Your Wombats are Boring!
or
Why your combat environments in His Majesty should be dynamic and interactable
Category
HMtW
The thoughts below are considerations I have had while in the concept Phase of a lethal mech hack for the combat system in His Majesty the Worm. The mech system is intended to be a combat focused system that takes advantage of His Majesty the Worm’s dynamic and involved combat system. I have been playing a few sessions of Lancer lately and while I enjoy the system writ large, I have become increasingly frustrated with the pace of play and the five hour long combats our group has been experiencing. I am tentatively labeling my project as Souls Weighed Down by Gravity to credit the main inspiration: Gundam. The combat system I will develop for this project will also inform the ranged combat rules being developed for my other project His Majesty the Atom, which, in turn, is being influenced by Labjer from the His Majesty the Worm discord and their work on a ranged combat hack.
I credit Castella from the His Majesty the Worm discord for much of the original thought and theory below, I am merely an agent of synthesis and analysis who has briefly expanded on the thoughts and applied my hypothesized solution to addressing player frustrations. Very little of this conversation will be novel to the veteran blog consumer, but the context the ideas are presented in are as new as the game itself. I claim any and all terrible opinions stated or otherwise inferred below.
Wombat
The dynamic combat system of His Majesty the Worm is a vast improvement over the legacy turn-per-initiative system of the predominant ttrpg systems from previous decades. Gone are the days where a player must wait 30 minutes (or more!) for their turn to come around and they get to play the game again! Huzzah!This is hyperbolic, of course, but His Majesty the Worm’s use of tarot cards as a card-based method of combat resolution is a substantial deviation from the more traditional legacy combat resolution systems. With big changes comes big adjustments and some players have a hard time making that adjustment, at least at first. However, based on these struggles, game masters can make adjustments to mitigate possible frustrations.
The worm combat system (I will be calling it the Wombat system) has two distinct adjustments that players must consider: The differences between declare-then-roll and roll-then-declare, and the Suit-as-options limitations on minor actions.
Declare-then-roll vs Roll-then-declare
The first major change players must grapple with is the change from a declare-then-roll method to a roll-then-declare method of action adjudication. In the former a player decides what they want to do and then consults the bones to determine if the action is successful. If the dice roll bad then fate has intervened and at least we can say we tried our best but it was not to be.In the latter, however, you consult fate to determine the outcomes first and then place the outcomes where they make the most sense. In Wombat, this means you are drawing cards and have to decide how those cards can best be used based not only on the value but also on the suit of the card.
While both methods have the same components (deciding on an action, random number generation, and action adjudication), the order has an important psychological effect. In a declare-then-roll system, a player feels in control - the player decided the action and it was fate that foiled them. In a roll-then-declare system, the player feels less in control because they may want to attack but their desire is foiled by the values they rolled - they know ahead of time that an attack would fail or would be likely to fail.
I posit that this perspective is a failure in framing. It should be explained, and players should understand, that there is functionally no difference in attacking then rolling a one and rolling a one and then deciding to attack. They both will fail. The strength of the Wombat system is that you are an oracle of fate - you know the results already so you can instead focus on doing actions that will have impact rather than wasting effort on actions destined to fail.
Is Suits-as-Options a limitation of Wombats system or a strength?
The Second mindset change is the use of cards for random number generation instead of dice. This is especially distinct to Wombat in that it's unlikely players will have been exposed to a card-based ttrpg before. While the drawing of a card to randomly generate a number isn't difficult to wrap one's mind around, the use of suits in Wombat to determine what actions are available to a player is a much larger shift in mindset that necessitates an adaptation by both players and game masters.Wombat consists of two action types, a major action and a minor action. Both types of actions share the same pool of possible options, but with different restrictions in place. The major action occurs on the player's initiative turn and has the player's character in control of the combat - they can do any action with any card, and can add their stat bonuses to any action they take. They are, quite literally, taking the initiative at that moment. The minor action, on other hand, happens after another player's (or DM creature's) initiative turn and before the next initiative turn. The minor action carries additional restrictions. A minor action has to match the suit of the card, and the player cannot add their stat bonuses. For example, a player must play a card with the suit of Swords card to attack as a minor action. This can best be framed as the player character not being in control of the situation when taking a minor action, they are responding to someone else, quite literally, taking the initiative.
