Battle Moves - Cooperative Cinematic Combat

A few weeks ago, at the end of this post, I stated that Relationships and Bonds were the most drastic change coming to this Alpha. That might be true in terms of sheer word count, but I think today's changes might draw the most average attention compared to any other individual feature.

Because we're changing how fighting works. Again.

The Previous Alphas

When the first DW2 Alpha released, now called vBlue, it had a fairly straightforward move for combat: Engage a Threat. You roll+Forceful and make various choices between hurting them, avoiding retaliation, taking something, and similar. It handled the cinematics of combat smoothly and dynamically, with mechanics for enemies to escalate the situation when hurt. However, fighting didn't really feel dangerous; enemies didn't consistently hurt PCs enough to turn them into high stakes situations. In hindsight, it was smooth, but too safe.

vRed went in a different direction, using more terms and tools from D&D. We brought back polyhedral rolled damage, with high HP and damage numbers built around those dice. Importantly, the new version of Engage a Threat always had you exchange damage with your enemy by default. When a damage roll doesn't go your way, because you often could have chosen to minimize or maximize it, it feels like the consequences of a choice you made, rather than luck. I worried the focus on HP would shift the focus from the fiction to the numbers, but the way they balanced instead made fights feel desperate. Enemies felt dangerous, and engaging them was always a notable risk.

This desperation made the game come alive during fights. Characters had to make difficult decisions both mechanically and narratively, and often talking, tricking, or running felt like legitimately better options. I loved how dangerous it was to directly engage a threat…but I didn't love how few ways players had to indirectly deal with it.

Overall, both Blue and Red emphasized different parts of cinematic combat: narrative focus and desperate drama, respectively. Now we're going to try to bring them together.

What Does Cinematic Combat Even Mean?

I think what makes combat "cinematic" is when it dynamically changes, frequently and significantly. Such a style tends not to focus on individual ordinary attacks, but rather on beats—efforts by one or more characters to substantially change the situation, usually in a new way. This could be setting up an opportunity now to exploit it later, or leading a foe into a trap or ambush, or drawing someone's attention away at the right moment, or buying critical time for an ally, or putting all of your energy into one last fireball.

This type of combat isn't about the fight itself, but using the fight as a lens to examine the characters (PCs and NPCs): who they are; what choices they make; what actions they take; and where they're strong—as well as where they're weak. Good cinematic combat is a pressure cooker for characters, leveraging its stakes to reveal, develop, or reinforce their aspects. If the fighter's brother is hurt in battle, do they fall back to keep them safe, or charge in for revenge?

This is why, to briefly talk about another recent fantasy game, Draw Steel manages to be cinematic despite its tactical complexity. Despite the systems' many numbers and mechanics, every time a character takes a turn, something significant always happens (a.k.a. a narrative beat takes place). Add in that most ability titles are quotes or other in-character statements, and translating the game's mechanical layer to its narrative one feels almost automatic.

Bringing things back to DW2, I want our combat system to feel cinematic by being:

• Desperate by default, with danger or other circumstances frequently pressuring PCs to cooperate.
• Dynamic, meaning whenever someone acts, the situation significantly changes, for good or for ill.
• Versatile, providing PCs with plenty of different ways to change things in their favor - some direct, some indirect.

So how am I trying to do that?

Combat in the Final Alpha

Introducing Battle Moves

While both previous alphas handled fights with a single core move, Engage a Threat, the Final Alpha will be trying a group of related Battle Moves:

• When you take something from an enemy (object, position, authority, etc.), you Wrest Control
• When you preoccupy an enemy or hold them off, you Keep Them Busy
• When you put everything you have into a single culminating strike, you do an All Out Attack
• When you study an enemy for a weaknesses (vulnerable points, blind spots, susceptibilities, etc.), you Find Weakness
• When you take advantage of an enemy’s weakness as part of another Battle Move, you Exploit Weakness

Battle Moves represent the core beats of cinematic combat, though you can of course use any other move during a fight. Each is a significant move with multiple choices, and some have their own appropriate approaches and stat rolls where it makes sense. If you "provoke with loud noises or biting words" then you might Keep Them Busy with CHA, but if you "harass them from the distance or shadows" then you'd instead roll the same move with DEX.

