Combat as Art - Boss Design and Reflections on Violence

When running "Combat as Sport" players and refs are mostly concerned with a "balanced game" where mastery over rules, procedures, execution and options results in victory. When running "Combat as War" the table is primarily concerned with the tactical infinity of conflict, using any and every imaginable advantage at their disposal to attain a win. In "Combat as Art" one is less concerned with victory, but the drama of conflict itself; What it says about the world, the characters, about violence itself. Were a battle to take place on an open field, Sport would be concerned on exact measurements between opponents. War would be concerned about whether you can set the field ablaze. But Art? Art asks you to describe the crimson spray across wilting grass as your blade finds its mark, then asks you what you feel...

The Drama of Violence (You Can Skip This Part)

I recently playtested my Craved from Brindlewood Mononoke-inspired zenpunk exorcist horror game (gosh that's so many buzz words) and it went incredibly well! (A thousand thanks to my playtesters!) The mystery was tight, the players brought so many incredible ideas and the resolution was sift... Almost too swift. See (despite my story game/OSR leanings) my bread and butter is what one might call "trad" games: We explore some rooms, we do a social encounter, we trigger combat and then we change gears to the "fight" portion of the game like this were a Fire Emblem battle. It has a predictable rhythm, but once you find your niche in running it you can still surprise your players and give them plenty of freedom to shape the unfolding story and world. Combat, often, is part of this rhythm. An anticipated climax, a way to express and flex and conclude. Many pages have been written on combat, as a war vs sport dichotomy, as a tension-release mechanism, and as many more things beside. While I think discussion of the "how" of combat is often more useful (in monster hunting, in gun slinging, in dragon slaying and even for those trying to avoid combat altogether), I hope you'll indulge me a bit in a "why" of combat, which is (to me) the fundamental art of it all.

Have you ever read Romance of the Three Kingdoms? It's sublime. The mytho-poetics, the characters, the conflict. It's all so intentional, so inspiring, so artful. As I'm reading it I've come to appreciate the ways in which the musou series Dynasty Warriors adapts its drama. The memetic "Do not pursue Lu Bu" (an optional boss with incredible stopping power) is perhaps the most quintessential example. The phrase (uttered throughout the game's franchise) is equal parts homage and warning that this boss will wreck your shit given the chance. Fittingly, the Lu Bu of the original Three Kingdoms is an equally unrivaled (heh) warrior, whose raw strength is so mighty that an iconic plot point involves honey-potting him away from a central antagonist so a league of nearly everyone else can finally take said antagonist down. If this sounds like the kind of hair-brained scheme players in an OSR game would come up with to deal with an imposing adversary, then you're following along.

Combat is where a character like Lu Bu comes alive. Through titanic slams and crowd-killing sweeps with "the flashing of the warriors' weapons looking like the revolving lamps suspended at the new year. [...] the warriors of the eight armies gazed rapt with amazement at such a battle." It's not just a "sport" where an asymmetrical confrontation can take place against the land's mightiest warrior, nor is it simply war where you deal with him via non-lethal means outside of the combat itself, the combat, the encounter, is a work of art. The staging of Red Hare against a setting sun, the thunder of his theme, the waves of allies rippling from his strikes. It's a thrill and a struggle that I can really only classify as an artform, one uniquely expressed by stepping into the shoes of Lu Bu's adversaries, to be the one who failed to assassinate his ward and now this titan at your heels as you cut through hordes of palace guards to escape - You are a force to be reckoned with to the average soldier, but to Lu Bu you are looked upon "as so much stubble." It says something about not only what it means be against a weapon of a man, but also comments on a world where a man that powerful can be bribed and wooed into submission. It's one hell of an arc to open on.

You see this in a lot of imperial art; nations defined by domination and conquest reflecting on the tension of conflict. Whether that be climatic battles at the close of the Han dynasty or split-second revolver duels on the American frontier. The drama, the tension, the veneration of violence as the ultimate locus of expression, the martial art. Problematic? Sure, but damn if it doesn't get to me. And I say this as a borderline pacifist. This is also where you get your anti-war narratives focused on that self-same fulcrum of force (see; Mecha).

Encounters With Drama

OK so what does this have to do with boss design? Well, a bit of everything. When making a boss I don't just consider what they block, how they threaten the larger world, puzzle mechanics, moves, health, etc ~ These things are important, but my first consideration is the art of it all. What does this boss say? What am I trying to express by putting them in my game world? The curtains aren't just blue and my sadistic-clown-lieutenant-turned-demi-god isn't there just because.

Every attack is a chance to express something, every detail an artful stroke. A puzzle mechanic involving different colored lights can express the many sides a boss has used to worm their way into power. When I have a revolutionary-turned-dictator use a move called "guillotine" I'm making a commentary. When my ancient vampire obsessed with beauty prioritizes targeting the character with the highest charisma, the battle becomes a reflection on jealousy.

