Gun Fu, John Wick Style

[Emberashh]

Design 'Problem':
What we're looking to achieve is a grounded "GunFu" style of combat, emulating the style of fight choreography made popular by the John Wick franchise, with realistic gunplay bombastically and coolly blended with martial arts.

This will be accomplished by adapting the systems from my game Labyrinthian, which is near feature complete, insofar as its combat system is concerned. This system will integrate Hit Locations, Accuracy, Ammunition usage (and potentially tracking), Martial Arts, Tactical Movement, and, as in Labyrinthian, the freeform ability to both improvise new actions, and new uses for your base actions.

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Core Mechanics:

For this primer, we'll be looking at the following as our core relevant mechanics; things like actual stats, abilities, items, etc., will factor in, of course, but at this stage we're prototyping, so we won't have that much content beyond some improvised examples for the purpose of this. Likewise, I likely haven't thought of every single angle on this; I came up with this today, so let's not get antsy if there happens to be some glaring issue.

That said, it should be noted that the base combat system this is being built out of has been extensively playtested at this point; it is involved, but it is also very fun, and you will quickly acclimatize to it the more you learn and play.

Anyways, on to the mechanics:

Composure:
Composure is effectively the combatant's HP bar, but it does not represent their physical wellbeing beyond superficial scrapes, knicks, bruises, etc. Instead, it represents your general mental fortitude and ability to keep going in a fight without exposing yourself.

When someone "loses their Composure," they are not considered dead. Instead, their Movement is Halved, and they can no longer React to attacks. Both of these will be important later, but what's key to note is that people can choose to exploit your Composure to get a free lethal hit on you.

The Combat Roll:
From round to round, each combatant will be pre-rolling 2d20. This input random roll should be thought of more as two separate 1d20 rolls, as each die individually represents one of the two Actions that player can take, giving them a base "Action Rating", or just Action for short.

Taken together, the Combat Roll also determines the combatant's base Movement, and whether or not the combatant will seize the Initiative for the Round.

The Skill Die:
This die, as the name implies, derives from your combat skills (the die goes up as you advance them) and grows from a d4 to a d12. Much of the time, this die doubles as your Damage and Defense dice, and the number of them you can roll at once will depend on your weapon. You will, with adequate skill, also be able to arbitrarily set your die size to any that you've unlocked, which lets you choose how often you can chase Momentum for precision, but at the cost of less outright Composure damage.

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Momentum:
Momentum is a form of exploding dice; roll a max (e.g., 6 on a d6) on your Skill Die, and you gain one use of Momentum. At a basic level, you can use this to just reroll and do more Composure damage, but you have additional options. In this version of the system, those options will be:

• Score a Hit
• Martial Arts
• Hold Fast

There are no explicit limits to how often Momentum can be generated and used in a turn, but ammunition tracking naturally limits it. The more dice you roll (and max out), the faster you burn through your ammo. Additionally, while rolling high can lead to more Momentum, rolling a 1 will eventually end your chain, even if you start strong.

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The Combat Grid:
For the moment, the plan will be to utilize the same Combat Grid as Labyrinthian, which one can view here:

Clicky, the imgur thing seems weird

The basics here are that in any given position, you do not have to spend Movement to interact with anything in that position (beyond what's required for Movement abilities, more on those later). To shift positions to any adjacent one, spend 10 Movement. Ezpz.

While the abstracted Grid is meant for quick play, I have successfully used it to build more elaborate set piece battlemaps. The arrangement of, and sometimes deletion of certain Positions actually makes for a very interesting design process when you know ahead of time where a fight's going to go down.

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Secondary Mechanics:

Pass Back Initiative:
This take on Initiative is designed to provide a fast-paced, punchy back-and-forth feel to combat. Whomever rolled the highest Combat Roll (CR) at the beginning of the round takes the Initiative and may begin their Turn.

Who takes it next will depend. If the current holder makes an Attack, their target, as well as any other enemy, could potentially React to that attack; if they do, the Attacker’s Turn is suspended after their action is complete, and they will have to steal it back, or be passed the Initiative, to take their remaining action for the Round.

If no one reacts to your attack, however, you can freely pass it to anyone you wish, even an enemy if you wanted. If you have the Initiative and do not know who else has an Action they can still take, you will call this out so that someone can tell you.

If no one on your side has an action, you must pass the Initiative back to the other side, and they decide who goes for them. If this happens and neither side has an action, a new round starts with a new Combat Roll. (Usually, the GM or someone else is loosely tracking who all has gone, so this doesn't typically have to happen.)

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Momentum Options:

Momentum Option: Extra Shot:
This is your basic re-roll for extra damage. It allows you to swap targets, and you could engage multiple targets by doing so. This is where we would have specific Martial Arts options that ride this extra shot rather than existing as their own thing. I'm thinking of stuff like grappling your first target to shield yourself against another guy and things like that. It'll bear scrutiny, but I think that's how this will develop out.

Momentum Option: Score a Hit:
This option allows you to select a specific hit location you want to aim for, such as a Headshot. If your attack is able to be lethal, this option will kill the target, and if not, you'll still be able to gain a secondary effect, such as a missed Headshot dealing double Composure damage.

Specific locations will also have drawbacks, which will make lethality harder to guarantee. For example, the Headshot could impose a -15 to your Action, representing the ineffectiveness of going for one, but even if you can't get the hit, you still deal double Composure damage because of course you're going to rattle someone if a bullet whizzes past their head. Other hit locations will be developed similarly along these lines.

Momentum Option: Martial Arts:
This works as it does in Labyrinthian; you will re-roll the die to deal extra Composure damage, and riding it will be an additional Technique, essentially a bonus effect corresponding to some kind of martial arts move.

For example, use a Hook Punch to reduce any Defense your opponent rolls by 1, as well as their Reaction by the same amount. If you use this 3x in a row, you can inflict the Fracture wound, breaking a bone essentially. This particular Wound in Labyrinthian acts as a Status Effect, and anyone who attacks you gets a bonus die equal to your Wound Size. (e.g., take a d4 Fracture, anyone who attacks you can add a d4 to their damage. Wounds go up a die size with every reapplication.) This would likely be unchanged in this system.

Going for Martial Arts is going to be integral to getting Lethal Hits in reliably and can even be used to deal the Lethal Hits themselves. For example, stab them in the femoral artery and let them bleed out. Players invest in Techniques through a Perk System, which is pretty straightforward. These Techniques will be investable, meaning you can improve their base effects as you advance the relevant Skills (or more likely, just one singular Skill, but we'll see how that goes when the time comes), which in turn lets you focus on your favorite way to fight rather than worrying about trying to wield every single Technique at the same time (though you could...).

Momentum Option: Hold Fast:
This gives you two options. Firstly, you can use it arbitrarily, without rolling any Skill dice, to forgo your entire Turn and use your Combat Roll as a flat bonus to your next Combat Roll. Secondly, if you're using Momentum, you can retain the max you rolled and use that die as a bonus on either your next Attack or your next Combat Roll, whichever comes first. These withheld dice, however, are lost one at a time with every individual attack you take.

