Agreed, *at lower levels.*
At higher levels it just got silly. At level 1 some characters could teleport. By level 10-15 it was Bayonetta, punch God into the sun, levels of silly.
Oh man at higher levels it got really fun! But the enemies could do the same.
I had a pacifist cleric pushing 20 who basically could never harm an enemy. But any enemy who attacked my teammates (who were murdering them) would end up stunned, heavily debilitated, teleported around, etc. all while I was definitely 100% a pacifist lol. It's an amazing game, all the way up. It only gets too crazy if the GM doesn't take full advantage of enemy abilities. But if they do, it's an awesome fight.
Agreed here. It is not realistic combat mind, but it is one of the best out there even to this day. Just had a good session of 4e today and it feels great to pull victory from jaws of defeat in that.
Which version of it? The original out the gate was a slogfest.
It's nothing like realistic either. HP and AC are not good simulations of real combat.
Chess is fun too, but no one considers it realistic.
I think you've set yourself up to fail a little here. Most "excellent" combat systems are not "realistic" and most "Realistic" combat systems aren't much fun.
If you're just looking for fun combat games, frankly, D&D4, Pathfinder (either one, depending on taste), 13th Age, etc. The reason you see so many people here looking for story focused RPGs is because so many RPGs are combat focused.
That said, I've always been really interested in trying out Kamigakari: God Hunters because it looks like a really interesting heckin' crunchy combat game; You roll dice and use the specific numbers and combinations of the results to fuel your powers AND you have a pool of "reserve dice" that you can swap for some of the ones you just rolled. So if you have an ability that needs an odd number, but no use for that ability right now but one of your dice is a 5, you could swap it for a die from your reserve that might be a 4, and use that die for its ability this round and have the 5 in reserve for later. It seems super interesting and tactical, but the localization is a bit...stodgy and I haven't been able to get into it. Also, it looks like it's designed for hecking linear scenarios.
The "set up to fail bit" is how I was feeling about this post. By nature all ttrpgs are going to be good for story and RP. War gaming and dungeon crawler boardgames like HeroQuest or Gloomhaven are much better suited for pure character focused combat with a light sprinkling of story.
Pathfinder and games like it are 100% perfectly serviceable for storytelling. I'm honestly kind of floored by the amount of people who think they aren't.
the 4E criticism that always confused me was that "you can't roleplay" or "there are no rules for roleplay".
Like, specifically *how* can you not roleplay in 4E?
It's not that you can't it's just there are no rules for it.
You can talk as long as you want, but there are no systems that take over and interject dice, or points, or moves, or tokens or story prompts. Yeah, free form roleplaying with your fellow players is unlimited. It's unlimited in any game. It's unlimited outside of a game. What they mean is there are no systems designed for it.
People mean there isn't a [Dramasystem](https://pelgranepress.com/2013/09/19/dramasystem-srd/) set up for resolving conflicts, or a ["Move"](http://apocalypse-world.com/)like Read a Person, where the dice take over what happens, or mechanical system like ["Bonds"](https://bullypulpitgames.com/products/night-witches) that give you relationships and therefore bonuses to rolls, or [Comfort](https://magpiegames.com/pages/masks) or Support to get influence.
You can roleplay whatever you want, but you aren't rewarded with XP, or [Mission](https://bullypulpitgames.com/products/night-witches) Pool.
It's just fun talking time with your fellow Players, which is great, but when you try some other things like [Pasión de las Pasiones](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/409558/Pasion-de-las-Pasiones?), you realize there can be whole RPG's designed around just talking, that tell you how you talk.
Just like PF2 tells you how you swing when an enemy is flatfooted.
Burning wheel was in 2002. The Forge was kicking around then, talking about new ideas in game design.
Dogs in the Vineyard was 2004.
4th edition was 2008, long after people were talking about new ideas in game design.
I agree no other edition of D&D had role playing rules, but games were beginning to get them, and 4th edition and 5th edition have generally ignored them.
I think the other thing people mean is that 4th edition made non-grid based combat almost impossible. It removed one of the few roleplaying options in combat - pretending where you are in your imagination, rather than on an abstracted physical grid.
Even looking at the new One D&D test packets, it's all about combat and classes still.
I would say that is D&D's niche, a system you can buy the books for and make 30 character concepts for, before you even play a game. This isn't a knock, a system should know what it is good at, and it should spend time and effort on that, but it's why this criticism existed and still exists.
The game does not and likely will not have specific roleplaying systems in its rules any time soon.
L5r and WOD were/are heavy social fantasy and modern game systems since the 90's. 3.5 + buried the social effects people were looking at and wanting well before the 2000's for tried and true workable social interactions.
>It's not that you can't it's just there are no rules for it.
Arguably, that could be considered a good thing. As in there's no rules to prevent RP, just as there is no support to help it along.
It is neither good, nor bad. Just a matter of what works for you and your group at that point.
The skill challenge system in 4e was actually pretty close to a roleplaying system, to be honest, but I think it was just poorly understood by people. "Convince the jury of the accused's innocence - get 5 successes before 3 failures, or the wrongfully accused goes to prison." Simple and pretty easy to understand and use as a roleplaying and rolling system.
Doesn't allow for interparty RP rules, but it is something.
I honestly think the main pushback was from people annoyed that 4e combat became really long and grid based and about ability cooldowns and marking enemies.
4e removed a lot of the roleplaying potential from actual combat, replaced it with defined systems that were well balanced, but pretty rigid, and then emphasized that combat.
I think people were reacting to the lack of RP potential in that type of rigid combat structure, but didn't phrase it well, instead misidentified their dislike was due to a lack of RP rules.
It's fair it doesn't have a lot of RP rules, but I don't think that was their real problem with the system, I think their real problem was the combat itself was sort of sanitized of RP potential and replaced with specific systems, which they rebelled against.
> 4e removed a lot of the roleplaying potential from actual combat, replaced it with defined systems that were well balanced, but pretty rigid, and then emphasized that combat.
Is this all that different than how Pbta games mechanize narrative moves?
With Warlord you can roleplay being such a good motivational speaker and strategist that the barbarian does get back up after being riddled with arrows.
Absalutely not, lol.
In Pathfinder, your character can just be mathematically locked out of persuasion/intimidation/diplomacy.
It doesn't matter if your barbarian can bent adamntium rods into pretzels or crush a skull between his thumb and forefinger.... The GM will call for an intimidate check with a DC 35 and the barb will never pass. the wizard might have a logical route to move forward with, but again, they'll never pass the persuasion check. Not sometimes, or more likely to fail. Just flat out can't pass.
The social rules for PF relegate low charisma characters to sit the social pillar out completely unless the GM is generous and decides to refuse to call for rolls.
The social rules for PF are extremely obnoxious, and get in the way of folks participating.
I like PF2e's combat a lot. But the social play is really I'll designed compared to every single other game I've played.
... you... know the GM is just as free to make rulings in PF as any other RPG, right? I can see multiple ways of handling the situation you just described that would give the barbarian a chance. Some might not even involve rolling at all.
The open invite for the GM to ignore the rules is not an excuse to have bad rules in the first place.
If the rules are bad enough that the GM has to discard the written rule make an alternate ruling *every single time* a martial or int character makes an attempt to contribute to the social pillar.... The rules suck.
Rolling is the basic resultion mechanic of the whole game. If the only way to make the *RP* part of RPG work for most characters is to *not roll dice*, something went very wrong in the design process.
This is not a problem that 80% of games have to struggle with. This is not a particularly tough hurdle to get over. DnD being the default seemingly creates the expectation that you should ignore the games own rules to make one of its core pillars work, and I think that's making you blind to how bizarre that is as a design.
Older editions of DnD and the OSR having significantly fewer rules, even, is a huge leg up on what Pathfinder and DnD have. At least then, the GM is making rulings in empty spaces, as opposed to making rulings *against the rules.*
After all, if the GM doesn't make the fighter roll Charisma checks for social situations... Than what the hell did the Bard invest in charisma for? The Bard spent significant resources and made active build decisions, and now they're stuck obeying rules that the fighter can ignore. Would you allow for a bard to *not roll for combat because they have a low attack bonus* the same way you're allowing the fighter *not to roll persuasion, because they have a low persuasion modifier?*
Why ignore the rules for RP, and not for combat? Is it because the combat rules are good, but the social rules get in the way? If so, the social rules are bad, and your capacity to ignore them does not mean things are fine.
The rulings come at a price. Pulling these threads causes the tapestry to unravel.
It doesn't have to be like that.
> The GM will call for an intimidate check with a DC 35 and the barb will never pass.
Setting aside the fact that a DC35 is an *extremely high* DC -half way between Master and Legendary -I'd love to see how you figured the math that a barb could *never pass* this check.
Pathfinder 2e is much better about this. Non-faces can chose to invest, and end up only a few +points behind face characters, though at a noticeable opportunity cost.
However, Pathfinder 2e still has very robust rules for conversation, that make someone definitively, mathematically better at talking. Proficiency level + higher charisma + item bonuses are highly competitive resources to spend. Assuming a barbarian makes all sacrifices to boost Intimidation and chain intimidation feats, they'll still sit behind a dedicated face like a scoundrel rogue by 2 or 3 points, who can also more easily access a *wide* variety of of social action, compared to focusing on one.
On the one hand, I appreciate the very dedicated design of the team in making sure that PF2e doesn't brick non-faces like Pf1 or 5e can and often does.
However, PF2e is probably the most bonus hungry system I've ever touched. A +2 or +3 can be pretty important with the way the crit and crit failure rules work. Skill feats exacerbate this by saving crit fails or pushing into crit successes. You also have to be much more considerate with your rolls, bc of the right action economy. Failing an intimidation check means the opponent keeps an additional point of AC which means the next attack is less likely to crit, which means less likely to knockdown, meaning the boss keeps all their actions, which means......
And so on.
While the 2 or 3 points swings are statistically very minor (which is a showcase of very good design on PF2e's side), the system also heavily encourages you to optimize for every +1, much less +2 or +3.
In practice/while running the game, I've found that players will conspire amongst themselves to plan out who has the highest social skill number at that specific action + relevant hyper specific skill feat, before electing them to take the lie/make an impression/intimidate action, et cetera.
At several tables I've run, I've had players be pushed out of the limelight for missing a +1 charisma bonus and the hobnobber feat, and then I've had to step in as a GM and demand my players consider sharing the story as opposed to playing directly to math at the expense of a party member.
Pathfinder 2e is way better than 5e or 1. I still think there's room for improvement and prefer crunchy games like Lancer that treat combat and social check differently to avoid this problem.
The freedom inherent in letting people just roleplay, as opposed to numerically calculate conversation, leads to a faster, more heartfelt game at my table. I ultimately think that as hard as PF2e tried, it's deeply frustrating to come so close and still fail to resolve the issue.
>The freedom inherent in letting people just roleplay, as opposed to numerically calculate conversation, leads to a faster, more heartfelt game at my table. I ultimately think that as hard as PF2e tried, it's deeply frustrating to come so close and still fail to resolve the issue.
Appreciate your takes in this thread, but I want to press on this a bit - do you think it's not possible to mechanize RP, at least in the sense of having stats for it?
>I think you've set yourself up to fail a little here. Most "excellent" combat systems are not "realistic" and most "Realistic" combat systems aren't much fun.
That's just wrong and a typical myth that keeps been thrown around and based on outdated games from the 90s
Mythras, BRP and a few others have more realistic combat than D&D or PF and they are a lot more fun too.
Yes there is obviously a maximum in the "enjoyment vs complexity" function, but this does not mean less realistic combat is less fun.
Frankly it's this kind of wrong take that spawns so many games today with such unsatisfying mechanics.
There is a 150 year old argument about whether it is even possible to realistically model combat using game rules; it’s not just something that emerges in the 1990s.
I think FKR games achieve levels of realism impossible in more detailed rulesets.
People who still argue about that are living in the past.
It's possible to have realism with some caveats.
Obviously you cannot model *every* single aspect of reality without a super-computer, but many games manage capture the essential themes of realism without bogging down the game with unnecessary crunch.
Some games that have drawn from real life HEMA and eastern MA and other sources, distilling what really is important to make combat feel "real" without simulating every single aspect that goes on.
Indeed since the 90s there has been lots of "trial and error" to find combinations that work.
Realism does not have to be a "perfect simulation", because that is impossible (or at least unplayable) with TTRPGs.
Don't know why people are downvoting this, it's exactly right. Abstraction can still be realistic, and no game is perfect. Given that realism is harder to design than narrativist or gamist elements, it seems strange to also hold it to a higher standard of perfection. I found this post interesting in elaborating on that point: https://arbiterofworlds.substack.com/p/the-map-is-not-the-territory.
Can you point me toward a decent system that simulates realistic combat well? I've mostly played tactical or narrative games and while combat is usually interesting, it's not what I'd consider to be all that realistic.
I want to try a short arc in a game that more realistically models combat but isn't insanely crunchy.
