Article:
GM Tips : Learning A New Combat System

It doesn’t matter how experienced you are with GMing games, sometimes learning a new system can throw you, especially when it comes to the combat system. With regular play you can take a second out to check up on a rule or two, but with combat you really don’t want to interrupt the flow of play to be looking through the book every time somebody does something.

Right, here’s a little tip I made up a few years ago on how to get to grips with a new game system, especially the combat system.

Let’s face it, the combat system of a game is quite often the most complex set of rules in the book, so here’s a routine that I use whenever I read through a new book with the intent of running a game and it’s just a series of trials that you perform on your own before going to the game to meet your players.

Prep.

Create a few sample characters. If that’s beyond you, then put the book down, walk to the nearest corner shop, buy yourself a carrot and insert it into yourself, painfully. Basics like that you can pick up from the books and I’m not here to help you with that now. Then create an empty room, with no distractions like windows and doors. The dimensions are not important, just so long as there’s space enough to move around.

Take 1.

Place a couple of your pre-generated characters in the room a few feet apart. Then have one stand still, get out his/her weapon and shoots/hacks/blasts the other until the target is dead.

Don’t worry about turn order and initiative, we’ll get to that next, but if you do this, then you’ll get how the weapons work and health points, aiming, hit locations, damage rolls and wounds. All important things you want to have down so you’re not looking them up on the fly.

Take 2.

Reset your characters and have both of them ready to shoot. This time both of them will be active so you’ll need to roll for initiative, or turn order or whatever the system has that you’ll be using. Don’t have them moving around, just stand still while they blast away at each other.

If you do it right you’ll have the turn order down, plus you’ll also encounter the effects of wound modifiers and how that affects further rolls. Does the aim get affected, is the damage lessened or increased, and is someone is knocked out or completely dead?