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Tactical Movement:
Relative to the size of the Combat Grid, and the basic 10pt cost to shift Positions on it, even brand-new characters will often generate more Movement than they strictly need just to move around.

To that end, we’ll have

Movement abilities like we do in Labyrinthian, but tailored to the mostly grounded nature of this system. As an example, we'll use "Check the Corner," otherwise known as peeking around a doorway or other open space in a deliberate way so as to set yourself up to React to and engage any given targets. This ability costs 10 Movement (as does almost any other use of Movement), and you gain +10 to your Reaction.

Another use, for clarity, would be Charging, which lets you dump your remaining Movement as bonus Composure damage.

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Ammunition, Accuracy, and Rate of Fire:
Each Skill die you roll, whether it's your initial roll or through Momentum, corresponds to a single bullet being fired, and if your gun supports Burst and/or Automatic Fire, you can roll 3 dice at once.

• Single Fire: You receive no special detriment.
• Burst Fire: You roll the 3 dice, but you lose -10 to your Action if you continue to shoot past that up to 3 more times, at which point you take the same penalty again, and so on if you're able to keep going.
• Automatic Fire: Drops your Momentum range by 1 (e.g., gain Momentum on 5 or 6 on a d6), but every individual bullet fired past the initial 3 will drop your Action by -10.

Through this, if it isn't apparent, we model accuracy, assuming you're generally competent at aiming if you're not just trying to dump the mag on automatic. However, as should also be apparent, this means we're tracking Ammo by the Bullet. This is fine; if John Wick can make paying attention to realistic mag sizes compelling, we can do it here.

That said, you'd probably be unwise to get reload happy if the situation doesn't truly call for it. If your gun goes empty and you can still continue your Turn, you gain 3 Free uses of Momentum. Pull a sidearm all slick like, or open a can of whupass. Or do both, go nuts!

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Procedure:
With the mechanics out of the way, now we can talk about how the system all works together.

The general goal of Combat revolves around a combatant’s Reaction, which, as long as they keep it identical to, or higher than, their Attacker's Action, means no shots or attacks made on them can be Lethal.

Attackers want to increase their own Action through whatever means they can while lowering their target's Reaction, and the Defender must do the opposite. This, in tandem with the available mechanics, is how we get the visceral back-and-forth we're looking for.

At a basic level, combat can just be a matter of reducing the other guy's Composure to zero, and then you can score a free Hit on them, and you can opt to make it Lethal by choosing the appropriate Hit Location. (Extremities are generally non-lethal; headshots, center mass, and inner thighs are lethal.)

This, naturally, is kind of boring, and it's a lot more efficient to break your opponent's Reaction, and thus score a Lethal Hit on them that way.

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Acuity and Stances:
Acuity first comes from a fixed value like Composure. If Acuity matches or beats your attacker's Action, you are automatically Reacting, and can make moves to further defend yourself. If it doesn't, you don't get to React at all, and you're probably going to get your head blown off.

Your Acuity, however, can be augmented, such as through the mentioned "Check the Corner" move, and you can also chain Martial Arts moves into a boost to it as well, which will be useful when engaging multiple targets in close quarters. These boosts could alternatively carry into an attack you make, seeing as you'll have the Initiative.

Stances, another option from Labyrinthian, can also be integrated into this system. Unlike in Labyrinthian, where Stances are based on Momentum, here they will be a passive system that you activate going into battle (assuming someone didn't get the drop on you) or while you're exploring.

Once you're in a Reaction, you can try to defend yourself. The obvious option here is to dive into Cover if it's available, which will confer some damage reduction as well as a further boost to your Acuity (but this would also bring Penetration into the mix, so choose Cover wisely).

Less obvious, if you can get into melee with your attacker, is to go for Martial Arts and try to open a can of whupass on them. Techniques let you damage their Action or increase your Reaction even as they, through the same means, do the opposite. These Techniques could, themselves, also be used to make Lethal Hits as well, with the same general mechanics.

The resulting clash of these dueling dice values is, well, a Clash, and whoever has the highest at the end of it wins out and deals the difference between the two as Composure damage, if a Lethal Hit wasn't able to be taken by the Attacker. If such a hit was taken, it becomes Lethal as soon as the defender, if they were able, finishes any Moves they have, and comes up short of meeting or beating the Action.

For example, if your Acuity is 15, and they come at you with a 14, you can React and defend yourself, but if through their moves they climb to, say, 30, and you only get to 29, then you're going to take a Lethal hit if they pulled one off.

Ideally, both the Attacker and Defender here would be describing what their Clash actually looks like as they work their dice. With the right people, this puts you as close to 1:1 with what's going on as you're going to get in tabletop, and it is genuinely awesome when two people are really able to convey their fight, using the mechanics to guide and inspire their descriptions.

But it's also possible to just do the calculations first, and then narrate the Clash. It ultimately doesn't matter how, but you'd lose out on half the fun if you just try to no-effort it.

This is, ultimately, a system for people who really enjoy consistently narrating how they fight, and the options available are there to inform and guide those narrations. So, even if you're not trying to put your own special flare on it, you can still at least describe what you're doing.

Now, when this Reaction occurs, you are stealing the Initiative in the process, and if you have Actions remaining, you can use them to then attack your target, or, if the situation permits, do whatever else you want to do.

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End of Combat:
From there, the firefight continues until either one side all dies, gets incapacitated, surrenders, or flees. Even with the kind of combat we're emulating, you're not obligated to kill; if you get a successful Lethal Hit, you can opt to treat it as an incapacitating hit, and you'd narrate that based on whatever it was.

If it was melee, you're probably knocking them out through some means, and if it's a gun, you might just be whacking them really hard, but it could also be something like putting a bullet in their knee or something to that effect.

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Final Thoughts:
As of now, this is what I've got. But as some last thoughts, I do want to note some things.

For one, as mentioned, this is being built out of an involved system, despite how much of it was designed to be as easy to engage with as possible. It will have to be learned and that will take some actual playtime. But, once you learn it, how smooth the system plays will become very apparent. This will remain true in this system in the end.

That said, for context, it has to be made clear that the balance intended for both the original system and this new one revolves around stakes. If the stakes are low, you're going to mow down every mook in your path with relatively trivial resistance, just like John does when he wipes out the guys at his house or the mooks in the nightclub. Like in Labyrinthian, most combat against such mooks won't even call for a Combat Roll; you'll just naughty word them up right in your exploration turn, ezpz.

But once the stakes are high, and you're facing down somebody that matters and/or isn't a pushover, that's when the full system comes into play. John killed like 20 guys in that nightclub before he had to stop and fight the one guy who could go toe-to-toe with him. Same idea.

