Combat Rules X2.5

New Experimental Combat Rules

5/2/2008

What and Why?
    This is, without a doubt, the most radical change to the combat rules yet. The goal that I had was to dramatically reduce the complexity without losing the realism or the strategic opportunities. As might be guessed, this set of new rules in not yet finalized. I have been juggling ideas for the better part of two years, and have tried as many as five other sets of battle rules. All of them, to one degree or another, has been successful. On the other hand, all of them have failed in the category of simplicity.
    Before getting into the details of this new system, I feel I should cover the things that I felt were wrong, and why. Feel free to skip ahead if you don’t want to hear about them. Also, I will be covering the things that will be going away.
Too Much Math – I don’t think I will get many arguments that the old system was too math reliant, especially the last two versions. Though they were very realistic, and allowed for a wide range of unusual situations and amazing feats, they simply required too much math. I am sure that this didn’t bother my veteran players, who have been weaned on the calculator in this game, but if this game is ever to hit the market, this area needs to be addressed. There will still be some math, but it won’t involve adding the results of two or three twenty sided dice to a Mark Statistic, and then adding bonuses and penalties, only to calculate out the difference between what was rolled versus what the opponent rolled, to figure out how many bonus points the attacker gained, or by how many points he may have missed his mark. Hell, that description proves it was too complicated.
Mark – The Mark statistic is one of the oldest parts of the game, and though I haven’t completely nixed the idea of using it, it will be going away in its current form. The old rules had it where the Mark Stat was a compilation of a number of statistics ranging from skills and attributes to weapon lengths and even its basic quality. In short, I added up everything that I though should fit into combat and gave it a basic number that represented everything the fighter was bringing into the ring. It is simply not that simple. In stead, I will be using a system that separates an attack into two phases, Finding an Opening, and Striking. This is how real fighting takes place. First, the fighter must work to find, and often even create, an opening in the defender’s defense. Once he succeeds at this, he must strike, often gaining some sort of advantage going into the attack, such as the possibility to initiate a special maneuver, or attack a specific region.
    In the old rules, these possibilities only occurred after successfully scoring a hit, which, if you think about it, makes no sense. The attacker would know before swinging his weapon whether the attack was a piercing attack, a power blow (max damage), or if he were swinging at the defender’s head. This is one of the biggest reasons that I have been engineering new ideas for combat.
DPot – The only thing about the Defensive Potential that I have ever really been thrilled about was the name, D-Pot. It always made me giggle and think of my stoners. With the old system, it worked, but left a wider range of possibilities in defense, while adding some extremely complicated logic to figure out…lets see, I rolled a 27 on the dice, but I am limited to a 22, so I just get a 22, and now I add that to my Mark, as well as a few bonuses, and then…

See what I mean?

Initiative – The initiative system wasn’t bad, but it was always very difficult to explain to newer players that there were two different sets of rules dictating when a character got an attack chance. A d20, limited to 1-12, and then multiple attacks could only occur if you rolled in order, but above the delay of the weapon. So, if I rolled a 4, then I got to attack at IP 4, but with my delay of a 5, I could only get a second attack if I rolled a 9, 10, 11, or a 12 on a second roll, unless I rolled between a 5 and an 8, at which time I could reroll, and keep rerolling so long as I kept the numbers in order…see? This doesn’t touch the fact that offensive rules had an entirely different system. On the other hand, the offensive initiative system was pretty easy (roll a specific dice and add your Delay dice, that is your initiative result).

The biggest issue I had with the initiative rules was the fact that these perceived, “openings” were completely under the control of the attacker (his initiative roll), without any regard to whether the defender was actually making any mistakes that would yield such an opportunity. You will see that with the new rules, initiative is really controlled in two basic steps.

The first step involves a classic Die and Delay roll, but where the die is always either a d6 (offensive stance) or d10, and the delay is always based off of the weapon size/weight (so far, easier than the old rules). The second step is the actual initiative. Both attacker and defender will be making a check that is basically controlled by his AMS skill only, but with a few edges given for obvious advantages that he has over his opponent. The defender will also be making a check to counter. NONE of this will involve adding a bunch of numbers, it is simply an issue of who rolls more successes. If the attacker gets more successes, then he can attack normally, but can spend extra successes on advantages (Max damage, hit location, etc) or even trade the attack for a special maneuver (disarm, two handed switchup, etc). So far, the most math that will needed will be counting less than 6 dice (not adding their results). If the defender had more successes, then he left nothing open to the attacker, and no attack roll will be made. With a few more successes than the attacker, he can even turn it around on him.
LFD – The biggest issue that I have had is that I haven’t been using the LFD system to determine outcome. This new system actually uses the LFD rules.
AMS and S@A - It also separates the skills Armed Melee Skill and Skill at Arms into two, very different purposes. Now, you will be using the AMS for what it was intended, to out-think your opponent, and to control the strategy of your fight. The S@A skill was supposed to be strictly used as a tool-skill, not the all-encompassing skill of fighting with weapons.

Overview of the New Rules

I hope you all like this. The only thing that is keeping me from writing this in stone is the fact that it hasn’t been playtested enough for me to see its major faults. Hell, for all I know, I might go back to the old rules. Lets look at the steps of combat, as I am leaning them.

