While working slowly but surely on Unnamed, my new RPG project that will eventually have a proper name¹, I got to thinking about extended conflict resolution mechanics, and because I’m sick in the head interested in this as a design space, I’ve decided to go the other direction from most other games, and generalize everything into combat rather than generalizing combat out.

Definitions

Extended conflict resolution

For the purposes of this post, I’ll be defining “extended conflict resolution” to be any structured system, outside of the game’s usual narrative time, which resolves the outcome of a conflict (whether physical, spiritual, emotional, etc) using special mechanics involving multiple rounds where the different sides in the conflict are able to choose actions from a more-or-less specific list.

Over the decades, games have mostly landed in one of several camps:

1. No extended conflict resolution at all (Dungeon World, Lasers and Feelings, my own games Ikaros and Hespera, almost every tiny game). These games just don’t have one! Everything is only individual rolls that happen in narrative time. They might have damage systems, but they don’t have conflict resolution systems beyond simple die rolls. When designing games, this is my happy place, and 9 times out of 10 it’s my favorite option.
2. A fully bespoke extended conflict resolution mechanic for combat, but nothing else. This is most commonly a critique of Dungeons & Dragons and games in its family², but it also includes games like The Riddle of Steel.
3. Fully bespoke extended conflict resolutions for multiple, common scenarios. This is your Burning Wheels (Duel of Wits, Range and Cover, Fight), or your Savage Worldses (extended conflict resolution systems for both combat and chases).
4. One extended conflict resolution mechanic that’s mapped, in the fiction, onto multiple unrelated kinds of conflict. Probably the best known example here is Mouse Guard, which uses a single rock-scissors-scissors-scissors³ system for arguments, fights, naval battles, bake offs, and everything in between. Cortex Prime also does this, in a really fun alternating-escalation type deal where the DC of your rolls is constantly increasing as the situation keeps getting more and more escalated.

In a sense, the system-of-systems I’m brainstorming in this article is just the halfway point between options 3 and 4. By its very definition, it’s using a method of creating similar, bespoke systems within a single extended conflict resolution mechanic to handle all conflicts, but this isn’t something I’ve seen in any of the games I’ve read recently.

Probably because it’s a bad idea! But, for the space of this blog post, let’s pretend it isn’t.

Combat

I posted about this very issue on Mastodon and Bluesky, and somewhat unsurprisingly ran into a need to define what I actually meant by combat. After all, I’ve already covered a half dozen extended conflict resolution methods just in the previous section, and that was only a few paragraphs!

For the purposes of this article, I will be defining combat thus:

1. There is a goal. When the goal is either achieved or becomes impossible, the combat ends. Maybe this is killing everyone in the room, or escaping a chase, or winning the bake off. If you were to reduce the entire conflict to a single roll, the goal is what you’d achieve if you won the roll.
2. There is a rules-based concept of whose turn it is, which I will call initiative. This includes both traditional intiative systems, where it’s someone’s turn and everyone else’s not-turn, as well as games where action resolution order depends on the type of action you’re taking, such as Shadow of the Demon Lord or Exalted.
3. There is a space (not necessarily physical) in which the combat takes place, and acting characters in the combat have a position within that space. During their turn, acting characters might be allowed to move in order to change their position.
4. There are actions an acting character can take on their turn.
5. There is a mechanism for characters to be taken out of the combat. In traditional combat systems, there are many slight road bumps, such as death, that can take a character out of combat.

Of these factors, goals and actions are shared by all extended conflict resolution systems, and initiative is arguably shared as well. So, for the purpose of this post, let’s assume that space and taking a character out are the two distinguishing factors that we’ll shoehorn explore in the various examples.

Using this definition, I’ve been happily exploring a system-of-systems that I call action scenes.

Just explain the damn action scenes system already

Well, it’s really more like a system-of-systems.

To start an action scene, you just have to define the goal, how initiative works, the space, available actions, and how a character is taken out. That sounds complicated, but in practice you can reuse everything except the goal and space in every combat of the same type, and in practice the type of conflict will also include a well-specified way of laying out and moving through the space.

That’s it! Well, that’s it at a high level. It’s still very abstract, and feels more than a little bit like I’m telling you to draw the rest of the fucking owl.

Let’s go over some examples in increasingly abstract order to help make things a little more clear.

Example one: fighting

Good ol’ fighting. The meat and potatoes of turning your opponents into meat so you can steal their potatoes.⁴ Fighting is the grandmother of all combat (and in many cases the sole application of it), so it naturally maps the most easily:

Goal

Kill, capture, or drive off the other side.

Initiative

You can do what you want here, but for the sake of simplicitly, let’s just do the tried and true “everyone rolls their speedness or noticing skill and go in that order.”

Space

Regular ol’ three dimensional space. Maybe broken up into a repeating 5 ft grid, maybe broken up into zones. Either way, there’s a 1:1 correlation between the position of something in the combat space and the position of that thing in the world.

Actions

Stabbing, running, jumping, climbing trees, the usual.

Taking out

Characters are taken out of combat when killed (but not when paralyzed or merely unconscious! They’re still in the combat system itself, they just can’t move or take actions).

Brutal. But a good place to start. Let’s get a little more abstract now.

Example two: chases

Chases are a dramatically underserved extended conflict type for how often they appear in game narratives. When a game only has two extended conflict resolution systems, handling chases is probably the most common second choice (debates are probably third). Here’s how you could represent a chase as an action scene:

Goal

Make it to the end of the chase zone (if the PCs are fleeing) or capture the opposition before they make it to the end of the chase zone (if the PCs are pursuing).

Initiative

Same as fighting. Give the environment one or two activations as-a-character,⁵ and let it create obstacles or attack characters (representing things like traps or unaware bystanders) on its turn.