However, from a player perspective, the suit restrictions for minor actions can be a double-whammy of restricting their agency. Not only does a player have to grapple with the change to a roll-then-declare system, they are then told that their pool of possible actions is cut by a fourth with any given drawn result. A player may draw a three of Cups and wonder what the heck they are supposed to do with that!
This is an understandable frustration. Nobody likes having their turn come around in any game and having no idea what they are supposed to be doing to help the situation. But, it should be explained that this is a feature, not a bug, of Wombat. The variation in suits forces players to think dynamically and to interact with their environments and the dungeon denizens more creatively. Anyone can trip an enemy, or use an item, or intimidate their foes. Wombat's restrictions on minor actions keeps combats from being a slugfest.
Interactable Environments are Necessary for Good Wombats
With the above mentioned mental adjustments in mind, game masters who are using Wombat therefore have an even larger responsibility than in legacy systems to create interesting environments where players might interact. Game masters must reinforce that Wombat combats can and should be dynamic by providing an interactable arena for players that includes obstacles, traps, usable items, obtuse terrain, and anything else their wicked mind can conjure. This isn’t to say that every keyed room in a dungeon needs an obstacle course of traps or a dozen precarious pillars to be toppled. A game master should still create rooms that fit in the narrative and an “empty room” is still a vital tool to manage the pace of play. Sometimes a storage room needs to be a storage room, but game masters should consider what is in that storage room, and what could be laying around to be grabbed or pushed over.You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink is as true for giving players options as it is for thirsty horses. Players will weigh the pros and cons of their actions and choose whether to interact with an environment or not. Players will also see a situation as a nail and their sword as the appropriate hammer to solve it. If a game master is frustrated that they put in the effort to create interesting environments only for their players to refuse to interact with that environment, then game masters can interact with it themselves. Goblins are just as capable of cutting the rope to drop the chandelier as player characters are. Once you drop a telegraphed chandelier on a player, you can be damned sure that they won’t let it happen twice. In fact, they’ll be eager to do it to someone else.
Another piece of advice is to not sweat the circumstances if they don’t work out in a way that creates an interesting combat. I once had a combat in His Majesty the Worm where we players were trudged up the side of a precarious mountain pass with ropes and pitons being the only thing that stopped us from falling to our deaths. Just as we were halfway across the pass, however, the game master pulled on the Meatgrinder table and revealed the random encounter: four ghosts from the ancient past that still haunt the dungeon valley we were traversing. The ghosts couldn’t interact with our ropes to endanger us, and the ghosts had no ropes for us to interact with to endanger them. It was the worst possible encounter we could have drawn for that particular environment (when considering how to have an interesting Wombat environment). However, that encounter still had narrative impact, even if neither party could exploit the precarious circumstances to our advantage. Shit happens and we have to roll with it.
An added point is that there can still be frustrations with Wombat when it comes to facedown cards. While it is absolutely true that a player has options when they draw a bad hand, a player can only play a single facedown card at a time. If a player already has a facedown card in place, especially a valuable one they want to keep, then this can be a further restriction of options. A player can’t riposte with an ace of swords as a bluff if they already have an aid played facedown waiting for its trigger. I don’t have an answer to this particular challenge; more thought is needed here.
A final piece of advice is to quote Josh McCrowell, the writer for His Majesty the Worm, on the combat resolution system. You can get good at the combat system and “players who put in the due diligence to learn the tactics underlying the [combat system] will have a lot of fun.“
I love this game and I hope you do too!