Theater of the Mind Combat

Trying to make it suck less

I’ve been thinking about combat a lot in OSR games. I wrote about it once before on my old blog. In summary I find players don’t use combat options much in my OSR games. Where basically they’ll just all focus one or two targets with attacks, try to take them down as quickly as possible, before just moving on to the next target.

They don’t try to swing from chandeliers, or trip people, or use maces to damage armor, or any such thing. The more melee classes will simply attack in melee and the other classes will just hang back and fire arrows or launch spells. I don’t think there is anything necessarily wrong with this, but I find it to be reality of play; most additional combat rules or options, regardless of the system we are using, are simply ignored.

The Binary Nature of HP

Upon reflection I think this is mainly for two reasons. The first is that with how hit points and combat works in D&D the ability to perform actions is kind of binary. As long as a monster has at least 1 hit point, it’ll still attack the same and is still the same level of threat. It’s not like if you weaken it’s HP it’s attacks get weaker and you’re better off focusing on the stronger monsters at full HP. Same with your own character. In this manner you’re kind of incentivized to all focus on attacking the same creature. Even more so if you use side based initiative like most OSR games where you can all go one after the other. The only way to neutralize a threat is to get it to zero hit points in which it’s removed from play. Until it’s removed from play in this manner, it can still attack you as if it had a million hit points. This also kind of incentivizes attacking as apposed to other maneuvers.

Yes, you could perform some combat maneuvers which might make your future attacks more powerful or damaging, but this isn’t a video game. You’re not working with complete information. You don’t know the monsters AC or remaining health or if it’s weak to poison or fire damage or how susceptible it would be to your combat maneuver. Furthermore, every maneuver attempt you take, often simply delays just attacking it and reducing it’s HP. After a couple of attacks, the chances of it being low or almost dead are high so you might as well just try to get it to zero as until you get it to zero it doesn’t matter. It’ll still attack you all the same.

The Lack of the Spatial Dimension

The simple solution to this is to simply make combat encounters more interesting where it’s harder to all just attack and all focus your attacks on a single monster. You can do things by making combat more puzzle like, like you’re fighting on a bridge above lava against goblins who are trying to avoid your attacks and throwing stink bombs at you and firing arrows at you.

This is an interesting combat encounter and would probably force the players to think a bit and come up with some interesting tactics. But in my experience it would also be kind of hard to run in a meaningful way using theater of the mind combat.

In my experience it’s very, very hard to give any suggestion of space or tactical space in theater of the mind combat. A lot of OSR games will attempt to define ranges such as ‘near’ and ‘far’ or a person being in one space or another, but I find this always kind of feels a bit unnatural beyond the general concept that at the beginning of combat, there is some space between the players and monsters and if they are going to melee attack they’re going to need to close the gap. For all intents and purposes, I find theater of the mind combat tends to gravitate towards the players and monsters just facing off like 30 or 40 feet apart in a barren room.

Yes, you could describe more, but trying to describe and cognitively keep track of anything more quickly becomes burdensome.

Theater of the mind combat is the style of combat I use when I play. I have zero interest in using miniatures. It’s kind of a defining nature of OSR play that I enjoy. You don’t need to and I think in some ways are encouraged not to use miniatures. I find because introducing miniatures tends to make the game feel more like a wargame and players will think less of themselves in an imagined space where they only limit on their problem solving is their imagination.

I do think that OSR games have genuinely given up something as a result: fun and interesting tactical combat. Or well, I do think theater of the mind combat can be fun and interesting, but you can’t make it so by using rules that would make it fun and interesting if you used miniatures.

Assumptions about Theater of the Mind Combat

These are some assumptions I have about theater of the mind combat after having played it for many years. I think they are things that are overlooked or not voiced much because by and large D&D began as a miniature wargame and it’s combat rules were ported over from that style of play instead of being built up for theater of the mind play.

1. Don’t have the players face off against more than enemies twice their number. I find most often I have about the same amount of enemies as players, maybe one or two more. Any more and it becomes very, very hard to track spatially. Like if there are lots of enemies, can a bunch surround a player? How many of one enemy can a single player block? What if they run really wide to the side and hook back in? If a player runs forward could they surround the player? What is their starting formation like? All these are relatively simple questions but the answers vary heavily on exactly how you are imagining the scene. If a player is imagining things even slightly different than you, then they’re probably going to feel like whatever action they took was based on what they imagined, not what you imagined. It’s probably going to feel unfair to them and they’re probably going to feel ganged up on, if you have a bunch of monsters mob a character and quickly cut them down.

2. Everything is happening in two dimensions: everything happens in two dimensions. Either kind of along a forward/backwards axis or a higher/lower axis. Stick to one axis. Trying to have a complex three dimensional space is really, really hard to imagine and convey. Like if one group of goblins are firing arrows down, and another group is advancing ahead. If I imagine the goblins above to be out of reach of climbing vs in reach of climbing, it’s going lead to a very different decision of which group to deal with first. Yes I could ask a lot of questions about the three dimensionality of the space, but once again, that’s going to slow things down and get tedious.