So while the system is involved, the game itself is designed to put that relative complexity where it counts. (And it's ultimately still fast as hell regardless, given what the system does; in Labyrinthian, even very complex scenarios can be done in under an hour, and most take half that time or less.)

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### Ammo:
As noted, I don't consider it an issue that we're going by the bullet. For one, that's thematic to the kind of combat we're going for, and for two, with the ubiquity of HP and Ammo tracker wheels and other fiddly chotchkies, it just isn't really a problem, unless one just will not ever get behind the idea to begin with.

The kinds of people who won't be satisfied into the thing they take issue with are not who I'm designing for.

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Lethality:
As presented, I imagine most would intuit this system is deadly AF. And it is. For one, this fits the game this would be a part of, which is intended to be a NASApunk sci-fi setting (but it says something rather than just being

an aesthetic), so one really shouldn't be getting into a bunch of firefights to begin with if you're that concerned about getting your head blown off.

But for two, that same setting also enables a lot more ways to mitigate some of the deadliness on either side of a firefight. Body armor, exosuits, even primitive energy shielding could all be in play, giving you the means to passively absorb a limited number of Lethal hits, but likely at the cost of your mobility or, in the case of energy shielding, your "Power" which I imagine is going to become important as a second trackable alongside Composure.

What's more, I think the system will probably reveal a lot of neat ways for GMs to build tactical maps on the fly, so that unplanned fights don't end up going sideways because there's no preplanned cover and whatnot. This never proved too important in Labyrinthian, as that game is a lot less lethal in general, but I can easily see this being vital here. (And now I have an excuse to watch all the GDCs on FPS level layouts, hooray!)

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Final Iterations:
Finally, just to reiterate, I obviously haven't thought of everything yet, given this is just a concept I came up with today. Just off the top of my head, I know things like Heavy Weaponry are going to call for scrutiny in terms of how Automatic Fire is going to work, and related to that is when someone has no actual way to defend themselves even if they can React; how does the system work if someone can't physically move and has no other way to interact with their attacker?

I also haven't covered Reloading and when that occurs. My inclination on that, thinking on it now, is that a Momentum option could probably be introduced to do a "tactical" reload for some benefit, and that general reloading would be a free action, but at the cost of the Free Momentum for running dry. I think Weapon design will be key to making that decision interesting; do you swap to a sidearm and keep going, or do you reload your Rifle because that's the better gun?

Stuff like that naturally calls for thinking and iteration. Hence, the point of this and why I'm posting it is mostly just to see what people think about how it's going about the things it's modeling.

Things like Hit Locations or Accuracy are usually pretty convoluted to interact with, and in my personal opinion, how I'm doing it feels pretty damn clever, particularly given I originally developed the base mechanics to handle a similarly high-octane, but high fantasy style of combat.

 

[Emberashh]

So developments! For one, how this system handles hit locations and lethality ended up being so compelling I'm folding it back into Labyrinthian, which has been fun even though it basically broke combat, as the benefits are just, so compelling. More authentic Plate Armor, simpler, integrated Mass Combat, simplified Wounds system, simplified Techniques, and the list goes on. Just wonderful cross pollination.

So thats all been nice, but I've also been dabbling more in how this system is going to turn out.

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The Cross

First up, we have a new mapping system. As I was looking at this GunFu system and thinking through how to synchronize what happens in the narrative of the mechanics with what players can see, the original Combat Grid (which I've now taken to calling the Churn), as I linked above, falls short. While I think, with adjustments, it can work if I was going for a Doom or Quake style Arena map, for this combat system I think its prudent to have something that supports a slower, more methodical approach.

So, first thing I do is I go back to your traditional grid system, blocking out a literal map of a physical place. And this is fine, especially if one takes to Jacquays style map creation.

But the problem is, by moving away from the Churn, we lose the rapid deployment and scalability of that system, as well as the play anywhere capability that having an abstracted, universal map system provides. This is a big issue when we still want to deliver a compelling tactical experience, that, especially, needs to support completely improvised fights to the same (or at least as close to it as possible) depth as more conventionally prepped and predesigned fights.

So, long story short, I started learning about map designs, and in particular, Multiplayer FPS Level design, and I identified what I needed out of an adaptation, thus defining the constraints:

1. We must maintain the same adaptability and immediate play as the original Churn. It must be able to be applied to a conventional map with zero rules changes.
2. We must find a way to intuitively synchronize movement on this grid with the tactical movement endemic to the choreography we are emulating.
3. Traversal on the map has to be compelling, and allow for emergent strategies.

Taking these constraints together with what I learned, I gravitated towards the 3 Lane style of map designs, and came up with what I have dubbed "The Cross":

The basic idea is that each "Room" is an arbitrary zone, which can be just a few feet in a room or as large as several hundred. (The Churn can scale up to entire battlefields, this one could do most likely)

Every line connection defines where combatants can move to from that Room, but also defines Line of Sight, and if you're out of a specific firing line (say from B3 to A3), you're effectively in hard cover against that line, and can't be attacked by anybody on it, unless, that attacker has LOS on you from another direction. Eg, if you're in L2, nobody in B3->A3 can shoot you unless they're in the Cross.

Meanwhile, as per the system, moving from Room to Room costs the standard 10 Movement.

So, in keeping with our constraints, the Cross first gives us adaptability. This map is compelling whether were depicting two guys in a knife fight, or a big shoot out in the middle of a street, and I could even see this working well with even larger scale fights. And naturally because of this, we retain rapid playability, as the GM can quickly define whatever things exist in each position, like Soft Cover, objectives, or what have you,

The next constraint was tricky to balance, but so far Im happy with it. By setting up the map as square "Rooms", we can more intuitively synchronize how a combatant moves in this system with the narrative of those mechanics.

While not every fight is going to literally be this long series of rooms, I think this layout effectively conveys how you, as a combatant, would interact with hardcover in an open environment, moving in and out of it, and using it to block Line of Sight on yourself as you try to close the distance or avoid fire that'd break through whatever soft cover might be available.

But most importantly, and leading us into constraint 3, this layout produces an interesting (if basic) set of options across its 3 Lanes. Along the center line you have the longest unbroken line of sight from B3 down into A3, and the Cross itself being essentially the Killbox, where its taking LOS from a while lot of Rooms at once.

Along the lefthand side, you have a concentrated trio of rooms, which allow for flanking around the Cross, but are also very costly to break through for the distance you get.

Along the righthand side, you get a much longer, more open lane to traverse, where you effectively move double to get from B2 to A2 (or vice versa), but as a consequence of this open and fast movement, you're open to a very long line of sight, where either side can easily protect their flanks. The righthand side also sports a 4th room, giving you the deepest hard cover, but nowhere to retreat.

