pen&paper RPG mechanics, combat Options

[Abbandon]

Hey guys im working on my own little rpg game and I'd like some input from everyone on what their favorite way to actually hit stuff is.

If one person attacks a monster do you like to just roll against some target number and you either hit or miss or....

Do you like it when both combatants roll dice and the guy who scores more hits wins and hit the other guy? meaning sometimes when you attack you yourself will take damage.

Or do you know of some other way to do to hit rolls that you consider to be fun and exciting??
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Seperate question....What has been your favorite way health has been handled in an rpg game? In my game people dont gain levels, much like shadowrun, so Im kinda lost on how to handle hit points. I dont know if characters health should grow by 10's or 100's. I think having really high numbers that go into the 100's or thousands would just be overly complex. I dont really wanna make people bust out calculators and stuff. On the other hand i think it would be cool to have a ton of health and have stuff do lots of damage.

I know I do not want something static like shadowrun, no offense to this game. But in my game characters health will definately be something that improves and grows.

[Karaden]

Personally i like the opposed roll, although I suggest that instead of whoever wins deals damage, have it be that if the attacker wins, he deals damage, but if the defender wins, he just doesn't get hit, but perhaps if he wins by a large amount he gets a bonus on his attack against that person next round (throws the other guy off balance) and if he wins by a massive ammount he gets a free counterattack (Other guy practicly throws himself on the sword).

As to health, there are advantages to both. Take D&D for example, where low level people have somewhere between 4-14ish. The pros are it is really easy to keep track of such low number, and even high level people won't get more then a few hundred, so numbers are alwayf fairly easy. The trouble is that at low levels, it is hard -not- to kill the character in a few hits because most attacks do at least a good d6 or so of damage and even a single point adds up very very quickly when you only have 4. Now, if your starting range was something like 40-140 you have alot more option for low level stuff to do, maybe 5 damage or something, and you can have incedentl things that do very minor damage (Maybe fatigue deals 1 point for each round of combat or something) A high number gives you more room to play around with stuff, you can move in smaller incriments if you want to. Of course the down side is at higher levels when I have 3855 health and just took 486 damage and I have to break out the calculator to keep track of it.

I suppose what you can do, is as you are going through working on damage for stuff, look at and see if you commonly find yourself saying things like "Man, this really isn't enough for a point of damage, but I want it to do -something-" or "Well, this is a bit stronger then 1 point, but not quite up to 2 points." or "Well, looks like all the damage here is a multipul of 10." If you find yourself saying things like that then you can switch from one to the other.

Hope that was enough for you, oh, and one other thing, if you do large numbers, using dice for damage is going to become harder and harder, and you'll eventually just have to have it set. You don't want to have to bust out 60d6 when your high level guy with a giant axe chops at the dragon's foot or whatever.

[Abbandon]

Hmmm! Thats a great idea that you mentioned for the to-hit rolls. I dont think I ever considered doing that. I can see the blades sliding against each other now as people parry and counter and the battle turns into one big fluid movement.

You HP advice is duely noted. I still want to hear from more people though. Feed Me.

[Kagetenshi]

Describe the game a bit more? Mechanics and desired atmosphere are inextricable, so I can't really give you any suggestions without knowing what you're looking for.

~J

[Abbandon]

You dont need to know the details in order to give your opinion on the things I asked about.

[Kagetenshi]

Um, yes, I do. How you do to hit rolls, for example, will determine how risky it is to attempt to hit someone, and what sorts of things modify risk or difficulty. How you increase health, if you do at all, will determine how differently normal people and powerful PCs react to things like getting run through. These questions simply cannot be answered without the details.

As an analogy: I'm getting an object. What colour do you think is a good colour for an object?

~J

[Blade]

Depends on a lot of things.

Is it ranged or close combat. Is it the same system for both?
More importantly: what's the feel you want for your game. People tend to forget that the game mechanics should match the game: a cinematic game should cut on the dice rolling to have a fast and furious gameplay while a tactical game will have mechanics closer to a wargame.

Is your game realistic, cinematic, complex, simple, story-driven or mechanic-driven (ie tactical game)? Do you want the combat to be one combat=one roll, or one move=one roll? Do you want your players to describe their action, to act on impulse or to plan their actions?

Then it will also depend on the range of characters your game has to support. It won't be the same if it's human vs humans only or if it can be rat vs dragon.

Same for the health system. Personally, if I had to design a health system, I'd do something both simple and complex. I'd get rid of hitpoints. Each time someone is hit, you'd consider where he's hit and how deep the wound is (scratch, small wound, big wound, critical wound). Then it'd be up to the GM and players to handle that and consider how this wound would affect the character, if he's still alive, still conscious, if he'll be able to heal naturally and so on. But that'd only work for some playstyle.

[Fortune]

For the Health System, you might consider a base amount of 'Hit Points' for each character, and then a 'Skill' or 'Ability' that can be improved by the individual character in some way to gain more 'HP'. Like Rolemaster.

