Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Cubic Combat Theory

I feel the need to clarify cubic combat theory.

It isn't an actual combat system. It's a trick. Like building a memory palace, you establish mental images in your head and reduce everything to cubes. It has nothing to do with the actual game mechanics of D&D 3.5.

One DM might choose to picture all dwarves as medium creatures, but because they are dwarves, they are only 1 cube high. This would be fine and would lead to some DM judgement calls that would be different then if you had then two cubes tall. The cubes exists to give you a frame of reference and make it easier to see how they interact, by eliminating that which is not needed.

For example, I once read a story to my wife who was sick in bed. It was by J.R.R. Tolkien. I spent a half hour reading this tongue twisting account of someone who was walking down to a river. It took three pages. The book went on and on about the history of this ford and the battles and the weapons used there and twelve generations of the people who fought there.

Me? I finally realized I spent a half hour describing someone taking a stroll down to a river.

None of those details were important or relevant to the story, in my opinion. Maybe they were because I said, "Good night" and vowed never to read J.R.R. Tolkien out loud again.

In the game, you might WANT to know every stat that a given cube has, but in practice, you don't have time. It's boring to describe the history of a given object back twelve generations if it's just a damn table and the players want to know how much cover does it give them when they flip it over and hide behind it.

Cubic Combat Theory is about only assigning the bare minimum needed for a given cube to function AS FAR AS CALCULATIONS ARE CONCERNED. When you convert back to "reality" you can go into detail of the twelve generations of highlanders that used to own that table, but in combat, none of that matters. My cubes are not the same as your cubes. In fact, the cubes aren't the same from player to player. Initiative roll 8 and initiative roll 7 may have radically different properties on the same cubes because the player who goes on 8 is a pouncing barbarian and the player on 7 is an evocation specialist wizard.

Don't get bogged down in the details of the cubes, just give the cubes whatever you need at the moment, then move on.

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