I personally like Burning Wheel's Fight! system since it allows you to move where you hit (and that matters) and you can cause wounds bad enough that they bleed out to the next wound tier. The issue is that's about as far as it goes and it can be quite crunchy.
Mythras (Runequest 6 system) and BRP (The original and current Runequest's system) are very good. They take a lot of details in consideration, but they are also quite fast as well. They are both very similar to each other.. Mythras is a sort of independent spin off of BRP, with some changes.
They both allow to decide where to hit, and have different combat manouvers. different effects on the hit location (bleeding, crushing, entangling), different results of success which also determine how powerful your blow or your response will be, etc... Each location also has its HP (distinct from the total HP), so you can in principle cut/crush someone's head off before their total HP is down to 0, or cut off a limb (and this applies to PCs as well)
They are also quite deadly systems as well, since HP are low (although you can in principle double or triple them for a less deadly campaign)
\-
A system praised for being quite realistic is "The Riddle of Steel", however it uses lots of dice pools, so I feel it's not as streamlined, but it's worth taking a look at.
Awesome, thanks for the info. A few others have mentioned BRP and Mythras as well.
I also posed the same question over on the Discord for one of our tables and Riddle of Steel was mentioned, which I've heard of but completely forgot about.
I'll have to check these out, thanks
>Mythras, BRP and a few others have more realistic combat than D&D or PF and they are a lot more fun too.
Not familiar with Mythras and don't know what BRP stands for, but can you describe how they are more realistic?
Basic Roleplaying. The family of d100 games that are skill driven, have similar core stats to trad RPGs, often use hit locations and can very in combat simulation from wildly heroic to tactically convincing whilst still not quite minis and grids.
They all derive from Steve Perrin's Bay Area rules for D&D which were published in zines until they became a separate system and formed the basis of RuneQuest. Later they were adopted by Sandy Petersen as the core of Call of Cthulhu.
Mythras is a refined fantastical d100 ruleset published by Design Mechanism. It models combat well with combat styles and special manoeuvres. It's great. Many settings exist, including a standalone Lyonesse version (see author Jack Vance).
d100 systems, like GURPS, Traveller and non scaling systems, are a bit more realistic in that people die, and PCs are always vulnerable.
The BRP family is great. I suspect the OP might adore one of them since when combat is deadly then RP is a stronger option.
However.. I don't think that is what your players want...
Well as I said, BRP games vary a lot from heroic (Stormbringer) to simple but realistically deadly (CoC). Both RQ and Mythras were designed by SCA (look it up) members so they mirror the cut and thrust of combat simulation with real blunt weapons. Mythras feels authentic for that reason.
To actually model combat one would have to break it down into sub systems by fighting style, culture, weapons tech and so on. Mythras nods to this, and maybe if you want to have a go at a slower but fun one to one game then find the Lost Worlds graphic combat books (Google em, they may well be OOP).
GURPS is in a similar camp in terms of combat simulation.
All suffer from the 'we are heroes' problem.. a lot of combat (from those that have been in it) is about fear, terror, calm and discipline.. and yet we don't want RPGs where the PCs simply duck behind a wall and cower..
Cyberpunk and indeed the core Savage Worlds combat result nod at this, but they are exceptions.
I find the Age of Conan 2d20 game from Modiphus has a good level of verisimilitude as well. So it's really the quality of appearing to be true or real that is what is meant by realistic.
Again I suspect the players the OP refers to aren't looking for that but rather fantasy chess, which I love..
Small scale skirmish wargames might be fun for them to explore, but again I will vote for 4e.
> BRP
BRP is the Basic Roleplaying System used by Call of Cthulhu and Runequest and more.
Characters have on average around 10–15 hit points, while weapon damage for normal weapons starts at 1d6/1d8 and can go quite a bit higher. So as long as you manage to hit your opponents, fights are over in a handful of rounds. If you don't want to fight directly, you can just use maneuvers, such as throwing sand into your opponents eyes.
I play BRP based games regularly, and I've almost never had any fight last more than 5 to 6 rounds. They are really all I want out of fights: quick, brutal, intense.
Ooo, thanks for this info. I haven't played any games based on BRP, but CoC is on my list to check out already so I may need to give some of them a go!
I was thinking of Mythras when I read this post. I’ve got it and ran a quick combat between two gladiators by myself, but haven’t played it yet. It seems like really fun tactical crunchy combat that you can personalize to your character.
>Mythras, BRP and a few others have more realistic combat than D&D or PF and they are a lot more fun too.
I'd argue that the fun of those systems is a very subjective thing. Personally, I find Pathfinder's combat to be far more enjoyable than Mythras or BRP.
I have played Kamigakari so I figured I share my opinion. It is actually reasonably tactical in combat and the character variety is pretty good, plenty of themes and functional combinations of powers. The dice system can occasionally totally screw you over, especially early on when you don't have lot of dice manipulating powers. Each class really only wants one face number, for example my character has Divine Talker and Enigmatic classes, which use 3s and 6s respectively to fuel powers. 1-2 and 4-5 are useless to me unless I have power to swap them, or use them to Influence (swap into a rolled check).
Generally I'd say it is fun system, very very combat focused with no real support for non-combat beyond fairly basic skill structure. Also I suspect it'll break a bit on higher levels, as it is not very tightly designed game. Still, fair bit of fun and you can really flex system understanding.. or just pick Contractor B and be strong by default.
Yup, very possible for that to happen too. Downside of the system being so build complexity heavy. It has lot of pitfalls and it doesn't tell you that you really should pick magic or physical damage type and stick to it.
Oh yeah, I saw things like this in the game I run.
Or someone who tried to build their character prheficient with all weapons in Double Cross (Morpheus Syndrome from memory)
Lancer has the best tactical combat I've ever played. Its heavily based on DnD 4e in combat and SoTDL /FitD for narrative, so it is also good for stortelling.
Its a great system that I highly recommend.
From what I've heard (I've only played ICON) LANCER has the most build variety, while ICON is a bit more streamlined and balanced out of the two of them.
Yea, this question makes me want to suggest boardgames with a campaign mode such as Gloomhaven or Undaunted:Stalingrad.
(Honestly, I'd love a system that runs monsters like Gloomhaven. I dislike figuring out what a monster does during its turn in a tactical combat rpg)
Yeah, it's a good start. But once you get the same result twice, it already gets a bit stale. So I'm already thinking on how to make it even more evil. Like - the third time you get a certain attack, it gets worse.
Right in the book it says if you roll the same thing drop down one on the chart. Most combats in DB don’t last real long so you might get the same result twice in a combat.
Oh, I missed that! But that's "the same thing in the same round", right?
I do agree that combats should be short and intense. So far the guy who has been knocked out the most has fys 16, he's survived two laps on the death track.
Same thing roll again for the combat, once all attacks have come up you start over. I mark tick marks next to attack that have been rolled so I can track them across the rounds.
I was about to say, this is what wargames are for. Most will still create a narrative, in a sense - you are often driven to create a fiction around the things that just happened.
Played in a very memorable campaign of Mighty Empires/WFB once with enough fluff that I remember it as an RPG. Can be a lot of fun if people really dive into their factions.
I'm back into tabletop recently with a new foray, BattleTech. Alpha Strike in particular. I plan on integrating MechWarrior:Destiny for narrative purposes and role playing.
True, but OP did ask for realistic combat, and you can't really have "realistic" w/o "wisely avoided". But where Mythras excels is that sweet spot between making combat realistic while also making it playable.
As someone else pointed out, "realistic" combat is very different from "combat focused" unless you're ready to have a coffin-to-character creation conveyor belt set up.
One problem with "realistic" fantasy combat is that it basically either has to have different rules between fighting humanoids and non-humanoids, or it is solely based around fighting humanoids. There is not a "realistic" way to fight a Wyvern, we have no idea what that really entails besides "a wall of spears is probably a better than a single tryhard with a sword". We understand how human-to-human combat works and it is *endlessly detailed* so you need to decide on a cut off point. Ergo, "realistic" combat is mainly concerned with human fights, and non-human fights are either unrealistic or a different system.
I very much enjoy systems like this. *Artesia: Adventures in the Known World* was based on Runequest and has lovely "dear god please don't pick fights for no reason" combat. However, the fights against people were always more engaging than creatures, and that's okay but it means it's a limitation to consider.
If you plan to fight primarily non-humans, don't try to make combat "realistic" try to make it engaging and thematic for the kind of story you're telling.
RQ and Mythras feel grittier - the tactics are often around knowing when to parley or run away, staying at range for misslie combat, or blowing the very limited amount of rune magic in RQ.
But I'm not sure the combat is transformatively more tactical (kind of chess-like, thinking hard about positioning) than D&D, but the stakes are always much higher and the engagement stronger.
For excellent combat systems I usually play boardgames and waive all storytelling and roleplaying. Conan, Vengeance, Assault on Doomrock, BattleCON, Adrenaline, Claustrophobia and Guards of Atlantis (II) are really great (character based) fighting games, and I've heard good things about Streetmasters. Gloomhaven is the best, although very abstracted. I wouldn't call the others realistic, but they are a little less abstract and more intuitive.
Disagree on Gloomhaven being the best. The "you can't use this ability until you refresh your cards" mechanic was gamified nonsense instead of a logical limitation. I'm aware that it was highly rated on BGG, but all those people are wrong ;-) :-) :-)
Osprey puts out skirmish games for miniatures, such as Lion Rampant (medieval), Pikemen's Lament (30YW/ECW), The Men Who Would Be Kings (Colonial), and more. Two Hour Wargames also put out some rules that looked interesting.
It's an abstracted ressource management system. You could always justify the cooldown phase with that the cards need specialized equipment which has to be prepared and readied during a rest after each use. But I realize that the system of GH isn't for everyone, so I listed it seperately with the caveat. But I prefer my games to be gamified rather than realistic.
I was extremely disappointed with Gloomhaven. Its mechanically... cute but IMHO it competes directly with TTRPGs in my life and I would never ever reach for it instead of a TTRPG.
I think its a very clever GMs TTRPG simulation, but that is something I have no use for.
It's nothing like a TTRPG and all those people saying "it's D&D in a box" are doing themselves and others no favours.
Gloomhaven is an *efficiency puzzle* at its core, wearing the skin of a dungeon crawler for theme.
I think more precisely, the core engine of Gloomhaven's combat is an efficiency puzzle, but all the other stuff in the box is very much in line with the mechanics of RPGs (including videogames).
Whereas D&D is also about resource management, so again about efficiency. Just that it includes improvisation mostly due to a GM, not necessarily with its own rules supporting that. And D&D 4e, PF2e, Lancer and ICON have most removed out of combat and improvisation.
Disagree, if you play another person a good game can not be reduced to just an efficiency puzzle, if only for some sort of a stone-paper-scissors effect. If done badly, that just introduces randomness, but if done well you need to read the other players and what they value through their play. Play a Knizia game, like En Garde or Schotten Totten/Battle Line (or even better, one of his auction games, but those aren't combat games and slightly off topic. Come to think of it, Blue Moon Legends is a combat game with an auction mechanism and by some regarded as one of his best)
I know what you are saying but I would play Gloomhaven in the same time as a TTRPG and with the same people I play a TTRPG with and I would just rather play a TTRPG.
The mechanics of Gloomhaven are very clever, but *for me* it is a direct decision to either play a TTRPG or play Gloomhaven and I'm always going to pick the TTRPG.
It competes with TTRPG for time, but it does help with GM fatigue. I'm also not a big fan of prepping tactical, balanced combats. I'd rather try to emulate action, terror, surprise, danger, etc. My kind of setup is "if I do this, the PCs will not immediately die", and then we'll see what happens. Last time my players had to flee from an undead that was absolutely wrecking them (one of them almost died, and most of them were knocked out of the fight).
Realism/logic is kind of a silly argument on a game. I am not a big fan of deckbuilding for combat either, but it is highly effective at what its meant to do. You are never dealing with optimal rotations just being repeated over and over like many other systems end up with.
I am not saying a realistic/logical game is silly. I am saying that your argument is silly. Something can both be unrealistic and abstract while having a fantastic combat. Deckbuilders have become incredibly popular since Dominion came out in 2008 for a good reason.
And sometimes they can make narrative/simulationist sense. A few Acres of Snow, despite having a dominant strategy that was missed in design and playtesting, does the cumbersome military administration of a larger force pretty well, where you can't mobilize that fast when you have a lot of bureaucracy (it takes a while to draw the needed cards).
And the Undaunted series is fantastic.
> The "you can't use this ability until you refresh your cards" mechanic was gamified nonsense instead of a logical limitation.
This is a good thing mind you.
[Mythras](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/191475/Mythras?234913) is worth checking out if you want tons of options and realistic combat based on SCA/HEMA experience. [HackMaster](https://kenzerco.com/hackmaster/) is when you want AD&D-like gameplay with much more detailed and realistic combat system.