[Cthulhudreams]

It really depends on the tone of the game, shadowrun is an ideal system for a near future game with guns that is vaguely attempting to be sort of realistic (if you get shot with a gun you die)

but if I wanted something heroic I'd go for a to hit roll and damage roll opposed by soak in a 4 stat system. probably.

[nezumi]

I generally dislike epic anything. I like my combat gritty, dark and deadly. So keeping that in mind...

10 HP. Who needs more than 10? It was good enough for my dad in his day, it's good enough for you. Alright, 15 or 20 would be acceptable to allow for a little more granularity, but that's IT. Vehicles and big monsters can get more, but they're not human like you and me, so that's okay.

I (and apparently most other players) cannot understand the concept behind D&Ds hitpoints. Why is it that today getting shot in the eyeball with an arrow kills me dead, but after a year of fighting that exact same wound can be ignored? Makes no sense. The only way to justify adding significant amounts of hitpoints (your hitpoints should not grow by more than around 20% between beginning of the campaign and end of the campaign without a VERY good reason, like your brain was implanted in a talking spaceship or something) is to also increase the amount of damage weapons do, and I don't think anyone wants to do that. A wound is a wound, a deadly wound kills you just as dead.

I like having an attack roll and something to evade or decrease that damage, either through dodging or 'soaking' it. At minimum, armor needs to play a roll in it, and it probably should not just make it harder 'to hit'. Hitting someone in armor is just as easy as hitting someone not in armor (unless that armor involves physically compressing that person). The question is whether the attack penetrates, and whether the person is able to dodge or roll with the blow and THAT requires a roll (not hitpoints! Hitpoints are a stupid idea that confuse everyone and result in people getting ambushed and saying 'eh, it's just a longsword at my throat.') Variability is good. Shadowrun doesn't even take it far enough. All guns should be dangerous, they should all have a non-trivial chance of causing you to bleed out. The heros will just be strong enough to resist better, and have the tools to 'fix' it better.

[Moon-Hawk]

[mfb]

yeah. there's no "best" set of game mechanics; the mechanics have to reflect the world you're using them in, if the game as a whole is going to be any fun at all. for vaguely cartoonish, quick-resolution combat, a one-roll attack is fine. for more detailed combat that allows greater player control of outcomes, you want an attack roll and a defense roll, or something similar.

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, I agree with the previous posters; mood is everything, and mechanics really can reflect that. Like mfb said, quick resolution mechanics are great if you're interested more in acting out events in broad strokes than sweating the details; perfect for those groups who see themselves as actors in a play and the dice outcomes as a director to be followed. On the other hand, introducing lots of granularity and putting in mechanics similar to cover, Edge, combat and Karma pools can help get players invested in the outcome of the dice pool and is great for games more focused on tension and gritty combat. Making people pick and choose when to bring their full resources to bear can really get them second-guessing themselves and before you know it players are sweating a li'l because they're afraid they may have made the wrong decision when they spent the last of their Edge pool last encounter.

Disclaimer: My praise of expendable bonuses such as Karma and Edge pool are meant in no way to be an endorsement of taking out Citymasters with flechette loaded Streetline Specials.

[Critias]

[mfb]

i dunno. Green Ronin's Black Company SB was, at least in reading, a damn sexy band-aid. porting the whole thing over to, say, SR3 rules would work even better, but with the system they chose to work with, they did a nice job. (i liked the part where high-end mages like the queen could hold their own in physical combat because they were level fucking seventy, with all the BAB that entails.)

but yeah, that goes back to what i was saying. straight-up d20 wouldn't work for the Black Company. the DM would be all setting the scene, talking about how horrible war is and how death could come at any moment, right? and then the campaign gets the the end of Shadow Games, and Croaker gets caught with his pants down, and that arrow comes out of nowhere and smacks him right in the chest--and he marks 8hp off his sheet and proceeds to solo the Shadowmasters' entire army, because after going through the first three campaigns, he's got enough xp to be level 20. so much for grit.

stuff as basic as handling hits and health really, really aren't something you want to try to find the 'best' mechanic for. like i've said, and like others have said, the 'best' mechanic is going to vary wildly with the setting.

[Mercer]

I haven't looked at the Black Company setting (a friend of mine owns it, but hasn't passed it around), but my group did play the Game of Thrones d20 game for a short campaign. It was an attempt at a pretty brutal combat system based in the d20 framework. Hit points didn't go up much (my 7th level character had 9hp, though the fighter-types had 20 or so), and you had a threshold based off your Con where if you took more than that in one attack you were knocked out for a number of rounds. Playing it, I was struck by the insane desire to run B2: Keep on the Borderlands using those mechanics.

