Designing Combat
One of the most exciting aspects of MythCraft is combat. When your adventuring party meets a vicious monster or cutthroat bandits, this will likely result in combat. This chapter will help you consider the various aspects of combat, and offers a handful of ideas to help you design interesting combat encounters.
When preparing a combat encounter, there are four primary elements to consider: the heroes, the monsters, the environment, and the objectives of everyone involved.
Heroes
Think about the adventurers in your party. What are they generally good at? Do your martial characters typically fight in melee or at a distance? In most encounters, you will want to be sure that your monsters enable your adventurers to fight using their preferred methods and abilities. In some particularly challenging encounters, though, your heroes will find that their typical strategies are thwarted. This is especially true of intelligent villains who can quickly adapt to make the heroes less effective.
Monsters
Your monsters might be mundane creatures, NPCs with goals diametrically opposed to the heroes, or fearsome monstrosities of legend. When designing a combat encounter, it can be helpful to think about the role of various creatures in battle. These are not technical terms and have no mechanical bearing, but they can be useful frames of reference to help you consider how a monster should function in combat.
Assassin
An assassin has lower HP and defenses than the average monster of its level, but does more damage and can increase its damage output through clever tactical positioning. Some assassins might be hard to hit through other means, like being able to turn invisible or laying traps to hinder its enemies.
Beefcake
Beefcakes have much higher HP or higher defenses than average, but tend to have a significantly lower damage output. They often have abilities that let them exercise greater control over the battlefield, such as hindering the mobility of heroes.
Minion
Minions are typical monsters of a lower level than most of the others in their party. They might have slightly lower HP, defenses, and damage output than other monsters of their same level. Minions are generally easy to dispatch quickly and adventurers should be able to easily flex their powers to demolish minions.
Summoner
Summoners have lower HP and attributes than most other monsters of their level, but have the ability to summon minions. This can create a specific objective for the adventurers, who must take out the summoner before they are overwhelmed by its minions.
Support
Support monsters don’t have as much HP as other monsters of their level and might have lower attributes than others, but they can significantly bolster the stats of other monsters, making beefcakes significantly harder to take down or making assassins especially lethal.
Enemy Tactics
When deciding how your monsters fight, consider their intelligence level and their instinctive cunning. A pack of wolves will typically only attack one or two creatures, but are capable of taking down quite large game through skillful teamwork. Clever bandits will target the party’s rogue or ranger first to remove the party’s best capacity to deal damage. An angry bear might simply go for the creature that looks the most threatening, ignoring the others. Thinking about your monsters’ intelligence will help you determine what kind of tactics you should use. The monsters with more cunning will not only pick their targets carefully, but they will also implement their natural surroundings to better effect. Cautious monsters will think nothing of retreating if they feel outmaneuvered, and pragmatic villains may appear to retreat only to lure the heroes into a devastating trap.
Environment
Rarely will a battle occur on a perfectly flat stone arena. Nor should it; such a battle would be supremely boring for tactical positioning. When preparing a battle, think about where the battle is taking place. A simple forest has trees behind which you might take cover; some amount of variability in terrain height; roots you might use to trip enemies; and underbrush might slow you down or conceal you from your enemies.
The more you can conceptualize your environment and the various ways that the heroes or monsters might use it to their advantage, the more dynamic a combat can become. If there is not a rule for interacting with a natural object, you can use TA or TD and the Blinded, Concealed, Cover, Shaken, or Sickened conditions as you deem appropriate.
For example, if you are battling on a beach and a sailor kicks sand in a hero’s eyes, first determine what kind of attack that would be (DEX vs ANT, for example) then determine its effect (the creature is Blinded until it spends 1 AP to clear its eyes with water).
Such clever implementations of environmental phenomena will invest your players in using the battlefield to its fullest possible extent.