For the purpose of having a simple, adaptable, abstract grid to use for any given firefight, I think this one nails it, particularly because, as with the Churn and the Tactical Grid from Hollows before it, we still have the Tag system coming into play, letting us define not just what each Room has within it, but also relative elevation; we could very easily depict a 3 dimensional fight with this map just as we could with the Churn. R4 for example could easily be designated as an Elevator, or the move from R2 to R1 or R3 as Stairs.

We can also use tags to provide brand new traversal options. Vents anybody? Ezpz

But then as Ive found with the Churn, you can take this same system and use it to build out a literal map, using the Room nomenclature to define zones within that map. Depending on the map you use or build, you might lose some of the interactions of the basic Cross, but, thats okay, as having more or less Rooms than the basic one can be interesting in of itself.

All in all, pretty cool. I do imagine there will still be refinements to be made over time, but thus far Im pretty happy with it, and doing some haphazard solo scenarios on it has proven pretty compelling, particularly with how PassBack Initiative works, as two sides that start at either end end up spreading out like its a chess opening, and then all hell breaks lose when bullets start flying. Right where we want it I say.

But whats really interesting is that I could actually see both the Cross and the Churn being possible options to set firefights in, as well as potential future ones that cater to different kinds of fights. Particularly because as of now, the Churn is likely to still be our go to for space combat; that's more or less already been proven through Naval Combat in Labyrinthian, and we'd just be elaborating on it slightly to account for the 3rd dimension.

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Other Developments

The big development I think was the Cross, but I've also settled on some other iterations.

Reloads - As I initially figured, Reloads will come in two flavors, with a bonus option.

Firstly, the Basic Reload. Free action, reload your gun. Basically free out of combat, but in combat, you have the other two which will be more beneficial.

Second, the Tactical Reload; whip that empty mag out of the gun and load a new one all slick like. This one costs Momentum to use, and you would lose the mag itself unless you go out of your way to pick it back up. But, in exchange, you gain a heavy Momentum Bonus, lowering your max threshold by up to +3, which effectively makes Momentum much more likely to generate in that next initial shot you take. Very useful for those who like burst fire especially, but it can quickly get out of hand if you try automatic fire with it.

The other option is to instead let your gun run dry; as soon as it does, you immediately gain 3 uses of Momentum which you can use same turn, which is intended to primarily be used to switch directly into Martial Arts. But, you could also do it another way, as you do have 2 different Actions you can take.

So may be you take your Movement and get into Hard Cover, and you Hold Fast with your Momentum. Change your Stance to something more appropriate for close combat, and just wait. If that doesn't spark the imagination, here's what that dynamic is directly emulating:


(If it doesn't start there, 4:43 is the sequence Im looking at)

Gun goes empty, can't reload it anyway, use it as a weapon and set yourself up, then proceed to beat the crap out of the guy with it. Excellent!

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Momentum - As I was playtesting this system, it became apparent, in a much more obvious way than it ever did with Labyrinthian, that Momentum is actually hard to generate reliably, even with d4s. While in a high fantasy context this is okay, as the narrative of just lowering Composure still works really well to not make you feel like an idiot, in this system, if we're not getting Hits we're not exactly lethal GunFu fighters are we?

The solution, thus far, has been relatively simple in the idea of a Momentum Bonus. This Bonus would never be able to exceed +3 (as any higher and you're generating infinite Momentum with d4s), but you could stack multiple sources of it, which would primarily come from Martial Arts options (but not all options, for sure), but could, as we saw, also come from Tactical Reloads.

This is a rather elegant solution for this, as it actually just reinforces and better delivers on the choreography we're emulating. How many times has John Wick had to do some martial arts just to get a bullet into a guys head? Like 75% of the time of course!

Not only is combat about breaking their reaction so you can score a Lethal Hit, its also now about making sure you have Momentum when you do. With the right polish, this should be a heck of a lot of fun, particularly as I introduce more fighting styles beyond just putting bullets in guys heads.

John Wick 4 had dudes and dudettes in gun fights fighting with martial arts, swords, and bows and arrows, and unlike John Wick, as Im putting this system into a scifi game, I have an even better justification for why that works beyond it just being rad.

And its also nice as Labyrinthian is going to be the first go at polishing the melee system, and integrating what I learn from that will make the whole process very smooth when the time comes. Speaking of!

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Sniper Rifles- I mentioned originally that I was still uncertain how heavier weaponry like machine guns and what not would factor in, and I am still thinking on it, but for Sniper Rifles in particular, adapting Bows and, funnily enough, Magic into the Lethality dynamics already revealed how to handle these weapons.

In a nutshell, long range weapons like rifles will interact with Momentum and Ammunition a little differently, where instead of every die rolled being a bullet fired or a Technique used, you're instead "dialing in" your shot, building up a dice pool with successive use of Momentum, and/or your second Action,, but not actually dealing any damage with these dice.

You would only deal damage with the against a chosen target either when you say so, or when you you end up in a new Combat Round, at which point you lose an Action, and have to take your shot.

Whatever the case, when you do this, you're going to apply the total of your dice pool no matter what to the target. But whether or not its lethal, will depend. You'll pick up your dice pool and roll it; if you get Momentum, you can take a Lethal Hit, and do whatever else you want with it if you have more uses, which can include setting up your next shot.

In Labyrinthian, this leads to a bunch of ideas I've had for Ranged Techniques, but also for how to modify and elaborate on Spells, but in this system, while I think Gun Techniques wouldn't be out of line, it wouldn't be near as indepth. Snipers should be pretty simple I'd say.

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Handling Big Parties - I think an obvious question of this system is how it deals with a lot of players. Labyrinthian has been run with up to 10 people at the table, and while its a lot, it does work if everybody is learned. That said, the sweet spot I've been designing for is 6 Players vs the 1 GM.

At this stage, I do not think that 6 Players on the Cross would reveal anything weird other than them just having a lot of firepower, and I think the only real issue is that with where I'm taking this game's setting, we won't have a lot of boss level enemies to fight, if any really. And this is okay; I think for what I'm going for, the difficulty of combat is more in surviving it and being efficient than it is in defeating especially skilled, distinct, and/or powerful enemies, separate from the usual rabble.

That said, as we are going for a very specific brand of Scifi (NASAPunk Star Trek in a nutshell), I have been giving a lot of thought to how different character archtypes would be able to work together as a party, and that leads to the question of how do we, in keeping with my overall design philosophy, allow people who have no business getting into gunfights to participate in that part of the adventure?

In Labyrinthian this was pretty much baked in, given how much LOTR influenced that game, so even if you're basically just Frodo Baggins, you can still go adventuring despite not being terribly useful in full blown combat. You'd essentially have to go out of your way to get yourself killed in low stakes fights, and your friends would have to let it happen in higher stakes fights. There's also about a half dozen other ways its addressed, but that's out of scope for this.

Anyways, for this scifi game, my way to approach archtypes like your Engineers or Scientists, who might not have any real combat skills at all, is two fold.