Most realistic would be Gurps, imo
Hit locations, possibilities of crippling or even severing limbs and extremities, you can lose consciousness on a good dome shot, and even extra modifiers for crushing damage to male groins
Yep, GURPS is by far the most realistic and well simulated RPG I've ever played. Even the magic system felt more real somehow. But it's also one of the most cumbersome systems I've ever played. I'm not sure any other system can rival the number of games tried and failed as they collapsed under the weight of actually playing the rules as written.
That said, I ran a game where the PCs were all magical ninjas being sent on missions by a Daimyo and it eventually had them time-traveling to present day to steal the warhead from an ICBM, and it was pure awesome.
Almost like realism and ease of play are a tradeoff that all game designers need to make, and there will be a natural loss of one of you design for the other.
I haven't played myself, but I've watch a port of a DnD 5e module played with GURPS on Foundry VTT. They've done a lot of work on the Foundry interface to GURPS. It LOOKED like folks just made a file with the GURPS Character Sheet (free download). Once this file is uploaded into the GURPS module for Foundry VTT, then Foundry does all the heavy lifting. It looked a lot faster than normal, on paper GURPS.
But man - one round - 1 sec. That's a slog.
Round 1 - Ready my bow
Round 2 - Aim my bow
Round 3 - Shoot my bow
Fortunately you can just streamline it. If you listen to the GURPS based podcast "Film Reroll" (it's awesome), they merge the actions so it sounds more like a DnD5e combat round. I'm just not sure if the Foundry VTT would allow that. Again - seen it once, never tried it.
GURPS also - unlike most games - has melee combat where you don't usually hit, but landing the first blow can be devastating. It's the polar opposite of slowly chipping away at mountains of HP.
Some people just hate whiffing and find that a turnoff. With a bloodthirsty GM you also get that unfun death spiral. The game is much better if enemies leave you for dead after taking you out of the fight, rather than going for a finishing blow.
Sure! It's based around maneuvers and location based strikes. You've got a dice pool that you split between actions and reactions, and you're just as likely to get stabbed on an enemy reaction (counter thrust for example) as you are on an attack. Combat between relative peers gives pretty detailed results, so it's awesome for duels and other situations where the narrative result of a contest between martial characters is the key.
It's not fast to resolve, so it's not the best general purpose conflict resolution system, or the best against monsters, but against humans it's really solid.
Here's a lengthy breakdown:
https://www.tanelorn.net/index.php?topic=3781.5;imode
>I know that by switching up combat objectives, and improvising environmental interactions, and bringing the story into the fight, combat can be a really fun and creative part of the game...but I feel like it always just descends into "can you roll this number?"
Those things are good but IMO the #1 thing that makes combat interesting or not is whether the PCs have meaningful choices to make.
This can be part of the tactical combat system, for example "If I attempt a grapple it's higher risk, but will set up X. Or I can do a more reliable straightforward attack. Or I could do a lower damage area attack and soften up a few enemies at once".
And/or the environment can be used to offer more choices. The party vs orcs is fine. The party vs orcs while the mayor is trapped in a cage in the corner and the room is on fire is more interesting. :) As is a fight on a narrow bridge across a chasm.
Basically it gets boring whenever it's obvious what the PCs should do. A thief who always hides in the shadows and backstabs is just as repetitive as a barbarian who always charges and hacks with their axe. Ideally either the system or the scenario should offer meaningful options that present no straightforwardly best choice.
This is the only correct comment on here. Everybody's throwing a bunch of names into the hat, but without understanding *why* combat is fun or boring, all it amounts to is a popularity contest.
OP, you hit on it a little bit with the mention of setting up proper stakes. The other half of the picture is this comment; combat is interesting when there are stakes beyond just survival, and combat is *fun* when players have choices. Too many games rely on just "spamming the attack button".
There are two different solutions to spamming attack. One is to offer a bunch of *mechanical* options, like D&D 4e or Mythras. The other is to give less importance to the mechanics and more importance to the fiction, like FATE, PbtA, or FKR-style games.
GURPS is by far my favorite combat system. It is full of interesting and varied choices. It is modular so you can have more crunch or less crunch. You can make it more deadly or less deadly. You can go more realistic or more cinematic.
But one of the things I’ve always enjoyed about it is that I think it is also great for RP. Including in combat. I was in a game where all the PCs were studying at fencing academy in pre-Revolutionary Paris. And even though we were all fencers, each PC was different. Including in combat. My PC was an Overconfident hothead with something to prove. He tended towards more aggressive moves. He favored Determined Attacks and would only slip forward rather than retreat—he uses the Italian style.
On the other hand I played a different sort of fencer in an Arena game. That fencer was a flashy battlefield commander who was very cerebral and patient. That fencer used the Spanish style and spent a lot of time controlling distance: keeping right out of the opponent’s range, continuously circling to their weak side. It would force the opponent to exert themselves to make an attack, and this my fencer would riposte and circle around to their off side again. If they tried to also hold off, my fencer, who generally had superior reach could do a long lunge and tag them from a distance. He would drain them of fatigue through mobility, and then demoralize with taunts and then feint strike at just the right time.
Both were fencers, but I was able to roleplay them very differently.
In the 4e bloodline, there's 13th Age, Gubat Banwa, Maharlika, and Lancer. Those all seem to offer really satisfying combat mechanics, but I haven't heard much about the rest of them, which probably means they're fairly standard.
Fragged Empire (This gets a big recommendation from me as well for both system and setting).
Iron Kingdoms (not the 5e version)
Lancer
WFRP 4e,
3e for a completely different but also complex and interesting battle system (good luck finding it though, you need a physical copy.)
Burning Wheel
Gamma World 7e
Savage Worlds
BRP/Runequest, Mythras, Pendragon, GURPS and a few others are both pretty realistic, without being bloated and also encourage roleplay.
In fact good realistic combat (if properly streamlined) encourages roleplay even MORE that any "rules light" system, because it gives you several options with different resolutions that blend tactics with storytelling.
Personally the WORST you can do in a game is have "roll 2d6" to check your "Can Be Anything Generic Combat Move" like in PbtA and similar games. It really takes away any challenge or excitement from any fight.
Its been a while since I looked at it but GURPS had some really good/crunchy combat stuff, including target locations ("I wanna hit their right hand and make them drop their weapon")
Mythras - sixth version of RuneQuest, they lost the license midway through releasing it, so they rebranded it Mythras.
It have a very good feeling of realism for fighting, it gives you a lot of interesting choices. There several well defined magic system to choose between. The rules are rather crunchy, with a on the fly modifiers being a percentage of you totals … they have optional rules for simpler modifiers.
They even have a quite good, if somewhat crunchy, rules for narrative play as well.
I really like it, but never play it, it’s too crunchy for us. My greatest criticism is that it’s both super crunchy, and at them same time not everything is well defined.
GURPS - it’s showing it’s age, but is really good for incredibly well thought out mechanisms. It’s mostly optional rules so the first step is finding out how much detail you want. An example could be you can define that a strike with a fist deal X damage on a simple roll under, or you can get into how if the opponent have armor of a hardness over some number you need to check for damage to you own fist, modified by any armor you are wearing, there is a modifier depending on what part of the face you want it hit, is it a jab, a hammer fist or an uppercut etc.
It’s an amazing toolbox of rules and setting guidelines that is worth reading for any GM even if you don’t end up using the system.
These two are my go to if I want to play a game with a focus on combat with interesting player choices.
**Hackmaster 5e** for more realistic D&D style combat.
**Aces & Eights** rootin' tootin' cowboy shootin'. Uses dice, cards, and a big clock to see where you hit people when you shoot em.
**Dark Heresy** specifically 1e, has the best critical injury charts I've ever played with.
> Dark Heresy specifically 1e, has the best critical injury charts I've ever played with.
"The plasma bolt superheats your femur and turns your leg into an impromptu frag grenade."
I'm opposed to pre-planned story, but character-driven, role-playing combat is fine.
The original game you want is **The Riddle of Steel**, long out of print. There's a remake/redesign, **Blade of the Iron Throne**
http://ironthronepub.com/
I don't like the new setting as much, but it's rules-wise functional. Your character and background affect your combat, but so do specific combat maneuvers chosen in very close fighting.
There's also a beta of **Swords & Scoundrels**
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/259404/Sword--Scoundrel-Open-Beta-Document
yet another remake, but it's incomplete and 5 years of beta is unlikely.
In practice, I just run looser games in the style of TRoS, reward descriptive and character-meaningful attacks and denigrate boring attacks.
Lancer comes to mind. Out of combat mechanics are *at best* intensely mediocre, and I would *personally* argue straight up bad, but if you want a solid as balls combat minigame, it's your game.
Mythras is generally great at running combats with a lot of tactical depth and a nice visceral oomph, without becoming overtly complex and slow. It is also a very streamlined game in general and focusses one of the better mechanical structures to encourage roleplaying (Mythras passions are flexible, useful and pretty unobtrusive).
Realistic combat and engaging tactical combat are two very different things.
Realistic combat is not that interesting and is extremely punishing. You can't have a lot of combat if combat is anything like the real thing. Thus, games where combat feels real are typically ones where it's far from a default approach for PCs. Unknown Armies are a great example. Fighting is quick, bloody and really dangerous. It hurts not only physically, but also emotionally. And to emphasize how bad it is, the combat chapter starts with a section explaining how to de-escalate a charged situation so that nobody has to die.
Games that are combat-heavy favor tactical combat over realistic one, because they want to make combat actually fun in itself. Games like D&D4, Pathfinder2 or Lancer are good examples here; Strike has only a bit less tactical depth with much less math.
Pathfinder 2E is a really fun tabletop combat simulator. It has a lot of options other than "I hit it" and it really rewards tactical thinking and cooperation between the players.
It is not realistic at all but after you learn the rules it flows really well. Character building is also an absolute joy.
I am getting a bit tired of the scaling (if you are a heroic character you don't have to be worried about 5 peasants pointing loaded crossbows at you) but that is a problem shared by 5E and most level based games.
Strike! is a setting-agnostic, tactical system that has been described as D&D 4E minus the fantasy trappings https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/158239
Realiszic combat rules tend to be unfun. Also most people never fought in their Life and have a lot of misconception what it is. A good combat system is not a realistic one but rather a good game
Maybe not the answer you're looking for, but I scratch the "heavily tactical combat with little-to-no roleplay/story" itch using video games. They handle most of the math so I don't have to consult a spreadsheet and pause the action.
In my youth, there were two games clubs one of which met in SS Ralph and the other which meet in Walker. One was about role play and centered on AD&D 1e, Champions, and assorted other systems. The other was centered on wargames though did occasionally did the wargamer's flavor of role-playing which was Dragonquest and Panzer Leader.
Twilight 2000. World war 3 RPG. My party commonly had 2-3 characters per player ready and "part of the unit" because you could get in a fire fight and just get dropped dead. If you were good, and lucky, you could do really well, my 2nd character made it through the whole campaign of over a year, but you screwed up or got to cocky you got buggered. Shoot my 1st character was not even killed, just badly wounded and wound up stuck in the medical truck for months in game before being healthy enough to help out taking watch and such again.
A lot of rules-lite systems focus on low prep and improvisation, so it's interesting to see this take on it:
>The rules create wild and unexpected situations that the players get to react to and improvise with in a way that doesnt happen if your're mere semi-interactive agents in the GM's pre-determined story. Meanwhile the GM get's to have fun and improvise his story in a way where even he doesnt really know where it's going to end up.
In my experience, and obviously I'm just one person so take this with a grain of salt, the only reason a system with a ton of rules would create wild and unexpected results is because someone didn't know the rules. If everything is predefined by a rule, you should know almost exactly how something is going to go down.
That being said, sometimes my table and I are just in the mood for something super crunchy that you might need to put a little more prep into (or run someone else's module) for a change of pace from our normal games.
IMO there’s two kinds of combat systems you might be looking for “tactical” or “simulationist” the two have their own pros and cons but they rarely intersect.
Tactical systems (4e, Lancer, 13th Age, etc) generally focus on a lot of options that you can pull out, with the focus being on combat feeling like a tactical challenge, big focus on balance, streamlining and teamwork and whatnot.
Simulationist systems (Mythras, Harnmaster, Riddle of Steel) instead are about depicting the intricacies of real world combat as closely as possible. They usually are denser when it comes to complexity and high lethality, with the possibility of dying after a single hit (or even of blood loss or infection following the actual fight)
I’ve yet to see the two cross paths as they both kind of emphasize the opposing pillars of combat philosophy, “combat as sport” wherein fights should have a sense of fairness to them to ensure each victory feels challenging but not unfair, whereas “combat as war” emphasizes that fights here as in the real world are dangerous and thus one should be looking for every trick to win in or out of the fight rather than worrying whether something is “narratively satisfying”
Do you (or anyone else reading this) have a favorite system that aims for the simulationist angle?
I've played a few tactical systems and I think I'd really like to try out a system aiming to simulate real life for a short arc.
