Origins of scripted combat?

[buzz]

From James Maliszewski's retrospective on En Garde (http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/11/retrospective-en-garde.html), an RPG produced by GDW in '75.


Dueling is the most complex mechanic in the game, though, and the game's combat system is actually quite cleverly done. Each player chooses a weapon and a series of twelve maneuvers. These pre-plotted moves are then revealed and cross-referenced on a table that adjudicates their relative effectiveness. It's simple, certainly, but it allows for the use of tactics, as players can get a sense of which attacks or defenses work best against others. There were also rules for aborting certain moves in response to those of one's opponent, so dueling was not wholly "mechanized."

Hmm...

[luke]

Nope. Never even heard of it before I got out into the wide world.

[buzz]

Nope. Never even heard of it before I got out into the wide world.
Oh, I didn't mean literally. I just thought it was interesting to see an example of scripted combat that predates even AD&D. Heck, it predates Eldritch Wizardry.

[rafial]

"Plotted movement", which involved pre-scripting a units movements/attacks several turns in advance was a not uncommon mechanism in war/minis games back in the day (60s & 70s) to provide "fog/chaos of war". It's much fallen out of favor even in that part of the hobby. I first encountered it in Avalon Hill's _Submarine_. That one was interesting, because merchants & capital ships had to script 10 turns in advance, the sub 3, but destroyers had free movement, so you represented different degrees of ability to respond quickly to changing circumstances.

So En Garde was using a mechanic very much of its time.

[luke]

I definitely was inspired by war games, but particularly Diplomacy.

[Totally Guy]

It's called Game Theory for a reason. I wrote a dissertation on it back at university.

I'm surprised there isn't more of it in games.

[Kublai]

Anytime you need simultaneous actions, you need a method of revelation. Scripting is the only way to do that, I think, whether it's choosing one card to drop, or multiple actions across a period of time.

[noclue]

When I first described the Burning Wheel scripting mechanics to a Old Skool friend, he remarked that it sounded like the old En Garde! dueling rules. Here I thought I was being all hippy and new wave.

[Aramis]

When I first described the Burning Wheel scripting mechanics to a Old Skool friend, he remarked that it sounded like the old En Garde! dueling rules. Here I thought I was being all hippy and new wave.

Doing scripting in a roleplaying context pretty much is...

En Garde is right on that border of RPG/Non-RPG.... and has been since release in 1975. While it is a game of character development, the time scale (week an action) and focused rules put it into the non-RPG category. It's a boardless boardgame, in many ways. Here's an online example of the rules , you'll see that it's right on that edge.

Several other RPGs have limited forms of scripting; Hero System, for example, has some actions that require others precede them, and a few where there is a chain of 2-4 phases of action. But BW is one of the first to make it a standard to plot out the round to what actions will be taken the whole round, whilst still being truly a Role-playing game.