Unserious Combat

Games with unserious combat fail to hold my interest. Some may have fun story mechanics, but in general, a game's staying power with me is directly related to how seriously it takes combat and conflict.

Some, like BX, are classics I can't ignore, but they are more work for me and don't give me the narrative "sauce" I enjoy in a game. The more the game can help me tell the story, the better it is for me. With BX, it is a universal, iconic system, but it still carries a narrative coldness that demands a lot of extra work to fill in.

If a game sits there and expects you to play like an MMO and "grind down a health bar," it will not have a long life on my shelves. Similarly, games where it is a bag of hit points being depleted through abstract combat that the game "expects us to interpret" are weaker in my eyes than games that put in the work and deliver a satisfying, weighty combat experience.

Why am I, as a referee, coming up with all this meaningless color for combat descriptions? You are making my job harder as a referee without some guidelines here.

Your battleaxe does 7 damage to the goblin, who has 3 hit points; the goblin dies.

You swipe down with mighty force, hitting the goblin's shoulder and cleaving the smaller monster nearly in two with a sickening slurp and gash, goblin blood flying everywhere as the split sides fall to the ground with a wet thud.

That second one? That is me, but it gets tiring to keep making up combat color when other games just give it to me with a cherry on top. Rolemaster does this well (but has plenty of repeated results), and GURPS does a great job of providing sufficiently specific details and letting me fill in the rest.

GURPS is sort of the best middle ground here. I can roll a hit location, compare the damage type and total to the location's hits, and interpret a result with far more information than D&D gives me, with guidance from the GURPS combat system, which does a great job at laying out what happens.

From this point on, creating the color of "the sickening details" is far easier than in D&D (5E or BX), where I have to make it all up on the spot. If that arrow sails into the goblin's arm, and through it - I know exactly what to say, and throwing a maimed arm on there and a dropped weapon, shock, and a failed stun roll, is a bonus bit of information.

With 5E and BX? I need to make it all up myself.

That is part of the charm of the classic systems, but it also creates a lot of work, and not every DM is trained that well on this sort of narrative flourish. In fact, I rarely see it mentioned in the rulebooks.

With GURPS? I get enough information to get me started. My job as a referee is far easier with this much information. I am busy enough here behind the screen; anything the game can give me is appreciated. With Rolemaster, it steps a bit too far into the "too much information" level, and the repeat results need to be changed (and a list of the current ones put in short-term memory), so it ends up being too much work with too much information.