Schedule of Combat, and Combat Cards

[scottanderson]

Here's how we do combat Rounds in Mythical Journeys:

Table 31: The Combat Round 

1. Check Morale (2d6) 

2. Declare your Action 

3. Roll Initiative (1d6) 

4. Move 1/3 Speed, including
Retreats 

5. Ranged Attacks 

6. Magic Spells 

7. Melee Attacks 

8. Misc. Actions 

9. Repeat

The key steps here are 2 and 3: we declare our actions before we know who is going first!  This is makes it so combat feels chaotic and keeps people from "cheating" in some ways - gaming the system.  It's fun and kind of swingy.  There's something akin to rock-paper-scissors going on at the start of every combat Round.  You have to guess what is going to happen.

Mike Mornard said that he had done it like that some in the old days too, and it made sense to him.  I remember reading about something similar on the Lord of the Bling thread on Big Purple years ago.  I don't know whether I read it right but it seemed like they declared before initiative.

What else might jump out at you is there are very few categories of things to do during combat: move, missile fire, magic spells, melee attacks, and other things (overturning a table, drinking a potion, binding wounds.)  That is, there are only five categories of actions to take.

[scottanderson]

Combat Cards

What I tried a while ago, and it didn't work perfectly, is to write out combat cards, each of which has one of these action categories written on it: Full Move, Melee, Magic, Missile, Other.  

Each player would then select his card and hide it;
I would decide what the monsters would do; 
Then the players would "lock in" their action by revealing the cards;
Then we rolled for initiative, 1d6, by sides.

Then when the combat actually happens, the players and monsters can adjust their specific actions based on what category they had committed to initially - they could decide who to shoot at, who to stab, where to cast what spell, etc.

So it didn't really work the way I wanted it to.  I'm going to be a jerk and blame the particular players for the failure.  Either I didn't explain it well enough or they just weren't turned on by the little mini game.  (I love the old Match Game and Price is Right game shows and in my brain it looked like that in action, oh well.)

Anyway, I think I want to try it again.  Do you see any issues with this that I can clean up before I roll it out at the table?  Or do you think I should just try it and hope for players willing to work with me?