Step One – Initiative

As mentioned above, Initiative rolls are now always done by either rolling a D6 or a D10. A D6 is for Offensive Attackers, while the D10 is for Defensive Attackers. AMS Level no longer affects this number. A Delay (modifier) is added to the result, giving you a slightly higher number than what you rolled. This does not represent when your character finds an opening, as much as how much time needs to go by, in regular combat, between normal attacks. If the opponent is dodging, you don’t have to roll the die at all, relying on the delay only! This only occurs when the defender is announcing that he will be dodging all attacks (he might do so to avoid large MAG bonuses or because he gets a large bonus to defense when dodging).

Step Two – Find an Opening

    Attacker – will roll a specific number of d20 dice, based off of a few factors (below). This is usually just two dice, but there are a number of factors that will give him extra dice, like if he is offensive (stance), or has the Stride advantage (he is bigger). What he is looking for in the results are the number of results equal to, or below, his Compiled AMS. So, lets say he gets four dice, and has a AMS of a 9+2 (compiled is an 11). If he were to roll a 2, 9, 18, and a 20, then he would have two successes. I will wait on explaining this until after the defender’s step.
    Defender – will also roll a number of d20 dice, based off of similar factors (Stance, Size, if he has a shield or a second weapon, etc), with a target number equal to his own Compiled AMS. After rolling, he counts the number of these that were equal to, or below, his Compiled Armed Melee Skill. For this example, lets say he has 3 dice with a Compiled AMS of a 10, and rolls 7, 13, and 19. He would have only one success.
    Who Won? If the attacker had more successes, then he can spend the successes to make an attack (costs just one success), gain advantages on the attack, make special maneuvers, break combat, or even to change position on the battlefield. After all, AMS really represents the fighter’s ability to control the fight, not just hit the other guy. It needs to be pointed out that the amount of successes that you would get to spend will be based off of how many MORE successes you have over the opponent, so our example above, who had two successes to his opponent’s one, would only have won the situation by a single success. He would only get to spend one (not two). This could buy him an attack opportunity, or a change of position, or even a 1-pt maneuver (once we develop them).
    If the defender wins (gets the same number or more successes), then no opening was found for the attacker. If he had any extra successes left over after figuring out who had more (like if the attacker got 2 and the defender got 3, then the defender would have 1 left over success), then he may buy defensive-related things like a counterstrike, movement, or sometimes even a defensive maneuver.
    You will find that this opens the door to a number of cool maneuvers with their own cost-in-successes prices. I am seriously thinking of calling these Marks. This way, we could have a Mark-2 maneuver, which would cost two free successes, etc. The biggest thing to take from this is that the Finding an Opening step, though very fast to figure, is not the actual attack, it is the strategy.
    Bonuses and Penalties come in the form of adding or taking away d20 dice in the rolls. They do not affect the target number (except for LFD bonuses, of course) or the number of successes/failures. In all situations, neither attacker nor defender may have less than a single dice to roll, regardless of penalties, and can have as many dice as he can earn.
    Rule of Luck – In any situation where a roller (attacker or defender) rolls successes on all dice, he may roll a single additional dice, with a new target number equal to the original target number –2, to gain an additional success. If this one too is a success, he may do this again (again with a single d20) with a target 2 points lower (-4 from the original target), and so on, until he eventually fails. So, if you got 3 dice with a AMS of 11, and happen to roll a 3, 7, and a 10, then you could roll one more dice with a target number of a 9. If you then roll a 4, then you could roll a fifth die with a target number of a 7 (and so on). This allows for spectacularly unlikely super-rolls.

Step Three – Striking

Now, technically, step three could mean a number of things, based off of what actually happened in Step Two. If the attacker won the Finding an Opening bout, he may not choose to use the successes to attack. He may try to disarm, or to break free from the fight. Hell he may decide to try to sack a brother. Who knows. For this description, we will assume that he spent one of those points on a strike, or in other words, to actually attack his opponent.
In this step, there will be a little of the basic math, but not as complicated as before. What the attacker will be doing is making a basic Skill at Arms (S@A) LFD check, and then adding a bonus (usually a number in the 10-20 range) that is based off of a few advantages he has in the fight, while the defender will be doing the same thing with either a Dodge Defense LFD roll or a Skill at Arms LFD roll of his own based off of his weapon skill. Though there is still a double digit number to deal with, it is no longer an issue of adding up everything, figuring out the difference and spending it. It is comes down to one simple thing…did the attacker get a higher roll? If so, then there is no more decision making to take place. No spending points, nothing. All of this would have been decided in step two. If the defender wins, then nothing extra happens either, it was simply a miss. You are done. Of course, with successful attacks, the normal damage and hit locations come into play. The only way any of this can be purchased (max damage, etc) is by winning more successes in the Finding an Opening step (name WILL change).

The Details

If you are looking for the lists of details (what the successes can buy, what are the bonuses to attack and defense rolls, etc, then these will have to wait a bit longer. None of what you are reading is meant to go directly in the rulebook, as much as to give an overview of what I believe to be the basis for the final combat rules, and will be written without consideration for earlier rules when the time comes to put the rules into the book. For those who don’t believe that these are the final rules, you are partially right, after all, I haven’t had a chance yet to playtest with this. On the other hand, I have been saying, all along, that I was making this major change sooner or later, and that all of the other groupings of rules were only there for me to see the advantages and disadvantages of everything that I have been toying with. None of the rules that I have come up with in the past meshes so well with magic, ranged weapons, special maneuvers, etc, quite like this. In short, get used to what I just spent an hour and a half writing. It is here to stay.

Posted by Logan on Friday, May 02 @ 16:33:33 MST (190 reads)
(Read More... | 1 comment | Score: 5)


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