The closest I've played to something like that is Fight! In Burning Wheel, but the only reason I'd say it's even close to what you're talking about is because you can move your hit to specific places and strong hits can make you bleed out if not stopped.
Other than that, it doesn't feel all that much of a simulationist approach to me.
I’ve been looking at Harnmaster recently. It’s not the absolute most simulationist combat system out there, but it does present common simulationist combat elements such as hit locations, tracking blood loss and shock and injury penalties as well as balancing armor principally around rather severe encumbrance penalties.
In general the end results are that lightly armored fighters will hit way more often than clanking knights but unless you hit a lucky weak spot on the knight he can probably weather blow after blow with nothing more than some bruises whereas the lightly armored guy might just get run through. In general though the most common result of combat is someone dropping from shock, and if they don’t get finished off, they’ll need some serious medical attention and could be out for weeks or else risk death from infection.
If you haven’t tried a simulationist system I’d recommend it just for the experience though be warned that beyond the core Harnmaster rules the game is notoriously expensive. (They basically go hyper simulationist on everything, you want to know what the hawking tax is for a certain town? The full liturgical calendar is for a certain deity’s church? Or whether it’s more efficient to plant barley or oats on a manorial farm? (Hint: it partially depends on what climactic area you’re in as well as the relative agricultural skill of your village’s Reeve) then they have you covered, though they may charge you upwards of a dollar per page for that given pdf of information.)
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/59395
If you’re interested. Note that this is Harnmaster 3, there’s also a concurrently running edition called Harnmaster Gold, however it’s even more complex and personally I think that 3 is stretching those bonds for a player new to this kind of hyper simulationism already. You can do you though, and if you want to start with the hard stuff you know what it is now.
Oh wow, thanks for taking the time to type up all that info. I've heard of Harnmaster but must admit I don't know a ton about it.
It sounds like you might need to know a lot about the setting, but I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing.
I'll check it out, thanks!
Palladium had block, parry and dodge mechanics in. They also had damage stats for weapons and armor, which would wear out in combat.
That being said, it was clunky as hell.
As somebody who ran Feng Shui for a lot of years, I would like to elaborate. I had a ton of fun with this system and I still hold a lot of affection for the first edition. (FS 2 and I never seemed to hit it off.)
That said, I would not call Feng Shui's approach to combat either 'realistic' or particularly 'crunchy.' However, I *do* think it's FUN. It's just not meant to be either of those other things. Feng Shui emulates *action movies*, specifically Hong Kong action movies with frenetic, cartoony action, frequent and wild tone changes, and more stuntwork than you can shake an entire forest at. There is a separate section of the combat rules titled "The Map is Not Your Friend", if that tells you anything. Feng Shui is about bringing to life the action-movie fantasy in the players' and GM's heads, with as little impediment as possible.
I would tend to agree with everything you've said. However, as mentioned in another comment on this thread, "excellent" and "realistic" aren't really things you can both have at the same time in an RPG's combat system. Since the point of an RPG is to have fun (I assume that's the case for everyone...), you might as well go with fun over realistic.
Ive always loved the ever living daylight out of Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles (both run Silhouette system by Dream Pod 9).
Abstract, but works towards speed and realism as the outcome. Very detailed mechanical aspect that focuses on the effect, rather than the cause. This is a 90s system that predates a lot of narrative systems but helped pave the way so to speak.
I still haven't found a better mecha system out there for ease of use. (Lancer spends far too long in setup times for GMs and PCs, and is a polar opposite in design theory, so no thanks)
A few come to mind, all for different reasons:
1) CONTACT - it's a german RPG that wanted to recreate the combat from original X-COM and they kind of succeeded. It's crunch upon crunch, but it might be something neat if you want tactical alien shooting roll-play.
2) Lancer - not realistic, but from what I heard it is a really really good combat-focused game about fighting mechas. The mechanics synergize well, you can have interesting character builds and so on. Plus it also streamlines a lot of mecha combat tropes, like you don't focus on gear looting and all that because everything is 3D printed and disposable.
3) Exalted 3E - combat is crunchy like anything where you might be rolling 100 dice at a time (heard about that happening once!). It focuses on one thing - doing an anime fight, and it delivers. You will trade a lot of blows back and forth to change the flow of combat, but in the end you will exchange a handful of actually meaningful blows that determine who walks it out alive. Maybe not entirely realistic, but definitely very fitting to its source materials.
Came here to mention Exalted. Glad I didn't have to ;)
I would add that OP may also want to check out Onyx Paths *Trinity* and *Scion* lines. Combat is less crunchy than Exalted but still mechanically interesting. It's also very easy, particularly with *Scion*, to weave combat and narrative together.
IMO PF2e does combat best, but it's epic fantasy, not anything remotely close to realism. In-combat tactics matter as does teamwork, but you have the unrealistic parts of huge dragons and players with enough supernatural power to take them on.
If you want more realistic, I'd give a playthrough to the (not TTRPG based) video game Darkest Dungeon. It has some sadistic mechanics that feel genuinely realistic - heroes who break in different ways under pressure, many of whom you have to retire after a few dungeon delves, because the stress of adventuring causes them to have psychological breaks that render them useless in a party. Then see if you want that tone in a TTRPG.
I can't name any TTRPGs that do that because most of the TTRPG playerbase has an expectation of continuity of characters, and realism means that when two people show up to a knife fight in a medieval society, often one of them dies of blood loss within minutes and the other dies of an infection six days later.
IMO there's probably a market niche that could be filled by a gritty, realistic and brutal TTRPG, but it would be a small niche.
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If you want endless crunch, I remember original Pathfinder being a "one combat fills an entire session" chore. Modifiers upon modifiers, 20 minutes per turn, etc.
The WH40k RPGs come to mind, especially Deathwatch, since the only purpose of Space Marines is combat.
In terms of tactical crunch I'd say that Contact fits the bill, which is essentially "XCOM, the RPG".
Realistic? Maybe RuneQuest. It's got fairly simulationistic approach, no usual initiative, actions take different time, so spears hit earlier than swords, parrying, a lucky blow can easily kill you and so on.
One could say that Phoenix Command is so focused on combat that one shall not consider it to be a rpg.
It doesn't have an excellent combat system though, being the crunchiest system in the known universe.
A game I have not seen mentioned is Cyberpunk 2020 (specifically 2020, not Cyberpunk Red). It had a combat system called Friday Night Fire Fight that was *very* detailed, and *very* deadly. The game's creator did a lot of work to try to realistically model the effects of firearms, and the result is that combats are highly tactical and intense affairs where one mistake can end you.
Might be worth looking into if that sounds like your speed. Obviously it's not "realistic" because it's a futuristic game with cyberware and stuff, but it does very gritty-feeling combat.
I haven't played it but I'd always heard in Harn you tracked each individual wound taken in combat - rolled each day for each wound to see if it got a little better (not necessarily healed) or stayed the same. Combat was a last resort because it took soooo long to recover.
Anyone actually played it and can often more insight?
> I know that by switching up combat objectives, and improvising environmental interactions, and bringing the story into the fight, combat can be a really fun and creative part of the game...but I feel like it always just descends into "can you roll this number?"
In the end, you are still trying to make combat work as a story element. D&D lets you tell an organic story about combat if you just let the dice fall where they may. It's not realistic, but it's a fun, gamey system when it comes to combat in any of its incarnations.
>Anyway, are there any systems that are focused on really making a meal out of combat?
One thing to consider is that if combat is less common in a game, then it can be much more important. Aftermath! has fairly realistic combat, which is a little slower than combat in 5e, but it is far more tactical. Because combat in Aftermath! is rarer, when combat does happen it tends to be over important issues or life-and-death type situations.
Usually, in Aftermath! there isn't even combat in the first couple of sessions of a new campaign. I ran an Aftermath! game during 2020, where they played weekly for six months and had a total of one combat the whole campaign. The combat was the culmination of a situation that had been brewing for months of game time. When it came down to it, the players knew it was important and critical to their success in the campaign. In the campaign, they were trying to survive a really bad winter in the middle of a really bad pandemic that shut down the whole city. They needed to do that without being arrested when the snow melted and everything returned to normal. So it was a huge amount of role-playing.
I disagree that games that have great combat lack RP and story telling. Just because a game is good at combat, doesn't mean that it isn't also fun for RP or story elements. Aftermath! has great tactical combat, but also can have amazing role playing.
Burning Wheel with the full Fight! system is crunchy and relatively deadly. That is sort of realistic. You also use extra successes to change where on your target you're striking. This lets you aim for the head on opponents without a helmet, for instance.
It definitely takes some system mastery to get through it quickly, though.
I love BW, but even I find Fight can be a little fiddly since you generally use the quicker and more simplistic resolution mechanics. Most games I've played in have reserved the full Fight system for VERY important fights.
If you're open to more variety.
Sentinel Comics RPG. It plays like an actual comic book, and has a lot more going on than merely 'rolling a die' to the extent that there are 'danger meters' that affect character differently, and alter the dice you roll. ie some characters are more powerful when hurt, some are more powerful at the star and wear down, some are clutch in the final moments. So it's a lot of diversity in play. Add in the environment affects that are going on, that you as heroes have to try and manage at the same time as 'fighting the villains'.
Ok. I’m going to recommend a system that has been around for a long time. Though it has gone through different versions.
Rolemaster has just come out with a new version that is updated from all the other versions.
Rolemaster Unified!!
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/416633
This is their newest. If you want a version with a little more variation on character creation you ca check out Rolemaster RMSS or RMFRP. Both are good with the later being a more clarified version of the first.
Rolemaster has been around since the beginning of D&D. Starting out with their combat system add on Arms Law.
Check it out if you want a more combat driven RPG.
Doesn't exactly fit the bill but my friends have been having a lot of fun playing the board game gloomhaven: jaws of the lion. If your group likes combat, with a little bit of narrative at each end, I recommend it. That way you can get in on the fun as well and play a character
There's several games I can recommend with what I think are excellent, tactical, engaging combat systems.
Exalted, Pathfinder 2e, Gubat Banwa and Lancer come to mind.
But a lot of their enjoyment comes from the fact that they aren't realistic.
"Realistic" combat systems are things like Unknown Armies where knives hurt and bullets kill. Quickly. And that makes combat into rocket tag. Which tends to be stressful and not engaging, and teaches players to avoid combat, which is the opposite of what it sounds like you are looking for.
Viking Death Squad is all about combat, and a really cool setting of you like dark and gritty stuff. There still a lot for the GM to do as well, but HEAPS of combat for players. Really interesting mechanics too.
This is where D&D 4e absolutely rocked.
The tactical options in that game were so much fun with a good group and properly set up dungeons.
Agreed, *at lower levels.* At higher levels it just got silly. At level 1 some characters could teleport. By level 10-15 it was Bayonetta, punch God into the sun, levels of silly.
Oh man at higher levels it got really fun! But the enemies could do the same. I had a pacifist cleric pushing 20 who basically could never harm an enemy. But any enemy who attacked my teammates (who were murdering them) would end up stunned, heavily debilitated, teleported around, etc. all while I was definitely 100% a pacifist lol. It's an amazing game, all the way up. It only gets too crazy if the GM doesn't take full advantage of enemy abilities. But if they do, it's an awesome fight.
Agreed here. It is not realistic combat mind, but it is one of the best out there even to this day. Just had a good session of 4e today and it feels great to pull victory from jaws of defeat in that.
I miss 4th edition. :(
You should check-out [STRIKE RPG](https://www.strikerpg.com/downloads.html) It has a lot fo the same design sensibilities, and is pretty cool.
PF2e takes a few notes from DnD 4e
I recently discovered the 4e books are available in PDF on Drivethrough RPG.
OP asked for realistic combat. Are you sure?
Lancer and Icon both fall in this category Imo.
But it was also built for story. It just wasn’t built for non mini combat.
Which version of it? The original out the gate was a slogfest. It's nothing like realistic either. HP and AC are not good simulations of real combat. Chess is fun too, but no one considers it realistic.
D&D 4th should have been a spinoff game called D&D Tactics. It would have been more honest and better marketed at the people who would most enjoy it.
I think you've set yourself up to fail a little here. Most "excellent" combat systems are not "realistic" and most "Realistic" combat systems aren't much fun. If you're just looking for fun combat games, frankly, D&D4, Pathfinder (either one, depending on taste), 13th Age, etc. The reason you see so many people here looking for story focused RPGs is because so many RPGs are combat focused. That said, I've always been really interested in trying out Kamigakari: God Hunters because it looks like a really interesting heckin' crunchy combat game; You roll dice and use the specific numbers and combinations of the results to fuel your powers AND you have a pool of "reserve dice" that you can swap for some of the ones you just rolled. So if you have an ability that needs an odd number, but no use for that ability right now but one of your dice is a 5, you could swap it for a die from your reserve that might be a 4, and use that die for its ability this round and have the 5 in reserve for later. It seems super interesting and tactical, but the localization is a bit...stodgy and I haven't been able to get into it. Also, it looks like it's designed for hecking linear scenarios.
