Combat in Single-Player Campaigns

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

It occurs to me that the "genre" of Conan involves lots of downtime between individual short stories. All Ezra has to do is calculate how much time it will take to heal after an adventure and start the next adventure some time after that. The next Conan story begins...

That's a valid take. I believe to make it work, the GM needs to have enemies always charge frontally and/or attack one at a time, so the outnumbered lone hero isn't flanked and backstabbed, which with GURPS' lethality is much worse than "you'll need to heal some." This is easier with a "theatre of the mind" approach than with a battle map, because the GM can more easily have the time it takes the next bad guy to reach the hero be magically equal to the time it takes the hero to defeat the current bad guy. In tactical combat, it's much harder to explain why an NPC is just standing around taking Do Nothing maneuvers, and not circling behind the PC.

I suppose that's "play style" in a sense, though it's a result of there being a single PC, not a choice most GMs would likely make if there were several PCs, some with abilities that require a battle map to shine. Ultimately, it's still really about numbers, not style of play.