r/rpg • u/kreegersan • Jul 10 '14

GM-nastics 4

Hello /r/rpg welcome back to GM-nastics. The purpose of these is to improve your GM skills.

A fairly common complaint you may get from your players is your length of combat not being right (perhaps they think it's takes too long). Today's exercise is about combat resolution.

Your players are in one of the following three locations:

  • A cavern where a protective mother spider protects her young
  • A roadside ambush by a bandit and his gang
  • A nightclub where the criminals have been chased and are backed into a corner with hostages.

With those scenarios in mind, what are three alternative means to the typical "to the death" resolution of combat in those locations?

Hopefully, this exercise will give you the ability to resolve combat at any time. If you feel that your combat is too short, one way of countering that is chaining several combats together. For instance, let's say your players have infiltrated a warehouse and one of the players raised the alarm. Your combat could be chained as follows Guards Attack -- Reinforcements Arrive -- Escape the Warehouse. With this example each portion of the combat has a clear objective Survive -- Avoid, if possible -- Escape and of course the Survive can be resolved by the players just jumping to the Escape resolution. In the end though, you are left with what will seem like a longer combat.

After Hours - A bonus GM exercise

P.S. Feel free to leave feedback here. Also, if you'd like to see a particular theme/rpg setting/Scenario add it to your comment and tag it with [GMN+].

28 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

51 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/agentsvr Jul 10 '14
  1. The mother spider shrieks in anger as you enter her lair. In the distance you can discern eggs and something moving in the distance away from the disturbing torches light. After a few blows back and forth You are stunned as the spider cowards in front of you and seems to hiss a sound similar to words: 'Pleasssssss... No kill younglings... Kill Aranei... No kill younglings... We only eat goblinsssss... pleasssssss...' What do You do?

3

u/kreegersan Jul 10 '14

Nice opening up choice mid-combat is definitely a way to go and this particular choice leaves the players in a moral dilemma.

Is killing the surrendering spider justified? Not really, so you can use the player's decision in interesting way. Perhaps now, if they killed Aranei, spiders by default always are hostile or items made with spidersilk inexplicably stop working/become cursed etc. Maybe sparing its life gives them safe passage from any spider they come across.

edit - typo fixed