This observation came about in two ways. First, a member of the Fight! Google group mentioned that they were using a hybrid of Gumshoe and Fight! for their campaign. They were using Gumshoe for the investigation portion of their scenarios and then using the Fight! rules for combat. I thought that was pretty cool (and, given how rules-light the non-combat parts of the game are, very easy to do).

Second, I myself jumped onto the Gumshoe bandwagon with the pre-release of Ken Hite’s Night’s Black Agents. This was the first Gumshoe rulebook I’ve purchased, and I’ve come to understand that it is a pretty refined and comprehensive version of the rules set. I really think it looks great and I hope to use it soon.

Two things jumped out at me as I read the rules. First, the core use of General Abilities (what would usually be called skills in most games) was governed by a single d6 roll, modified by points spent out of a pool to increase the chance of success before the roll. The narrative purpose of this mechanic is to allow the player to highlight when they wanted their character to look awesome. This is not so very different from the use of Fighting Spirit in Fight! In fact, you could pretty much eliminate FS entirely from the rules and the game would still work. It would just be less tactical and probably not as fun. But similarly to Gumshoe, spending Fighting Spirit notes when the player wants to highlight the importance of this die roll right now.

Night’s Black Agents also uses more complicated combat rules than other Gumshoe games. This complexity comes about through a series of options available only to some characters, based on their General Ability levels. There are quite a few of them, and while they all work with the same simple core mechanic, they have their own costs and rules for resolution. They reminded me a lot of the Action Point options in the Dramatic Combat System of Fight! There, you can fight with just Basic Moves, but your Skills open up many other fun options for combat. The shonen-focused supplement I’m working on will provide even more of these options.

Fight! and Gumshoe truthfully share very little in terms of genre emulation. But in the design space, there are some interesting similarities with the same purpose and same mechanical approach. And I don’t mind finding out that my ideas are similar to those of Robin Laws and Ken Hite.

And speaking of divine madness, what a gift that God would deign to become one of us in the Incarnation! Enjoy your new toys everyone!

The length of the book may be surprisingly long. We have not established the format we are using for the characters, so it’s too early to tell, but based on the length of the Word document at the moment, it looks to be as long as the core rules. Fight! characters can take up a lot of space! The major downside of this, since the book will be in color, is that the POD hardcopy version of it will be cost-prohibitive to all except those of you who really, really love the game. The only reasonable alternative I can offer is to make a grayscale version available.

If you have a character featured in the book, expect an email from me soon asking for some more details to fill out the sheet.

Anything you are really hoping to see in Challengers? Let me know – it may not be too late.

Back to work now. If I don’t get back here before the end of the year, Merry Christmas to all those out in Divine Madness Land.

(And for those interested, the hardcopy of Wake is on sale too – for the first time ever, I think.)

But I do think the idea of epic heroic fantasy is very cool. I have a desire to run such a game, complete with the social combat rules from Round 2, so that the PC warrior-philosophers could do war with armies while they engaged in philosophical debate with gods, all for the fate of the universe decided by the edge of a sword. Anyone with me?

So how best to have a Fighter do war against an army? I figured it was all a matter of scale. So I’m proposing a rule idea for anyone who wants to try it out. It is incomplete here, but I hope that I get to work with it more. For now, I’m calling it “Saga Scale Combat,” and it is a modification of the Thug Thrashing rules.

In the normal rules, Thugs gather in groups of up to 10 single individuals. In Saga Scale, each Thug in each Thug Group would represent a greater number: either 10, or 100, or even 1000 if you wanted enormously over the top battle scenes. So in the normal rules, a Thug Group of 10 would be 10 opponents. At Saga Scale 10, for instance, that same group would be 100 opponents. When the Fighter eliminated a Thug, he or she actually took out 10 rabble.

But as at least a token nod to realism, some changes need to made. For each step up the Saga Scale (i.e., 10, 100, 1000), all of the Thug’s Attributes are increased by one point. Thus, a Thug 1 at Saga Scale 10 would have Initiative and Damage of 1d4+1, Accuracy of +1, Defense 4, Life Save 3, and no Qualities. Furthermore, a Fighter’s Thug Thrashing Skill is halved (rounded down, minimum 0) for each step up the Saga Scale. Even a master at facing multiple combatants with Thug Thrashing 10 would only have Thug Thrashing 1 at Saga Scale 1000. Then again, this seems like a small price to pay for regularly defeating one to two thousand opponents per turn.