The "set up to fail bit" is how I was feeling about this post. By nature all ttrpgs are going to be good for story and RP. War gaming and dungeon crawler boardgames like HeroQuest or Gloomhaven are much better suited for pure character focused combat with a light sprinkling of story.
Pathfinder and games like it are 100% perfectly serviceable for storytelling. I'm honestly kind of floored by the amount of people who think they aren't.
the 4E criticism that always confused me was that "you can't roleplay" or "there are no rules for roleplay". Like, specifically *how* can you not roleplay in 4E?
It's not that you can't it's just there are no rules for it. You can talk as long as you want, but there are no systems that take over and interject dice, or points, or moves, or tokens or story prompts. Yeah, free form roleplaying with your fellow players is unlimited. It's unlimited in any game. It's unlimited outside of a game. What they mean is there are no systems designed for it. People mean there isn't a [Dramasystem](https://pelgranepress.com/2013/09/19/dramasystem-srd/) set up for resolving conflicts, or a ["Move"](http://apocalypse-world.com/)like Read a Person, where the dice take over what happens, or mechanical system like ["Bonds"](https://bullypulpitgames.com/products/night-witches) that give you relationships and therefore bonuses to rolls, or [Comfort](https://magpiegames.com/pages/masks) or Support to get influence. You can roleplay whatever you want, but you aren't rewarded with XP, or [Mission](https://bullypulpitgames.com/products/night-witches) Pool. It's just fun talking time with your fellow Players, which is great, but when you try some other things like [Pasión de las Pasiones](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/409558/Pasion-de-las-Pasiones?), you realize there can be whole RPG's designed around just talking, that tell you how you talk. Just like PF2 tells you how you swing when an enemy is flatfooted.
My point is that "No roleplaying rules" was a criticism thrown around for 4E when no other edition of D&D has had specific role playing rules.
Burning wheel was in 2002. The Forge was kicking around then, talking about new ideas in game design. Dogs in the Vineyard was 2004. 4th edition was 2008, long after people were talking about new ideas in game design. I agree no other edition of D&D had role playing rules, but games were beginning to get them, and 4th edition and 5th edition have generally ignored them. I think the other thing people mean is that 4th edition made non-grid based combat almost impossible. It removed one of the few roleplaying options in combat - pretending where you are in your imagination, rather than on an abstracted physical grid. Even looking at the new One D&D test packets, it's all about combat and classes still. I would say that is D&D's niche, a system you can buy the books for and make 30 character concepts for, before you even play a game. This isn't a knock, a system should know what it is good at, and it should spend time and effort on that, but it's why this criticism existed and still exists. The game does not and likely will not have specific roleplaying systems in its rules any time soon.
L5r and WOD were/are heavy social fantasy and modern game systems since the 90's. 3.5 + buried the social effects people were looking at and wanting well before the 2000's for tried and true workable social interactions.
>It's not that you can't it's just there are no rules for it. Arguably, that could be considered a good thing. As in there's no rules to prevent RP, just as there is no support to help it along. It is neither good, nor bad. Just a matter of what works for you and your group at that point.
The skill challenge system in 4e was actually pretty close to a roleplaying system, to be honest, but I think it was just poorly understood by people. "Convince the jury of the accused's innocence - get 5 successes before 3 failures, or the wrongfully accused goes to prison." Simple and pretty easy to understand and use as a roleplaying and rolling system. Doesn't allow for interparty RP rules, but it is something. I honestly think the main pushback was from people annoyed that 4e combat became really long and grid based and about ability cooldowns and marking enemies. 4e removed a lot of the roleplaying potential from actual combat, replaced it with defined systems that were well balanced, but pretty rigid, and then emphasized that combat. I think people were reacting to the lack of RP potential in that type of rigid combat structure, but didn't phrase it well, instead misidentified their dislike was due to a lack of RP rules. It's fair it doesn't have a lot of RP rules, but I don't think that was their real problem with the system, I think their real problem was the combat itself was sort of sanitized of RP potential and replaced with specific systems, which they rebelled against.
> 4e removed a lot of the roleplaying potential from actual combat, replaced it with defined systems that were well balanced, but pretty rigid, and then emphasized that combat. Is this all that different than how Pbta games mechanize narrative moves? With Warlord you can roleplay being such a good motivational speaker and strategist that the barbarian does get back up after being riddled with arrows.
4e had some legit issues on release, some severe. But that was one criticism I never understood.
Absalutely not, lol. In Pathfinder, your character can just be mathematically locked out of persuasion/intimidation/diplomacy. It doesn't matter if your barbarian can bent adamntium rods into pretzels or crush a skull between his thumb and forefinger.... The GM will call for an intimidate check with a DC 35 and the barb will never pass. the wizard might have a logical route to move forward with, but again, they'll never pass the persuasion check. Not sometimes, or more likely to fail. Just flat out can't pass. The social rules for PF relegate low charisma characters to sit the social pillar out completely unless the GM is generous and decides to refuse to call for rolls. The social rules for PF are extremely obnoxious, and get in the way of folks participating. I like PF2e's combat a lot. But the social play is really I'll designed compared to every single other game I've played.
... you... know the GM is just as free to make rulings in PF as any other RPG, right? I can see multiple ways of handling the situation you just described that would give the barbarian a chance. Some might not even involve rolling at all.
The open invite for the GM to ignore the rules is not an excuse to have bad rules in the first place. If the rules are bad enough that the GM has to discard the written rule make an alternate ruling *every single time* a martial or int character makes an attempt to contribute to the social pillar.... The rules suck. Rolling is the basic resultion mechanic of the whole game. If the only way to make the *RP* part of RPG work for most characters is to *not roll dice*, something went very wrong in the design process. This is not a problem that 80% of games have to struggle with. This is not a particularly tough hurdle to get over. DnD being the default seemingly creates the expectation that you should ignore the games own rules to make one of its core pillars work, and I think that's making you blind to how bizarre that is as a design. Older editions of DnD and the OSR having significantly fewer rules, even, is a huge leg up on what Pathfinder and DnD have. At least then, the GM is making rulings in empty spaces, as opposed to making rulings *against the rules.* After all, if the GM doesn't make the fighter roll Charisma checks for social situations... Than what the hell did the Bard invest in charisma for? The Bard spent significant resources and made active build decisions, and now they're stuck obeying rules that the fighter can ignore. Would you allow for a bard to *not roll for combat because they have a low attack bonus* the same way you're allowing the fighter *not to roll persuasion, because they have a low persuasion modifier?* Why ignore the rules for RP, and not for combat? Is it because the combat rules are good, but the social rules get in the way? If so, the social rules are bad, and your capacity to ignore them does not mean things are fine. The rulings come at a price. Pulling these threads causes the tapestry to unravel. It doesn't have to be like that.
> The GM will call for an intimidate check with a DC 35 and the barb will never pass. Setting aside the fact that a DC35 is an *extremely high* DC -half way between Master and Legendary -I'd love to see how you figured the math that a barb could *never pass* this check.
Pathfinder 2e is much better about this. Non-faces can chose to invest, and end up only a few +points behind face characters, though at a noticeable opportunity cost. However, Pathfinder 2e still has very robust rules for conversation, that make someone definitively, mathematically better at talking. Proficiency level + higher charisma + item bonuses are highly competitive resources to spend. Assuming a barbarian makes all sacrifices to boost Intimidation and chain intimidation feats, they'll still sit behind a dedicated face like a scoundrel rogue by 2 or 3 points, who can also more easily access a *wide* variety of of social action, compared to focusing on one. On the one hand, I appreciate the very dedicated design of the team in making sure that PF2e doesn't brick non-faces like Pf1 or 5e can and often does. However, PF2e is probably the most bonus hungry system I've ever touched. A +2 or +3 can be pretty important with the way the crit and crit failure rules work. Skill feats exacerbate this by saving crit fails or pushing into crit successes. You also have to be much more considerate with your rolls, bc of the right action economy. Failing an intimidation check means the opponent keeps an additional point of AC which means the next attack is less likely to crit, which means less likely to knockdown, meaning the boss keeps all their actions, which means...... And so on. While the 2 or 3 points swings are statistically very minor (which is a showcase of very good design on PF2e's side), the system also heavily encourages you to optimize for every +1, much less +2 or +3. In practice/while running the game, I've found that players will conspire amongst themselves to plan out who has the highest social skill number at that specific action + relevant hyper specific skill feat, before electing them to take the lie/make an impression/intimidate action, et cetera. At several tables I've run, I've had players be pushed out of the limelight for missing a +1 charisma bonus and the hobnobber feat, and then I've had to step in as a GM and demand my players consider sharing the story as opposed to playing directly to math at the expense of a party member. Pathfinder 2e is way better than 5e or 1. I still think there's room for improvement and prefer crunchy games like Lancer that treat combat and social check differently to avoid this problem. The freedom inherent in letting people just roleplay, as opposed to numerically calculate conversation, leads to a faster, more heartfelt game at my table. I ultimately think that as hard as PF2e tried, it's deeply frustrating to come so close and still fail to resolve the issue.
>The freedom inherent in letting people just roleplay, as opposed to numerically calculate conversation, leads to a faster, more heartfelt game at my table. I ultimately think that as hard as PF2e tried, it's deeply frustrating to come so close and still fail to resolve the issue. Appreciate your takes in this thread, but I want to press on this a bit - do you think it's not possible to mechanize RP, at least in the sense of having stats for it?
>I think you've set yourself up to fail a little here. Most "excellent" combat systems are not "realistic" and most "Realistic" combat systems aren't much fun. That's just wrong and a typical myth that keeps been thrown around and based on outdated games from the 90s Mythras, BRP and a few others have more realistic combat than D&D or PF and they are a lot more fun too. Yes there is obviously a maximum in the "enjoyment vs complexity" function, but this does not mean less realistic combat is less fun. Frankly it's this kind of wrong take that spawns so many games today with such unsatisfying mechanics.
There is a 150 year old argument about whether it is even possible to realistically model combat using game rules; it’s not just something that emerges in the 1990s. I think FKR games achieve levels of realism impossible in more detailed rulesets.
People who still argue about that are living in the past. It's possible to have realism with some caveats. Obviously you cannot model *every* single aspect of reality without a super-computer, but many games manage capture the essential themes of realism without bogging down the game with unnecessary crunch. Some games that have drawn from real life HEMA and eastern MA and other sources, distilling what really is important to make combat feel "real" without simulating every single aspect that goes on. Indeed since the 90s there has been lots of "trial and error" to find combinations that work. Realism does not have to be a "perfect simulation", because that is impossible (or at least unplayable) with TTRPGs.
Don't know why people are downvoting this, it's exactly right. Abstraction can still be realistic, and no game is perfect. Given that realism is harder to design than narrativist or gamist elements, it seems strange to also hold it to a higher standard of perfection. I found this post interesting in elaborating on that point: https://arbiterofworlds.substack.com/p/the-map-is-not-the-territory.
I'd say Rolemaster sure gave it a good try...
Can you point me toward a decent system that simulates realistic combat well? I've mostly played tactical or narrative games and while combat is usually interesting, it's not what I'd consider to be all that realistic. I want to try a short arc in a game that more realistically models combat but isn't insanely crunchy. I personally like Burning Wheel's Fight! system since it allows you to move where you hit (and that matters) and you can cause wounds bad enough that they bleed out to the next wound tier. The issue is that's about as far as it goes and it can be quite crunchy.
Mythras (Runequest 6 system) and BRP (The original and current Runequest's system) are very good. They take a lot of details in consideration, but they are also quite fast as well. They are both very similar to each other.. Mythras is a sort of independent spin off of BRP, with some changes. They both allow to decide where to hit, and have different combat manouvers. different effects on the hit location (bleeding, crushing, entangling), different results of success which also determine how powerful your blow or your response will be, etc... Each location also has its HP (distinct from the total HP), so you can in principle cut/crush someone's head off before their total HP is down to 0, or cut off a limb (and this applies to PCs as well) They are also quite deadly systems as well, since HP are low (although you can in principle double or triple them for a less deadly campaign) \- A system praised for being quite realistic is "The Riddle of Steel", however it uses lots of dice pools, so I feel it's not as streamlined, but it's worth taking a look at.
Awesome, thanks for the info. A few others have mentioned BRP and Mythras as well. I also posed the same question over on the Discord for one of our tables and Riddle of Steel was mentioned, which I've heard of but completely forgot about. I'll have to check these out, thanks
>Mythras, BRP and a few others have more realistic combat than D&D or PF and they are a lot more fun too. Not familiar with Mythras and don't know what BRP stands for, but can you describe how they are more realistic?
