Alternate rule for multiple combatant Bloody Versus

As written, Bloody Versus with multiple combatants on each side relies on having a primary fighter being helped by his friends. This can generate a situation where either no one on a side is hurt, or everyone is equally hurt (if a wound is taken, everyone on one side takes that wound). The following is my attempt at reconfiguring Bloody Versus slightly, in order to do away with the helping rules and the ‘equally wounded’-case. It is also my goal that all players contribute equally to a fight, both in a risk-reward sense, and in the sense of giving everyone a chance to flex their gaming muscles.

  1. Unlike normal Bloody Versus, each fighter participating is paired with an enemy fighter. No one is allowed to simply stand on the sidelines and offer help.

1a. After all fighters have been paired and there are still fighters on one side remaining, these leftovers are assigned to unlucky fighters from the outnumbered side. Note that these must be equally distributed; no ganging up on a single enemy with 3 fighters if there are still unpaired enemies left.

  1. Everyone builds their base pool with FoRKs, advantages and so on, and distributes an attack and defend pool (as per the normal rules).

2a. Outnumbered fighters make two (or three, or whatever) pools: one for each enemy facing them. They thus get a chance to wound each enemy, while also being at risk themselves of taking a hit from each enemy. To represent the disadvantage of fighting two enemies at once, these unlucky fellows add +1 Ob to either their Attack or Defense pool.

Victory conditions follow the usual Bloody Versus rules:

  1. If one side takes a hit while the other is unharmed, a clear victor has been found.

  2. If both sides are hit, all wounded fighters make a Steel test. If one side fails a Steel test while no one on the opposing side does, a victor has been found. If both sides pass (or fail) their Steel tests, the side with the most attack successes decide what happens: another round of fighting, or opposed Speed/Forte/Power tests. These tests are done using the lowest exponent in the group, with helpers adding dice to the pool.

  3. If neither side hits, the side with the most defense successes chooses what happens: new round of fighting or an opposed stat test (as above).

Comments and critique are welcome, this was something I just whipped up and it hasn’t been playtested. Obviously, the biggest issue is how much of a disadvantage the outnumbered fighter should face. In place of the Ob penalty, I considered giving each outnumbering fighter a +1d advantage (but decided this advantage was too small).

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At this point you might as well do a standard Fight. The whole point of BV is a midway point from a simple vs. test and Fight, but still leaning towards the simple versus.

I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t quite agree. While this variant of Bloody Versus is certainly more complex than the RAW, it doesn’t take that much more time - especially not compared to a multiple combatant-Fight. It’s still a single roll, just with multiple pools. My proposal is more involved than a normal BV, but it’s also designed to be: it’s used for when each player wants to contribute equally, while avoiding the hassle of scripting out 6 character’s worth of exchanges in Fight (especially to spare the GM). If the PCs are more or less equally armed and skilled, and they are up against a nameless group of city guards, it makes sense to use the standard Bloody Versus. If there is a single knight in plate armor with his three helpers armed with clubs and rags, I find it a bit unsatisfying for him to both dish out and absorb damage on their behalf.

What? Not in any meaningful sense. It’s two rolls per combatant-pair. It would be as accurate to say that you could resolve an exchange of Fight in a “single roll” by revealing all the actions at once, then building pools for each action and rolling them all at once.*

If you had experienced players and there was at most one GM-controlled character involved in the conflict, you are correct that this could be handled quickly. (Of course, in that kind of setup you could script and run a small Fight very quickly as well.) But for a more common players-vs-GM conflict, I’m having trouble picturing how the GM can resolve this as a “single roll.” Say she has two NPCs, we’ll call them Hans and Franz. So, what, she has four boxes labeled “Hans Attack, Hans Defense, Franz Attack, and Franz Defense?” She picks up Hans’s attack in her right hand, Hans’s defense in her mouth, Franz’s attack in her left hand, and Franz’s defense in the crook of her elbow? Then she throws all the dice into the boxes at the same time, and the players of the two characters facing off against Hans and Franz count her attack successes against their defense pools and read the results while she interprets their attacks against her defenses?

If there are three PCs involved, now she has six pools to juggle.