Firstly, Eye in the Sky/Person in the Chair mechanics. Characters that aren't physically present, but have copious abilities to let them still affect gunfights and larger battles. This is very easily informed by Star Trek, but would also draw on characters Batman, where your Alfreds and Barbara's serve a similiar role.

Through this, if we assume some number of the players want to take up these roles, we can actually find ourselves a pathway to more organically difficult fights. Less people on the ground, but augmented by people in orbit, makes for a more interesting fight than if you just had 6 Tactical Players just mowing down hordes of Mooks (which is still going to be fun mind, just not as tactically interesting without intervention, such as a physical map rather than the default Cross)

The second option, however, would be mechanics to let them operate in these environments despite not having any or minimal combat skills. Engineer types are obvious, give them machines and other tech based shenanigans to play with. Sciencey types are harder, but given I have a somewhat compelling idea for hard scifi psionics, its entirely possible we just go for that.

Both would still have to he covered and protected by Tacticals, but thats not a bad thing I think; teamwork and all that razmatazz.

And ultimately, any mix of the 3 would be viable. Heck, ideally I think the design is going go trend towards a mix being the preference, with Orbital Tacticals getting into the mix. And this naturally follows from general scifi tropes, where of course the science or engineering guy has to get on the away team alongside a bunch of Tacticals, who so conveniently happen to be the main characters of the crew unless they're Redshirts.

Redshirts, funnily enough, is another idea here particularly for parties that build up a single large star ship rather than a small fleet of individual ships, or perhaps join up with factions and such. Redshirts would probably be a limited number of player controlled Mooks who can engage in full combat but, as Mooks, die easily. Thematically appropriate, and let's players who aren't inclined to push their characters into the Tactical direction to still get in on the action, if the other options don't work yet, or if as may well happen, we end up with other archtypes. I did, after all, end up integrating full Civilians into Labyrinthian, so who knows...

===

Overall, this been an exciting little sidetrack from working on Labyrinthian, if only because of the cross pollination thats going on, as even though this new game is in its infancy, it and Labyrinthian have already influenced each other considerably. Gotta love that, if nothing else.

 

[pemerton]

This seems quite intricate - there seem to be a lot of steps involved, including comparisons of values; and a lot of tracking.

Just as one example of what I mean:

use a Hook Punch to reduce any Defense your opponent rolls by 1, as well as their Reaction by the same amount. If you use this 3x in a row, you can inflict the Fracture wound, breaking a bone essentially. This particular Wound in Labyrinthian acts as a Status Effect, and anyone who attacks you gets a bonus die equal to your Wound Size. (e.g., take a d4 Fracture, anyone who attacks you can add a d4 to their damage. Wounds go up a die size with every reapplication.)​

I gather from this that an attack roll is compared to a defence roll. And the punch adjusts the latter. It also adjusts the Reaction, which is a separate value. There is a need to track how many hook punches are done in a row; and then to track the status affect which grants a bonus die to attacks.

It's not clear how impactful all this is - eg a -1 reduction seems modest if it is d20 rolls being compared. I couldn't tell how big wounds are. I'm also not sure how often momentum is generated, given it's based on rolling max on a damage die (I think?).

I also wasn't sure how the focus on hit location fits together with other parts that seem to be more freeform - eg "it could also be something like putting a bullet in their knee or something to that effect".

I also wasn't clear on how the "grid" is meant to work - does the same grid work for fighting in a lift (elevator), in a ball room, in a sports stadium, etc? And what does "fleeing" mean on this grid? (Given that fleeing is indicated as one way of ending combat.)

It would help me to get a handle on how all this is mean to work to have the procedure set out step-by-step: who decides that a combat is occurring, and how does play "transition" onto the grid; and then who performs what steps and how are actions declared and resolved?

 

[GMMichael]

Design 'Problem':
What we're looking to achieve is a grounded "GunFu" style of combat, emulating the style of fight choreography made popular by the John Wick franchise, with realistic gunplay bombastically and coolly blended with martial arts.

I just dropped the rules prior to "end of combat" into OpenOffice text at 10 point font. It's about five pages, no tables, no illustrations. I suppose a nice flowchart might make this look more simple, but GunFu is supposed to be lightning-fast, right? My concern is that it won't feel lightning fast when there are so many rules to process.

 

[Emberashh]

I just dropped the rules prior to "end of combat" into OpenOffice text at 10 point font. It's about five pages, no tables, no illustrations. I suppose a nice flowchart might make this look more simple, but GunFu is supposed to be lightning-fast, right? My concern is that it won't feel lightning fast when there are so many rules to process.

Well, what was written is essentially just an essay that explains the system and the context it exists in, but also the design context for why it was designed that way.

So, I'd say it'd be a bit of a misstep to treat this as though its a rulebook, particularly when at the time of writing it was still largely theoretical compared to the system it was adapted from. I'd wager roughly 90-95% of the text you copied wouldn't be needed if the intent was to give something directly playable.

Labyrinthian as of the last revision of its combat section condensed the core rules down to one 14pt font page (and this was with me still throwing a lot of flavor in rather than pure rules), and you'd be extracting the Content you want to care about onto your character sheet and/or Item Cards. A person with zero experience can follow that page and be basically competant in any combat scenario, even if they aren't as fast on the uptake as experienced players, and the teaching method thus far has been don't worry about anything not on that sheet until you're ready to learn more. (Usually when somebody else at the table does something cool)

And speed wise, this system is still one you'd have to learn at the end of the day, and once you do it becomes clearer why it can run as fast as it does, as you're not constantly engaging the full system just because you're fighting.

Not only do most fights not require shifting into the combat procedure at all, but within the ones that do, the game mechanics organically focuses your choices, which reduces the overhead you're having to engage with.

But now you've got this on my mind I'm probably going to end up doing a write up of GunFu today, so we'll see how that goes. This system in comparison to Labyrinthian has the potential to be even faster due to the intense lethality of it and what will likely be fewer players-as-combatants, but its too early to say for certain, knowing it took over a year to iterate Labyrinthian's combat into its current state, which is actually even more streamlined than what the 1pg sheet would suggest. The whole game is undergoing a revision atm from the ground up, so its just been a minute since I've put hands on that.

 

[Emberashh]

@GMMichael

One Page, 12pt for most of it

To be clear here, this wouldn't be a full reference. You'd also have your Character Sheet and, probably, Item Cards, and this is where all of your Content References would go, tailored only to what you specifically care to use. So, things like Techniques, Wounds, and any weapon specifics.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@GMMichael

One Page, 12pt for most of it

To be clear here, this wouldn't be a full reference. You'd also have your Character Sheet and, probably, Item Cards, and this is where all of your Content References would go, tailored only to what you specifically care to use. So, things like Techniques, Wounds, and any weapon specifics.