Damage and HP

Much like vRed, damage is not dealt, but "exchanged" by some of these moves, which is why PCs can use other moves to "set up" the next exchange, increasing damage dealt, or decreasing damage taken, or other things entirely. Charging in for an immediate All Out Attack may be viable if you want to finish a fight quickly, but it's likely safer to first Keep Them Busy while a second PC Finds a Weakness to set up the third PC to All Out Attack.

The Final Alpha still uses HP and Damage as terms, but rather than polyhedral dice, they use static numbers, similar to Apocalypse World. 

• PCs have either 6, 8, or 10 maximum HP, depending on their Class, and currently nothing can change that max. 
• PCs typically deal 1-3 damage, determined by their weapon, plus bonuses from other moves, abilities, equipment, and similar.
• A simple enemy minion might deal 1 damage, while a group of minions or a solitary monster might deal 3 or 4 damage, and an elder dragon or world-breaking horror might deal 6-7 damage.
• PCs can spend uses of armor, a shield, or certain moves to reduce their damage taken (after using a shield, switching to a new one doesn’t refresh any uses).

Bloodied

While a PC's HP is at or below half of maximum, they're Bloodied, meaning they have Disadvantage on all Battle Moves. While similar to conditions, Bloodied is not a condition itself; it cannot be marked or cleared the way other conditions can be. As soon as your HP returns to above half, you immediately clear Bloodied. When it returns to below half, you mark Bloodied again. NPCs can also be Bloodied. While they don't roll dice, being bloodied might trigger certain PC moves and more.

Another source of Disadvantage that can stack on top of conditions sounds harsh, but Battle Moves themselves provide plenty of opportunities to support your allies and receive support in return to overcome this. It also acts as a strong bridge between the mechanics of HP and the narrative of a fight.

Finishing Thoughts

Combat is such a big staple of D&D, and I want to give it the spotlight it narratively deserves without taking away from its potential cinematic strengths. Despite being directly inspired by AW's Battle Moves, this is still a really big departure from both previous Alphas, and it probably needs even more refining than the other "big changes". But the purpose of each Alpha is to experiment and push the game in different ways, seeing what works and what doesn't, so that's what I hope to do here.

Playtests however have been promising, though I've had to adjust my own GMing style to account for Battle Moves. Where I typically have NPC enemies act aggressively in ways that demand immediate responses, that caused my players to adopt a "kill it before we die" approach, focusing primarily on dealing damage despite how much they were also taking in return. When I eased off and gave my players a bit of breathing room, letting the damage exchange mechanic handle some of that pressure for me, they became much more proactive and expressive in battle without ever feeling quite safe.

It's very different, but I'm excited for how it has felt so far, and I hope you are too.

Thanks for reading,

Spencer

Co-designer Commentary - Helena

Of all the changes and ideas we’re trying in this Final Alpha, this is one I’m most doubtful of. I feel that adding a whole new suite of combat moves puts too much emphasis on combat as a whole. And I know some of you may be like, “What are you talking about? D&D (and DW) has always been about combat! The more focus on it, the better.” Thing is, I don’t disagree with that necessarily, but I’ve always been more on the side of having a good mixture of the “combat, social, exploration” triad, especially so because my main sources of inspiration for running both D&D and DW—fantasy fiction—usually only includes as much combat as dramatically necessary. Which is to say, not that much.

For me combats work the best when they don’t “overstay their welcome”, so to speak, and I’ve always hated the slog fests of D&D 3.x, 4th, and 5e. My sweet spot has always been 2-3 very intense “rounds” where the whole party contributes while their opponents try their very best to get rid of them. In this sense, the setup of vRed was the one I’ve felt most comfortable with so far but, as always, we’ll be paying a lot of attention to your feedback before we move forward to Beta, so please let us know how you feel about these Battle Moves… And everything else in this Final Alpha!