As detailed in The First Duty
I’ve been told I write very good to great combat sequences in my books, so bear with me.
One of the challenges I set out for myself when I started writing The Timeless Ranger series, and in particular The First Duty, resolved to present a tale of hard survival amid real, natural environments—or at least as real as I can make it in a Fantasy world full of immortal Dharva, which are my elves. I typically eschew from the “gamification” that D&D placed upon Fantasy combat and try to place my stories back in some sense of reality. That’s not to trash gamified systems though; in fact many of them are able to capture aspects of combat better than not, and from video games to table top roleplaying games, tons of wonderful creators are out there that do it very, very well.
But that’s not the combat you’ll see in The First Duty, or the sequel, The Second Requirement.
There are no AC scores or armor classes, only the armor you have on you at the time of the fight you’re in and whether or not it can stop another foe’s weapon. Swords definitely do horrific damage to mortal flesh, but axes create medical catastrophes. Arrow volleys aren’t a real thing, but arrow showers are, but in reality Robin Hood can’t just stand there and shoot down all of his foes without getting stormed upon and slain in an instant.
But what else is often missing in literary depictions of combat, and why do authors often leave them out?
Once again, this post isn’t to critique authors who have gamified versions of combat in their books or stories, but it’s important to try to note the places where reality and Fantasy tend to meld well together, and where they do not (and more importantly, why!)
The easiest answer is that “why” is to understand that the reality of combat takes a lot of time that sometimes translates into a good bit of boredom for most readers no matter how detailed, nuanced, and florid the narrative and/or the writing presents. In Fantasy and genre fiction in general people read for escapism.
However, escapism only works as far as the suspension of disbelief and the author’s ability to maintain that for the reader. For those in not in the know, the suspension of disbelief is a conceit all consumers of fiction make when they enjoy creative works—we know it is not real and are okay with that as long as we are taking on a compelling journey with varied heroes and villains, plots, settings, maybe a bit of romance or comedy, and often safe outcomes we can assume to find in a Western Cowboy drama like we could in a Holmesian mystery. There’s a respect, or at least a certain level of it, for the natural intelligence of the audience who show up for the play, the book, the film, or the concert. However, that suspension of disbelief is inversely contingent on a strong sense of a story’s believability, or how immersive the tale becomes for the one or many enjoying it.
Suspension of disbelief has a lot of positives and negatives, which I have found boil down to three things you, the creator, are really never able to control:
- The fickleness of the reader
- Focus on details and constructions
- Taste in presentations
Sometimes people are just not going to like what you do or how you render something. They might not like you for no reason at all. There’s really no need to break down the three points above because there are easy examples to help parse them out quickly.
Let’s use Star Wars because it is THE Macro example.
Many fans are fickle about the Final/Rey Skywalker Trilogy for not centering the main narratives on Han, Leia, and Luke. Some fans are fickle because they don’t want stories of Han, Leia, and Luke, but new and diverse characters that expand the Star Wars universe and who is in it. Likewise, a small but loud community within that fandom does not like the focus on female-led narratives or reconstructions of the Force, or the canon, or whatever main character they don’t like this time. Some only watch the movies and don’t really make time for the shows or animated series, and therefore shape their tastes in Star Wars toward that.
Some people don’t even know there are Star Wars novels that are considered canon, or comic books. Honestly, more people now might know Star Wars through video games than they do anything else. All of these different versions of Star Wars have committed fandoms to themselves.
(Some people don’t know even about the dread Christmas Special.)
But they know about lightsabers and that you can do a backflip without getting cut in half, or deflect lasers moving at the speed of light! They have a basic set of rules they’ve agreed to when they show up to enjoy Star Wars.
And when it comes to the depiction of combat, there are basic rules to follow when it comes to its presentation and how to make it believable no matter if it is a boxing story about two athletes or massive mechanized mobile suit battling in space.
