[4e] Initial thoughts on combat

[Tegyrius]

My solo gaming lately has been Five Parsecs From Home, but I sidelined it this week to try to get a better understanding of the 4th edition combat rules before I run a short campaign for my old college group. The following is a fairly lengthy list of my takeaways.

(A note: I did not back the Kickstarter due to not receiving the "ending soon" reminder email, and I avoided any of the preview material in favor of waiting for the finished product. Thus, my first exposure to 4e was cracking open a locally-sourced boxed set in late December. I may be behind the curve compared to those of you who've been casting a critical eye toward it for months now.)

My first impression is that this is both much faster and much more lethal than previous editions, though it has some idiosyncrasies that I'll probably house-rule.

I generated a party of six PCs with the life path rules (which are a separate issue begging for a better character creation system). I selected the most combat-capable three of those and put them up against three stock marauder NPCs with AKMs. At the start of the fight, the marauders were looting an abandoned farm when they spotted the PCs coming and tried to set up for an ambush. The PCs were just starting after escaping from Kalisz and hoping to acquire a vehicle; the marauders' HMMWV provided an appealing option.

The marauders' plan was to take the PCs under fire as they entered the open space between the two main houses. However, the opposed Recon check did not go in the ambushers' favor and combat played out without ambush effects.



I won't post the grueling 18-turn combat log here, but the end result was rather bloody. Despite the PCs having a distinct advantage in skills and armor, a couple of good critical hits on the marauders' part made the fight a lot more even. At the end, Blue 01 was down and bleeding out from an "arm arterial bleeding" critical. Blue 04 was unconscious from pushing a Hail Mary attack roll. Blue 02 was still up but had taken 4 of his 5 hits and was also bleeding out from a "shattered elbow" critical. In the absence of a medic, Blue 01 and Blue 02 both would have bled to death. On the marauder side, Red 02 and Red 03 were both down, while Red 05 was scampering away untouched with a newly-acquired M16A2.

So, as I said, this system is much more lethal.

Lessons learned, in no particular order:

• I'm definitely not a fan of the card draw initiative. It fails to take any degree of PC competence (or NPC competence) into account. This is definitely a candidate for a house rule, perhaps using Coolness Under Fire for something like Five Parsecs' Reaction-based initiative (if you succeed, you go before the NPCs; if you fail, you go after the NPCs), modified if you're facing green (+1) or elite (-1) NPCs.

• Suppression is a nasty piece of action economy that feels plausible and can completely ruin a plan. Maintaining unit cohesion to get the additional Coolness Under Fire die from unit morale is absolutely key to avoiding suppression effects, even for a character with CUF A (d12).

• The real value of smaller explosives, particularly grenade launchers and hand grenades, seems to be to inflict suppression checks and knockdown rather than to do damage. You can't rely on them to produce casualties.

• On a map with 10m hexes where your base movement (before terrain modifiers) is 2, the Mobility skill and its bonus movement on a successful check are key to any sort of tactical maneuvering.

• The Stamina skill doesn't seem to come into play a lot during combat. However, after the fight, it's kinda key to not bleeding out if you take one of the 19 (out of 40 possible) critical hit effects that has the potential to be lethal.

• I didn't have a medic in this fight, but post-combat survival also seems to hinge on keeping the medic alive so they can render skilled, effective aid after combat. By extension, I think the best medic weapon is crew-served, indirect-fire, or a sniper rifle.

• For a group that's armored and firing from cover, arm critical hits will be the most common crits. Having a sidearm ensures that you can keep shooting after taking an arm crit, because any arm crit either inflicts a -2 penalty on using two-handed weapons or makes it impossible.

• I was wondering whether a one-point difference in Range was enough to differentiate an M4 from an M16. The answer is yes, it's quite significant if your fight is occurring at 5 hexes.

• The 1d6 hit table makes head hits a lot more common than they were in previous editions - perhaps too common. I'm mentally tinkering with a 1d10 hit table: 1-2 legs, 3-7 torso, 8-9 arms, 10 head, with partial cover providing protection on a 1-6. That would allow a chance of an upper torso hit on a target shooting from cover, with a net 40% chance of bypassing that cover versus the RAW 33% chance.

• Cover is your friend. Even if hits on cover still yield suppression, it's better than bleeding out.

• When cover has a definite orientation on the map, maneuvering to flank an enemy position and rake it with enfilading fire is definitely a viable tactic.

• Team tactics: waiting until an opponent is suppressed and then running in to curbstomp him before he recovers is kind of frightening. The +2 for close combat attacks against a prone target can be decisive quickly.

• Use smoke or suppression to disrupt overwatch before moving through a covered area. There is no skill to make shooting you harder.

• When bonuses and penalties are assessed in terms of die type rather than numerical result, even a +1 bonus feels good to have, especially if it pushes a d8 to a d10 (or negates the -1 penalty that would drop a d10 to a d8). Compare this to D&D, where a +1 is rather meh.

• I'm undecided on the utility of ammo dice. A 1 in 6 chance of being effective feels rather underwhelming and they didn't generate a lot of benefit. However, a couple of times, they did generate an extra hit that resulted in one round getting past cover.

Things I was running incorrectly and need to remember for the next time I do this:

• Pushing a roll only inflicts damage if you have 1s on the base dice after the push, not every time you push.

• Only ranged attacks inflict suppression. Melee combat doesn't.

• I forgot the -1 penalty for attacking a moving target. This might have been key in not critting and disarming one of the PCs early in the fight (arm hit while entering an overwatch-targeted hex).

• I wasn't consistently applying the fast action requirement to enter cover.

• I ignored the -1 penalty to attacks with an M4 or M16 that has an M203 mounted and I likely will continue to ignore this on purpose because it irrationally offends me.

All in all, I'm happy with combat in 4e. It needs some tweaks to get it to run the way I want, but not many. Moreover, it's (relatively) simple enough that I think D&D groups with some first-person shooter experience - your prototypical modern gamer - will be able to pick it up without the friction that would've characterized a group's conversion from "the world's most popular fantasy RPG" to earlier Twilight: 2000 editions. I've previously speculated that this was (or should have been) a design objective for this edition and I think they got it mostly right. It's clearly not D&D but I think your average D&D5 group will be able to get their heads around it in a way that 2.2 or Reflex would've been a struggle.

My last comment is that the gameplay reminds me quite favorably of a tabletop RPG implementation of X-COM. The action economy, movement, suppression, and cover mechanics all have that turn-based tactical shooter flow. In that, 4e oddly feels more wargame-ish than previous editions.

- C.