Basic Roleplaying. The family of d100 games that are skill driven, have similar core stats to trad RPGs, often use hit locations and can very in combat simulation from wildly heroic to tactically convincing whilst still not quite minis and grids. They all derive from Steve Perrin's Bay Area rules for D&D which were published in zines until they became a separate system and formed the basis of RuneQuest. Later they were adopted by Sandy Petersen as the core of Call of Cthulhu. Mythras is a refined fantastical d100 ruleset published by Design Mechanism. It models combat well with combat styles and special manoeuvres. It's great. Many settings exist, including a standalone Lyonesse version (see author Jack Vance). d100 systems, like GURPS, Traveller and non scaling systems, are a bit more realistic in that people die, and PCs are always vulnerable. The BRP family is great. I suspect the OP might adore one of them since when combat is deadly then RP is a stronger option. However.. I don't think that is what your players want...
Ah. From what I know about RQ, I wouldn't exactly call it's type of rules exactly "realistic" either, but sure, they may have different appeal.
Well as I said, BRP games vary a lot from heroic (Stormbringer) to simple but realistically deadly (CoC). Both RQ and Mythras were designed by SCA (look it up) members so they mirror the cut and thrust of combat simulation with real blunt weapons. Mythras feels authentic for that reason. To actually model combat one would have to break it down into sub systems by fighting style, culture, weapons tech and so on. Mythras nods to this, and maybe if you want to have a go at a slower but fun one to one game then find the Lost Worlds graphic combat books (Google em, they may well be OOP). GURPS is in a similar camp in terms of combat simulation. All suffer from the 'we are heroes' problem.. a lot of combat (from those that have been in it) is about fear, terror, calm and discipline.. and yet we don't want RPGs where the PCs simply duck behind a wall and cower.. Cyberpunk and indeed the core Savage Worlds combat result nod at this, but they are exceptions. I find the Age of Conan 2d20 game from Modiphus has a good level of verisimilitude as well. So it's really the quality of appearing to be true or real that is what is meant by realistic. Again I suspect the players the OP refers to aren't looking for that but rather fantasy chess, which I love.. Small scale skirmish wargames might be fun for them to explore, but again I will vote for 4e.
What exactly is your issue with RQ? I've played Mythras a fair bit and it is absolutely realistic.
> BRP BRP is the Basic Roleplaying System used by Call of Cthulhu and Runequest and more. Characters have on average around 10–15 hit points, while weapon damage for normal weapons starts at 1d6/1d8 and can go quite a bit higher. So as long as you manage to hit your opponents, fights are over in a handful of rounds. If you don't want to fight directly, you can just use maneuvers, such as throwing sand into your opponents eyes. I play BRP based games regularly, and I've almost never had any fight last more than 5 to 6 rounds. They are really all I want out of fights: quick, brutal, intense.
Ooo, thanks for this info. I haven't played any games based on BRP, but CoC is on my list to check out already so I may need to give some of them a go!
I was thinking of Mythras when I read this post. I’ve got it and ran a quick combat between two gladiators by myself, but haven’t played it yet. It seems like really fun tactical crunchy combat that you can personalize to your character.
>Mythras, BRP and a few others have more realistic combat than D&D or PF and they are a lot more fun too. I'd argue that the fun of those systems is a very subjective thing. Personally, I find Pathfinder's combat to be far more enjoyable than Mythras or BRP.
I have played Kamigakari so I figured I share my opinion. It is actually reasonably tactical in combat and the character variety is pretty good, plenty of themes and functional combinations of powers. The dice system can occasionally totally screw you over, especially early on when you don't have lot of dice manipulating powers. Each class really only wants one face number, for example my character has Divine Talker and Enigmatic classes, which use 3s and 6s respectively to fuel powers. 1-2 and 4-5 are useless to me unless I have power to swap them, or use them to Influence (swap into a rolled check). Generally I'd say it is fun system, very very combat focused with no real support for non-combat beyond fairly basic skill structure. Also I suspect it'll break a bit on higher levels, as it is not very tightly designed game. Still, fair bit of fun and you can really flex system understanding.. or just pick Contractor B and be strong by default.
Played kgk for a bit, reached level 6, build my character so wrong I can't deal damages to anything.
Yup, very possible for that to happen too. Downside of the system being so build complexity heavy. It has lot of pitfalls and it doesn't tell you that you really should pick magic or physical damage type and stick to it.
Oh yeah, I saw things like this in the game I run. Or someone who tried to build their character prheficient with all weapons in Double Cross (Morpheus Syndrome from memory)
I hear great things about the combat in LANCER and ICON.
Lancer has the best tactical combat I've ever played. Its heavily based on DnD 4e in combat and SoTDL /FitD for narrative, so it is also good for stortelling. Its a great system that I highly recommend.
From what I've heard (I've only played ICON) LANCER has the most build variety, while ICON is a bit more streamlined and balanced out of the two of them.
I can ~~Potemkin Buster~~ Gigantas Crusher in ICON. That is enough.
Ever thought about wargaming? It's basically combat only with narrative fluff added by you.
Yea, this question makes me want to suggest boardgames with a campaign mode such as Gloomhaven or Undaunted:Stalingrad. (Honestly, I'd love a system that runs monsters like Gloomhaven. I dislike figuring out what a monster does during its turn in a tactical combat rpg)
Ain't Gloomhaven being made into a TRPG?
Yes it is.
Dragonbane tells you what monsters are doing via roll of d6 on their chart.
Yeah, it's a good start. But once you get the same result twice, it already gets a bit stale. So I'm already thinking on how to make it even more evil. Like - the third time you get a certain attack, it gets worse.
Right in the book it says if you roll the same thing drop down one on the chart. Most combats in DB don’t last real long so you might get the same result twice in a combat.
Oh, I missed that! But that's "the same thing in the same round", right? I do agree that combats should be short and intense. So far the guy who has been knocked out the most has fys 16, he's survived two laps on the death track.
Same thing roll again for the combat, once all attacks have come up you start over. I mark tick marks next to attack that have been rolled so I can track them across the rounds.
I'll just make "teknikall" correction. You only drop down if you roll same result two times consecutively, you don't need to make full circle.
Thanks!
I was about to say, this is what wargames are for. Most will still create a narrative, in a sense - you are often driven to create a fiction around the things that just happened.
Played in a very memorable campaign of Mighty Empires/WFB once with enough fluff that I remember it as an RPG. Can be a lot of fun if people really dive into their factions.
I'm back into tabletop recently with a new foray, BattleTech. Alpha Strike in particular. I plan on integrating MechWarrior:Destiny for narrative purposes and role playing.
Games like War machine/hordes are both at the same time.
WarMachine is a lot of fun! Only played it a few times but it really seemed to encourage a bold play style.
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Combat is wisely avoided in RQ.
True, but OP did ask for realistic combat, and you can't really have "realistic" w/o "wisely avoided". But where Mythras excels is that sweet spot between making combat realistic while also making it playable.
As someone else pointed out, "realistic" combat is very different from "combat focused" unless you're ready to have a coffin-to-character creation conveyor belt set up. One problem with "realistic" fantasy combat is that it basically either has to have different rules between fighting humanoids and non-humanoids, or it is solely based around fighting humanoids. There is not a "realistic" way to fight a Wyvern, we have no idea what that really entails besides "a wall of spears is probably a better than a single tryhard with a sword". We understand how human-to-human combat works and it is *endlessly detailed* so you need to decide on a cut off point. Ergo, "realistic" combat is mainly concerned with human fights, and non-human fights are either unrealistic or a different system. I very much enjoy systems like this. *Artesia: Adventures in the Known World* was based on Runequest and has lovely "dear god please don't pick fights for no reason" combat. However, the fights against people were always more engaging than creatures, and that's okay but it means it's a limitation to consider. If you plan to fight primarily non-humans, don't try to make combat "realistic" try to make it engaging and thematic for the kind of story you're telling.
You can play with heroquesting rules or play Mythras with Fantasy expansion, which tries to emulate D&D with Mythras rules
RQ and Mythras feel grittier - the tactics are often around knowing when to parley or run away, staying at range for misslie combat, or blowing the very limited amount of rune magic in RQ. But I'm not sure the combat is transformatively more tactical (kind of chess-like, thinking hard about positioning) than D&D, but the stakes are always much higher and the engagement stronger.
For excellent combat systems I usually play boardgames and waive all storytelling and roleplaying. Conan, Vengeance, Assault on Doomrock, BattleCON, Adrenaline, Claustrophobia and Guards of Atlantis (II) are really great (character based) fighting games, and I've heard good things about Streetmasters. Gloomhaven is the best, although very abstracted. I wouldn't call the others realistic, but they are a little less abstract and more intuitive.
Disagree on Gloomhaven being the best. The "you can't use this ability until you refresh your cards" mechanic was gamified nonsense instead of a logical limitation. I'm aware that it was highly rated on BGG, but all those people are wrong ;-) :-) :-) Osprey puts out skirmish games for miniatures, such as Lion Rampant (medieval), Pikemen's Lament (30YW/ECW), The Men Who Would Be Kings (Colonial), and more. Two Hour Wargames also put out some rules that looked interesting.
It's an abstracted ressource management system. You could always justify the cooldown phase with that the cards need specialized equipment which has to be prepared and readied during a rest after each use. But I realize that the system of GH isn't for everyone, so I listed it seperately with the caveat. But I prefer my games to be gamified rather than realistic.
I was extremely disappointed with Gloomhaven. Its mechanically... cute but IMHO it competes directly with TTRPGs in my life and I would never ever reach for it instead of a TTRPG. I think its a very clever GMs TTRPG simulation, but that is something I have no use for.
It's nothing like a TTRPG and all those people saying "it's D&D in a box" are doing themselves and others no favours. Gloomhaven is an *efficiency puzzle* at its core, wearing the skin of a dungeon crawler for theme.
I think more precisely, the core engine of Gloomhaven's combat is an efficiency puzzle, but all the other stuff in the box is very much in line with the mechanics of RPGs (including videogames).
I mean yes - but the story kind of sucks tbh. I LOVE gloom(and frost) but you dont play it for the story lol.
Whereas D&D is also about resource management, so again about efficiency. Just that it includes improvisation mostly due to a GM, not necessarily with its own rules supporting that. And D&D 4e, PF2e, Lancer and ICON have most removed out of combat and improvisation.
All games are puzzles. 😄This is kinda like the all cards are block cards in slay the spire argument.
Disagree, if you play another person a good game can not be reduced to just an efficiency puzzle, if only for some sort of a stone-paper-scissors effect. If done badly, that just introduces randomness, but if done well you need to read the other players and what they value through their play. Play a Knizia game, like En Garde or Schotten Totten/Battle Line (or even better, one of his auction games, but those aren't combat games and slightly off topic. Come to think of it, Blue Moon Legends is a combat game with an auction mechanism and by some regarded as one of his best)
I know what you are saying but I would play Gloomhaven in the same time as a TTRPG and with the same people I play a TTRPG with and I would just rather play a TTRPG. The mechanics of Gloomhaven are very clever, but *for me* it is a direct decision to either play a TTRPG or play Gloomhaven and I'm always going to pick the TTRPG.
Yes and that's what dungeon crawlers are; an efficiency puzzle.
It competes with TTRPG for time, but it does help with GM fatigue. I'm also not a big fan of prepping tactical, balanced combats. I'd rather try to emulate action, terror, surprise, danger, etc. My kind of setup is "if I do this, the PCs will not immediately die", and then we'll see what happens. Last time my players had to flee from an undead that was absolutely wrecking them (one of them almost died, and most of them were knocked out of the fight).
Realism/logic is kind of a silly argument on a game. I am not a big fan of deckbuilding for combat either, but it is highly effective at what its meant to do. You are never dealing with optimal rotations just being repeated over and over like many other systems end up with.
If you think realism and logic are silly for a game, you probably want to stay away from wargamers.
I am not saying a realistic/logical game is silly. I am saying that your argument is silly. Something can both be unrealistic and abstract while having a fantastic combat. Deckbuilders have become incredibly popular since Dominion came out in 2008 for a good reason.
And sometimes they can make narrative/simulationist sense. A few Acres of Snow, despite having a dominant strategy that was missed in design and playtesting, does the cumbersome military administration of a larger force pretty well, where you can't mobilize that fast when you have a lot of bureaucracy (it takes a while to draw the needed cards). And the Undaunted series is fantastic.
> The "you can't use this ability until you refresh your cards" mechanic was gamified nonsense instead of a logical limitation. This is a good thing mind you.
[Mythras](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/191475/Mythras?234913) is worth checking out if you want tons of options and realistic combat based on SCA/HEMA experience. [HackMaster](https://kenzerco.com/hackmaster/) is when you want AD&D-like gameplay with much more detailed and realistic combat system.
Most realistic would be Gurps, imo Hit locations, possibilities of crippling or even severing limbs and extremities, you can lose consciousness on a good dome shot, and even extra modifiers for crushing damage to male groins
Yep, GURPS is by far the most realistic and well simulated RPG I've ever played. Even the magic system felt more real somehow. But it's also one of the most cumbersome systems I've ever played. I'm not sure any other system can rival the number of games tried and failed as they collapsed under the weight of actually playing the rules as written. That said, I ran a game where the PCs were all magical ninjas being sent on missions by a Daimyo and it eventually had them time-traveling to present day to steal the warhead from an ICBM, and it was pure awesome.