Space

Unlike fighting, chases represent their space in one dimension, starting at 0 and extending for however long the chase zone is. The players are fleeing in a market that you’ve already described as 300 feet long? Good, the chase zone is 300 feet long. Movement is at normal character speed, unless the chase zone is incredibly long. Try to aim for movement to be no less than 1/10th the length of the chase zone, which gives a five round chase if players take double moves.

Actions

Double move, delay pursuers (such as tipping over a cabbage cart in a market chase), repositioning for an advantage (such as climbing up onto a roof so you can run unopposed). Get creative here!

Taking out

This depends on how your system handles narrative resilience. In games like D&D, it’s probably enough to just say that you’re taken out if you’re grappled for too many turns, or beaten unconscious, or, y’know, killed. In games like Unnamed, where stress is a measure of your ability to avoid consequence rather than a direct measure of health, capture attempts deal stress damage, and a character is captured or otherwise permanently out of the chase when their stress hits 0.

Example three: debates

Remember when I said that debates were probably the third most common type of extended conflict to get bespoke mechanics? Well, get ready to get abstract, because this one’s weird.

This one was written for Unnamed, so it makes a few assumptions about which stats are present:

1. There is a stat called stress that is usually in the low double digits, and which you can spend to avoid consequences for failed actions. They’re basically like hit points, but more generic.
2. The two mental stats are Wits (WIT) and Aura (AUR), which are intelligence and charisma+willpower, respectively, and which range from -1 to +3.

There’s also a character representing the third party who the two sides are trying to convince. It doesn’t take actions, but its position in the conflict space matters.

With that out of the way, let’s get into it.

Goal

To take the third party to 0 stress on an argument your side controls. Once the third party hits 0 stress, the results depend on where it was:

• If it hit 0 stress in one side’s goal space, that side wins a major victory. The third party completely believes their arguments, and discounts the arguments of the opposing side.
• If it hit 0 stress in one side’s supporting argument space, that side wins with a minor concession. The third party found that supporting argument to be believable, but isn’t convinced of the goal argument.
• If it hit 0 stress in the tie space, whichever side brought it to 0 stress wins with a major concession. The third party isn’t sure of anything, but is willing to tentatively go along with one side, for now.

Initiative

Roll WIT vs WIT at the start of the debate, with the winner going first. Initiative order is one member of the side that won initiative, then one member of the other side. Each side must allocate actions as evenly as possible (no having one person make every single roll!).

Space

Each side determines what they’d like to convince the third party of, as well as two supporting arguments in their favor. Then, set up the conflict space like so:

The third party starts on the Tie argument, and everyone else starts in their side’s goal argument.

Movement: you may move up to your WIT (minimum 1) between adjacent arguments before taking your action.

Actions

Opposed actions are always made against the member of the other side who acted most recently, or an opposing character of your choice if no one on the other team has acted yet.

Also, whenever you take an action, make sure to base your roleplay off of whichever argument your character is currently located in. You can’t argue your goal directly from the opposition’s supporting arguments, you’d have to argue against them first!⁶

Make a point

If you are within one zone of the third party, roll against the other side. On a success, move the third party up to one space, then reduce the third party’s stress by your margin of success. On a failure, the other side may move the third party one zone or reduce its stress by your margin of failure.

Change the subject

Roll against the other side. On a success, move the third party two zones. On a failure, the other side may move the third party one zone.

Ad hominem

Roll against a character of your choice on the other side. On a success, deal stress damage to that character and the third party equal to the margin of success. On a failure, the other side may move the third party up to two spaces, then reduce its stress by your margin of failure (both effects are optional, but must occur in that order).

Bait into argument

Roll against a character of your choice on the other side in the same zone. On a success, each point of margin of success lets you move one opposing character one zone. The same character can be moved multiple zones if you have the margin for it. On a failure, the other side may move the third party one zone.

Taking out

A character is taken out of the argument when their stress hits 0.

Oof. That was… a lot. And it’s completely untested! But I think it illustrates how much you can use space as a way to model an extended conflict that doesn’t seem like it would be amenable to it at first glance.

Conclusion

So, did I set out to meet my goal? Yes and no. I was able to show how space could be used in different conflict types, even those that don’t take place in a physical location, but I’m not sure the juice is worth the squeeze, and rather than creating a true generalized combat system that can cover non-combat extended conflict resolution, all I’ve really done is create a framework that lets you create such systems with no balance guidance and a pretty extreme amount of playtesting needed for each and every system. This is definitely more of a thing for game designers than for GMs.

I’m going to try this out with one of my RPG groups to see how it goes. Our usual game is Lancer, which has the first traditional combat system I’ve actually enjoyed in a very long time, and I kinda wanted to see what I could do with a similar focus on positioning as an orthogonal axis to actions.

Honestly, at this point probably the best that can happen here is that a blogger with a lot more experience than me will see this and decide to improve it on their own 😅

Anyway, thanks for reading! Have fun!

Appendix: prior art

There’s more than a little Burning Wheel in this, particularly because Duel of Wits, Range and Cover, and Fight all expand on the same three-volley-chassis in the same way that action scenes all expand on goal/initiative/space/actions. However, I don’t think we should discount the difference that a concept of space makes in how a system actually feels in practice. Range and Cover and Fight have a concept of distances between different opposing groups, but in those systems it’s purely relative to other members of the conflict. Having a universal frame of reference changes the feel of things in subtle but important ways.

The debate system also takes a lot of heavy inspiration from a line-of-scrimmage combat system that Oren Ashkenazi (creator of Rising Tide, editor of Hespera, and a good friend) was working on a few years back, and while that didn’t end up shipping I really loved the idea of extended conflict resolution being primarily about pushing the other side back, and in practice it worked out super well. I’d love to see it make the light of day sometime!

Footnotes

---