OK, so, I start to scan this: From a sim "rules map game state onto fiction so as to produce a realistic outcome" standpoint I am confounded by the first section "composure". What is this modeling? I mean, as a game mechanic I'm not especially complaining, it is just some resource/damage track kind of thingy that when it hits zero it flips a rules switch. But if you were to imagine actual people in combat, what would justify this half speed movement thing? I'd think people who have 'lost it' in whatever sense, are no longer 'composed' (taking a reasonable English language definition of that word given the context) might well move either slower or faster, depending. Like they probably move pretty damn quick when they are GTFO of there. They might well choose not to move at all otherwise, but I think if you watched a few war movies of the more realistic sort you might see that a blanket rule like this is not terribly realistic.

Honestly, this reads pretty similarly to what you get when you layer the more advanced combat rules in places like Striker on top of the basic range bands and LoS system of Classic Traveller. Traveller doesn't have anything that is exactly equivalent to Composure, instead you just allocate damage to different attributes, so for example allocating damage to INT (granting core rules only talk about END, STR, and DEX here) you'd get something similar where your character can't think anymore once they're subjected to some damage.

Anyway, BRP does similar stuff, especially the more full-blown '80s versions of RQ (later games have elided a lot of the more fiddly bits, since games like CoC don't really focus on heavy armor and melee weapons).

All of these types of games are more or less 'heavy', on the order of something like 5e, and mostly produce similar results. I'm not entirely sure, just based on this extract, how momentum would tie all this together in a different way, maybe it does. At a surface level it gives me pretty traddish impressions ala some of the more modern trad RPGs, perhaps.

 

[GMMichael]

One Page, 12pt for most of it

To be clear here, this wouldn't be a full reference. You'd also have your Character Sheet and, probably, Item Cards, and this is where all of your Content References would go, tailored only to what you specifically care to use. So, things like Techniques, Wounds, and any weapon specifics.

Well done! It reads to me like it requires a hefty level of supporting context, though, so while it might closely emulate the Atomic Blonde's extended-shot fight scene, it would be too much work for me. To put that into context (ironic?), most things based on WotC's SRDs are too much work for me.

 

[Emberashh]

What is this modeling?

Exactly what it says it's modelling.

But if you were to imagine actual people in combat, what would justify this half speed movement thing?

This misunderstanding is understandable given I don't elaborate on it in the page; Movement in these mechanics do not correspond to speed. Recall that combat takes place on abstracted maps that look like this:

While these grids can be mapped to a non-abstract physical space or landscape, Movement as a mechanic is still based on your ability to shift positions in this abstracted space, not how fast you can physically move at any point.

They might well choose not to move at all otherwise, but I think if you watched a few war movies of the more realistic sort you might see that a blanket rule like this is not terribly realistic.

Has to be said realism is completely besides the point. We're emulating cinematic choreography not real combat.

That said, the cinematic combat we're specifically emulating isn't actually that far off from real combat dynamics; its actually part of the reason why this choreographical style is so engaging, and still would be if the exaggeration was dialed back. Composure as designed is a way of depicting this connection in gameplay, by divesting physical injury and Lethality from the conventional HP bar.

If one loses focus in a fight, you're left open to your opponent taking advantage of you, up to and including being killed, and sometimes, this might happen even with excellent focus. In relation to you questioning Movement losses, you shouldn't be thinking "slower", but "hesitating", which is quite deadly in a fight. This as true in all kinds of real combat as it is in the exaggerated movie combat of John Wick or DND:HAT, both of which were the most direct influences here.

I'm not entirely sure, just based on this extract, how momentum would tie all this together in a different way, maybe it does.

I think for most people it clicks when they see the content that would go along with the system, and how easily the system maps to the kind of fights being depicted.

While its in the process of being updared given the changes GunFu cross-pollinated over, as an example over in Labyrinthian we have three different Hand to Hand Techniques. Vital Strike, Grapple, and Toss. All three utilize Hit Locations to depict a variety of different things.

Vital Strike is pretty easy to understand; a punch, elbow, or kick to a specific body slot, which can include targeting the things "in" those slots.

But with Grapple and Toss, we can do a lot more. Headlocks, suplexes or bear hugs, trips, disarms, and so on and so on. These easily map to things we'd see in cinematic combat; John Wick specifically loves weaving these kinds of moves into its exaggerated gunplay. But they also exist in real combat:


Start around 2:28 for the specific sequence if it starts from the beginning. The actual fight at around 3:00 is also pretty good for showing what Composure represents. The two fighters who get defeated would track to combatants who lost their Composure and took a fatal blow and an incapacitation as a result.

I believe this was something I talked about elsewhere, may be the RPG = Improv topic, but the big thing about Composure in particular is that it, and the subsequent Wound and Lethality systems, changes the aesthetic meaning of attacking, defending, and doing damage to each other, and this gets compounded with the idea of the Clash.

In this system and Labyrinthian, when an attacker and a defender clash, the difference between their respective damage and defense rolls is not just a number applied against the defenders Composure, but also a numerical guideline to how the Clash between the pair actually pans out "in the fiction". The lower the final damage, the more effective the Defender's efforts, and this influences how we interpret the Attackers efforts, and whatever Techniques or other abilities are used gets incorporated into it.

This in the end produces a very distinct gamefeel that, as I've seen playout even with earlier versions, maps very closely to the film choreography being depicted. GunFu hasn't had anyone (afaik, now that I've technically put the core rules out in public) actually sit down to play it other than myself against myself, but it does produce that same effect just as Labyrinthian does for the real people that play it.

Plus, as an aside, with Labyrinthian in particular we did give thought to how it might be adapted to depict HEMA and realistic combat in general. The big changes with regards to what we're discussing would have been the change of "Damage" to "Offense", and a new rule that states if you Defend well enough to cause your Clash to go negative, the value is still applied to your Composure; eg, restoring it. These changes aren't particularly intuitive however, and the latter would need further support to justifu.

Such a change would have been an increased presence of Composure Saves throughout the system, which is something actially missing from the rules page here. The idea there, as it is in Labyrinthian, is that there is only one Saving Throw, and any ability that calls for it uses your Current Composure to set its DC, alongside a dice roll if applicable. Likewise, your targets when attempting to pass the Save have to use their own Current Composure, either by itself or alongside a dice roll (at the cost of an Action), to do so.

This not only outright prevents any sort of yo-yo healing issue, but in the context of a more deliberately realistic system, would synergize well with the Composure restoration of Defense, and be a great basis for providing another avenue of Lethality thats even more directly mapped to real combat.

I would have to put thought to it, but I can imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to find similiar solutions for a more realistic take on Gunplay, if the above doesn't already do the trick. But as it happens, I have even less interest in realistic gunplay than I do swordplay, so that idea gets a resounding meh from me.

Well done! It reads to me like it requires a hefty level of supporting context, though, so while it might closely emulate the Atomic Blonde's extended-shot fight scene, it would be too much work for me. To put that into context (ironic?), most things based on WotC's SRDs are too much work for me.

