Article:
Improvised Combat: You Can Do More Than Just Shoot It...

Combat in a roleplaying game is a complicated business and in many ways it has been hurt by the video games industry. It’s not the video game’s fault, but those sort of games are geared to a specific style of combat and the technical complexities of being able to do anything that your imagination can come up with is still beyond the abilities of most, if not all, computer or console games.

You see, in a video game your abilities go so far as to shoot, club, throw and hide. That’s it as far as your abilities go and even if you’re working in a multiplayer environment you’re still working mainly on what you yourself can see and do.

This isn’t the same with any roleplaying game, (and just for clarity’s sake I’m talking pen-and-paper roleplaying games played over a table with friends as opposed to an electronic RPG such as Oblivion, Fallout or Mass Effect) where your actions are only limited by your own imagination and the physical limits set by the GM.

It’s not something a new player will arrive to the game with, for the most part, though a few do. It’s more something that will come into the gameplay through experience and ingenuity.

The way I phrase it normally is that ‘Everything is a weapon’. When in combat I have no problem with grabbing a gun and blasting away, but if I’m playing I’m also trying to think of anything that would give me an advantage and so will more than likely look around at not just the terrain, but the objects nearby, the makeup of the building I’m in and so forth.

Let me give you an example. Say you’re in a warehouse gun battle with plenty of cover everywhere. The enemy is bunkered down with no easy shot on target a quick grenade would do the job fine, if you had any grenades. You could take your time and wait for an opportunity or keep blasting away, or what you could do is throw any object, a tin can, a bit of pipe, an empty clip into their foxhole. If you’ve got the time to place a still burning cigarette into the can before you throw it, so much the better. Chances are the bad guys are 50/50 likely to assume it’s an explosive and break cover in front of you rather than run the risk of getting all blowed up, even more so if it’s smoking a little.