This will often be less time-consuming than a full Fight, particularly with green players (but if they never learn Fight, they’ll just stay green…) but it’s a far cry from a “single roll.” I also think some of the choices you’ve made are suboptimal, particularly relating to pairing-off. The situation created encourages very small dice pools and contains a vicious penalty for being outnumbered. Let’s say I’m a bad motherfucker of a half-armored knight, B6 Murderin’ Axe skill, facing off against three muggers with knives. I have light mail and the longer weapon. That gives me nine dice, while they have Knives B4 and no advantage dice. I’m about to kick some ass, right? Only I have to make six pools out of that, so I have only three dice left over, and three of my pools are at penalty. So I could throw everything at one mugger, putting 4d into attack and putting obstacle on my defense for him and attack for everyone else. I will almost certainly take three wounds in the process: my primary target can’t miss (I’m rolling one die at +1Ob) and my other two attackers are only testing vs 1d. I have decent odds of inflicting a single wound on one of my attackers: 4d vs between one and three dice. In this scenario, two of the muggers get their intent (they wounded me, I didn’t wound them, so they win) and the third either loses (if I can pass a Steel test while triple-wounded, and assuming that muggers have low Steel) or else I get a chance to run away from him. So the knight has effectively no chance at anything but a total defeat with that strategy.

If, on the other hand, he puts everything into defense (1d attack at +1Ob, 2d defense for each attacker) he cannot wound anyone, so no chance of winning. He has some defense, and it is possible he will go unwounded (but even here, it’s likely that one of the muggers got more defense successes than his pool against that mugger and can keep the fight going), but it is more likely that one of his pools comes up traitors, or someone put 3d into attack, and he does take a wound. He is again defeated.

In Fight, that knight is gonna fucking destroy the knifemen unless they can get a lock on him. They probably can, but at least one of them is gonna take the Murderin’ Axe right between the eyes in the process. The fight will end either with one or more knifemen dead beside the knight, or with all the knifemen dead or fleeing. In RAW Bloody Versus, the fight is more likely to end with the knifemen wounded and fleeing (which is the more realistic result: muggers aren’t gonna stick around to get murderin’-axed) or with the knight forced to throw down his purse and flee (that, presumably, being the knifemen’s intent).

An additional problem with this approach is that of intent. The muggers have one single intent: to get the knight’s purse without getting axed. The knight also has one intent, perhaps to escape with his money, or to strike fear into the hearts of the underworld, or to look like a badass in front of those rich merchants. But since we’ve now split it out into three separate tests, it’s quite possible for two of the muggers to get the knight’s purse while the knight beats the third and so successfully escapes with his money. What happens then?

*Assuming we hand-wave away wounds, that is.

Devin:

While you are free to disagree with me, I don’t understand your criticism and believe you misunderstood what I wrote.
In the case of the knight versus the three muggers, I would parse it like this:

Knight: pool of 9d. Let’s say he splits it as 5d attack, 4d defense. This would be his pool against each mugger. He would, however, get an Ob 1 penalty to either his attack or his defense against each mugger. Yet each mugger only has a 4d pool against him. Sure, let’s say they’re feeling frisky and go attack 3, defend 1. That way they’re likely to get a margin of success of 1, maybe 2 if the knight puts his Ob penalty in the defense pool. The knight would thus end up with 3 neat little bruises. But the knight would maul the muggers, in return: a 5d attack pool against a 1d defense pool? They’re toast, and one of them probably has said axe buried between the eyes. I don’t know if you think this produces results that are completely out of line with either standard Bloody Versus or Fight, but to me it looks as a likely outcome no matter which system you use.

Would this take the same time to play out in Fight? Sure, maybe for some. I couldn’t do it, though.

Is the Ob penalty for being outnumbered too low or too high? Sure, it may not be calibrated to a fine degree yet. Against three opponents, I would probably up the penalty to being Ob 1 on both pools.

As for the comment about intent, I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Are you saying that each mugger has a separate intent? If so, that is not my idea. My proposed idea relies on the intent rules as written in the original Bloody Versus: each side has an intent, not each individual fighter.

Oh! I did indeed misunderstand (though in my defense, your scheme is not the BW default meaning of “make multiple pools,” which more typically means splitting your dice).

In that case, I’d argue that you’re insufficiently penalizing multiple opponents. The knight’s gonna murder them all, which he wouldn’t in Fight or standard BV. (By contrast, the standard BV version is 9d vs 6d, so that’s like 5 vs 3 on attack and 4 vs 3 on defense,

My comments on intent have to do with split results: If the muggers all share one intent, but some of them win and some of them lose, what happens then? If it’s an aggregate, you’re kinda messing with intent and task: suddenly now instead of one test for one intent, you have a situation where everyone must succeed to get a success, and otherwise it’s a draw, which radically increases the chances of a draw, leading to more rounds of fighting or more resolutions via stat test. (And since the muggers probably can’t subdue the knight via one-on-one Power tests, don’t really want to run away, and don’t care about possession of the field, they pretty much need to have more rounds of combat to win.)