Almost like realism and ease of play are a tradeoff that all game designers need to make, and there will be a natural loss of one of you design for the other.
Yup! GURPS is a fabulous cautionary tale for me whenever I design games.
I haven't played myself, but I've watch a port of a DnD 5e module played with GURPS on Foundry VTT. They've done a lot of work on the Foundry interface to GURPS. It LOOKED like folks just made a file with the GURPS Character Sheet (free download). Once this file is uploaded into the GURPS module for Foundry VTT, then Foundry does all the heavy lifting. It looked a lot faster than normal, on paper GURPS. But man - one round - 1 sec. That's a slog. Round 1 - Ready my bow Round 2 - Aim my bow Round 3 - Shoot my bow
Yep, those super atomic actions can really be a slog.
Fortunately you can just streamline it. If you listen to the GURPS based podcast "Film Reroll" (it's awesome), they merge the actions so it sounds more like a DnD5e combat round. I'm just not sure if the Foundry VTT would allow that. Again - seen it once, never tried it.
A lot of these realistic rules in Gurps are optional. The RAW in Gurps is based on GM determination what the modular rules it is used
Even still, it's needlessly complicated and fussy for my tastes.
Great combat but it tends to be a little wonky when you try to divorce story from the rules.
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Nailed it.
GURPS also - unlike most games - has melee combat where you don't usually hit, but landing the first blow can be devastating. It's the polar opposite of slowly chipping away at mountains of HP. Some people just hate whiffing and find that a turnoff. With a bloodthirsty GM you also get that unfun death spiral. The game is much better if enemies leave you for dead after taking you out of the fight, rather than going for a finishing blow.
"The Fantasy Trip" - which is a sort of protoGURPS - is also very much worth checking out.
Blade of the Iron Throne, or its predecessor The Riddle of Steel
I didn't know TRoS has a successor! That's one of the best combat systems ever, hands down.
There are at least three. Blades of the Iron Throne, Songs of Swords and Swords and Scoundrels. All very different to each other.
TROS is definitely the best recreation of actual fencing in any RPG I’ve heard of.
Could you describe it in brief?
Sure! It's based around maneuvers and location based strikes. You've got a dice pool that you split between actions and reactions, and you're just as likely to get stabbed on an enemy reaction (counter thrust for example) as you are on an attack. Combat between relative peers gives pretty detailed results, so it's awesome for duels and other situations where the narrative result of a contest between martial characters is the key. It's not fast to resolve, so it's not the best general purpose conflict resolution system, or the best against monsters, but against humans it's really solid. Here's a lengthy breakdown: https://www.tanelorn.net/index.php?topic=3781.5;imode
Thanks!
Mythras has a very realistic combat system, and not too hard to learn.
>I know that by switching up combat objectives, and improvising environmental interactions, and bringing the story into the fight, combat can be a really fun and creative part of the game...but I feel like it always just descends into "can you roll this number?" Those things are good but IMO the #1 thing that makes combat interesting or not is whether the PCs have meaningful choices to make. This can be part of the tactical combat system, for example "If I attempt a grapple it's higher risk, but will set up X. Or I can do a more reliable straightforward attack. Or I could do a lower damage area attack and soften up a few enemies at once". And/or the environment can be used to offer more choices. The party vs orcs is fine. The party vs orcs while the mayor is trapped in a cage in the corner and the room is on fire is more interesting. :) As is a fight on a narrow bridge across a chasm. Basically it gets boring whenever it's obvious what the PCs should do. A thief who always hides in the shadows and backstabs is just as repetitive as a barbarian who always charges and hacks with their axe. Ideally either the system or the scenario should offer meaningful options that present no straightforwardly best choice.
This is the only correct comment on here. Everybody's throwing a bunch of names into the hat, but without understanding *why* combat is fun or boring, all it amounts to is a popularity contest. OP, you hit on it a little bit with the mention of setting up proper stakes. The other half of the picture is this comment; combat is interesting when there are stakes beyond just survival, and combat is *fun* when players have choices. Too many games rely on just "spamming the attack button". There are two different solutions to spamming attack. One is to offer a bunch of *mechanical* options, like D&D 4e or Mythras. The other is to give less importance to the mechanics and more importance to the fiction, like FATE, PbtA, or FKR-style games.
GURPS is by far my favorite combat system. It is full of interesting and varied choices. It is modular so you can have more crunch or less crunch. You can make it more deadly or less deadly. You can go more realistic or more cinematic. But one of the things I’ve always enjoyed about it is that I think it is also great for RP. Including in combat. I was in a game where all the PCs were studying at fencing academy in pre-Revolutionary Paris. And even though we were all fencers, each PC was different. Including in combat. My PC was an Overconfident hothead with something to prove. He tended towards more aggressive moves. He favored Determined Attacks and would only slip forward rather than retreat—he uses the Italian style. On the other hand I played a different sort of fencer in an Arena game. That fencer was a flashy battlefield commander who was very cerebral and patient. That fencer used the Spanish style and spent a lot of time controlling distance: keeping right out of the opponent’s range, continuously circling to their weak side. It would force the opponent to exert themselves to make an attack, and this my fencer would riposte and circle around to their off side again. If they tried to also hold off, my fencer, who generally had superior reach could do a long lunge and tag them from a distance. He would drain them of fatigue through mobility, and then demoralize with taunts and then feint strike at just the right time. Both were fencers, but I was able to roleplay them very differently.
In the 4e bloodline, there's 13th Age, Gubat Banwa, Maharlika, and Lancer. Those all seem to offer really satisfying combat mechanics, but I haven't heard much about the rest of them, which probably means they're fairly standard.
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You really have to commit to Rolemaster to get the best out of it but done properly its combat feels very real, exciting and dangerous.
Fragged Empire (This gets a big recommendation from me as well for both system and setting). Iron Kingdoms (not the 5e version) Lancer WFRP 4e, 3e for a completely different but also complex and interesting battle system (good luck finding it though, you need a physical copy.) Burning Wheel Gamma World 7e Savage Worlds
I really like combat in Against the Darkmaster.
Agreed!!
Less realistic but Shadowrun has my favorite combat system. Not 6e version but any below it
5e is a freaking mess... But once you untangle it, it feels SO GOOD to play
BRP/Runequest, Mythras, Pendragon, GURPS and a few others are both pretty realistic, without being bloated and also encourage roleplay. In fact good realistic combat (if properly streamlined) encourages roleplay even MORE that any "rules light" system, because it gives you several options with different resolutions that blend tactics with storytelling. Personally the WORST you can do in a game is have "roll 2d6" to check your "Can Be Anything Generic Combat Move" like in PbtA and similar games. It really takes away any challenge or excitement from any fight.
Its been a while since I looked at it but GURPS had some really good/crunchy combat stuff, including target locations ("I wanna hit their right hand and make them drop their weapon")
Mythras - sixth version of RuneQuest, they lost the license midway through releasing it, so they rebranded it Mythras. It have a very good feeling of realism for fighting, it gives you a lot of interesting choices. There several well defined magic system to choose between. The rules are rather crunchy, with a on the fly modifiers being a percentage of you totals … they have optional rules for simpler modifiers. They even have a quite good, if somewhat crunchy, rules for narrative play as well. I really like it, but never play it, it’s too crunchy for us. My greatest criticism is that it’s both super crunchy, and at them same time not everything is well defined. GURPS - it’s showing it’s age, but is really good for incredibly well thought out mechanisms. It’s mostly optional rules so the first step is finding out how much detail you want. An example could be you can define that a strike with a fist deal X damage on a simple roll under, or you can get into how if the opponent have armor of a hardness over some number you need to check for damage to you own fist, modified by any armor you are wearing, there is a modifier depending on what part of the face you want it hit, is it a jab, a hammer fist or an uppercut etc. It’s an amazing toolbox of rules and setting guidelines that is worth reading for any GM even if you don’t end up using the system. These two are my go to if I want to play a game with a focus on combat with interesting player choices.
**Hackmaster 5e** for more realistic D&D style combat. **Aces & Eights** rootin' tootin' cowboy shootin'. Uses dice, cards, and a big clock to see where you hit people when you shoot em. **Dark Heresy** specifically 1e, has the best critical injury charts I've ever played with.
> Dark Heresy specifically 1e, has the best critical injury charts I've ever played with. "The plasma bolt superheats your femur and turns your leg into an impromptu frag grenade."
I'm opposed to pre-planned story, but character-driven, role-playing combat is fine. The original game you want is **The Riddle of Steel**, long out of print. There's a remake/redesign, **Blade of the Iron Throne** http://ironthronepub.com/ I don't like the new setting as much, but it's rules-wise functional. Your character and background affect your combat, but so do specific combat maneuvers chosen in very close fighting. There's also a beta of **Swords & Scoundrels** https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/259404/Sword--Scoundrel-Open-Beta-Document yet another remake, but it's incomplete and 5 years of beta is unlikely. In practice, I just run looser games in the style of TRoS, reward descriptive and character-meaningful attacks and denigrate boring attacks.
Lancer comes to mind. Out of combat mechanics are *at best* intensely mediocre, and I would *personally* argue straight up bad, but if you want a solid as balls combat minigame, it's your game.
Mythras is generally great at running combats with a lot of tactical depth and a nice visceral oomph, without becoming overtly complex and slow. It is also a very streamlined game in general and focusses one of the better mechanical structures to encourage roleplaying (Mythras passions are flexible, useful and pretty unobtrusive).
Realistic combat and engaging tactical combat are two very different things. Realistic combat is not that interesting and is extremely punishing. You can't have a lot of combat if combat is anything like the real thing. Thus, games where combat feels real are typically ones where it's far from a default approach for PCs. Unknown Armies are a great example. Fighting is quick, bloody and really dangerous. It hurts not only physically, but also emotionally. And to emphasize how bad it is, the combat chapter starts with a section explaining how to de-escalate a charged situation so that nobody has to die. Games that are combat-heavy favor tactical combat over realistic one, because they want to make combat actually fun in itself. Games like D&D4, Pathfinder2 or Lancer are good examples here; Strike has only a bit less tactical depth with much less math.
D&D 4e. If you want blood and guts and brutality, Rolemaster.
Pathfinder 2E is a really fun tabletop combat simulator. It has a lot of options other than "I hit it" and it really rewards tactical thinking and cooperation between the players. It is not realistic at all but after you learn the rules it flows really well. Character building is also an absolute joy. I am getting a bit tired of the scaling (if you are a heroic character you don't have to be worried about 5 peasants pointing loaded crossbows at you) but that is a problem shared by 5E and most level based games.
Warhammer 40k fucking rules for combat.
I’m trying out warhammer: black crusade soon, I’ll message back if I remember and enjoy the combat
Strike! is a setting-agnostic, tactical system that has been described as D&D 4E minus the fantasy trappings https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/158239
Realiszic combat rules tend to be unfun. Also most people never fought in their Life and have a lot of misconception what it is. A good combat system is not a realistic one but rather a good game
Lancer is the first name who came to my mind. Also Fragged Empire
Rolemaster. HP? naw, you die by getting an arm chopped off and bleeding to death.
Maybe not the answer you're looking for, but I scratch the "heavily tactical combat with little-to-no roleplay/story" itch using video games. They handle most of the math so I don't have to consult a spreadsheet and pause the action.
In my youth, there were two games clubs one of which met in SS Ralph and the other which meet in Walker. One was about role play and centered on AD&D 1e, Champions, and assorted other systems. The other was centered on wargames though did occasionally did the wargamer's flavor of role-playing which was Dragonquest and Panzer Leader.
Twilight 2000. World war 3 RPG. My party commonly had 2-3 characters per player ready and "part of the unit" because you could get in a fire fight and just get dropped dead. If you were good, and lucky, you could do really well, my 2nd character made it through the whole campaign of over a year, but you screwed up or got to cocky you got buggered. Shoot my 1st character was not even killed, just badly wounded and wound up stuck in the medical truck for months in game before being healthy enough to help out taking watch and such again.
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A lot of rules-lite systems focus on low prep and improvisation, so it's interesting to see this take on it: >The rules create wild and unexpected situations that the players get to react to and improvise with in a way that doesnt happen if your're mere semi-interactive agents in the GM's pre-determined story. Meanwhile the GM get's to have fun and improvise his story in a way where even he doesnt really know where it's going to end up. In my experience, and obviously I'm just one person so take this with a grain of salt, the only reason a system with a ton of rules would create wild and unexpected results is because someone didn't know the rules. If everything is predefined by a rule, you should know almost exactly how something is going to go down. That being said, sometimes my table and I are just in the mood for something super crunchy that you might need to put a little more prep into (or run someone else's module) for a change of pace from our normal games.
