Dynamic Combat

This week we start taking a look at some of the alternate rules from the Tome of Whispers. Dynamic combat is not just one rule set, but a trio of them that each seeks to make combat more interesting and impactful, without also ratcheting up the difficulty. These rules include weapon techniques, injury, and impairment. Each set can be used by itself, or they can all be added to the game at once for maximum effect. Let's dive in!

Weapon Techniques

Weapon combat in tabletop RPGs often boils down to repeated attacks and rolling damage. While this is both necessary and effective, it's a lot less exciting than what the magic users in the party tend to get up to. These rules seek to bridge that divide, taking weapon combat from a predictable and stale slugfest and making it something that is consistently fun to use, while still being quite effective.

One of the important concepts for weapon techniques is the basic strike. A basic strike is any Strike made on its own, not part of another activity like an action economy enhancer. If you're standing in your hex and you swing your sword at an adjacent enemy, that's a basic strike. If you were executing a special maneuver, like a sudden charge that lets you stride up to twice and then strike all as part of one activity, that isn't a basic strike. That's already got some inherent dynamic action to it.

Weapon techniques are special effects whenever you would use a basic strike. Each weapon group has its own set of techniques, and there are a few universal ones that can be used with any weapon group. There are two tiers of techniques. Expert techniques can be used if you are an expert with the weapon group. Master techniques can only be used if you have master proficiency instead. There are no new types of techniques unlocked with legendary proficiency, however. Instead, becoming legendary with a weapon group allows you to utilize expert techniques whenever you strike, not just when making a basic strike. A legend with brawling weapons could toss out a haymaker at the end of a sudden charge.

There are a lot of different techniques available across all of the weapon groups, but there are a few similar categories. Called shots let you take a penalty to your attack to try to hit a specific part of the body. This might include targeting a foe's arm to try to make it drop an item, targeting its gut to deal bleed damage, or even targeting a vital spot to make the attack crit if you pull it off. Other weapon techniques add special effects to your attacks, or let you use them in unusual ways. For example, remise with a sword lets you ignore your current multiple attack penalty if your last attack was a miss, or high arc with a bow lets you ignore a target's cover by increasing its effective range increment.

Weapon techniques are freely available to any character with the appropriate proficiency, and they help to make each weapon group feel even more distinct than they already do. If you're considering which weapons you want your character to use, weapon techniques offer another dimension to the choice. No matter which weapons you use, however, you'll always have interesting and useful tricks up your sleeve to prevent things from getting monotonous.

Injury

Critical hits, and critically failed saving throws, are devastating events when they happen, but their impacts tend to be brief. Ten extra damage per crit increment can quickly deplete a character's Hit Points but, once that subtraction is finished, there's no meaningful difference between having been crit for fifteen damage and taking two separate attacks that added up to fifteen damage. The injury rules seek to make these critical events more impactful by trading some of the immediate danger of a critical hit for more long-term consequences.

If using these rules, critical hits and critically failed saves cause the target to risk an injury instead of applying the extra ten damage. Each damage type has its own injury table, and you have to roll on the appropriate chart based on the damage type you were crit by and the severity of the critical hit. You always roll 1d10 per critical increment, but deadly attacks add the extra dice to the result on the chart instead of dealing more damage. There's always a chance for a lucky break, but the majority of the time this will result in some sort of injury.

There is a suite of different injuries appropriate to various different damage types. You might get tinnitus from sonic damage, a headache from mental damage, or a sore arm from bludgeoning damage. Each injury has a prognosis, which represents its severity and how difficult it is to recover from that injury, and an effect which applies an appropriate debilitation while that injury persists. Recovering from injuries can be slow. You get a chance to recover from an injury once per day. The Medicine skill can be used to treat injuries, making them easier to recover from, and magic can also be helpful.

Most of the low results on the table are fairly mild injuries on their own, but many injuries progressively become worse as they are taken repeatedly. Your sore arm might not be too big of a deal now, but it becomes sprained if it would become sore again and then fractured. This makes every critical hit take on additional significance, as it could have ramifications that last through many later encounters, rather than just being easily healed off during or between battles. Player characters have the option to inflict injuries on monsters if they choose. This might be helpful to apply a serious de-buff to a foe with an attack that might otherwise do nothing but damage. But monsters are ephemeral things that don't usually hang around to be fought again, so players get to choose to just deal the extra damage.

Impairment

Amongst the damage types in Realm of Runes are several more esoteric damage types, like mental and alignment damage. While it makes absolute sense that you can easily Treat Wounds to recover from some damage types, these stranger damage types stretch the Hit Point abstraction right to the edge of disbelief. That's where impairment comes in. When using these rules, these more esoteric damage types do not cause you to lose Hit Points as normal. Instead, they raise your damage floor from zero, increasing the threshold at which you are rendered unconscious without actually changing your current Hit Point total. This functions conceptually like a reduction in max Hit Points.

Let's say you took fifteen points of subdual damage. If you later take bludgeoning damage which brings your HP total below fifteen, you fall unconscious as if you had been reduced to 0 Hit Points. You would have to increase your Hit Points to fifteen or more, or reduce your impairment value, in order to get back into the fray. Many effects which trigger when you are reduced to zero Hit Points instead trigger when you would reduce your current Hit Points below your impairment value. Importantly, becoming incapacitated due to impairment is slightly less dangerous than being reduced to zero Hit Points. You do not increase your dying value if you still have Hit Points, only if you have no actual Hit Points left. This makes subdual damage, in particular, more broadly useful. It doesn't matter if the non-lethal hit is the one to knock the target out, landing any subdual damage at any point will help.

Because of its esoteric nature, impairment is more difficult to recover from than regular damage. Most effects that cause you to recover Hit Points do not have any effect on impairment. Rest is always an option. When you recover Hit Points from resting, you also reduce your impairment value by the same amount. Because positive and negative damage are impairment damage types, whichever one heals you can reduce your impairment value. If you would recover Hit Points from positive damage, for example, you can choose to reduce your impairment instead. Unlike rest, you have to choose which way to recover. This makes impairment damage types more important, as they cannot be shrugged off quite as easily as other attacks.

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Each of these three optional rules systems has a dramatic effect on how combat in Realm of Runes feels. Because they function independently, your group can feel free to pick and choose ones to suit your particular taste. By including them in the Tome of Whispers, it lets players get a firm foundation with how standard combat works before adding in these additional complications. Next time we'll return to the Card Game to introduce another villain, so stay tuned!