Combat without Combat

May 27, 2025

NULL_SPACE #

Liminal Void is has been consigned to the void. Well, the name has, anyway. Going forward, it will be called NULL_SPACE!

When I spoke about it last, I said both of the following:

(in the context of priorities for the game:) De-emphasize combat. Over each edition, the degree to which anyone can easily do combat has been relegated more fully to explicitly chosen weaponry and combat-ready outfits - which was the goal from the start, but at the time I’d been coming off of LUMEN so I was still kind of thinking in the combat-game sense.

This is a game with combat, but the idea is that it isn’t strictly a combat-focused game. (Basically any game I’ve made that a fair number of people have actually read or played is like this so I need to make this very clear. This one takes cues from Valiant Horizon for obvious reasons of “it’s the same engine” but it’s not intended to be exactly that.)

In thinking about it more, and thinking more about the goals of both the game and the modular booklet idea that I want to use for it, I had a funny thought: what if it just didn’t have combat? Not in the sense of “you can’t attack anyone or be attacked, but what if I made Capital-T-Capital-C Tactical Combat purely relegated to one of those sub-booklets? And what would it look like without that?

Prerequisite Reading #

There’s a few sources that helped me put together how I wanted to approach this.

• Gila RPGs’s LUMEN 2.0 healthless ideas, as best exemplified by They Have a Cave Troll, are a big one. I really liked the LUMEN 2.0 approach from afar, but only really had a chance to play around with it fairly recently: the idea of enemies being “one hit kill” but sometimes have things that prevent that is an excellent way to approach things.
• My own Devlog #1: Healthless* was written (along with Valiant Horizon Tactics mechanic in question) to riff off of LUMEN 2.0! I’ll get into a specific pull later but for now note that my exact approach to dealing with “healthless” LUMEN 2.0 ideas isn’t exactly the same as Spencer’s.
• Explorer Design’s The 1 HP Dragon. At the time I instantly pinged the convergent-evolution similaries to LUMEN 2.0!
• Explorer Design’s Why Combat Is a Fail State is kind of a sneaky semi-accidental prequel that sets up a question that The 1 HP Dragon answers. We’ll get back to it later.
• As I was writing this Explorer Design put out yet another banger that aligns well with both the previous two AND with this article, Designing Locks With More Keys. I don’t want to rewrite this to get too far into it but it aligns really well with what I already wrote, especially with the section I pull out of Healthless* below.

Combat without Numbers #

So first off, the big thing I wanted to do was get rid of numbers on enemies. Get ’em out of here! The first move was to take a page from LUMEN 2.0: a lot of enemies take one “hit” to defeat. Nastier enemies have a few Qualities that make them harder and need to be removed or addressed before being defeated. Easy.

The thing is that LUMEN 2.0 is very much still built in that LUMEN vibe of “pretty competent heroes”. It’s also built for explicitly, nearly exclusively puzzle-y resolution. As I noted in Devlog #1: Healthless* (with asides omitted):

My goal is to make a TTRPG, not a board game. I think one major step towards securing it as a TTRPG is that expression needs to be encouraged to some degree. Puzzle-y approaches are very strategic in nature: they have one basic answer, in this case sometimes with a “skip” granted by pre-preparation. For what I’m doing here I don’t want to force that layer on anyone. I’d like them to not feel like they have to do one of two very specific things to win a fight. They’re going to still have to figure out how to achieve extra offense within the context of what they want to do, but that’s something that almost any playstyle can spec into eventually, albeit with some risk - and it’s easy enough to swap between the three methods of dealing with it based on your enemies. Basically:

• If you’re prepared, you bring the tools to deal with it; or
• If you’re tactical, you solve it; or
• If you’re determined, you push through it.

I think that 3-layer approach is where I still land on things for this iteration too, for the most part. In one way, this gets addressed in the same way as it does for Valiant Horizon Tactics: you’re presented with a meaningful threat’s qualities.

• If they have armor and you have a gun with armor-piercing, you can just skip that and aim to take them out without having to address it. OR if they have armor and you have something that’s precise, you can probably argue that you can aim for an unarmored spot, as long as that seems reasonable in-fiction. You get it.
• Alternatively, you can use a situational thing to deal with it. For example, if you can flank them in the environment, then you’ll have a clearer shot.
• If you don’t do any of those, you probably have to do it the hard way: first take out the armor, then take out the enemy.

But how do we encourage NOT just bashing your head against every problem? We make it risky to do that.

Combat with Non-Combat #

I’d set up non-combat actions prior to this as essentially doing one of three things:

• You just kind of do something that doesn’t involve risk, meaningful resource expenditure, or increase in threat profile. There’s no roll needed here.
• You do something that involves no risk, but does spend time, advance a Threat (basically a Bad Clock), or risks resource expenditure. This is called a Steady Action: There is a roll, but it’s just to see how much advancement/expenditure there is.
• You do something risky. This is called, appropriately, a Risky Action: There is a roll to see whether or not it works, splitting on that now-familiar success/success with a twist/failure with a twist ternary.¹

Combat is largely a series of Risky Actions, if you’re not savvy about it. (Sometimes it can be Steady if there’s something that’s unlikely to be interfered with.) Unlike LUMEN 2.0, you don’t just succeed: you have to roll for it to see what ELSE happens. This means that you can take multiple risky combat actions to do something - for example from above, removing armor and then taking the enemy out. But a Risky Action is using the Total//Effect base roll at 8-, 9-12, and 13+ thresholds for the classic ternary, so the default is about a 25/50/25% fail/mixed success/unqualified success². This means that each of those actions puts you at 75% chance of blowback, and each one might not work, but as a baseline you’ve got a 75% chance of success as well. You’ll probably get you want unless you’ve got active penalties, but you’ll likely pay for it.