I agree.

My comments on intent have to do with split results: If the muggers all share one intent, but some of them win and some of them lose, what happens then? If it’s an aggregate, you’re kinda messing with intent and task: suddenly now instead of one test for one intent, you have a situation where everyone must succeed to get a success, and otherwise it’s a draw,

Well no, everyone need not succeed for the battle to be won. If one mugger chose to concentrate on defending himself and thus didn’t hit the knight at all, the muggers as a whole could still win. I get what you’re saying about an aggregate intent, but I see the same thing going on in Range and Cover, where each group has an objective: that’s a set victory condition under which murdering people from the opposite side may or may not contribute to accomplish. Similarly with Fight, all those tests you and your friends make during a Fight in the end produces an aggregate result: you either win or lose the combat. I suppose it depends on whether one views the Bloody Versus as a ‘normal’ test or one that is part of a subsystem.

which radically increases the chances of a draw, leading to more rounds of fighting or more resolutions via stat test. (And since the muggers probably can’t subdue the knight via one-on-one Power tests, don’t really want to run away, and don’t care about possession of the field, they pretty much need to have more rounds of combat to win.)

Yes, it does lead to a bigger chance of a draw, and this is an issue. I will note however that the muggers would be straight up fools if they didn’t try to beat a hasty retreat from the knight after being knocked around like that. Actually, the knight would likely have more attack successes than the muggers, so he would probably decide on which test to make.
If it’s a big problem, you could say that there’s no option of going another round of fighting unless the Speed/Forte/Power test is also a draw.

In the end, I’d like to point out that the whole case with the lone knight against the three identical muggers would be an ideal situation for a ‘normal’ Bloody Versus test. What my proposed idea is supposed to solve is situations where you have characters of differing combat capabilities (particularly on the PC side of things). For example, an armored knight, a wimpy courtier and a sorcerer using White Fire going up against two goblins, a wolf and an orc leader. It still needs some work, however :slight_smile:

Similarly with Fight, all those tests you and your friends make during a Fight in the end produces an aggregate result: you either win or lose the combat.

Actually, one important categorical difference between Fight and Bloody Versus is that Fight does not have winners or intents. Sure, you can say that if me and my buddy murder you without taking a scratch, we “won” but Fight does not say so. It just says “Jais is dead, Devin and Evdokim Bobrov are unharmed.” Maybe we were trying to force our way into the tower before the ritual was complete, and we didn’t do that, so we failed even though we “won.” In contrast, the Duel of Wits is all about intents. R&C Objectives are not quite conflict intents either: it’s possible, depending on the objective, to get beat up badly and lose every maneuver but still achieve your Objective and “win” the conflict. Objectives appear implicitly in Fight as well, of course (maybe we knew the ritual would take two exchanges, giving us an implicit objective of forcing our way into the tower before that deadline). (Making them implicit rather than explicit is, I think, a design decision intended to make Fight more visceral and less strategic than R&C (at a character rather than a player level). It makes beating on your opponent very tempting, because there’s nothing that says you win if you do X. That’s appropriate to the flavor of violence in BW.)

I would highly suggest sitting down with a couple of buddies and running through a dozen Bloody Versus scenarios. Pick scraps from games you’ve played, model them in the standard rules and see how it goes, then model them your way and see how that goes. I think you’re going to get wacky results. You may or may not be able to tune what you’ve got here until it produces good results, it’s hard to say without trying it.

One other point of failure: you say “pair up the fighters” like it’s that easy, but it’s not. Taking your example, for instance (and using characters from the Rogue’s Gallery)… The wolf wants to fight the knight (Crushing Jaws are VA 2, better than anything else they have). The orc wants to fight the sorcerer, probably. The goblins can go wherever. BUT! The knight wants to fight the orc! The sorcerer wants to fight the two goblins together (more bang for his spell). The courtier wants to get killed. How do we resolve this? Or, what if the orc and the wolf both want to hit the sorcerer? What if the whole point is to murder the courtier, so everybody wants to dogpile on him? How do these pairing conflicts get worked out to generate the neat 1-on-1-plus-leftovers setup you describe?

You’re right, sorry.

I would highly suggest sitting down with a couple of buddies and running through a dozen Bloody Versus scenarios. Pick scraps from games you’ve played, model them in the standard rules and see how it goes, then model them your way and see how that goes. I think you’re going to get wacky results. You may or may not be able to tune what you’ve got here until it produces good results, it’s hard to say without trying it.

