Or how I had a cool idea that I wanted to turn into a blogging bandwagon because by god I need to write more of these.
I'll also be compiling takes on this prompt/challenge to this post as I either come across them or am informed of them so de feel free to check back here every now and then.
So far myself, Havoc of Lonely Star blog, Mr.Mann of The Foot of Blue Mountain blog, diregrizzlybear and Justin H of Aboleth Overlords have taken the challenge for a spin.
I would also like to apologise in advance, the formatting of images is not exactly one of blogger's strong points so I couldn't make this post look exactly super pretty. Hopefully it should still be readable and not go too janky on mobile view or anything of the sort.
The what now?
So this is an idea I stumbled myself into after witnessing another user on the OSR discord server going over their re-read of Berserk and talking about it's fight scene of Guts facing off against Lord Zondark and how some of the things that happen in the fight might translate to stuff players could do during combat in a tabletop rpg.
Some amount of spitballing ensued, and I wanted to try getting people on board with this for couple of different reasons.
Firstly, there really isn't that much player-facing advice out and about on the osr blogging circles, or if there is I have ran into pretty much exactly none of it, and I figured something like this could kinda be used to highlight to the players how you can pull off all sorts of cool stunts in a fight in order to attemp to level the playing field instead of just resorting to the "I hit you, you hit me, I hit you, you hit me" that I find B/X combat can often devolve into.
Secondly, I thought it would be really interesting to get to take a peek inside the heads of different GMs and see how they approach adjudicating these type of more unorthodox fighting manouvers in whatever syster, hack of one, or other amalgamation of rules and procedures they use to run their games with, as well as seeing how two different GMs might adjudicate the same scene with the same ruleset in a completely different manner to kinda highlight how the OSR scene is often more about rulings made during play rather than hard rules recited from a book and a number of GMs aren't afraid to let players pull of cool figting manouvers just because there's no rules precedence for them.
Secondly, I thought it would be really interesting to get to take a peek inside the heads of different GMs and see how they approach adjudicating these type of more unorthodox fighting manouvers in whatever syster, hack of one, or other amalgamation of rules and procedures they use to run their games with, as well as seeing how two different GMs might adjudicate the same scene with the same ruleset in a completely different manner to kinda highlight how the OSR scene is often more about rulings made during play rather than hard rules recited from a book and a number of GMs aren't afraid to let players pull of cool figting manouvers just because there's no rules precedence for them.
The Challenge
It really is as simple as:
- Pick a fight scene that isn't just two dudes hitting/shooting each other back and forth. Preferrably something with clever/weird manouvers and unconventional fighting techniques.
- Run as through how you would have adjudicated the fight, what kind of rulings would you have made to allow the players to pull off all the cool manouvers.
As such, the scene that sparked this all is from the manga Berserk and takes part during The Guardians of Desire chapter between Guts and Lord Zondark.
Here's the short of it, you can go find it yourself if you'd wish to read around it for more context or just prefer not squinting through series of screenshots on blogger.
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