StrikeForce :2136 Combat Revision

[darnest]

Okay so StrikeForce is a transhuman high tech adventure RPG with a conflict system for the characters to develop against.  The world is design on conflict, on purpose by the UN but that another thread, This is a percentile game where you subtract roll from the skill of the character to determine their effectiveness(called EF). Combining relevant skills is encouraged. It plays extremely well and I am releasing  At gencon this year.  But I had a moment of thought that seems to fix the 3 issues I have always had with my combat system. I need to explain the system and then I will go into the test I did of the change.

The combat system has worked well for years, but it has had 3 weaknesses IMHO. 
1 it was a very mechanical process roll the dice figure the Effectiveness of the skill roll add weapon damage, determine damage taken roll or call location and then figure crit and malfunction... It worked but it was rote mechanics after you knew the steps..
issue 2 is that to get to higher levels of damage the characters had to invest in combat skills, newer better ammo, or tech to improve the EF of their attacks and as such improve their damage.  At higher levels skill tops off, always has so the characters end up looking for other ways to increase damage done.  The 3rd issue was the system to make called shots was never very good and as such never got used, not a lot of advantage or reason to.

So the new system right now being called Combat Influence, solves all 3 problems so far as I can see.  The combat goes like so Add   Combat skill to weapon accuracy and technology bonuses - subtract ecm and dodges from the target for the base hit.  roll the percentile dice and subtract. This is your attack EF.  normally you just add a weapon power to this and there is your damage rating.  Compare the DR to the Armor Rating on the chart and that number + 2d10 percentile is the damage the target takes.  now anyone who has a 400 EF or greater ( or a technology bonus of 150 or more) can call their hit location (head cheast ect..).  If you can call location you get Combat influence points to use prior to the damage, crit, malfunction phase.  So each CI point ( you get one for every 200 EF of an attack) would allow the character to choose one of 4 options:  1) roll an addition set of percentile die for damage 2)Increase the severity of their critical 3)force a malfunction roll out of sequence 4) increase the chance of a malfunction when a roll is made.
So with these rules the player is involved in many ( not al) of their attacks after the skill roll.  There is a tactical decision to be made.  More damage, malfunctions, or critical increase..
It also eliminates the need for "called shots" with fire combat.  With melee the CI points allow the user to make a called effect and modify the chance it happens.

For the play test I had my testing player in his full on ExoSkeleton against 4 droids of varying power.  The Payer (dan) won the reaction phase over all 4 droids using drugs..  He then blasted his first droid with linked Plasma and laser weapons.  The EF of the attack was a 623  after the roll.  He can call location as he has good tech so he gets 3 CI points.  He chooses to add 3 rolls for damage to his attack.  So normally the total attack would have been a damage rating 7 against Armor ratings of 6. Which makes it 50 pts damage + 2d10 percentile.  He rolled a 58 on his first damage roll for a total (old system) of 108 damage.  He rolled 3 more times and added (3, 72,64) 139 pts for a total of 247.  This took his critical severity 3 (lowers better) from the 2and row of criticals to the 6th which is huge. He rolled a successful critical and instead of simply slowing the droid down by losing and action he forced it to shut down.
His second shot with his plasma (his laser does not get a second shot).  His second EF was a 590 so he only got 2 CI points and the damage rating was only a 6 ( no laser) so he was at a 10 from the chart plus dice.  He chose to increase his crit severity from a 4 to a 3 and force a malfunction roll out of sequence (to see what that did).  It did alot.  His total damage was on a 67 ( 57 + 10) and the crit (he made the roll) forced the droid to lose his combat action that round.  but forcing the malfunction roll caused the droid to fail.  So Dan has disabled 2 droids.  Now the first remaining droid shoots at Dan. 
The droid has an EF of 530 ( gets 2 CI) and a a Damage of a 7 versus dans armor of a 5.  so dan takes 100 points of damage plus 2d10 percentile.  I add 1 more damage roll and get a total of 123 +100 for 223 damage from that attack. The critical is now a Severity 1 and dan uses luck points ( part of the system) to modify the crit chance to a measly 10% which I miss.  Now dan took the hit just to see what would happen, and after shooting himself full of drugs so he does not die, he  decides for the next shots he will dodge.  He rolls a good active dodge of 475, which goes against all shots against him.  The first droid has now has a 60 to hit with his second shot, i rolled a 75 so a miss, the other has no shot.

So based on the above test it seemed to work.  Dan was more interested in the combat influences (he said that at least).  He did say  that most times he would opt for more damage or a crit severity boost.  He did say he needed better drugs if he was gonna take that kind damage very time, I think the end result of the test was success.  I can fill the healing gap with drugs or luck points.  I am just curious if based on this test I am missing something.  I know no one knows this system yet, but if you could read through this and just give me your thoughts or even Ideas  on how to improve this I would like to hear...

[darnest]

so to any who care to know I used the new system in a real adventure full on.  against lower level and a couple of equal level characters.  Dan really enjoyed the system change this time...   He really got into deciding what effect he wanted to do and why.  He was able to increase damage and do High value criticals where before he would have done good criticals, but not combat ending ones.  Overall it enhanced the speed of combat when it entered into play, but it only entered on a few cricial shots.  The other shots people where diving like crazy.

A good example of the night would be when he shot a gang member from close range shorted out the armor as he blew off the guys head.  Really gorey fast combat. He choose to add 2 damage rolls and increase the malfunction rolls and chances. It worked out well. the equal level NPC's where able to damage and force dan to roll malfunction and take more than a pittience of damage.  While not thrilled at taking so much damage he could certainly heal it up and continue with the fight. The healing issue was not as bad as I had thought originally.  I made 1 small tweak to what I call luck points in the system and that allowed the user to minimize damage to 1/4 Endurance (the hit stat) and damage was manageable.  Overall it did not really kill the lower level NPC's a whole lot quicker, but the player was much more involved.  So I think this is a success.  again anyone with questions or comments please post  thanx for looking.