Objectives
The most common objective in a fight is to kill or incapacitate the other side, or force them to flee. While you don’t need to pressure yourself to come up with different objectives for every fight, varying the goals for either the heroes or villains can be a fun change of pace. The following example objectives can work either for the heroes or the villains:
- Assassinate or kidnap a specific target
- Conquer a stronghold
- Cut off a supply route
- Defend a stronghold
- Destroy an object before it can be used
- Escape hostile territory
- Escort a noble or object through a hostile space
- Steal an object from the other side
- Survive long enough for reinforcements to arrive
Combat Difficulty
A creature’s Monster Level (ML) represents how much of a threat it poses to a party. A creature of ML 1 would be considered a challenge for two heroes of Character Level 1. A party of four Character Level 1 heroes could generally hold their own against two creatures of ML 1, or one creature of ML 2.
To determine whether your encounter is balanced, add up the Character Level of every hero in your adventuring party, and add up the ML of every creature that will be directly fighting them. The total ML should be 1⁄2 the party’s sum Character Levels. It’s fine if the total ML is not exactly 1⁄2 the party’s sum Character Levels, but note that this will change the anticipated outcome of a fight. If the ML in an encounter is lower than 1⁄2 a party’s Character Levels, the fight will be easier and will not tax them as greatly. If the total ML is more than 3⁄4 a party’s Character Levels, the fight will be significantly harder and might kill one or more of the heroes. If the total ML is equal to or greater than a party’s Character Levels, the party is unlikely to survive.
If environmental hazards can equally affect the heroes and the monsters, this will not adjust encounter difficulty.
If environmental hazards might hurt the heroes but will not affect the monsters (such as a fire elemental in a lava field), increase the total ML by 25% when calculating encounter difficulty.
Not all Fights are Fair
Sometimes, your heroes will be outmatched. If they get into a situation where they are fighting a monster or group that is significantly more powerful than them, be sure to communicate this narratively. Perhaps their arrows are splintering against a beast’s fearsome hide, or even after a critical hit from a zealot, the monstrosity appears completely unfazed. Make sure that your players know that retreat is an option, and sometimes it’s better to cut your losses and live to fight another day.
Running Combat
Running combat can be daunting, as it has a lot of moving parts and is at times difficult to keep track of. When combat begins, write down everyone’s Initiative from highest to lowest so that you can see sequentially who will be going next. This should generally be public knowledge for your players, so that they can begin preparing their turns in advance to help speed up gameplay.
If the battlefield includes environmental phenomena (such as a rockslide) or complicated enemy movements (such as respawning hordes), you can write these into the Initiative order so that you remember to do them every round.
Most people find mental addition to be easier and faster than mental subtraction, so you might want to use this to your advantage when running monsters. Because you are tracking a lot of different monsters’ health at once, you might just add up the damage that a monster has taken.
Tell your players that it is Bloodied when the sum of all the damage it has sustained equals or exceeds 1⁄2 its maximum HP, and that it has died when the sum of the damage equals or exceeds its maximum HP.
When tracking conditions (such as Dazed or Sickened), you might use colored beads that you put on a creature’s stat block or next to their name in initiative. If you use minis, you can twist pipe cleaners into small loops that are color coded to symbolize various conditions.
Whatever methods you use, having a handful of physical and clearly visible props will help you keep track of all of the variables in combat.
Initiative
Combat begins when all creatures involved roll Initiative. You typically roll initiative when a monster or adventurer takes some form of aggressive action.
Initiative determines the order in which creatures take their turn during combat.
Initiative is an AWR check: each creature rolls 1d20 and adds their AWR. The one with the highest roll goes first, followed by the second-highest, and so on. After the last creature takes its turn, the first creature takes its second turn. Initiative order is repeated until combat is resolved.
In the event of a tie between one or more creatures, the creature with the higher AWR goes first out of those creatures. If one or more creatures tie and have the same AWR, roll unmodified d20s for each tied creature; the highest roll goes first out of those creatures, then the second highest, etc.