• You can improve your odds by spending resources, gaining little advantages, and so on: 1 Adv makes it about 10/40/50%, for instance, 2 Adv brings that to 5/30/65%, and 3 brings it to about 1/19/80%. As an example of something everyone can do, each Attribute spent on a roll gets you 1 Advantage and you can blow multiple on one roll to get multiple Advantage if you’re dedicated. BUT: those are resources you can’t spend later! So there’s a do-you-try-to-ensure-this aspect to it.
• The major suggested Twist for combat is that the character takes Harm! Characters still have 4 Endurance and 6 Health, and getting hit to Health is bad and running out of it is worse. Average suggested Harm is Mid Die (average of 3.5) so characters without +Endurance equipment or equipment that gives them Resistance (making it Low Die, so average 2) usually get one freebie, then the second hit brutally injures them, then the third hit kills them. The Narrator is encouraged to just have those things happen to you if you don’t address a problem, too, so it avoids being a matter of “I only get hit when I try to attack so I’m not going to do that”.
• You’re going to be better off thinking about what you can bring to the situation to fully remove risk. A weapon’s quality can also remove certain kinds of risk even if it doesn’t remove a quality: for example, a weapon with “hull-safe” explicitly means that it can’t be used to poke a hole in the side of the ship, which is great when you miss with it inside. A risk-free situational change could just as easily negate something on an enemy as a spent resource, though, so it pays to think laterally and do smart stuff!
• We can introduce qualities that are sticky: they HAVE to be specifically negated or bypassed, they can’t just be brute-forced. And we can introduce qualities that don’t have to be bypassed or dealt with, but actively cause a problem if unaddressed (like a guaranteed twist or a penalty to do something else). And we can add in qualities that change based on what they do: like if an enemy ducks into cover or pops a smoke grenade, that’s now a new thing you have to deal with or figure out a way to bypass!

Non-Combat with…Combat? #

Let’s jump back to one of Combat as a Fail State³’s final few paragraphs for a second:

Outside of combat, doors don’t have HP, poisoned food doesn’t care about THAC0, and players don’t roll saves for diplomacy, but in combat, the rulings have to follow the rules. Stats, rolls, and rounds become a crucial part of the conversation and often negate it or lead it.

Up until this point, we’ve talked about Combat minus the Tactical bit. For meaningful challenges, we’ve established a means by which you outline complications for defeating enemies: either you do something smart that removes those qualities, or you just have to deal with them one by one. Noncombat’s usually not that engaging, though. Either stuff works or it doesn’t. So what we gave a door HP, so to speak? Not actual HP, of course, but the kind of HP we established.

NULL_SPACE defines both combat and noncombat problems as Challenges, and the various qualities that make them harder and more complex are Complications. For example:

A big, nasty security door in your way is closed, and you would really prefer it to be open. It’s got a standard access scan.

• If you’ve got the right data for its scanner - badge, retinal scan, the security chief’s microchipped severed hand - open sesame, no frills. Challenge accepted and bypassed.
• If you want to hack it, it has two Complications: Anti-Tamper Alarms and Access Control Encryption. The latter needs to be untangled to open it, the former is more of a floating threat of “someone will find out that you would rather not if you ignore this”.
• If you want to physically pull or rip it open, Anti-Tamper Alarms probably still apply in much the same way, but now you have to care about Heavy Reinforced Metal rather than the specifics of access control. That last one is probably stickier: you’re going to need some kind of major equipment to deal with it, like a big drill or extra strength from an exoskeleton.
• If you just use a mining charge to blow past it, it almost certainly just works! No real roll needed, a big boom is a big boom. (What that does to the rest of the ship is another story that usually involves “rapid depressurization”, but sometimes you have to burn that bridge when you come to it.)

So we’ve now taken our combat tech and ported it BACK to non-combat. This means we end up with something that has a little chew to it outside combat that uses a similar language. This is important, because as noted up top, this isn’t just a combat game. For noncombat stuff, it’s very likely solutions will be more on the Steady Action/no action side of things unless you’re on a tight clock or there’s some kind of actively complicating risky circumstance, which then makes choosing between those two meaningful: Do It Fast vs Do It Reliably is a tough choice sometimes, both strategically and characteristically!

Combat WITH Combat? #

In a game where we don’t want combat to be the default, I think it’s a reasonable choice to not put it out there. But what if we still WANT to have proper combat? What if your particular game is more about getting into fights? This is important because NULL_SPACE is supposed to be flexible and cater to several kinds of crews who can specialize in certain kinds of jobs, should they want to, and is going to be designed to be more extensible in parts where you want that.

Combat is definitely something where I’ve been kind of lazy in the past with respect to NULL_SPACE (in its Liminal Void incarnations) in particular, and have tried to become less lazy. I have a lot of personal preferences for combat systems…but a lot of them are for more Power Fantasyish things. My initial idea for Total//Effect was a kind of low-fantasy Combat Game based on my previous work (betraying its original-original origin as “what if I really stripped down 13th Age -> 36th Way even further” as well as my personal inclinations) and a lot of my initial approaches to the game that would become NULL_SPACE come from that: Each piece of equipment, tool or weapon, had two Combat Powers that corresponded to one of the roles and subroles of the SRD I’m currently rewriting. It wasn’t a GOOD idea to get into combat because Health/Endurance still worked the same way but it was still basically that 4Eish Combat Powers thing that Valiant Horizon is, you know?

In that vein I think what I’ve come up with here is more true to the game I have been trying to write, but given my intent to break the game up into core + modules, I think we can still make it a little more complicated for people who want that in their life without sacrificing that. But that’s going to take some care AND that’s going to be a later problem. For now, I’m happy with where it’s landed.

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