As to the sweet spot, I find it helpful to think of D&D as a collection seperate games based on level. 1st-3rd is a gritty, deadly setting where a good sneeze can kill a pc. 4th-8th is your typical, sword-and-sorcery deal. 9th-12th is high fantasy or "heroic" D&D, the kind you saw represented on black light poster art in the late 70's, early 80's. 13th+ is, well, I'm not really sure what that is, since my group never plays that high. Play is radically different within these strata. At 1st level, average weapon damage can incapacitate some characters, critical hits can be fatal to anyone. At 10th level, most characters can survive a 200' fall. Spells are probably the most dramatic example of how advancement changes the game, since getting a new level of spells tends to drastically change what your character is capable of. (Raise Dead and Teleport, for example.)

There's a lot of really interesting stuff over at The Forge these days. System Does Matter is a good jumping off point, as are the Forums. (Disclaimer: I like the Forge, because I think it has a neat approach to gaming. Almost everyone I game with hates it. Some of the stuff is radical, or just plain weird. But for me anyway, I don't have to agree with every single facet to appreciate that there are some useful ideas in there.)

[Wounded Ronin]

One guy wrote up a little rules patch for D20 where hitpoints just reflected your combat aptitude towards reducing damage. When you lost hitpoints it reflected luck, fatigue, and a kind of divisor effect where the same hits were affecting you less because you were riding with them.

Kind of like how if you popped a random soccer mom with your best left hook she'd go down like a sack of rice but if you did the same thing with Chuck Lidell it wouldn't effect him and he'd hurt you.

Therefore, sources of damage that could not possibly be effected through combat finesse, such as when you fall into a vat of lava, would bypass hitpoints and go directly into a CON reduction, and when your CON hit zero you'd die.

It was an interesting and more satisfactory handling of the hitpoint issue.

[Cthulhudreams]

The problem here is still that how to manage hitpoints is completely Dependant on the setting. Without deciding on what your games setting is, meaningful answers just don't exist - imagine the outcomes of trying to run D&D with the shadowrun system (blergh).

Here's a great flowchart that Frank spat out at me after some people (including me!) got into a big mess trying to work out a 40k system. Reposted without permission.

[shadowfire]

i would have to disagree to a point with the idea that you would need to know the details to give an opinion. He's not asking how he should do it, but what we have seen or like to see done in a game(s) we play(ed). I think he just wants to see what people like or dislike that is already present in most games.



as far as hit points go i would say it depends on how easily you want them to die.. or i should say how easy it is for a person to die on a crit from a gun without armor and stuff.

I do like how shadowrun does health in general and you never see other games think out side the box very often when dealing with health.




As for attacks: i like the idea of a target number, but what if you based it on a skill roll instead.. lets say it was all percentage based and you had a sword skill at 43%, to successful swing the sword at an opponent you just have to roll under that percentage.. to get a critical you would have to get within something like 5-10% on the roll. Same thing for defense except that only to parry a criti you would have to get under 5-10% on the roll.

thats just an idea though. most games have you roll just a standard die.. something like a 1D20 and depending on how high you roll is how high the defendant has to roll to parry. Then the weapon./combat skills just give you bonuses to strike and parry.. But i kind of like this idea i just came up with and may use it in the future the next time i make a system.. but thats after i get done with the one I'm play testing now.

[Ravor]

I haven't tested any of this, but this is an idea that I've been toying with...


Step 1

Opposed Roll of Attacking Stat vs Defending Stat

-- If the defender wins, he can use his net hits to either increase his Defending Stat or Attacking Stat for his next roll.

-- On a tie nothing happens.

-- If the attacker wins, he can use his net hits to either apply damage to the defender, or save the net hits to increase his Defending Stat or Attacking Stat for his next roll.


Step 2

Opposed Roll of Applied Damage vs Toughness Stat

-- If the defender wins, nothing happens.

-- On a tie, the defender is hindered and takes a small penalty on the next combat turn.

-- If the attacker wins he can choose to lower either the defender's Attacking Stat or Defending Stat in addition to applying health damage.


This system is universal, whether ranged, melee, or mystical in nature, although the various Attacking and Defending Stats would be different, different weapons or spells would give a modifier to the original opposed roll, and health points would be fairly low so getting hit in combat would be a very bad thing.

[HellHound]

If you are going for universal, is this also going to apply to social 'combat'?

[Moon-Hawk]

Need more details. As it is, if the defender wins in step 1 he's going to increase his own attacking stat 99% of the time, because killing the other guy and not being attacked any more is better than having more defense. Of course, depending on injury modifiers, initiative rules (will they be taking turns? Could make a difference), does this apply to multiple opponents, etc. Each come with their problems, but may offer an incentive for the other option.
Similar predictions can be made for each person in each step.
What I'm saying is, it could be a good system, and it could be broken, but that depends entirely on the rest of the combat mechanics wrapped around it. The initiative system used is going to make a huge difference. The types of penalties people can expect from taking damage will made a huge difference. A single combat mechanic can't really be evaluated outside of the context of a combat system. Now if you could walk us through an entire combat turn, we could probably give you much better advice.
I will say, as it is, there's nothing inherently broken about it, but it depends entirely on the rules you put with it.