Band-Aids & Bullet Holes Design Diary: Combat As Set-Piece

Band-Aids & Bullet Holes is my upcoming deckbuilder tabletop roleplaying game built for bloody revenge operas inside a tight-knit clique of professional assassins. Here’s a post where I take one story from its design and break it down so maybe you can better design your own games. If you want more context on how the game works before diving in, check out this free demo.

Chris over at Deeper in the Game wrote this little post a while back about kinds of combat in rpgs:

There’s a set of ideas that have been floating around a while for RPGs: Combat as Sport Vs Combat as War.

Combat as Sport is generally built around “even-ish” challenges, taking danger mostly head on, and so on. You know, a lot like how sports work; we want to see closely matched teams play on a fair game.

Combat as War is the idea of how real life deals with combat; you never want to fight fair, and your enemies won’t either. There may be social or other costs to certain levels of underhandedness, but generally you go as far as you can and that will succeed.

Maybe this is exists out there somewhere since these ideas have been around, but let me add a third:

Combat as Theater. In Combat as Theater, challenge is irrelevant to showboating and drama. This might be a game where there’s really little or not tactical consideration to have, and stacked with no heavy consequences to losing.

I like adding this third option, though I’d describe Combat as Theater as more like “instead of caring about how the combat works practically, we care about how it feels and the emotional stakes.”

Anyway I liked this post because it allowed me to feel smug about how I think Band-Aids & Bullet Holes offers a fourth kind of combat (I’m sure this is not the first game to do so, but it’s the one on hand for me). Let’s call it Combat as Set-Piece.

In BABH, combat is a press your luck game. You’re basically just playing the classic card game War: you both flip up a playing card, high card wins. Loser suffers a wound. Three wounds and you’re dead. Winner gets to decide if they run away or fight another round; loser has to go along with the winner’s choice.

But the special sauce is that every card is a “calling card”: it’s got an evocative little object or phrase written on it like “nail gun” or “horrible necktie” or “naive face.” So when we flip up nail gun vs naive face and the nail gun wins it… well. Yeesh. But what happens when the naive face is the higher card? Interesting! Let’s narrate a little beat of combat!

The fun part of combat is then using these little bits of narrative inspiration to create cool beats in an action sequence. The game isn’t about who will win or lose (combat as war, combat as sport) or even what it will cost or how we’ll feel about it (combat as theater). Instead it’s how is this going to be sick as fuck? It’s putting the players in the position of director, story-boarder, stunt choreographer, set decorator and offering them tools to be good at those jobs.

There’s still elements of combat as sport and combat as theater in here, but they end up secondary a lot of the time. That’s probably true across the board: any given combat in play probably has some elements of many/all of these.