Part of this is considering what a villain, monster or "combat obstacle" represents in the world (see also: my first post on villains), but also what the tension of a conflict with them represents; The stakes, the context. Battling a Militech corpo executive over an arms cache feels a lot different if you're just going to sell that cache to Arasaka vs if those weapons are fanning the flames of a proxy war in your home country. A lot of these themes can (and in many ways should) be emergent through play, but once you start to see them you can shine the spotlight on them all the better. And there's no stage quite like the battlefield.

If you're populating your world as you play (or tweaking it to better suit the kinds of adventures you want) consider where you should ratchet the tension to best highlight the themes at play. This way when the combat ensues to release that tension, the art comes through all the stronger. Think about how each boss in Metal Gear Rising: Revengance acts as both a narrative and mechanical reflection of who and what the cybernetic protagonist Raiden is and how Mistral is a reflection of his femininity and need to transition. Who in the world is fighting and for what? And how do you make that momentum collide with the player? (Or better yet, how do you coax the players into wanting to collide with it?)

I think some central questions to any campaign that wants to engage with violence and combat mechanics artfully should be "Why do people fight? What does it look like? What does this say about the game's world? What am I trying to say about conflict, the human condition or my own world as a result?"

Additionally, if you use music in your campaigns, a "boss theme" can be more than just hype music; It can give subtext. To go back to our Metal Gear Rising example, the lyrics of each boss' battle theme helps build out the context of the boss character without requiring a lengthy flashback. Similarly you can link characters with leitmotifs, musical genres, etc, weaving thematic throughlines through bosses who may have never met each other. The canvas is yours to paint!

Mechanics With Kinetics

Killing people kinda sucks doesn't it? Even the act of ending an animal's life is sufficiently grief-inducing that we as a species have created numerous rituals and codes of ethics to alienate ourselves from, justify ourselves in or honor the horror of the act. And yet fishing games are pretty fun right? Getting a headshot in Halo is fun right? This is perhaps a less universal experience, and perhaps I (like the subjects of Metal Gear's VR missions) have been indoctrinated into the thrill of violence from a young age[*1], but there's something notably fun about the feel of combat. Primitivists would likely point to something about our primal instincts being activated by it, and I can't help but admit my monkey brain is as thoroughly delighted by a crunchy finisher in Doom as it is by a delicious banana.

I've talked about the nature of violence before, but I didn't mention the nature of combat, of the artful kinetics of aggression and force. It feels like I often hear about the thematic impact of the inclusion of combat far more often than I hear about what that combat's mechanics say. From an artistic standpoint, roll-to-hit expresses violence like a random spasm, a desperate struggle. Meanwhile roll for damage expresses attrition, inevitability, the clock ticking down on all of us. When your stats take damage it expresses the physical (and often emotional) toll combat has on us. When all leveling up does is make you better at killing, the game is expressing that a path forged by violence becomes honed for violence. The min-maxer is more than a munchkin, their character is an avatar of the obsession with violence and combat. Their min-maxing means something about what it means to want to be the best at fighting, whether they're conscious of this or not.

This is often the most central consideration I have when developing games; Not "what does having combat say about the game" but "what does each option in combat say about my views on the nature of violence?" In my WIP mecha skirmish game Project Tears, a central mechanical fulcrum is managing your Pilots' emotions to hone them into the perfect killing machine; that the less human they are, the better they follow orders, and yet their human unpredictability allows them to exceed past the limits of any automated drone. The pilots enacting the violence can hardly be considered monsters compared to you, their puppeteer and potter.

Hotline Miami, with its eternal question of "Do You Like Hurting Other People?" offers a cocktail of blood splatter, amping beats, neon visuals and a combat system that's as rhythmic as it is addicting, ever goading you to answer "Yes." There's sport in trying to get a high score on a level. War in using every door, corner and window to your advantage just to complete it. But the art is in the adrenaline rush of beating 3 faceless goons senseless with your bare fists before finishing the last one off with a shotgun on the floor only be faced by your eager breath and the droning quiet of a level complete... a moment of lucidity to wade through the blood.

When picking a game with a combat system, or writing your own, if your intention is to say something with your campaign, to evoke emotions and offer new viewpoints (a common consequence of nearly any game anyways), I'd advise you take into consideration the mechanical kinetics and what they say about the act of combat.

All this is to say, much like how games are art, the combat of games is also art, and an art worth deeper consideration beyond victory conditions. The next time you're filling out a bestiary, designing an ability or stocking your dungeon, I encourage you to consider what each entry can say, what each swing can express. When I look to my two favorite adventures (Spy in the House of Eth and Gradient Descent), I see the care that was taken to ensure each combat encounter mean something; To the world, to the mystery, to the themes. And lord knows You Will Die In This Place excels due to its emphasis on the art of its encounter design over all else. Even if you want to execute something as simple as the horror of being turned to stone by a grotesque eye-monster deep in a dungeon, remember there's something artful in that terror and the combat it takes to best it ~

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[*1 : Video game tangent - What a horrifying yet brilliant bit of nation building the first person shooter became; The all-American gun genre whose game-feel became so iconic to the act of indifferent violence that the military literally uses Xbox 360 controllers to fly UAVs that actually kill actual people - This is not to say "first person shooters bad" but the ways in which they've been co-opted are as fascinating as they are mortifying.]