A Note Pinned to the Combat Log
A courier arrived mid-skirmish this week, breathless, bearing not a game but a grievance — the oldest one in the solo player’s ledger: combat that will not end. Daniel (@dungeondive) has laid out his workbench of fixes for anyone who has ever stared down a thirty-HP stat block and sighed.
- Fixing Tedious Combat in Solo RPGs — scaling HP, strong/weak/miss moves, damage charts, and a death-free narrative dice-pool for combat you’d rather tell than tally.
From the deeper stacks, for those still whittling foes down one die at a time:
- 2D6 Dungeon - for once I’m excited about the combat in a dungeon crawl! — the rare crawl whose combat he actually looks forward to.
- The Peril of Cymbaline Isle - A look at Scarlet Heroes — his favourite solo RPG, and the source of half these fixes (fray die and all).
- My favorite Tool for Solo RPGs - A Deck of Cards (A Land in Peril) — a peek at the very design he’s still wrestling into shape.
Planned excavations resume next cycle.
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– The Keeper
Observes that the archivist, who has outlasted a thousand paper monsters, would sooner narrate a foe’s defeat than subtract it point by point — and suspects this is less impatience than mercy, extended chiefly to himself.