Abstracting combat into a turn based system is a tricky thing, especially when it comes to melee combat. When you’re shooting in a tabletop game you can reasonably abstract the action of combat into phases, you aim, shoot, reload, take cover ect. Its a very mechanical and almost ordered timeline of events that the player and the GM know and can understand. But combat with multiple people in a mele fight or a tavern brawl is a lot more difficult to abstract into turn and dice rolling methods that are engaging and fair.
One of the issues of melee combat is characters or enemies moving through the combat space, or needing to retreat. It feels cheap and game braking when an enemy character walks by your player characters and gets past them, it breaks the immersion of the fight as this action acknowledges that this fight is on a clock, and when it’s not your turn then you are frozen in time, unable to affect the world until it is your turn. As a player you feel powerless and that loss of agency can cause real discomfort and even resentment at the table. This lack of agency is what I talked about here in my post about grappling and stunning.
So to get around this frozen in time aspect the attack of opportunity rule was introduced. You or an enemy *can* run through the mele, but you may be attacked for doing so. That seems fair right? You as a player have to gamble, is this action worth it? This way the combat feels a little less static as you as the player have options.
However this has caused its own unintended issue. As the player is potentially punished for taking a bold action, you incentivise the player to stand still and just fight whoever is in front of them. A rule meant to give more fair freedom of movement to do wacky and dynamic things has not turned the battlefield from a game of chess to multiple games of rockem sockem robots, each pair trying to punch the other out and move on to the next.
If you’ve played Baldur's Gate 3 you will know all too well the stagnant nature of the combat and how enemies seem to always get an attack of opportunity, but strangely your characters dont always proc the action.
So how do we fix this? I was watching the film Extraction2 on netflix and there was this fantastic prison yard brawl scene where Chris Hemsworth’s character has to escort another character fro one side to the other. It reminded me of the prison yard scene in the Raid 2 wich was clearly an influence, but with more snow than mud.
The way the scene is broken up is that our hero will fight someone one on one, move further along and get attacked by another enemy. But he’s always doing something different. He’s shooting people, using knives, grenades, the environment ect. The scene is several fights, but they all flow together.
So what I'm instituting in Black Powder and Brimstone is a modified attack of opportunity rule that still adds a penalty to whoever is moving through combat, but still favors the player.
What I suspect is making combat so static is that an attack of opportunity is treated and ruled like a regular attack, with the same weight and rules as a character taking their time to take a big and measured swing at the enemy. But if you wee in a brawl and decided to take a pot shot at someone as they run past, while still fighting someone who is right in front of you, you wouldn't be able to put all your effort into the pot shot as you’re already concentrated on not getting brained by the enemy right up in your face.
So the way I’ve reworked the rule is attacks of opportunity proc when a character or enemy moves within melee range during combat, but instead of a 12 to hit like in normal combat it's a 14, and to dodge an attack from an enemy NPC it's a 10 Agility rather than the usual 12.
This way there is still some danger, but doesnt turn every enemy character into a proximity sensor landmine of damage when you really need to sprint through combat to help someone or get to something important. As a bonus, if you get lucky on your Agility roll and roll a 20 you get a free attack on the enemy, so if your player gets lucky they could be running and slashing through combat like a Bruce Lee action hero.
Because at the end of the day when I’m making these games I want the players to be scared because they have low hit points and death and damage are something to be feared. But also make them feel like they are swashbuckling adventurers dodging and diving on a shifting and changing battlefield.
I think that's a much more fun way to play than rockem sockem robots.