In practice once its learned its not very heavy, especially compared to something like 5e, and much of the weight would be opt-in as your fighting style is essentially customizable in terms of having a lot of options, but no strict need to engage all of them at once. And you wouldn't be able to starting out anyway. Have to earn it first.

But even if you want to because thats the sort of character you want to develop, I'm doing a lot to ensure you can easily condense things down in a way that makes it easy to reference. In Labyrinthian, this means suggested abbreviations and the like, ideally such that you could fit the entire system onto your sheet if you wanted to, at least for one type of fighting.

The magic system for example already does this. 15 Spells with easily abbreviated effects, and you can do pretty much everything you could with 5e, Ars Magica, and DCC combined, provided your group has agreed to a gametone that will push that far, anyways. Non-magical fighters will need more than just 15 options, but this will involve mixable groupings; an Archer doesn't need all the same things a Sword and Board guy needs, for example.

It'd only get unwieldy if you wanted to be a literal master of all combat, but at that point its opt-in and your character has to do a lot to earn that distinction; by the time you do so, there's zero reason you'd still be struggling to balance all of that content.

GunFu in comparison is going to be much lighter, as we're only depicting two very focused kinds of semi-grounded combat, as opposed to 4 Big Fantasty umbrellas with a bunch of different subdivisions.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Exactly what it says it's modelling.

I'm always bewildered by this genre of reply. I mean, a MODEL is a thing which, in some ways, resembles, thus could be said to be an analog of, some other thing. I was simply probing the nature of the analogy, but in any case I think you've significantly explicated this later, so we need not linger on that point.

This misunderstanding is understandable given I don't elaborate on it in the page; Movement in these mechanics do not correspond to speed. Recall that combat takes place on abstracted maps that look like this:

View attachment 386261

View attachment 386262

While these grids can be mapped to a non-abstract physical space or landscape, Movement as a mechanic is still based on your ability to shift positions in this abstracted space, not how fast you can physically move at any point.

Right, I mentioned Traveller. Marc never drew out a map like your's, which I assume is based on some other recent games that do this. Still Traveller has range bands, so 'rings', and describes the movement from one to another, as well as describing how you might arrange different 'wedges' based on various considerations (IE a building might divide a range band into segments where one is 'north of the building' and one is 'south of the building' and thus have a certain relationship to whatever is in the center, what you label as 'the churn', but would be the closest range band in CT where presumably melee could take place. I get that you mean this in a bit more abstract way than what Marc originally described, but the effect is pretty much the same in practice.

Has to be said realism is completely besides the point. We're emulating cinematic choreography not real combat.

That said, the cinematic combat we're specifically emulating isn't actually that far off from real combat dynamics; its actually part of the reason why this choreographical style is so engaging, and still would be if the exaggeration was dialed back. Composure as designed is a way of depicting this connection in gameplay, by divesting physical injury and Lethality from the conventional HP bar.

Having only participated in some, probably only marginally realistic, ersatz combat at some SCA 'wars', and such, I wouldn't count myself as any sort of qualified expert on the subject of realism in RPG combat systems. I think we'd also have to further define what is meant by 'realism', as there are a number of possible goals that might deserve that label (IE authentic sorts of outcomes that resemble real-world combats with similar weapons, authentic seeming decision spaces, authentic experiential elements aka immersion, etc.).

If one loses focus in a fight, you're left open to your opponent taking advantage of you, up to and including being killed, and sometimes, this might happen even with excellent focus. In relation to you questioning Movement losses, you shouldn't be thinking "slower", but "hesitating", which is quite deadly in a fight. This as true in all kinds of real combat as it is in the exaggerated movie combat of John Wick or DND:HAT, both of which were the most direct influences here.

Yeah, I don't think I have any particular issues with that as a concept. I'd have to know which sorts of realism are intended to comment on whether I think it works or not.

I think for most people it clicks when they see the content that would go along with the system, and how easily the system maps to the kind of fights being depicted.

While its in the process of being updared given the changes GunFu cross-pollinated over, as an example over in Labyrinthian we have three different Hand to Hand Techniques. Vital Strike, Grapple, and Toss. All three utilize Hit Locations to depict a variety of different things.

Vital Strike is pretty easy to understand; a punch, elbow, or kick to a specific body slot, which can include targeting the things "in" those slots.

But with Grapple and Toss, we can do a lot more. Headlocks, suplexes or bear hugs, trips, disarms, and so on and so on. These easily map to things we'd see in cinematic combat; John Wick specifically loves weaving these kinds of moves into its exaggerated gunplay. But they also exist in real combat:

Well, I think you see things like 'wrestling move' stuff a lot in fictional combat, like Chinese fantasy is obviously FILLED with it, I'd be extremely surprised if it comes up basically at all in your more intensive life-and-death types of fights in reality. Police certainly need to have techniques like locks and similar due to a need to use less-than-lethal force most of the time, but soldiers just gank you with their assault carbines, spears, or whatever happens to be available in the time period/milieu. So, I have little difficulty with a combat system of this type representing cinematic action. In practice I'd be wary of the 'D&D syndrome' where fiction is largely elided in favor of simple mechanical description (IE "I swing at him; A 14! That's a hit, he takes 9 damage.") which I find is not really evocative of much of anything except TT Wargames.

Start around 2:28 for the specific sequence if it starts from the beginning. The actual fight at around 3:00 is also pretty good for showing what Composure represents. The two fighters who get defeated would track to combatants who lost their Composure and took a fatal blow and an incapacitation as a result.

I am not real sure why that term, Composure, is being used. Dead guy #1 got run through after each opponent spent quite a while making various moves. Presumably he was a bit slower and/or less practiced than his opponent. Guy number 2 doesn't seem dead, but he's got a knife in him and perhaps was overcome with pain/shock/blood loss. He could well be fatally injured. #3 simply failed a morale check or in any case he appeared to be more of a lackey of guy #2 who didn't really have an interest in fighting.

Basically, yes, you could model the dynamics of a fight partly in terms of an attribute of 'control'. I think that was a bit of the intent of systems like 'initiative', or at least that was kind of what they're mapped to in D&D-esque systems. It doesn't work super well, but I think we all can agree that in any 'situation' sometimes you are acting, you have active control of the flow of the situation in some degree and your OODA loop is working. In other cases you have lost control, the situation is driving you or you have run your decision tree down to a dead end where no further choices are left. I don't think RPG combat systems really model this well, and the inherent reason for that is simple: most traddish RPGs seem fixated on a model in which the player always has the say on what options her character chooses next, but reality often, perhaps mostly, doesn't work that way.

I believe this was something I talked about elsewhere, may be the RPG = Improv topic, but the big thing about Composure in particular is that it, and the subsequent Wound and Lethality systems, changes the aesthetic meaning of attacking, defending, and doing damage to each other, and this gets compounded with the idea of the Clash.

