Generally, the simpler the system, the easier it is to embellish combat. You can continually lead players into making interesting combat decisions by having the players’ opponents dogpile their characters, as real brawlers would, and by making your scenery rife with chairs, tables, rivers, chests, masts, and other interesting things, and sending the players and their opponents flying over these things throughout combat.
Use this new, swashbuckling combat scenery to describe things smashing, bleeding, and fracturing. The more gruesome, the better.
If that over-the-top brawling does not inspire Errol Flynn tactics, I don’t know what will.

BRCarl: Savage Worlds has a nice, non-visual chase mechanic that could probably be translated to other systems.

I have had better luck with making the situation more interesting, though. The trick here is making things challenging without a) forgetting that one thing that the PCs can do to completely undo your “extra efforts,” and b) make things so tactically hard/overpowering that the PCs get trounced through no fault of their own.

I would love to simulate the tension-filled action scenes you see in the movies, but the system I’m playing with right now (D&D 3.5e) doesn’t seem to support that very well. Anything involving chasing seems particularly hard to make interesting.

P.S.: Nice to see you posting to the Intertron again, Martin R!

Mine is a chat-based game, and I don’t like to waste the group’s time with incidental or random encounters. Any fight they get into is plot-related and intended to challenge them – so it’s imperative that I make those fights dramatic.

With a willing group of players, collaborative combat description eases that burden. You may still have some players who give you “I attack” every round. One cheat I use is to consult critical hit charts for flavor text, even those from other games, to add flavor, especially for the killing blows.

(Which reminds me: lightly off-topic, but you’ll want to establish and maintain your game’s “violence rating” early on. The first couple of fights I ran were PG-13, then I described a minor villain’s death in a gory manner and threw everyone off. Something to think about…)

I really like the idea of fights having a goal besides just “kill them all.” Trying to take enemies alive is always trickier, and therefore, more fun. I’ll have to think about adding some other combat goals into games I run.

My campaigns are usually high magic, and most of the big bads have a variety of spells at their disposal. I like to have the party make rolls to notice any effects that don’t directly target them – for example, the wind picking up the round before an evil mage envelops the fighter in a cyclone, or only the party’s rogue noticing that an enemy berserker seems to have just gotten three inches taller.

Having certain players realize things that other players don’t changes their tactics, and adds more teamwork. If that raging berserker is going after a party member who doesn’t notice his new strength, his teammates who did notice now have to choose between helping their suddenly outmatched friend, or finishing off their own opponents.

as a player, i’ve found that, when dealing with crunchier RPGs (D&D in my experience, though there are many out there that i haven’t encountered), there is kind of a culture *against* this kind of creativity and visualization in battle. i’ve tried to get into it and do cool moves and things (which wouldn’t, on paper, make any difference), only to have my DM raise the DC of whatever i’m doing!

@Adam: i like what you said about the GM “setting a good example.” i feel like players will start to get more into it and add to the description (making your job easier and more fun) if you show them that it’s all right.
@Kurt: i like the (pretty realistic) balance that you described between a goal (“slicing the throat”) and the extent to which it’s achieved in relation to the dice.

Player: “I’m going to go for his throat.” (Dice indicate a hit, but minor damage.)
GM: “You slash at his neck, but he ducks and you miss. However, you do graze his thigh as you lower your backswing.”

For tactics, I try to think in terms of synergies. A balanced party of the four food groups (Tank, Sneak, Medic, Blaster) is much more powerful because of their synergy. Another element to abuse the characters with is environment. A lizardman fight in the swamp should be disastrous for an unprepared party, although the same lizardmen in a dungeon corridor are a breeze.

To echo Adam’s comments, the GMing Wiki is a great resource; poke around in there from time to time.

I used to try to describe each attack action like you said, but pretty soon gave up on it because: A) the time describing is time added to the combat (which I try to minimize) and B) the originality of my descriptions quickly wore thin.

However, now that my combats are better streamlined, I can again try to squeeze in some extra seconds for the sake of flavor. Furthermore, your advice to make a list of short descriptions to fall back on is something I’m definitely going to try.

Again, thanks for the creative spark!