"Mythic violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake. Divine Violence is pure power over all life for the sake of the living. The first demands sacrifice; the second accepts it.
...the expiatory power of violence is invisible to men."
— Walter Benjamin, Critique Of Violence
A No Rounds, No Turn Order, No Initiative Roll, Kinetic and Brutal Combat System that interacts directly with the Fiction. This is Liquid Steel Ultraviolence. Violence as Conversation. Dialectical Combat.
Read on for an unfurling.
On Fiction
Violence is inevitable in the dead world of 10,000 Swords Against Heaven. This combat is neither combat-as-sport (as seen in games like D&D 4e or Lancer) or combat-as-war (as seen in most OSR and NSR games). Instead, the Liquid Steel Ultraviolence that is the combat system of 10kSwords is Violence-As-Conversation.
The basis of the core mechanic of the 10,000 Swords Against Heaven is the conversation. The Intercessor reveals the world through a situation or a vista (known as the Telegraph), and the Wanderers must react in kind (their Action or Struggle). In a dialectical sense, the action is the negation of the telegraph. In the act of negating the telegraph, comes consequence. In other words, the situation is changed.
All this is part of the Fiction. We do dialectics with the Fiction.
And so the core of combat in 10kSwords is conversation as well. There is no "cut-load into battle scene" moment in 10kSwords. Any moment can explode into violence. Put down a grid or a battlemap as needed, but they're not needed. Any punch is an Attack Check, any attempt to leap out of danger's way is a Dodge Check.
This is, in essence, the approach of Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games, which are two great loves of mine. Their revelation of the Fiction, to me, upended all RPG design, in the same way Marx upended all anthropology and sociology (maybe/not maybe Philosophy) with a purely materialist approach. To me, the Fiction is the main thing that separates Tabletop RPGs as a medium from Boardgames, Wargames, and Video Games.
Fictional Violence is Dialectical Violence
How then, do we apply that to combat? Something famously kept within the hindrances of non-fiction mechanics? Something that has special abilities that work within its own mechanical language, and having the Fiction arise as a byproduct of interlocking, interacting mechanics?
Boardgames, Wargames, and Video Games all have the capacity to generate Fiction. In those mediums, they like to call it "Fantasy." When gameplay matches the "fantasy" it is considered as good. However, one unique property of RPGs is their capacity to interact and influence directly the Fiction. Hell, in some game traditions, such as FKR, they play almost completely within Fiction!
Many factors go into generating and influencing Fiction. Not just the game's mechanics, themes, and vibes, but also the cultural background, expectations, and projections of the players. In a sense, there is no Fiction but the interlocking consciousnesses and projections of all the aforementioned factors. This is dialectical materialist and radically of the Sunyata philosophy as found in Buddhist texts.
So 10kSwords has Violence that interfaces directly with the Fiction. But I didn't want to just do PbtA, which does sometimes feel a bit too wishy-washy. I wanted to give it some modicum of structure—not procedure, but scaffolding. And so I made vulgar the usually subtle mechanics of "Situation -> Reaction -> Situation Change" loop of almost every RPG. And I did it thanks to some ideas from replaying Bloodborne.
The Game Master As Indispensable
This is how you telegraph light and darkness.
The core of a Souls-like combat is telegraphing and decision points. Most monsters you face in a Souls game will telegraph the danger they possess. Usually this is obvious: they raise a hand which will come down the next instant. They pull their blade back. They aim with a gun. Sometimes it's more subtle: a giant hippopotamus or crocodile telegraphs that they'll attack with charges, bites, and spins by dint of what they are. A revenant with multiple flailing limbs will probably be able to attack you in a quick and abusive flurry. It's one of the best things about Souls-like design—not just because the combat is good, but because the combat is inherently part of the environment and the greater painting of the game. This is why just copying Soulslike combat is useless—Ocarina of Time has Soulslike combat. Soulslike combat is Soulslike combat within the context of the game and environment. It is an empty concept.
That aside, that became a core part of violence. And I realized I was already doing that with the core mechanic of 10kSwords—telegraph -> reaction & consequence -> new telegraph. So that's now the core of Liquid Steel Ultraviolence. It's a "no turn order," "no rounds," "no initiative check" system because you don't need to do that.
