Felltower & Mapless Combat

I recently posted a set of guidelines for non-tactical, mapless combat for Felltower. I wanted to get down in one place all of the rules I’d made to supplement the rules in GURPS Basic Set: Characters for my own play. I also wanted to mention the Retreat ruling and the range bands.

All of this, except for the Retreat rules, has been seen in play already.

Before 2020, we played in person. We did mostly mapped combats for anything that was confusing, but also did a lot of mapless combat. All mapless combat used those rules, except that instead of formal range bands I’d just state a reasonable-sounding range based on the map and go from there. Come 2020, though, we had quarantine. We couldn’t game together. We swapped first to the Roll20 and then to Foundry based on a Forge server. Suddenly, almost 100% of combats were mapped. Unless it was against a tiny amount of foes – one pudding, two spiders and some swarms, a single giant, etc. – we did everything on the battle map. The fact that we need icons on a map to roll against pushed us even more towards that.

But over the past year or so, I’ve tried to push here and there for mapless fights when I felt they’d be fast enough and small enough that no one would complain. When I did so, those were the rules I used, except for the “Retreat” ruling and the Reach ruling. I even used Range Bands. I didn’t say I was using range bands, but the range penalties I’d offer up were straight from there. No one complained.

It’s with that in mind that I decided to push a little more for mapless combat. My players are willing to give it a try. It’ll be interesting to see how people react to formal, visible rules for something I ran informally (but almost identically) and with hidden rules determining the rulings.

The goal? More combats resolved in less time. Big set pieces are fun, but 1-2 hour fights for nothing really special just because someone really wants to make sure they clip as many people as possible with their area attack or get a +1 to Parry when they Retreat isn’t really worth the cost in gaming time.

Let’s see how it goes next week.