TL;DR: Group had issues with FIGHT!, player and I made a revised version which simplifies the system overall, we would absolutely love feedback and criticism, and perhaps the attached document might be one you find useful.
Notable Changes:
- Clarified move interactions, primarily by combining/eliminating some moves, and modifying others to have more standardized interactions.
- Adjusted wounds and wound penalties to make a slightly less lethal combat, suitable for parties that want to wear their scars and risk death, but not be completely terrified of a difficult fight.
- Clarified positioning rules and adjusted die advantages and obs, to mitigate potential snowballing of positional advantages, and create more opportunities for counterplay.
Explanation:
My group was involved in a multi-system “Sliders”- type game, wherein we would have multiple concurrent character sheets per character, depending on what world we had found ourselves in for that session/arc/chapter. This resulted in a game where the players were constantly learning multiple systems, and more or less mastering them on the fly, but the two primary (and purposefully thematically opposed) systems they were operating in were a modded Pathfinder 1.0 and Burning Wheel Gold.
About halfway through the game, I realized that even though we had spent quite a lot of sessions in BWG, we remained relatively illiterate on FIGHT!, taking what were sometimes complicated routes in order to avoid using that system. They loved Duel of Wits, and were pretty quickly fluent in some of the more arcane spokes of BWG, but kept dodging FIGHT!. After a couple forced encounters wherein I tried to present it as a viable option for large-scale, serious combat, it became clear that it just wasn’t clicking. This was a group that did not shirk crunch, and vocally wanted a nice, tactical, brutal combat system, but FIGHT! wasn’t working.
As a response, one of the players and I spent a few weeks working on revised rules for the system, which have been linked above. We playtested it in some controlled settings, and then introduced it to the game proper, where we were able to teach it and run it inside of half a session. It’s been a really successful hack by our standards so far, and we’re eager to share it with some other players, and see if anyone has any ideas for improvement, or notices any potential problem areas which we have yet to encounter.
Thank you very much!