This is what I have so far. I know I need to change the time scale. Normally, each Time Count is about one second. I’m thinking that it should be 10 seconds at Saga Scale 10, five minutes at 100, and 30 minutes per Time Count at 1000. Thus, a battle against 30,000 opponents might take an experienced Fighter a whole day to defeat. And even these times might still be too quick.

I’m also thinking that using a Special Move means that that is the only attack you can make in a turn, but the Glory is multiplied by your Thug Thrashing +1. This makes Special Moves more special when they are used.

I know there is more that needs to be considered and playtested. But I thought it might be a cool idea. What do you think?

PS – Pretty off-topic, would anyone be interested in having some effects-based system similar to a simplified version of the Special Moves system to define how to use Magic, Psychic, Gadgeteering, and Power? Or are they better as narrative-driven powers?

For those looking for it, the rules for multiple combatants are in the core rules, pages 128-130. These are to be distinguished from the rules for team combat, which usually features variations of one-on-one combat, found on pages 152-153 (and significantly expanded in Round 2). Fights with more than two combatants are a little more complicated at first, but really, once one gets used to using the band grid suggested in the rules, fights are not only not that much longer, but are very easy to visualize.

The dynamics of combat change in interesting ways. The rules for Hit Stun keep combat moving at a decent pace, as it is unlikely that all the combatants will get to act every turn. Ganging up on an opponent has the same advantage as focus fire in any other RPG, but there is actually an incentive for each fighter to attack a different opponent, so as to lock up all of the opposing forces with Hit Stun.

All in all, I don’t find multiple combatant fights to be any more difficult to run than any other tactical combat-heavy RPG out there. Personally, I think it plays better than multiple combatants in the old Street Fighter game.

Here is some advice on running multiple combatant fights so more players can feel confident running Fight! as a more traditional RPG with everybody involved at once. First, know the rules. Fight! plays fast enough but it does require the buy-in of at least the Director knowing how the game is supposed to be played, and this is especially so if multiple combatants are involved. Second, set up a chart for the fight on a piece of paper. Include columns for each of the combatants. Each turn, record the character’s Initiative and Control. When the character acts, or is deprived of his or her action, cross their numbers off the sheet. If Hit Stun reduces a character’s Control, but not to zero, cross off the rolled Control and write the new Control. Thus, the Director (or whoever is designated to control the sheet) can just look at the highest Initiative that has not yet acted to see who acts next. Third, try to avoid Environmental Hazards. Adding a single one is not too difficult to manage, but more than that becomes very difficult (albeit not impossible) for multiple combatants. (I wish this was not the case, as I love Environmental Hazards a lot, but I have yet to come up with a better method short of using an actual battlemat for combat, which I refuse to concede to.)

I like fights with lots of fighters because Special Moves interact in new ways when there are more combatants around. Elements like Mobile, Increased Knockback, Ranged, and Hurl gain new value. Throws happen more often. Bottom line: give it a try and see that the rules can handle multiple combarants just fine.

At the moment, my largest combat was this: 5 PC Fighters supported by 10 Thugs against a faction of 3 NPC Fighters supported by 20 Thugs against a faction of 30 Thugs with guns. 68 combatants in a single fight. And I resolved it in play-by-post, no less.

Challengers is getting a lot of love from me these days. I’ve been putting a lot of time into it and it is shaping up nicely. I’m pretty much done with the largest (and easiest) part of formatting the contributed characters according to a single template. Now I have to add lots of additional text to the characters to make them more useful to players. I also have six new characters to design to add to the roster’s numbers. I have started them, but they are mostly in the conceptual stage at the moment. After this, I need to write the introductory and explanatory text for the book (which, frankly, is very boring to write, so I suspect I will be keeping it short) and I want to add a short chapter on Thugs as well, with lots of examples.

At this point, I’m going to (very, very roughly) guesstimate the final page count to be close to 200 pages. Keep in mind that each character takes several pages to detail properly.

Dan is keeping busy with the artwork. There are 39 characters in the book. At the moment, I think 15 of them are colored, and another 8 are sketched out.

So, all in all, things are moving along.

Still, work on Challengers continues slowly and surely. Formatting each character is an easy but slow and tedious job. The artwork has also been coming along more slowly than I would like, but it’s filtering in with some consistency.

If anyone out there has been playing Fight!, drop me a line. Nothing motivates me more than knowing someone is actually playing the game!