In this system and Labyrinthian, when an attacker and a defender clash, the difference between their respective damage and defense rolls is not just a number applied against the defenders Composure, but also a numerical guideline to how the Clash between the pair actually pans out "in the fiction". The lower the final damage, the more effective the Defender's efforts, and this influences how we interpret the Attackers efforts, and whatever Techniques or other abilities are used gets incorporated into it.

How is this different from the modeling in a melee round in say 4e (or 5e, etc.)? Now, if you say that Labyrinthian DICTATES that fiction must be described and specified in order for the situation to be resolved, or further resolved, that would be one answer. D&D doesn't dictate that we determine what exactly rolling a 2 on an attack roll means, fictionally. Dungeon World OTOH absolutely does! You cannot process moves in DW absent fiction, and moves are triggered in reference to the fiction, affect the fiction, and then feed back into further move descriptions (with mechanics constraining what are allowable fictions, etc.).

Lets put this in terms typically used to describe this: You start with the 'cloud', the shared fictional state, and a transition/input is made to the 'boxes' (called a 'right arrow' classically). Now something happens in the boxes, some rules processing, dice are thrown, etc. which outputs something, say someone takes some damage. Finally a 'left arrow' happens, the game state change, plus some sort of decision about what kind of consequences/GM move happens is applied as a description of a new fiction which must comply with a number of fairly hard constraints which the game conscientiously explicates.

Now, Composure, and/or a number of other possible game state objects, could exist within a game of the sort I'm describing. DW actually has mostly just hit points for various reasons. Games like Stonetop add disabilities and even harder possibilities like discrete injuries. Honestly, most PbtA games are fairly relaxed as to the details of which of these are suitable outcomes in a given situation, though in practice the normal process is that a GM describes when such outcomes would be 'on the table' along with the potential positive outcomes that could be achieved. Players then choose, perhaps rejecting certain potential fictional declarations due to their unfavorable risk profile, etc. However, in some cases, once things have reached a certain point of 'badness' often what you find in DW/Stonetop is that the players lose control of the situation almost entirely. The available outcomes become simply a choice between 'bad' and 'worse', or even simply a sequence of GM hard moves followed by Defy Danger (or similar) checks that then provoke MORE GM moves, representing a snowballing loss of overall control by the PCs. In a tactical situation this could easily represent something akin to Composure.

It is interesting to contrast with FitD where the game explicates this in an even more concrete way with Position. There is, often, a slide from a good position state to a bad position state, and then as a consequence, the Resist system (and Devil's Bargains) pulls the situation into a spiraling one where surviving THIS move requires a transition to an even worse fictional state! Next move the risks/consequences equation is even more disfavorable and things can rapidly spiral into "oops I've Stressed Out of the scene entirely!" or even "Oops I've acquired a level 4 injury and I'm now dead."

As to whether Composure and maybe other elements of 'the clash' would generate this sort of flow I'm not sure.

This in the end produces a very distinct gamefeel that, as I've seen playout even with earlier versions, maps very closely to the film choreography being depicted. GunFu hasn't had anyone (afaik, now that I've technically put the core rules out in public) actually sit down to play it other than myself against myself, but it does produce that same effect just as Labyrinthian does for the real people that play it.

Plus, as an aside, with Labyrinthian in particular we did give thought to how it might be adapted to depict HEMA and realistic combat in general. The big changes with regards to what we're discussing would have been the change of "Damage" to "Offense", and a new rule that states if you Defend well enough to cause your Clash to go negative, the value is still applied to your Composure; eg, restoring it. These changes aren't particularly intuitive however, and the latter would need further support to justifu.

Such a change would have been an increased presence of Composure Saves throughout the system, which is something actially missing from the rules page here. The idea there, as it is in Labyrinthian, is that there is only one Saving Throw, and any ability that calls for it uses your Current Composure to set its DC, alongside a dice roll if applicable. Likewise, your targets when attempting to pass the Save have to use their own Current Composure, either by itself or alongside a dice roll (at the cost of an Action), to do so.

This not only outright prevents any sort of yo-yo healing issue, but in the context of a more deliberately realistic system, would synergize well with the Composure restoration of Defense, and be a great basis for providing another avenue of Lethality thats even more directly mapped to real combat.

I would have to put thought to it, but I can imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to find similiar solutions for a more realistic take on Gunplay, if the above doesn't already do the trick. But as it happens, I have even less interest in realistic gunplay than I do swordplay, so that idea gets a resounding meh from me.

I think, given my perspective rooted in 4e D&D play, that 'yo-yo healing' is only an issue if you insist on considering hit points as being some sort of 'meat' or similar. I've always considered them to be largely just an abstract measure of overall durability, luck, and resolve. I also grant that 4e has some of the negatives of other D&Ds in the sense that it really doesn't ever contemplate 'loss of control'. It is also designed to cater to the potential for a very fictionally disconnected kind of play, although that leaves a lot of the more interesting aspects of the game in the ashcan (and I can only presume exists due to a fear by WotC that a more explicitly Narrativist design would get too much pushback).

In practice once its learned its not very heavy, especially compared to something like 5e, and much of the weight would be opt-in as your fighting style is essentially customizable in terms of having a lot of options, but no strict need to engage all of them at once. And you wouldn't be able to starting out anyway. Have to earn it first.

But even if you want to because thats the sort of character you want to develop, I'm doing a lot to ensure you can easily condense things down in a way that makes it easy to reference. In Labyrinthian, this means suggested abbreviations and the like, ideally such that you could fit the entire system onto your sheet if you wanted to, at least for one type of fighting.

The magic system for example already does this. 15 Spells with easily abbreviated effects, and you can do pretty much everything you could with 5e, Ars Magica, and DCC combined, provided your group has agreed to a gametone that will push that far, anyways. Non-magical fighters will need more than just 15 options, but this will involve mixable groupings; an Archer doesn't need all the same things a Sword and Board guy needs, for example.

It'd only get unwieldy if you wanted to be a literal master of all combat, but at that point its opt-in and your character has to do a lot to earn that distinction; by the time you do so, there's zero reason you'd still be struggling to balance all of that content.

GunFu in comparison is going to be much lighter, as we're only depicting two very focused kinds of semi-grounded combat, as opposed to 4 Big Fantasty umbrellas with a bunch of different subdivisions.

I obviously have to take your word for it on all of this, but I've certainly not seen anything that makes me think it can't be so. Honestly, I think there are a number of modern approaches to combat which can play out reasonably quickly. Most of that is going to depend on level of abstraction. So, for example DW tends to play out combat fairly quickly, mainly due to the fact that it only requires mechanical input at points of actual consequence, there's really no such thing as the equivalent of a 5e combat round where nothing happens. The fiction will ALWAYS advance with every move/reframe cycle, and the mechanisms of resolution are ubiquitous, 2d6 get tossed again and again, maybe 3d6 now and then in 3rd gen PbtAs, etc. Honestly, snappy flow here is mostly a question of how fast people make decisions and describe things.