--- title: "Attack and damage" subtitle: "And the illusion of progress" author: Seth publish_date: 2025-09-20 08:00 date: 2025-09-20 08:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: explosion-1600x800.webp show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: blog tag: [ gaming, meta, wargame, rpg] --- Roleplaying games are often thought of as a game about storytelling. With no set script, a conglomerated story emerges even when major milestones and plot points have been predetermined. A _story_, of course, is a kind of journey from one state to another. A humble villager defeats a notorious villain and becomes a respected warrior, a lowly page achieves knighthood and slays a dragon, a mystery that's confounded the police is solved by a persistent independent investigator. In roleplaying games and wargames, there's also a lot of combat. And that's a form of storytelling, too, and roleplaying games and wargames tend to tell that story a little differently. ## Combat in roleplaying games In many RPG combat systems, the convention is for players to "hit" often. What a "hit" actually represents is open to interpretation. Maybe you only hit armour, wearing your opponent down but dealing no physical wound. Maybe you remove "hit points" from your opponent, but those points only represent the remaining probability that your foe survives. After you've chipped away enough HP, the probability is reduced to 0, and you finally deal the mortal wound that slays your enemy. Or maybe it's an especially cinematic universe, and those hit points represent wounds dealt to what's essentially a superhero. You roll dice to remove hit points. Sometimes it's a lot. Sometimes it's a little. Regardless of what you imagine is happening, mechanically a "hit" is a sign of progress. Progress feels good in a game. When you detect no progress, you feel like you're wasting your time. A combat with no discernible progress could theoretically go on forever, and what's the point of that? ## Combat in wargames In a wargame, hits are often harder to come by. When you do score a hit, you've killed your target. As in real life, getting stabbed or shot is all it takes. In extreme cases of very good armour or supernatural entities, a hit at least means you're half way, or a third of the way, to its death. It might be hard for a roleplayer to think of 3 HP as being almost over-powered, but it's not uncommon in wargames for soldiers to possess just 1 HP. That's because progress in wargame combat is expressed differently than in an RPG. Wargames have objectives, matters of attrition, and armour saves. ### Objectives An objective is often one of the primary storytelling mechanisms in a wargame. It's the reason the game is being played, it's the goal you're striving toward, and it's the prize you take home at the end (or not). You have a sense of progress throughout the game depending on how close you're getting to the goal. ### Attrition You also feel progress through attrition. Many wargames involve tens or even a hundred miniatures, which cumulatively represent a bulk sum of hit points. The more soldiers you hit and kill, the fewer enemy forces there are. When you look across the battlefield and see 20 instead of the original 40 models, you have a tangible sense of progress. Conversely, when you're not hitting your enemies due to bad dice rolls or poor tactical choices, you may still see progress as your own force is reduced. It's not a great feeling, but it's progress nevertheless. It's part of the story. ### Saves Many wargames have highly interactive rounds. Whether it's your turn or your opponent's turn, the combat sequence is a two-player affair. Your enemy rolls to hit, and you roll to save. Your enemy rolls to charge, and you get a reaction. Suddenly you're in melee, rolling to hit each other all at once. Sure there are moments of standing around while the other player moves lots of miniatures around on the battlefield and makes some tough choices, but largely you're involved in the game from start to finish. An armour save gives you a sense of progress by giving you a sense of narrative control. It's a false narrative, which is true of anything where a dice roll is ultimately making the plot decision, but it feels authentic. When you save, you feel you've wrestled the power of storytelling away from your opponent. That soldier isn't dead, it has armour, or it dodged the attack. It's a built-in plot twist, and so the story goes on in an entirely different direction. ## A story of conflict Mechanically, the "story" of combat is that when you lose, the game is over, but if you win then you get to keep playing. Like any story, it's a change in status (for better or for worse). Combat is the ultimate all-or-nothing gambit, and it's concentrated into a relatively brief encounter. This isn't a puzzle you can spend several game sessions trying to solve. You don't get to reset the problem after guessing incorrectly. Combat is immediate and dire. Because it is a story, the sense of tension and apprehension that comes from combat wouldn't last long if players had no sense of progress. The act of fighting a monster isn't exciting unless you expect for the combat to end at some point. Otherwise, it's an astoundingly boring activity of hitting and being hit in an endless loop. The "story" of combat is the journey from resistance to release. I've been playing a very low combat campaign of **Stardrifter** for the past year. It's been fascinating to see what triggers that same sense of resistance and release outside of combat. So far, I think the closest emotion to the stress of combat is suspense. Subterfuge generates a lot of suspense. Will we get caught sneaking around this space station in places we aren't meant to be? Not immediately getting something we want creates suspense. Mystery creates suspense. There are, it turns out, lots of ways to tell a story about resistance without relying on combat. It's not something I am personally great at as a Game Master, but it's definitely something I'm hoping to get better at this coming year.