I disagree with your notion that the results are ‘bad’ if they don’t resemble the Bloody Versus RAW. I came up with this variant precisely because I found that both the process (the helping rules) and the result (having the armored knight absorbing hits on behalf of his team) were unsatisfying in the normal version of Bloody Versus with multiple combatants. Getting another result is the point of it. I love the BV mechanic, I think it’s brilliant for 1-on-1’s (and certain cases of identical opponents), but find it lacks something in other cases. Because the helping rules only add +1d to a pool it generates outcomes that are vastly different than if you had two opponents up against one in a Fight. And because either everyone on one side takes the same wound or everyone is unharmed, it both produces outcomes that are, again, very different from Fight, as well as letting the squishy characters hide behind the skillful and armored ones. While doing this, they are working as mere cheerleaders and not being able to affect the outcome in any real sense. Aside from unbelievable results (“remember that time we all took a traumatic wound at the same time?”), I find it not very satisfying from a gameplay point of view. It’s fast and streamlined though, and it is saddled with less mechanical problems than my idea.

I really like the helping rules in all other cases, but thus find that it falls short when applied to combat. Others may not agree.

One other point of failure: you say “pair up the fighters” like it’s that easy, but it’s not.

No, it isn’t, you’re perfectly right. It’s something I had thought about, but you really hit it home with the example of the wolf and the knight. As of this moment, I don’t have a good solution. Maybe it renders this idea unworkable in practice. Conceivably, one could come up with some sort of ability that functions as a prioritizer: e.g. “highest reflexes declare first, ties go to highest speed/stride”. One could also argue that this problem exists in the standard BV, where the PC party wants the knight to be the primary combatant, but only if he isn’t fighting the wolf (I do agree it’s less of a problem there, though).

Thanks for your input!

Immidiately I’m thinking: “This is bloody* good!”

Then I got to think, and the arguments that it’s really not less simple than a Fight!** is completely valid (even though I understood the dividing of pools-bit). I think your problem can be solved with a simple Bloody Versus, but with careful intents and stakes***, and those not helping could possible accomplish other things - or get advantage dice to their test for fleeing/hiding/whatever.

Example:

    So, we're about to deliver a ring to Mount Doom. The Nine of us, enter the mines of Moria, and we fail our Read-test and get ambushed by goblins. Our failed test for (untrained) Goblin-wise (thanks a lot, Pippin!) means that they have a Cave Troll with them. 
    Boromir and Aragorn takes charge and tries blocking the doorway. Boromir rolls [i]Power[/i], Aragorn helps. Their intent is to keep the goblins out (for as long as possible), at least until they can mount a defence. They succeed, and we don't get disadvantge-Ob. for the Bloody Vs. leads with the goblins. Aragorn test s his Sword Vs the goblins Spear w/help and Boromir, Pippin and Munti help with Sword and Knives. Their intent is to win/hold the goblins at bay and they tie with the goblins who's intent is to spear everyone in the Fellowship. Even if Aragorn and his helpers lose, the goblins will not get everyone in one test - most importantly the Ringbearer (Frodo) is safe (or as safe as you can be fleeing from goblins in Moria). Amazingly, due to excellent rolling and great Sword skills, Aragorn tie the goblins. The GM considers them the defenders, so the tie go to them. They'll be continously hounded until the Bridge of Kazad-Dùm the GM says, and everyone is happy. 

Note, that if Aragorn &Co would get hurt, different MWs and the application of armour-tests could ensure that not everyone suffered the same kind of wound or a wound at all!

While Aragorn and Boromir with help deal with the goblins, Legolas says he’ll take on the Cave Troll, to stop it smashing through the defence. He wants Gandalf to help, but Gandalf is either turtling or testing his Bridges of Moria-wise so he declines. Frodo volunteers though, and they enter a Versus with the Cave Troll. “If you fail this,” says the GM. “The Cave Troll will smash through the door giving the goblins an advantage-die against the defenders and the Ringbearer will be skewered for a Mortal Wound!” (Legolas has a Belief about protecting the Ringbearer, so he spends three persona and cries: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” … when the traitors appear. Frodos instinct of keeping his elven chain hidden gets tested, but he rolls all the dice and successfully survive beeing skewered by a cave Troll’s spear.

I do agree that the Bloody Verus is a bit difficult to get. Last time I used it I was defending against three orks and just spent all my Beginner’s Luck-dice in the defence-pool, as it would seem that I got my intent (Survive the clubbin’!) if that succeeded. As a GM I’ve been more inclined to make a simple Vs roll, and maybe grant a test to avoid beeing hurt.

