Last night I decided to read the latest pdf to Mythic Bastionland to see how the rules work. Chris McDowell previously simplified D&D combat in Into the Odd by taking out to hit rolls, instead everyone just rolls for damage. Missing an attack isn’t interesting, doesn’t feel good, and drags out combat rounds, so better to abstract it away and say everyone in combat is causing violence to each other. So just roll for damage.

Although this solves the issue of combat dragging on too long it doesn’t necessarily make combat more interesting. Especially low level characters tend to not have a lot of good options available to them. Of course players can try and propose an action for their character to take to give themselves some sort of tactical advantage. Since you might not want to let the players automatically succeed for stuff like this though, you’ll have them make some sort of stat or skill check. And at lower levels players are likely to fail those rolls. And so that means the optimal play is usually the boring play: stick to the action that does damage. Surely there’s got to be a better way…

Enter Mystic Bastionland with its combat gambits. When you make an attack in Mystic Bastionland you form a dice pool with everyone attacking the target. The highest number rolled is the damage you do to the target. The other dice in the pool can be used for gambits if they are a 4 or higher. Gambits are various sorts of combat advantages from bolstering the attack (+1 damage) to temporarily disarming a foe, stopping an action next turn, etc.

There’s a lot to be excited about by this system, and I think I probably plan to implement it into any games I’m running going forward. It’s tactically interesting without being overly complex. It’s extremely hackable. You can design environments and enemies that have special gambits. Gambits could be slotted into a enemy puzzle design. The possibilities here are really exciting. I hope we start seeing a lot of new design work around the gambit system.