of combat systems is a luxury not everyone has.  > "I envy the exploration of multifaceted overseas TRPG combat systems. 13th Age 2e's descriptions are increasingly getting by without maps. The similarity between Swirling Melee and SW2.5's melee zones is interesting. Burning Wheel's Fight! 🫣 ... En Garde!, which even has a Japanese translation, is the coordinate axis of combat-system classification. Turn-based is still very much the mainstream in Japan. Passions only entered the RQ line from RQ6 on." ## It's All Turn-Based Really Which prompted one of my favorite bits of pedantry — the reminder that it's all turn-based, because there's no such thing as real time in an RPG, and the interesting part is how a game plays with the fiction that pretends otherwise.  Technically, all of these are turn-based games. After all, there is no such thing as real time when it comes to RPGs. That may be the one thing that hasn't been particularly explored. I'm sure somebody has done something with real-time action, but that is a process problem. The closest thing I can think of off the top of my head is the way that **[[ShadowDark]]** ties torch time to actual real time. A torch lasts a gameplay hour, not an in-game hour. When I want to play something that is more map focused, I am more likely to reach for what is currently classified as an adventure wargame, like **[[Five Leagues from the Borderlands]]**, which integrates a dynamic campaign generation system with a tactical miniatures experience. Interestingly, a simplified initiative system because a player is expected to be running multiple characters at the same time. ## Strike Ranks & GURPS [@151Moo30018](https://x.com/151Moo30018) brought it back to the practical: if you try to weld time, position, and action order into one system, you don't get some bright new frontier — you get something that looks a lot like **[[GURPS]]** at one-second resolution.  > "Strike Ranks worked as a turn-based alternative, but once you try to unify time, position, and action order in one system, you end up approaching GURPS's one-second turn-based, like RQ3's Monster Coliseum. Another possibility is Burning Wheel's Fight! — and with QuestWorlds, fans could even define action-compatibility tables through genre packs." ## Keep It Snappy And this is where the thread finally turned back to the point I'd actually been circling the whole time: none of this complexity is where the player decisions live. Initiative is the boring part. The game should be about what you do, not how you sequence it.  At a certain point, and in my opinion that point is awfully early, it becomes counterproductive to start trying to manage the sequence of actions into double entry bookkeeping. In fact, the faster, easier, and lighter weight it is, the more it actually seems to work better. Remember, players really don't have much input into initiative. This is not something that leads to choices on their part. Sequencing is boring from a decision-making point of view. When you start layering more and more complexity on it, like a sliding window and variable length actions and that whole rigmarole, it stops being a game about the decisions that you're making in play and starts being a game about playing with initiative sequences, which would be fine if that's the intent, if you want your game to be all about juggling initiative. But you're going to have to make the trade-offs elsewhere, and it's not really what people want. Keep it fast, keep it snappy, keep the focus on the decisions that players get to make in the moment, and move on. That's actually one of the things I really love about the **Powered by the Apocalypse**/**Forged in the Dark** style: "The players are the only ones that roll the dice" kind of play. The world reacts to their actions and sometimes takes the lead in terms of narrative, but there's really no pressure beyond managing your resources that distracts from deciding on what you're going to do. What you're going to do impacts what happens next, of everything, not just yourself. Initiative in the 5X games from Ivan Sorensen are almost as snappy. At the beginning of a round, you roll the dice, one d6 for each character, and if they roll under their speed, they move before the other force, and if they roll over their speed, they move after the other force. That's it. That's the whole initiative system. Then you pick which one you want to go when. Getting fiddly with it is just a distraction from really playing the game. There's probably a good argument to say that getting fiddly with any mechanic is just a distraction from the actual part of playing the game that people want to do, which is make decisions about how to change the world. ## The Feint Question And then [@151Moo30018](https://x.com/151Moo30018) aimed it dead at the thing this whole article is named for. If real tactics are about maneuvering and feinting to create a local advantage, then shouldn't a game give you a rule for that? My answer, after all this walking: you already have one, and you've had it the whole time.  > "If advanced combat means real tactics, doesn't that require maneuvering and feinting to create a local advantage? With S&V, would you split the clock? If it's non-turn-based, maybe Crossfire (or Infinity?) fits. For QuestWorlds, a Diplomacy-style approach sounds interesting. I'd also like a feint rule that forces a reaction from the enemy." Here's really the problem for introducing anything "realistic": Most people have no idea what realistic looks like. In fact, if you show them realistic things, they will find that they are quite boring and non-interactive, because in general, that's kind of how life works out at an individual level. Realism is not the end-all and be-all. There's another word that I'm not sure will translate into Japanese as readily as I would like: verisimilitude. That is the quality of something being believable as opposed to being real. What people can believe is real is very different from what is actually real. Which brings us back around to tabletop RPGs because you have a third question to bring up in this context: is what we're doing more work than we have to, mechanically? In **Scum and Villainy**, it doesn't actually require doing anything different mechanically, because maneuvers and feints would be just changing the fictive positioning. Changing the fictive positioning can have multiple kinds of effects, but the primary one isn't directly mechanical in the sense that it introduces a new element at all. It simply changes the position and effect for the action chosen. So let's look at an example. Your crew is outnumbered and surrounded by another crew, after you broke into their ship, stole some rather valuable data, and got out in a previous mission. They've caught you on a space station some time later and are looking to take a little retribution out of your hide. Now your character could wade straight in and start getting all fist-centric. Certainly an option, but you're going to be outnumbered and surrounded, which means that your position is desperate and your effect is going to be limited no matter what happens. That seems to be a bad situation, and you'd like to turn things to your advantage. You know that the local authorities aren't looking for that opposing crew, but they don't know that the local authorities aren't looking for them. So you decide the best thing you can do is make them uneasy. You step up, smile broadly, and say, "I'm glad to see all of you fine gentlemen here today. The station cops are closing in on our position right now. They know what you've got on your ship. They know because we told them. I believe in honor between thieves, so I'm going to give you a little bit of a heads up so that you can start running." Is any of this true? No, but you're pretty good at lying. This is mechanically a sway action. It looks like it's pretty desperate, which is fine. It's not any worse than you were going to be, but the potential outcome very well could be great. You shake those guys pretty well and they'll be looking over their shoulder expecting the cops to come in at any moment, because they do in fact have something they'd rather not have the authorities know about on their ship. That could completely derail having to go do a scrap and straight-up fight next, or reduce your position for that scrap from desperate to merely risky. You don't need specific mechanics intended to directly model maneuvers and feints. You just need to have impact in the mechanics you already have. Those mechanics can be extremely lightweight for a good interpretive effect. It's also possible that you deliberately invoked the authorities on the station, knowing that they run constant surveillance on the audio system, and you are in an area where that surveillance is occurring. That might literally trigger setting a clock for "the authorities show up," meaning that your desperate scrap remains desperate, but all you have to do is run out the clock before the cops show up. It's all a matter of interpretation, what your expressed intent is, and working with the MC to figure out what the repercussions are. If you really wanted to make sure that the authorities were surveilling the area in S and V, you could spend a couple of stress, have a flashback, and literally be talking to the cops about having some audio monitoring exactly where you're standing because you expected the other crew to come after you and you wanted to lure them into a trap. This is an advanced maneuver. But it is completely satisfying. You can also use more short-term flashback stress spins to do things like see that someone has a weak knee and make a strike directly for it, or notice that some of the muscle is not really wanting to take this fight, and so they're less motivated. All sorts of fun can come up without having direct mechanical specifications for it. You can, of course, do something similar in the slightly crunchier **Ironsworn** mechanics, particularly making use of the Face Danger and Secure an Advantage moves. Let's assume that you're in exactly the same situation, but you're playing **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]** (which uses the **Ironsworn** mechanics). Again, you're facing the crew of a ship that you may have ripped off a couple of weeks ago. You're surrounded, and things are not looking great. Sadly, we don't have the flashback mechanics because that would make things extremely simple here — or do we? Face Danger doesn't say that we absolutely have to stick to narrative linearity here. We could use it to implement the equivalent of a flashback mechanic. Likewise for Secure an Advantage. That would be a pure question of interpretation. But for the moment, let's play by the most obvious interpretation of the rules and say we can't just flash back to having made an arrangement with the local