*) Excuse my lack of english explicits.

** Yes, I still like to have the exclamation mark.

*** “failure clauses” we’re calling them.

What I’m also concerned with, is that as this idea is much more complicated than a simple Bloody Versus, and not neccesarily much less than a Fight! - you really get a lot of rolls, but not the energy and intenseness of the Fight! - and not the nice oppourtunities for getting sweet tests and using Artha.

In situations involving a disparity of numbers, I’ll have the players make successive BV tests.
In situations involving disparity of gear, I group like with like so the fiction makes sense. The example of the knight fighting alongside rag pickers is a bit extreme, but in that case the rag pickers would be one group and the knight would fight on his own.

Otherwise, try to use the Fight system. The new version is very clean and fast and creates the unpredictable results you’re looking for.

That wasn’t actually what I was trying to say. Obviously if the RAW outcomes were exactly what you wanted, you’d just use them. So there must be some change in those outcomes that you’d prefer. But equally obviously, there must be a whole lot of possible outcomes that are different from both the RAW outcome AND your desired outcome. For instance, you’re probably not looking for a setup where combatants with lower skills are favored over those with higher skills. When I said “wacky,” I meant just that: I think if you test it, you’ll find a lot of results that have you going “Huh, that’s not how I thought that would turn out…” I’m not trying to say that you can’t get the effect that you want, but you are making some rather far-reaching changes here and it’ll take some tuning to get them right. Hence my suggestion that you spend an afternoon testing it.

Thanks for the comments, everyone. Between Michael and Luke’s suggestions on how to use Bloody Versus, and the not insignificant mechanical problems with my approach, I’m starting to come back around to the original way of doing things. I might still do a full playtest at some point when I get the time, but otherwise I’m going to give this a rest. Comments and suggestions are still welcome, of course.

Interesting.

The thing that stands out to me is that the pairing is potentially contentious, and could have a big impact on the outcome.

Since you’re pairing up, you might let each combatant do their Steel tests separately, having the injured or overwhelmed drop out of the battle. Another option would be to start everyone off with a Steel test, and only those who pass can participate in a given ‘volley’. A sort of guts-based initiative.

I agree with luke, the new Fight, though it looks similar, is a lot faster and smoother than the old one. Once-per-volley positioning has a big effect, since it eliminates a lot of the whiff factor in scripting.

I’ve spent many hours yearning for something less complicated than BWR Fight but more satisfying than BV (we played a lot of BV in the early part of Burning Grunweld, and it was most annoying as the party could hide behind the one character’s B6 Sword skill, despite the fact that he had crappy Speed and Reflexes, the rest of them crappy Steel, etc.) I’ve now converted my group to Fight! for the key fights though, and they go pretty quickly.

For less important battles, particularly if there are a lot of them in your campaign, what occurs to me is to do it much like BW recommends handling a mass battle, or Mouse Guard handles the GM’s turn - the GM essentially picks out the challenge of greatest interest and focuses on that.

[ul]
[li]Maybe your battle with the kobolds is absolutely certain victory for the PCs, but the crucial factor is whether you beat them fast enough to prevent a scout from escaping and warning the others - Sword vs. Speed.
[/li][li]Perhaps the kobolds only care about a chance to stab the sorcerer PC, whom they perceive as the biggest threat. Does the party recognize this in time and close ranks to protect him? Tactics.
[/li][li]Perhaps the players are hopelessly outclassed and it requires a test (Tactics, Observation, Umber Hulk-wise) for them to realize this before someone gets seriously hurt.
[/li][/ul]

If you look at the anatomy and context of battles, there are dozens of interesting tests to draw from, any of which might be the crucial, decisive moment.

This relies somewhat on the GM being able to adjudicate combat in a way that’s okay for the group. (This is one nice thing about Fight, the system will carry you along and reveal the key moments and tests naturally.)

What this doesn’t do is address a mixed bag of task-level player intents. For example, if the ranger wants to sneak around the side and use his bow, the sorcerer wants to scare away half the enemies with The Fear, while the tank wants to plow in and lay waste with his new superior quality sword, what the heck do you test? (You could use linked tests.)

I find this mixed bag of intents happens mostly when the specific battle isn’t really important to the wider plot, it’s just a resource-sapping obstacle (like most fights in a D&D module). There’s no party-level goal for the combat, other than to enjoy it, so the players look for ways to express their combat strengths individually. This strikes me as the doldrums of combat, worth avoiding.

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I like this. A lot. Mr. Fuseboy, sir, you just reinvented the boring battle scene. Thank you very much.