Bighomer
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- Aug 11, 2025
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- #1
Combat, the eternal issues with it!
(This thread is going to be a bit long, so put on your reading glasses and thinking cap)
(This thread is going to be a bit long, so put on your reading glasses and thinking cap)
Combat is an essential part in most TTRPGs and roleplay servers, every game or tabletop has it in some form.
Even more RP oriented TTRPGs, ala VTM, Mage the Ascension and others have some form of it in the game.
Let me show you an example of how combat is done in VTM and elsewhere.
In those tabletops, combat is extremely deadly and risky due to the random nature of it.
An elder vampire can be killed with a single well-placed shotgun shot to the head or chest.
As can be seen in the tale of Theo Bell killing off Hardstadt the Younger, a powerful fourth generation vampire that can resist most damage applied to him with his vampiric abilities.
“Theo Bell got a lucky shot on him with a firebreath shotgun shell, burning his head to a crisp and vanquishing him to the underworld with one fell swoop, even though Hardstadt was a vampire of higher power than Bell.”
This is a story that illustrates the random nature of combat, now onto actual mechanics..
Rolls are made by combining skills and attributes.
The system is very simple, since all you have to do is combine an attribute and skill like “strength and brawl”, count the amount of dots given and then make a roll based on the difficulty the gamemaster sets for you, for example.. A difficulty of six for making a dice roll to punch some guy in the face.
The counted dots represent a d10 and the player rolls.. The amount of dice based on his combined skill and attribute value.
The amount of successes above the difficulty number set by the GM counts as a success. A 10 is a critical success.
Anything below that is a failure, so on and so on... 1’s count as a “failure” taking off one success and possibly turning the roll into a ‘botch’.
Pretty simple, huh?
A system built for RP, there aren’t any complex dice mechanics like in GURPs or anywhere else, just a very simple sheet and mechanics that leaves room for creativity for players and the GM.
Willard isn’t so different, the problem is.. It’s far, far more flawed than what WoD uses for most of its SPLATs.
I was told it would be best to explain the “systems” WoD SPLATs use, to at least show a system that really works well and mixes with what most of the SPLATs focus on, that is.. roleplay!
Something that Willard attempts to do, but ends up creating a system that incentivizes players to prioritize winning the engagement rather than roleplaying through arbitrary stat boosts based on eating specific foods or focusing entirely on game-y skills.
Whereas World of Darkness chooses to focus on an experience that does not reward or prioritise constant fighting, making it extremely dangerous, lethal and random, Willard instead opts for a sleeker, more player controlled environment where, with enough mechanical preparation and bad-faith abuse of certain items, any encounter can theoretically be won, especially against unprepared opponents who simply wish to roleplay.
This can be seen in how most S2RP engagements tend to go, especially when fighting a person that is purposefully abusing mechanics to win in every encounter they’re presented.
Same with how inconsistent S2K is, where engagements are decided by who has better ping latency, FPS or better aiming rather than actual roleplay.
Three examples will be provided, where aforementioned problems could be seen, especially with the flow of combat and how most of these combat interactions got quickly derailed by the system being inefficient, poor organization, “bad faith roleplay” and much more.
Example one: Black Flags Vs. The Cadaver Cartel/Les Arrivants
The fight was roughly a 10v5, 10 on the Cartel/Arrivants side and 5 on the Black Flag side, everyone except the leader of the Black Flags have melee weapons.. And the leader of the Black Flags is carrying a USP with limited ammunition..
It starts off with S2RP, where some 1v1 fights happen between multiple characters, organized by the GMs.
After at least 20 minutes have passed, the GMs decide to switch to S2K because the whole interaction is getting hectic and they cannot track everything that’s happening and decide to switch to S2K by writing something roughly akin to “LOOC: Okay, switch to S2K, yes?”, as soon as that is written, the leader of the Black Flags, before anyone else could understand what’s going on, starts to shoot people in the head.
Bear in mind, people are spaced apart and not everyone hears the LOOC message, but the fact someone got domed in the head as soon as the LOOC message was given by the GMs isn’t exactly great.
The Black Flags leader proceeded to shoot everyone while people were confused and the fight ended with everyone getting NLRs and the Black Flag leader losing their gun.
And displays a larger issue that is S2K.
People aren’t incentivized to roleplay or miss their shots at all during these situations, instead.. They line up their crosshairs on someone’s head, press M1 on their mouse and win, because nobody likes losing.
We’ve seen similar examples of this happen in TLM and all across V2.
