Is there any pitfalls to adding in Fight! mechanics to Burning Empires? I know I can just stab him in the face, but sometimes I would knife fight a man, and not necessarily shoot him with a bazooka and kill all of his descendants with an orbital strike.
There are no melee weapon skills in BE. You’d be rolling Close Combat over and over again for all the tests.
Not to mention no Reflexes attribute.
The mini-firefight as described in BE works pretty well for one on one conflicts. I did it for a beautiful duel in a game I ran.
Bah, Reflexes is just a derived attribute and no skills just means everyone rolls Beginner’s Luck!
Might want to cue the Benny Hill song.
The lack of blow-by-blow interpersonal fights was one of the most interesting deliberate design decisions of BE, IMO. I didn’t fully appreciate how it would change the flow of the game 'til I ran up against it and hated hated hated that there was no combat system “like an RPG is supposed to have.”
The most memorable scene of my last BE game came down to an ICHASHITF! roll. And we had another pretty memorable scene where we used mini-Firefight! to work it out, and it was sufficiently detailed.
p.
We had an important scene like this. But it was sort of weird because, how it worked out, the NPC wanted to kill or die and the GMPC and his accompaniment wanted to take the NPC alive. So we had two rolls, one for the NPC to take a shot at the GMPC with a pistol and the other for the GMPC’s group to tackle, pin, and subdue the NPC before the NPC turned the pistol on their own head.
It worked well tension-wise I thought. shrug With some nice colour before (kicking in the door), between (manuvering and such that the NPC was “cornered”) and after roll results it played well to the group too. But I’ve played a single roll combat campaign before in BW and was OK with that too.
EDIT: And no, I wasn’t just happy with it because I got to put an eye-job worm into the Anvil Lord. 