authorities. We can still lie about it, and to do that, we just make a Compel. Same monologue as earlier, actually. Exact same phrasing. But what happens next? We make a Compel. Compel — Shadow +3. > [!warning] **Weak Hit** > - 💡 *+heart/+iron/+shadow* > - 🎲 Action **3** Stat **+3** = **6** · Challenge **2** · **6** > - your action score beats one challenge die — success with a cost. > - **Weak Hit:** They'll do what you want or agree to your conditions, but their agreement comes with a demand or complication. Envision their counteroffer and take +1 momentum. You shake them — that part lands. The captain's jaw tightens, and a couple of the muscle start eyeing the blast doors. But they're not buying it clean. "Cops, huh." The captain doesn't move, doesn't look away. "Funny. Then our little stolen drive isn't the only thing the station's about to hear about, is it?" They nod at your docked ship. "You get a head start. We get the name of who put you up to the first job." A demand, a complication. You take +1 momentum. We managed to talk our way out of the problem, but now we have a different problem. We're not going to get our asses kicked, but we do have something we have to decide about. Give up a confidential contact and get to run away, or stand fast and take the fight, or come up with some other clever maneuver. Maybe we decide that lying about who it was isn't going to get us out of this anytime soon, and instead we attempt to secure an advantage by spreading out just enough that maybe we can take on only a few at a time. Doing so would trigger secure an advantage again with Shadow, because we're trying to be sneaky here. Secure an Advantage, Shadow +3. > [!fail] **Miss** > - 💡 *choose by approach (+edge/+heart/+iron/+shadow/+wits)* > - 🎲 Action **1** Stat **+3** = **4** · Challenge **7** · **10** > - your action score beats neither challenge die. > - **Miss:** You fail or your assumptions betray you. *Pay the Price*. You start to drift, to spread the field so you can take them a few at a time — and you fuck up. They notice what you're doing before you've got the room to do it. **Pay the Price.** > [!info] **Pay the Price** > - 🎲 **91** / 100 → **You are delayed or put at a disadvantage** Well, that didn't work. They've twigged. That's going to lead straight into Enter the Fray, but because of that grade-A fuck up, we're just going to state that it's impossible for us to end up in control. No matter what we roll, we're going to be in a bad spot. Those guys are going to have the advantage, and we're going to have to fight out the hard way against a dangerous challenge-rank foe. None of these things need hard and fast rules that specifically say they're for feints or maneuvers or anything. All you really have to do is think of the fiction as the fiction. Look at the world, see how you're affecting it, and notice how things are going. Hell, we can do it with even lighter mechanics. Let me pull out the **Loner** tools and rewind time to just after the opposing crew has rolled up on us. For the sake of this discussion, we're going to assume that we have a "fast-talk" tag as well as "knows about their last cargo." On their side, we're just going to give them "lots of guys." We're going to start right at lying to their face about what's going on, because that's a great thing to resolve. Their trait of having a lot of guys actually gives them an advantage here. Somebody might twig to our lying. We have advantages because of our fast talk and "knows about their last cargo". There's only so much advantage you can have, so we come out on top. Oracle check, advantage. > [!success] **Yes** > - *Question:* Do they buy the lie about the station cops closing in? > - 🎲 Chance **4** · Risk **3** · *(advantage)* > - Success. They buy it. The captain's jaw tightens, the muscle start eyeing the blast doors — our fast talk plus the cargo we know about is just enough edge to carry the room, even with all their guys. Now it's just a matter of playing out the rest. Let's assume that we want to use the fact that we now have advantage to spread out and be in a better position. The same thing that didn't do us any good in **Starforged**, because of the way the dice fell. They still have a bunch of dudes, which makes this harder, but we just earned ourselves a little fictive advantage. Neither of our tags gives us any help here, so it's a straight-up roll off to see how it turns out. Oracle check. > [!done] **Yes, and…** > - *Question:* Can we spread out into a better position? > - 🎲 Chance **5** · Risk **4** > - Success — and something extra goes in your favor. We don't even lose the momentum. We drift apart, casual, not obviously — and it buys more than just room. With the lie still holding, the crew's attention is split between watching the blast doors and watching us, so the spread opens up a clean angle on their captain that wasn't there before. There you go, the dice actually liked us for a change. Not only did we get what we wanted, spreading out into a better position, but something else broke our way, getting a clean shot on the captain if we want to take it. Notice how we didn't need special rules or special mechanics to make these things happen. We just interpret what's going on. Simplicity gives you the freedom to interpret things. Locking things down with static mechanics ends up meaning that if you don't have a mechanic for a thing, people imagine they can't do it at all.