Before we delve deeper into the problems presented in this combat interaction, let us move onto example number two.
Example two: The 1v6 between Rhodes LeBlanc and the clinic
Here’s a recording of the whole ordeal.
Now, let’s begin deconstructing the S2RP interaction and the issues that came up.
How about we start with the length of the whole combat interaction?
It went for an hour and thirty minutes to kill one guy in a 1v6.
During that time, events outside of the S2RP are still ongoing and we cannot interact with them and miss out on chances to participate in GM organized events, instead we have to focus on the S2RP interaction.
Not to mention, some of the players involved had to go to work, because the S2RP interaction was going on for so long that the people involved had to get ready for work and hop off the server.
Which isn’t exactly great...
Now, you might ask..
Why did the interaction go for that long?
Despite Rhodes being cornered and surrounded by six people armed with melee weapons?
Well.. Multiple things really!
The first thing is “organization” and "initiative checks”.
A lot of LOOC communication is needed to tell who is next down the line during a fight like this.
Same with PMs and everything else to make sure something like this can be organized and occur, otherwise it will be hard to chew through and understand what’s going on.
A chunk of the time was spent wondering who is going next and writing out /me’s for combat to happen.
Now, this isn’t a big issue if it’s organized well, but during this whole S2RP ordeal, we had issues deciding who goes first and writing in LOOC to make sure it is our turn and that we can do something specific!
Second, “infinite counters and GM organization”.
Rhodes was provided infinite counters to make the whole ordeal ‘fair’, essentially making it so that Rhodes fights each person individually instead of getting ganged up on.
Mind you, in no realistic situation would something like this occur.
But, this was done by the GMs to give Rhodes a chance to fight and have a fair shot at combat, which shows really good faith and needs to be commended.
Even if it made the encounter a bit more dragged out and made it less enjoyable to the other six people involved.
Compared to other things that occurred during this entire fight, this isn’t as egregious and not worth arguing over compared to other more distasteful things that happened.
Third thing! “Player goodwill”.
The player behind Rhodes instantly one-shotted the player playing as Vasil, before Vasil's first action could be done.
By writing “/me aims for the neck with an axe”, not to mention that happened within 20 minutes of the interaction, Vasil had to watch the rest of the fight without being able to do anything else besides make gurgling sounds on the table.
It was allowed to be done, since it makes the fight a bit more fair for Rhodes, but doesn’t exactly show goodwill to others roleplaying.
Not to mention, the S2RP interaction was dragged out due to “bad faith roleplay”.
I know it might seem weird to say “bad faith roleplay”, but what I’m trying to describe is
“self serving roleplay”, even if Rhodes was whacked in the head repeatedly, he was able to keep going because of “adrenaline” and other things that seemed nonsensical to other parties involved and dragged out the ordeal by their own initiative.
Not to mention the abuse of goodwill provided by the GMs towards Rhodes during the whole S2RP session that left everyone with a bad taste in their mouths.
I am not making this post to bash the person who plays Rhodes, but to outline how much S2RP is dependent on player goodwill between all parties involved.
S2RP isn’t entirely dependent on GMs, it is dependent on the goodwill of the player and how he acts within the situation, it only takes one bad egg that abuses the goodwill of others to make the RP interaction far less enjoyable for all parties involved.
It’s the same case with the combat interaction between the Clinic and the Black Flags, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Fourth, “rolling”.
The system for dice rolls we currently employ is inefficient and can be easily abused with food buffs, by shoving food down your stomach, drinking a shot of vodka and injecting yourself with heroin.
You can get a +10 buff modifier to strength and agility, making the fight less fair for other people by making sure you’re well-fed, drugged up and drunk.
You can essentially dominate everyone else in any S2RP interaction, unless you’re extremely unlucky.
I don’t believe this needs further explanation to show how bad it is.
Especially when you take into consideration that “bad faith roleplay” occurs regularly at times.
In a bubble, this system is fine..
But when you take everything into consideration, the system becomes very abusable and far less enjoyable than imagined.
Example three: How S2RP can easily get clustered, the fight in the dilapidated apartment block
So, these two attacked them!
Which started off well, until..
A lot of /me’s were written, it was hard to understand what was happening to a specific character, during these situations.
If you’re being attacked by at least 10 people, it’s best to S2L (Shoot 2 Lose), otherwise you won’t be able to progress through all of this due to how hectic it is to understand what’s going on.
Which is a huge issue, when multiple people are writing /me’s and trying to do different things, the S2RP interaction was fine, but went bad due to how hard it is to parse and receive information in situations when more than five people are involved.