The Intercessor, as the world's shaman, reveals what the World does. What the monsters, bandits, enemies, threaten the Wanderers. They unhinge their maw. They pull their sword back. They sheathe their katana. They reload their gun. They aim their bow. They lurch forward. Open ended actions that are big telegraphs that the Wanderer must react against or else they suffer the consequences of ignoring a telegraph.
The Wanderers must then act accordingly. Any order—up to them to choose how. They can work together, combo together. A great beast rears up with a maw of liquid fire? Everyone leaps out of the way. Someone that can't move (Stunned, maybe?) can be pulled aside by an ally that's close enough. A slow and lumbering demon raises their bludgeon? The one with the dagger can unleash a flurry of stabs while a mage uses their Psionika to pull that Wanderer out of range of the bludgeon after performing the stabs.
The consequences happen immediately after actions. Not as a phase—in fact, Actions and Consequences are often resolved at the same time. This is because Actions and Consequences are really the same thing—negations of the present situation, creating a new situation. Taking the dagger wanderer example—if they pass their Check, and then the Mage passes their Magick Check, it unravels like how they thought it would. But if the dagger wanderer missed their Check? They might have suffered the striking bludgeon of the demon first, before the Mage pulls them out of the way, because that is the Consequence of failing the attack!
This is the job of the Intercessor, is to adjudicate all these effects, these Consequences. A skilled Intercessor keeps her Principles. There is no bad Intercessor, only an Intercessor that does not try. Always remember that something beautiful is going to happen. Against the current trend of popular design in TTRPG spaces, the game cannot be played without an Intercessor. You need her to reveal the World. Instead of de-emphasizing an Intercessor's role by creating a system that can play itself or by writing a solo-rpg, I instead double down on the importance of an arbiter/judge/caller that reveals the World to the Wanderers. Someone that establishes and facilitates the Fiction? Sounds like an integral part to the medium of TTRPGs.
Glimpses of Past Fury
A previous version of this game worked with the Hits-and-Parries idea I had. Roll Attack Dice vs Defense Dice. 4+ on Attack Die is a Hit, 5- on a Defense Die is a Guard. Guards cancel out Hits. This was elegant, but what I didn't like in practice was how it effectively allowed you to abstract and elide the fiction of multiple exchanging attacks and combos, with the added mental overhead of having to work with dice pools. It sounded cool to see five hits parried three times, with 2 getting through, but it essentially didn't feel like we were seeing it. The feeling was different. (In a sense, it felt like if Monster Hunter, Dark Souls, or DMC had no hitstop on their attacks).
So now it's liquid in the sense that since turns are moving faster, you can make multiple attacks back-to-back in a much more rapid pace. You do combos by performing your Martial Arts (which feed into the martial artist fantasy much better!) More importantly, combos aren't just something that feel like hitting Square five times. Rather, it's something you have to describe yourself doing: "As I run in, I slide low and elbow her knee, palm strike her jaw as I rise, and then spin into a back kick!" is not something you need complex mechanics or system mastery to do—it's something you can do if you think it's what the Wanderer would do! But keep in mind that that would only one Attack Check, one instance of DMG (which, with the lower Health values, is more lethal anyway), and the Fiction of your attack can detail how it could be Parried or how you could suffer Consequences from it. Maybe if you fail the attack, the target gets to catch your spinning back kick and send you sprawling into the ground, stunning you as a consequence. The exchange feels more natural, closer to the tender rawness of the Fiction, rather than having multiple layers of mechanization that separates it.
Denouement—or, the Aftermath of Violence
This is the surface-level philosophy for this particular twist in design. Having this no initiative check design helps make dungeon crawl into Souls-llike, Vagrant Story-like, Final Fantasy XII-like experience where combat is part of exploration and is not separate from. In the extreme violence of 10kSwords, it shears away even the separations between the "pillars" of RPGs.
I might go into the design philosophy of Cultivations next (Anti Paper Button Pushing, a negation of D&D 4e's Power Design [and therefore, ultimately, a sublation of its design into something new and still completely it]). But the game's initial open beta might be released here very soon! In like, a day or so, if work doesn't hold me up too much!
Thanks all! Until all the hells are empty, until all beings are free!