3. Maybe have one hazard or environmental obstacle for everyone to imagine: like you’re on a narrow bridge so it’s single file. Or the floor is icy. Something that’s going to effect the way they close the gap to melee combat or give them something to work with in terms of manipulating the environment to their advantage. Besides this, once again, because of the lack of easily visible set spatial dimensions it becomes very hard to imagine things and consider multiple things.

4. The combat gap is the only space that matters: the only real sense of space is the combat gap. That is the gap between you and the monster; who has closed the gap to melee and who hasn’t. This gap overall is kind of an abstract thing and should probably remain a bit abstract. Either your in melee or your not. It takes a move action to close to melee.

5. Focus Attacks on a Single Monster: because you have incomplete information on the weaknesses or status’ of monsters before, as mentioned before, your general optimal pattern of attack is to simply all focus the same monster when its your sides turn and try to kill it as quickly as possible and then move onto the next monster. Rinse and repeat until they are all dead or run away cause of morale checks. If your side begins to do too poorly simply run away and regroup.

The Role of Combat

I would argue that there are like two main types of combat encounters resulting from theater of the mind style play:

1. The Big Bad Monster: the players are facing up against a big monster with interesting special abilities. It has enough hit points that it’s not going to go down too fast, has enough multiple attacks to keep them on their toes, and an interesting ability or two that they’re going to have to find some solution to deal with. This tends to be when combat is the most fun in theater of the mind combat. There’s only one enemy so imagining and keeping track of it is easy, and it’s powerful enough and interesting enough that it poses a bit of a puzzle.

2. The Mob of Mooks: a bunch of weaker enemies that the players will probably win against, but it will serve to damage them a bit and expend some of their resources. If the players face off against enough of these mobs, the enemies might get lucky and be able to down one or two players.

I think these represent the two main types of combat encounters as they kind of represent the maximum cognitive load you can deal with at different ends of the spectrum. Either you have one single difficult but interesting monster that's easy to keep track of because there is only one of it, where the cognitive load is it’s powers and multiple attacks. Or you have multiple monsters that you have to keep track of; where they are and who they’re attacking, but their attacks are pretty basic.

You can try to have more, waves of monsters, multiple big monsters with powers, lots of minions each with a different power, a really complex battlefield with multiple area’s of cover and environmental hazards etc. But it’s going to make combat kind of burdensome and probably not as fun. You’d really need miniatures to play it out.

Combat as War vs Sport

All of this may seem like theater of the mind combat is kind of boring and limiting. To some degree I think this is true. Combat in OSR games is a bit of a fail state. You gain XP through obtaining treasure. Hostile or potentially hostile creatures should be seen as obstacles. Obstacles that are probably better avoided or gotten around in more efficient ways than combat.

When combat does occur it’s often more memorable when the players are forced to think outside the box a bit. Much has been written about combat as war v.s combat as sport in the OSR scene. I think this kind of checks out. Where the most memorable combat encounters I can think of is when my players had to run away to regroup and figure out how to approach combat with the monster.

The latest example of this is when they were fighting the Gloam (a giant evil undead humanoid bird thing) in a bell tower in Dolmenwood. They fight wasn’t going very well and their HP was getting low. In a last ditch attempt they tried to drop the bell on it, it landed on a player and they were trapped inside instead. After some more maneuvering they freed the player and decided to all just run.

While the fight was essentially 4 players against 1 monster, all taking place in a cramped bell tower, with most of the combat being all of them simply taking turns attacking, it was pretty memorable because of the last ditch attempt to drop the bell on it and trap it inside, and then running away when this failed.

Designing Theater of the Mind Combat from the Ground Up

I originally began thinking about theater of the mind combat because for all the aforementioned reasons in this blog post, I find that a lot of most rule sets borrow heavily from miniature combat and it kind of got me thinking about what it would look like if you tried to design a game or set of rules from the ground up where you really tried to focus on theater of the mind combat and what it’s strengths and assumptions are.

Like you can accomplish everything I have described with a very basic ruleset where everyone can simply move and attack and for all other creative actions you just make a skill check or roll under an attribute. In fact, a lot of OSR rulesets combat rules are pretty much this.

But if you did want to try and create additional rules to make the game more interesting, or more memorable; or to embody a certain type of fiction, what would add? How would these rules differ from the types of rules you’d use if you used miniatures?

Additionally, how would you help deal with the problem that as players level up, you kind of want them to be more powerful and able to tackle more monsters and bigger things, but you don’t want their added power making combat more and more complex to the point where the cognitive load is too much to run it theater of the mind style.

But because this post is kind of getting long I’m going to leave this topic for another day. So stay tuned!