Problems with S2K and S2RP
After we went over these three examples of combat occurring within D1, we have gotten ourselves a clear picture of the problems S2K and S2RP have as systems that Willard uses currently.
S2K:- Player goodwill can be easily abused
- RP doesn’t factor into S2K
- People are incentivized to win rather than roleplay
- The inability for GMs to coordinate it well in most scenarios.
- Shoot to miss doesn’t exist currently and people prioritize killing rather than anything else.
- Lag spikes, ping and mechanical skills like aiming in video games determines outcomes in fights rather than actual roleplay.
- Inconsistent combat across the board.
- Poor organization and the need to use LOOC communication to do anything!
- People having the chance to abuse the goodwill of other players and making scenarios less enjoyable for all parties involved.
- Rolling mechanics being abusable
- Taking a while to actually complete one combat sequence while the whole server carries on in the background, locking people in one scenario for at least an hour while events, RP and everything else happens outside of the bounds of the S2RP interaction.
- Hard to parse what’s going on when a lot of players are present, making people scroll through 50 paragraphs of text to understand what happened to a specific player.
Now, all of these problems have been felt since V2 and long before that across multiple servers, S2K and S2RP are inherently flawed systems that only allow for flexibility in how it’s done and in player action.
S2K and S2RP causes too many headaches for players that try to do anything combat related.
Unless they're diehard OTA mains that do nothing else besides S2K stuff, I think most people stand to agree that the current systems we have are flawed and need to be changed for them to be far more enjoyable.
Now, I’m not proposing a Delta Green-esq’ combat system where we have detailed tables of how much damage each individual weapon can deal and how rolls are made for S2RP.
What I think would be best is a sort of return to form or an implementation of a system that benefits players and prevents these three poor examples of combat from occurring again or being as unenjoyable as they were.
How can S2RP and S2K be improved upon?
It might be a bit polarizing for a few people, but reimplementing TBC is the best option currently.Turn based combat could be beneficial for Willard as it is currently.
Having a flawed, yet working system that can be improved upon could prevent situations like the Black Flag Vs. Cartel/Arrivants fights from spiraling into unorganized slugfests due to TBC having one key feature..
Being able to vote for S2K to happen and having actual timers for most things.
Not to mention the removal of most buffs that come from eating or using narcotics.
For S2RP, adding a feature that makes /me’s more readable when more than 4-5 people are involved, a sort of highlight feature that makes /me’s more readable during S2RP, especially if those /me’s are directed towards you.
It’s impossible to understand what is happening in situations like these without scrolling down 50 paragraphs of text to understand what’s being done to your character.
TBC
(Video of a situation where TBC is used in an altercation between the MCP and mafiosos)
(Provided by @Wraygun )
TBC, even if it is flawed, has good elements and features that can be worked upon.(Provided by @Wraygun )
Like having a system that automatically rolls for ‘initiative’ (giving Agility as a stat an actual use within Willard and gives a turn order for all players).
Offering people a way to vote if they want to initiate S2K and giving people a warm-up timer that prevents any issues down the line and other elements that are good for both GMs and players.
Now, TBC as it was had clear flaws in the past that need to be improved upon.
I personally believe TBC should be used by GMs, giving people a chance to vote and giving GMs a tool they can use to automatically get ‘initiative order’ out of people.
And make the lives of GMs far easier by not forcing them to curate and track turn order by themselves 24/7.
TBC can be abused, but it’s an actual system that can be improved upon and refined until issues that once plagued it ages ago become rare or non-existent.
TBC would prevent scenarios similar to the examples provided to flourish and get out of hand.
I.E. forcing players to make a vote if they want to switch to S2K instead of a GM asking everyone via LOOC.
Offering a form of organization in the form of automatic initiative checks and other features that make the experience a bit more bearable and make agility a stat’ worth investing into, since it would affect your turn order within an altercation, giving you a quicker chance to fight or run away.
Synopsis
HL2RP combat has had the same issues for almost a decade by now, many servers had different ways of handling it and Willard used to have TBC as a way of handling combat.
It got removed due to how janky the system was overall.
I personally believe TBC could work really well and is an actual system that could improve combat and make it more digestible for people.
Compared to the free-floaty and abusable nature of S2RP and S2K.
Still, I’d like to hear and see what others think when it comes to how S2RP and S2K can be improved upon.
Since combat plays a big part in most RP servers.
It’s a way we represent strife and conflict between groups.
A way to demonstrate struggle and create interesting scenarios for people to deal with and roleplay in.
