Cypher System: Combat Skills

One of the fascinating design choices behind Cypher System is a lack of generic "combat skills." There are ways to ease attack difficulty through abilities, but those are rare and needed for the game's balance.

How do you make attacks easier?

Effort.

And using your head.

Every character can do well in combat and contribute. Those specialized in combat will be more effective over multiple rounds and battles, but all character types can defend themselves and contribute. Warrior types in Cypher make fighting easier and more effective - but not so much that other characters feel excluded.

My combat-focused characters are excellent and tear things up, but my non-combat characters also feel effective and like they can contribute. When my combat characters land blows, they do so with less effort, and the hits are more effective - but they aren't excluded from even trying like in D&D 3.5, many OSR games, and earlier, where the combat modifier progression eventually excludes many characters from even contributing or landing a blow.

And unlike games with dozens of combat skills, you don't need time or mental effort trying to min-max them. The design of some games feels like a "race to breaking the game" with combat skills, where they level up so high nothing is a challenge, or the AC of monsters raises so high only the mix-max characters have a chance of landing a blow.

Or the combat skills are so esoteric and specialized that you are forced to choose between sabers and short swords in your skills, and you are narratively locked into a small subset of weapon types. Your character can never change or adapt, as that would mean "points were wasted." I love GURPS, but jack-of-all-trades characters tend to feel weaker than specialized builds. I know, of course, that is true! Sometimes I wish the skill system wasn't as narrow-grained and the game focused more on the bigger picture with a broad brush.

Even some narrative games fall into the combat skill trap, and I remember our time in the Star Wars/Genesys system when combat skills got to three of four yellow dice; that was the end of combat challenge for our games, and we felt those characters were a mix of OP and "nowhere else to go" in regards to focus and improvement. We also had this happen in FATE with the Fight and Shoot skills. These are still fun games, but they break easier in long-term play.

In Cypher, I like that everyone can defend themselves and contribute offensively - and in non-linear ways. The game does not feel as stratified as many traditional games derived from D&D and exclusionary in fighting, where a monster with an ascending AC of 35 shows up. This ends up with many players at the table saying, "Why bother? Use magic."