A friend was telling me about HackMaster’s combat system that used this running count mechanic and how it kept everybody up and involved instead of waiting for their turn to come back around. I would love to see a combat being played out, but am not planning on going to any cons in the near future. Can anyone point me to a video online of a combat being run. I tried searching youtube but could only turn up reviews of the system and no demonstrations.
Thanks,
rainy
Have you seen this one?
It looks like combat eventually happens, though like any normal game there is a lot of chatter.
You might also want to see the Illustrated Example of Play section of the PHB available as a free download.
I’d say that it’s not quite true that everyone is engaged at all times, because there will be a lot of times when you are already ‘engaged’ with an enemy and so can’t move without giving a free attack. You can be alert for opportunities each second or ‘count’ where making a Tactical Move would be useful. Mostly you’re just waiting either for your weapon speed to come back around, or to roll defense against an enemy’s attack. What’s different, however, than 1st/2nd edition style initiative + weapon speed is that you can in any count decide to stop and react to something that just happened by, say, taking a Tactical Maneuver to avoid having your back exposed to an enemy or to set your halberd against a charge that you see coming. The jockeying for position can be fun if a bit hairy sometimes. But most of the time you’re just waiting for your weapon speed count to come up just like in AD&D.
Here’s a summary of what I think you’d see if there were a video of an efficiently run Hackmaster combat demonstration, specifically in reference to how the count system works:
Everybody rolls initiative. The count starts at 1. Each count represents a second.
Everybody is waiting for their count to come up. When it does each begins moving, starting at a jog and breaking into a run one count later if they’ve got a lot of ground to cover.
As soon as somebody is adjacent to an enemy, the combatant with the greater reach attacks first, and the one with the lesser reach attacks on the next count. The attacker rolls an attack, the defender rolls a defense.
Once a combatant is engaged with an enemy they cannot break away without offering a free attack, though certain maneuvers can mitigate this. Otherwise, each must wait a number of counts equal to their weapon speed before they can attack again. While they wait, they may attempt to change their position using maneuvers. Otherwise, everybody is just waiting for the GM to call out the count at which they can next make an attack.
A combatant who is injured checks the damage against their Threshold of Pain. If this threshold is exceeded, they make a 1/2 con save. Failure means they are ‘ToP-ed’ – on the ground unable to do anything for 5 x the number by which the save was failed. Because of this, a combatant who thus falls may either be out for so long, the combat will be over by then, or they may re-arise as a threat in as few as 5 seconds. The latter situation may be helped with a coup de grace in which most characters can spend 10 seconds making sure the foe is dead, or rogues, thieves and assassins may do so more quickly.
When the combatant you are engaged with is either killed or ToP-ed, you are disengaged once again and may attack as soon as you are within reach of an enemy rather than waiting for a weapon speed to come around.
Once everything that everyone wants to do on a give count is done, the GM calls the next count, and the whole thing repeats.
I’ve left out some amount of detail for the sake of making the overall picture clear. The system does deserve credit for being unique, though it’s kind of like a hybrid between AD&D’s initiative roll + weapon speed for every round, and 3e’s wheel-of-turns system. That, and some granularity thrown in. It works quite well. But it’s not really the case that everybody always has something to do, but they can have if they want. Usually they don’t because it won’t help. But they can if it will.
Am I remembering that right? Did we actually re-roll initiative for every round back in the old days?
Yes we did. And I actually loved 2nd edition’s system of individual initiative plus weapon speed, so that the order top to bottom was shuffled every turn. I have often expressed my dislike for 3rd’s locked in method. A friend who has sat in on a couple of HM sessions said he was really impressed by how when combat rolled around everyone was out of their chairs and engaged. Personally I’ve never felt bored waiting for my turn to come back around since I’m usually pretty interested in seeing what everyone else is up to. But he spoke very favorably of HM and I wanted to see it work.
Thanks for the link I’ll give that a watch.
What I often finds keeps us on our toes during combats is that any swing can become liquid murder even without actually critting. So we’re always bracing for impact when an enemy attacks and waiting to witness a triumph when one of our own does. The fact that we can shift gears on any count does contribute to this, because we must be prepared to mitigate disaster. And it’s also possible to press an advantage if an enemy takes a bad hit.