Figure out your scale for the scene, not the entire story
Many authors when they’re starting out attempt to create these massive “battlescapes” right out of Tolkien and tend to lose the characters and plot for a lot big explosions and massive casualties. Not every war is for the fate of the world and not every battle is a war, nor is every shoving match a fight. Reality often helps writers more often than not and less actually does end up equaling more. People tend to show up with the people they are able to cobble together in time and while sometimes that can be on a grand scale, those are few and far between and usually feature extraordinary circumstances. But if you have a band of three running after a horde of orcs, you better have something like a white wizard or a larger band of horsemen out of nowhere to even things out. But in considering the scale of your battles, it also very important to remember…
Numbers actually matter, and so do weapons
Though I try to avoid any “gamification”, or anything that looks like you can get the same benefits in a video game, or if you can “see the dice rolls”, I actually want to give huge credit to D&D because they handled long ago the question of how many arrows your character has really well—and the fact that the moment you run out of arrows you either have to find more arrows, make new ones (which is super-hard and time consuming), or be out of luck. Same thing with swords—swords break. All the time. Axes kind of break less, but axes don’t swing like swords. Maces can definitely kill someone if you bash them in the head, but if they are wearing a full bucket helm? That instant kill is diminished to a big “maybe” immediately, though it still hurts the guy in the helm. God forbid you have to run away and drop your legendary blade that is over 1000-years old and is the *only* thing that can slay dragons—you’re likely not coming back for it either. Now if you want every weapon to return to the user’s hand like Mjolnir does for Thor, that’s fine too, but make sure there is a damned good reason for it.
(And sometimes it’s really cool is a perfectly good reason.)
The Setting is a Determinant of What Works (And What Doesn’t)
Often newbie-authors tend to get themselves wrapped up in the weapons, the tactics, and the action, but often leave out the setting. The place where combat takes center stage is only an empty stage for two people moving around each other unless you want to do more with it, and often that includes incorporating the stage itself in fun and interesting ways that challenge not only your characters, but your writing abilities. It is really hard to march up a sand dune, let alone fight on the side of one—how exactly do those Fremen traverse the sands so quickly? Likewise, it is very narrow aboard the deck of a pirate ship (or any ship): what happens when the fight causes everyone to run out of room? These sorts of hinderances not only create the ground for really versatile worldbuilding, but add a real-world intensity to your fights. Even in a world of dragons gravity still exists. What would it be like to actually ride upon the back of a dragon, with the winds tearing at your awkward little self on the saddle while Vhaegar banks, dips, dives, and at points goes semi-inverted?
Death and Dying is Death and Dying – and you need to handle it
Violence usually ends in one of two ways: either someone or everyone gets terribly injured or killed, or people get so scared and frightened in the act of violence that they run away after a few exchanges. Sometimes the injury of a leader or a sudden downing of several people, who may just be injured and can be rescued, results in the collapse of one opposing side against the other. The fantasy of combat is that we often write heroes and villains who do not flinch, do not question, and are rarely disillusioned by violence that they cannot take part in it over and over and over again. The hard truth is that if you want to write compelling fiction of any sort, it is often best to rely on reality to help weigh and color your prose. And the color of blood and the bleach of bones work very well. But they have a cost, and those costs, from a papercut to a gaping mortal wound, each have their own requirements and circumstances to deal with.
For the sake of your reader—deal with them. If your character has a healing spell that heals everything, fine, but what are its real limits? It’s great if you can regrow or replace a lost limb, but what about the loss of that limb in the mind? It’s easy to imagine that Luke Skywalker gets his cybernetic hand and everything is fine, but the truth is that in reality it would carry so much for Luke to deal with that Lucas and other Star Wars writers never really show us. You can and you should, but also along with the body there is something to always remember about the mind… tomorrow is tomorrow, but Tomorrow never arrives for some people in their heart or in their mind.
The depiction of combat will be different for everyone, but it is deeply important to take it seriously to create and maintain that suspension of disbelief, and put in the real work to make it segue well because one aspect of violence we don’t discuss often enough in fiction is that violence is a part of worldbuilding as well. Done and presented with aplomb, it is one of many needed tools authors of Fantasy should seek to hone even if it is not their main focus.
If you enjoyed this blog and discussion, I hope you will consider picking up The First Duty, which is available to read now for Kindle Unlimited subscribers!