My problems with combat
Combat systems are something that feature in the vast majority of mainstream RPGs and in the OSR space as well. I've had great fun over the years using many of them, but only the most tactical (like those in D&D 4e, Pathfinder 2e, or Iron Kingdoms 2012) have been systems that I enjoyed for themselves rather than the context that the game provided. It's important to me that combat be made up of interesting choices, which is something I've often felt deprived of while playing Runequest, OSR games, or D&D 5e. Combat is at least blessedly quick in most OSR games and it can be tense, but often it feels more like gambling and less like truly playing a game.
Action, and specifically combat, are one of the things I've been repeatedly thinking on in the last few years as the ideas for my current project nucleated. I've designed multiple combat systems and set them aside; the part of the playtest sessions that I've run that I was most frustrated by was combat. In most OSR/NSR playstyles, we endeavor to minimize abstraction as the players move their characters through the environment, handling things as part of a conversation, describing the environment, actions, and the consequences thereof. Rigid combat rules are an abstraction, the rules are eliding the fiction and allowing us not to think about it.
One of the forms of combat in games that I've always found most engaging is the conversation based flow that I was first introduced to in Apocalypse World. Stras' A 16 HP Dragon was one of the first introductions I had to exactly how this was supposed to work. The concept has served me faithfully over the years. I like to worry more about the fictional constraints preventing the players from achieving their goal in a combat than I do about the precise balance of incoming and outgoing damage. Last year, Clayton Notestine's The 1 HP Dragon got me thinking about it in an OSR context.
One of the concerns that I have about this conversation-based form of combat is fairness. One of the biggest benefits of an ordered combat system is its impartiality. If a character gets wounded or dies, it happens because of the cold facts of the rules and the randomness of dice rolls, not because I as the GM decided that the player made an error and thus their character deserves to die. In a PbtA game, I usually stop short of actually killing player characters - that's not what the game is about. I'll put them through some awful circumstances, but death is usually not the most interesting consequence that can be levied. However, that feels wrong for dungeon fantasy.
Challenge-based gameplay is a big part of what makes a dungeon or hexcrawl interesting. I want to emulate the feeling I get when playing B/X but in a game more perfectly suited to my tastes and that does a better job of integrating my Jewelsea setting. I need rules of some sort—they're a scaffolding that helps hold up the parts of the fictional reality that I'm less adept at managing in real time—so I don't want to go full FKR. This leaves me with a quandary—I do not care for turn taking in combat, especially of the I go, you go variety. It allows time for players' attention to wander between turns and makes each action feel disconnected from everything else happening at the same time. Simultaneous action as seen in Burning Wheel works better for me, but Fight is a subsystem that's so detailed I don't want to pull it out very often and the other forms get abstracted enough that I no longer find them interesting. I want to find a way to make a conversation work as combat in a way that feels fair.
So far, my best idea is emphasizing which side of a fight has the upper hand. If the players have positioned themselves well, when it comes time to let randomization take control a good roll will mean they achieve their goal and a bad roll will be merely a setback. Conversely, if they have let their opponents get the edge on them, a good roll will only move them in the right direction while a bad roll will spell disaster. This isn't terribly formal and leaves me feeling like I need to work on it more, but it's what I'm going to move forward with for the time being.
A final note - I'm debating whether I should change the name of my system from Fear the Dark. While I don't know of any other games with that exact title, there's enough with similar names that there could be confusion that I'm thinking about just calling my game Jewelsea RPG. I came up with the title Fear the Dark before the Jewelsea had really coalesced, but the Jewelsea is what I'm building this thing around and I think it's a more distinctive name overall, despite the fact that I still like the vibe of Fear the Dark.