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Kindling the Combat Spark

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Last week, I wrote about combat spark, and all the numerous ways to bring it about from the player side. While they’ve got a lot of control, though, we as GMs still need to hold up our end in encouraging combat spark from our players: it’s only everyone at the table contributing that gets us the kind of epic-awesome stuff that leaves them talking about that part, if not the whole game, for months afterward. How do we go about it?

Tell them what you want. Never, ever take for granted that your players have the same priorities you do. If they’re not setting off combat spark regularly, it might be that they don’t know how—but it might also be that they don’t realize that that’s what you’re looking for, or that their characters can even do that.

Set the stage. Small, easily gridded flat spaces with next to nothing in them may be useful if you’re dependent on miniatures, but if what you’re going for is a combat spark, they’re really bad kindling. Give the players parts of the landscape to bounce off of or destroy; give them props of all sorts; even give them noncombatants to work around, protect, make examples of, or incorporate in whatever way they feel like. They’re far likelier to give you a show if you give them a good stage.

Don’t make the execution too difficult! I find that one of the biggest things preventing moves based almost entirely around combat spark is the mechanical penalties many of the pseudo-extraneous moves and clever physics exploits incur. Consider finding workarounds: dropping multi-action penalties for parts of the action that are meant entirely for show, reducing difficulty penalties a bit for particularly audacious maneuvers (or, at the very least, not adding too many new penalties), implementing a “too cool to fail” rule variant… you get the idea. Bear in mind, many players prioritize getting things right over making them splashy: if doing things awesomely makes it too hard to get the job done, they’ll likely sacrifice the spark for the sake of the success—particularly if it’s character death-level high stakes.

Set a good example! Use your onstage NPCs, particulary your antagonists, to show the players what you’re looking for, then encourage them to follow your lead. Note that the second step is vital, particularly when the character you’ve just demonstrated with is a party ally: it can be hard to tell the difference between an example that you’re hoping they blow out of the water with their next move and a better-than-you DMPC if you don’t tell them that the former is what it’s supposed to be.

Positive reinforcement! For some people, this is just a “That. Was. So. Awesome.” or letting them catch you relaying the awesome thing they’ve done to someone else later (probably both), though the more shy or uncertain might require game currency dangled ahead of time to move them in the right direction. Either way,, there’s nothing to show people that they’ve just done exactly what you were looking for quite like informing them of that they did and giving them a little bonus.

If the spark’s not coming, don’t give sole blame to the players; add some kindling instead.


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