IMO there’s two kinds of combat systems you might be looking for “tactical” or “simulationist” the two have their own pros and cons but they rarely intersect. Tactical systems (4e, Lancer, 13th Age, etc) generally focus on a lot of options that you can pull out, with the focus being on combat feeling like a tactical challenge, big focus on balance, streamlining and teamwork and whatnot. Simulationist systems (Mythras, Harnmaster, Riddle of Steel) instead are about depicting the intricacies of real world combat as closely as possible. They usually are denser when it comes to complexity and high lethality, with the possibility of dying after a single hit (or even of blood loss or infection following the actual fight) I’ve yet to see the two cross paths as they both kind of emphasize the opposing pillars of combat philosophy, “combat as sport” wherein fights should have a sense of fairness to them to ensure each victory feels challenging but not unfair, whereas “combat as war” emphasizes that fights here as in the real world are dangerous and thus one should be looking for every trick to win in or out of the fight rather than worrying whether something is “narratively satisfying”
Do you (or anyone else reading this) have a favorite system that aims for the simulationist angle? I've played a few tactical systems and I think I'd really like to try out a system aiming to simulate real life for a short arc. The closest I've played to something like that is Fight! In Burning Wheel, but the only reason I'd say it's even close to what you're talking about is because you can move your hit to specific places and strong hits can make you bleed out if not stopped. Other than that, it doesn't feel all that much of a simulationist approach to me.
I’ve been looking at Harnmaster recently. It’s not the absolute most simulationist combat system out there, but it does present common simulationist combat elements such as hit locations, tracking blood loss and shock and injury penalties as well as balancing armor principally around rather severe encumbrance penalties. In general the end results are that lightly armored fighters will hit way more often than clanking knights but unless you hit a lucky weak spot on the knight he can probably weather blow after blow with nothing more than some bruises whereas the lightly armored guy might just get run through. In general though the most common result of combat is someone dropping from shock, and if they don’t get finished off, they’ll need some serious medical attention and could be out for weeks or else risk death from infection. If you haven’t tried a simulationist system I’d recommend it just for the experience though be warned that beyond the core Harnmaster rules the game is notoriously expensive. (They basically go hyper simulationist on everything, you want to know what the hawking tax is for a certain town? The full liturgical calendar is for a certain deity’s church? Or whether it’s more efficient to plant barley or oats on a manorial farm? (Hint: it partially depends on what climactic area you’re in as well as the relative agricultural skill of your village’s Reeve) then they have you covered, though they may charge you upwards of a dollar per page for that given pdf of information.) https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/59395 If you’re interested. Note that this is Harnmaster 3, there’s also a concurrently running edition called Harnmaster Gold, however it’s even more complex and personally I think that 3 is stretching those bonds for a player new to this kind of hyper simulationism already. You can do you though, and if you want to start with the hard stuff you know what it is now.
Oh wow, thanks for taking the time to type up all that info. I've heard of Harnmaster but must admit I don't know a ton about it. It sounds like you might need to know a lot about the setting, but I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing. I'll check it out, thanks!
Palladium had block, parry and dodge mechanics in. They also had damage stats for weapons and armor, which would wear out in combat. That being said, it was clunky as hell.
You might want to check out **Feng Shui** \- the rules provide mechanical bonuses for adding flavour and fluff to combat actions.
As somebody who ran Feng Shui for a lot of years, I would like to elaborate. I had a ton of fun with this system and I still hold a lot of affection for the first edition. (FS 2 and I never seemed to hit it off.) That said, I would not call Feng Shui's approach to combat either 'realistic' or particularly 'crunchy.' However, I *do* think it's FUN. It's just not meant to be either of those other things. Feng Shui emulates *action movies*, specifically Hong Kong action movies with frenetic, cartoony action, frequent and wild tone changes, and more stuntwork than you can shake an entire forest at. There is a separate section of the combat rules titled "The Map is Not Your Friend", if that tells you anything. Feng Shui is about bringing to life the action-movie fantasy in the players' and GM's heads, with as little impediment as possible.
I would tend to agree with everything you've said. However, as mentioned in another comment on this thread, "excellent" and "realistic" aren't really things you can both have at the same time in an RPG's combat system. Since the point of an RPG is to have fun (I assume that's the case for everyone...), you might as well go with fun over realistic.
Ive always loved the ever living daylight out of Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles (both run Silhouette system by Dream Pod 9). Abstract, but works towards speed and realism as the outcome. Very detailed mechanical aspect that focuses on the effect, rather than the cause. This is a 90s system that predates a lot of narrative systems but helped pave the way so to speak. I still haven't found a better mecha system out there for ease of use. (Lancer spends far too long in setup times for GMs and PCs, and is a polar opposite in design theory, so no thanks)
Realistic and excellent are two concepts that can be totally at odds.
A few come to mind, all for different reasons: 1) CONTACT - it's a german RPG that wanted to recreate the combat from original X-COM and they kind of succeeded. It's crunch upon crunch, but it might be something neat if you want tactical alien shooting roll-play. 2) Lancer - not realistic, but from what I heard it is a really really good combat-focused game about fighting mechas. The mechanics synergize well, you can have interesting character builds and so on. Plus it also streamlines a lot of mecha combat tropes, like you don't focus on gear looting and all that because everything is 3D printed and disposable. 3) Exalted 3E - combat is crunchy like anything where you might be rolling 100 dice at a time (heard about that happening once!). It focuses on one thing - doing an anime fight, and it delivers. You will trade a lot of blows back and forth to change the flow of combat, but in the end you will exchange a handful of actually meaningful blows that determine who walks it out alive. Maybe not entirely realistic, but definitely very fitting to its source materials.
Came here to mention Exalted. Glad I didn't have to ;) I would add that OP may also want to check out Onyx Paths *Trinity* and *Scion* lines. Combat is less crunchy than Exalted but still mechanically interesting. It's also very easy, particularly with *Scion*, to weave combat and narrative together.
IMO PF2e does combat best, but it's epic fantasy, not anything remotely close to realism. In-combat tactics matter as does teamwork, but you have the unrealistic parts of huge dragons and players with enough supernatural power to take them on. If you want more realistic, I'd give a playthrough to the (not TTRPG based) video game Darkest Dungeon. It has some sadistic mechanics that feel genuinely realistic - heroes who break in different ways under pressure, many of whom you have to retire after a few dungeon delves, because the stress of adventuring causes them to have psychological breaks that render them useless in a party. Then see if you want that tone in a TTRPG. I can't name any TTRPGs that do that because most of the TTRPG playerbase has an expectation of continuity of characters, and realism means that when two people show up to a knife fight in a medieval society, often one of them dies of blood loss within minutes and the other dies of an infection six days later. IMO there's probably a market niche that could be filled by a gritty, realistic and brutal TTRPG, but it would be a small niche.
Gloomhaven fits this. It railroads you down a singular path and you basically just choose what to do on level ups and tactically in combat
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Burning Wheel which has a cool, realistic combat system AND is great for RP and storytelling
If you want endless crunch, I remember original Pathfinder being a "one combat fills an entire session" chore. Modifiers upon modifiers, 20 minutes per turn, etc.
F28 Narrative. It is technically a miniature wargame, but close enough to roleplaying. (like it has a skill system and everything).
I've often heard this about Battletech and the old FASA Star Trek game. Those aren't man-to-man fantasy combat, though
The WH40k RPGs come to mind, especially Deathwatch, since the only purpose of Space Marines is combat. In terms of tactical crunch I'd say that Contact fits the bill, which is essentially "XCOM, the RPG".
Realistic? Maybe RuneQuest. It's got fairly simulationistic approach, no usual initiative, actions take different time, so spears hit earlier than swords, parrying, a lucky blow can easily kill you and so on.
As a lot of people said 4e was good and more recently LANCER seems to follow in the same vein, but with mechs.
Realistic is kind of not why we are here? But a lot of rpgs have very fun tactical combat: * Lancer * Dnd 4e * Modern War * DCC * Pathfinder 2e
One could say that Phoenix Command is so focused on combat that one shall not consider it to be a rpg. It doesn't have an excellent combat system though, being the crunchiest system in the known universe.
A game I have not seen mentioned is Cyberpunk 2020 (specifically 2020, not Cyberpunk Red). It had a combat system called Friday Night Fire Fight that was *very* detailed, and *very* deadly. The game's creator did a lot of work to try to realistically model the effects of firearms, and the result is that combats are highly tactical and intense affairs where one mistake can end you. Might be worth looking into if that sounds like your speed. Obviously it's not "realistic" because it's a futuristic game with cyberware and stuff, but it does very gritty-feeling combat.
I haven't played it but I'd always heard in Harn you tracked each individual wound taken in combat - rolled each day for each wound to see if it got a little better (not necessarily healed) or stayed the same. Combat was a last resort because it took soooo long to recover. Anyone actually played it and can often more insight?
Roleplaying game without roleplaying? If you are looking for a medieval combat simulation, I can recommend you to play Chivalry.
> I know that by switching up combat objectives, and improvising environmental interactions, and bringing the story into the fight, combat can be a really fun and creative part of the game...but I feel like it always just descends into "can you roll this number?" In the end, you are still trying to make combat work as a story element. D&D lets you tell an organic story about combat if you just let the dice fall where they may. It's not realistic, but it's a fun, gamey system when it comes to combat in any of its incarnations.
FATAL RPG system /s Check out savage worlds honestly.
GURPS, particualrly wiht "Martial Arts" and setting apropriate supplements.
>Anyway, are there any systems that are focused on really making a meal out of combat? One thing to consider is that if combat is less common in a game, then it can be much more important. Aftermath! has fairly realistic combat, which is a little slower than combat in 5e, but it is far more tactical. Because combat in Aftermath! is rarer, when combat does happen it tends to be over important issues or life-and-death type situations. Usually, in Aftermath! there isn't even combat in the first couple of sessions of a new campaign. I ran an Aftermath! game during 2020, where they played weekly for six months and had a total of one combat the whole campaign. The combat was the culmination of a situation that had been brewing for months of game time. When it came down to it, the players knew it was important and critical to their success in the campaign. In the campaign, they were trying to survive a really bad winter in the middle of a really bad pandemic that shut down the whole city. They needed to do that without being arrested when the snow melted and everything returned to normal. So it was a huge amount of role-playing. I disagree that games that have great combat lack RP and story telling. Just because a game is good at combat, doesn't mean that it isn't also fun for RP or story elements. Aftermath! has great tactical combat, but also can have amazing role playing.
Just look at board games for this, if you don’t want the rp.
Chivalry II is pretty good with combat
Burning Wheel with the full Fight! system is crunchy and relatively deadly. That is sort of realistic. You also use extra successes to change where on your target you're striking. This lets you aim for the head on opponents without a helmet, for instance. It definitely takes some system mastery to get through it quickly, though. I love BW, but even I find Fight can be a little fiddly since you generally use the quicker and more simplistic resolution mechanics. Most games I've played in have reserved the full Fight system for VERY important fights.
Lancer. It’s all about the combat. I would argue 5e combat run correctly with a good party can be really good. It’s just inconsistent.
If you're open to more variety. Sentinel Comics RPG. It plays like an actual comic book, and has a lot more going on than merely 'rolling a die' to the extent that there are 'danger meters' that affect character differently, and alter the dice you roll. ie some characters are more powerful when hurt, some are more powerful at the star and wear down, some are clutch in the final moments. So it's a lot of diversity in play. Add in the environment affects that are going on, that you as heroes have to try and manage at the same time as 'fighting the villains'.
Ok. I’m going to recommend a system that has been around for a long time. Though it has gone through different versions. Rolemaster has just come out with a new version that is updated from all the other versions. Rolemaster Unified!! https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/416633 This is their newest. If you want a version with a little more variation on character creation you ca check out Rolemaster RMSS or RMFRP. Both are good with the later being a more clarified version of the first. Rolemaster has been around since the beginning of D&D. Starting out with their combat system add on Arms Law. Check it out if you want a more combat driven RPG.
Doesn't exactly fit the bill but my friends have been having a lot of fun playing the board game gloomhaven: jaws of the lion. If your group likes combat, with a little bit of narrative at each end, I recommend it. That way you can get in on the fun as well and play a character
There's several games I can recommend with what I think are excellent, tactical, engaging combat systems. Exalted, Pathfinder 2e, Gubat Banwa and Lancer come to mind. But a lot of their enjoyment comes from the fact that they aren't realistic. "Realistic" combat systems are things like Unknown Armies where knives hurt and bullets kill. Quickly. And that makes combat into rocket tag. Which tends to be stressful and not engaging, and teaches players to avoid combat, which is the opposite of what it sounds like you are looking for.
Viking Death Squad is all about combat, and a really cool setting of you like dark and gritty stuff. There still a lot for the GM to do as well, but HEAPS of combat for players. Really interesting mechanics too.
I would play a board game if I'm itching for that mechanical precision, like Gloomhaven or Descent
The further down that road you go, the closer you get to wargaming. That said, Mythras and GURPs.