Combat system, d20/%, decent?

[DulothS]

An old game design used for games previous; anime-style, DBZish combat.

Essentially, each unit has a single primary stat; 'Power'. Combat goes in order of either surprise, or highest power first, action, reaction, action, reaction, so on, each turn ending when all have acted.

Each attack is a d20 roll, opposed by that of the opponent. You take your 'Power' and multiply it based on the d20 roll; in effect, multiply 1/10th your result by your Power. A roll of 20 means your attack or defense is at twice your total, a roll of 1 means its at 1/10th.

At this point, there are two options. Either this number is then divided once again, and subtracted from the enemy's power; resulting in a game where each character is steadily weakened by blows received; or each character has hit-points, a multiple of his Power based on his race and any special modifiers, which are reduced by the winning total.

One of the first adjustments to this was the addition of 'Ki', 'Energy Attacks'. While a normal sort of attack deals its result in damage, minus the defenders result, if an 'Energy' attack isn't blocked entirely, it deals all of its total damage. Which then leads to using energy to defend against energy, allowing partial deflections, as well as special forms of attack which penetrate energy barriers.

Then we have machines, Mecha, or simple outside weapons. A single basic body, which has its own Power, but its actual toughness is much higher than its Power; most likely an unusually high hit-point pultiple or a division of amount of damage dealt. And its weapons are either energy or mechanical weapons, which use the Mecha's own power, or simply projectiles, which have their own.

The original design was simply in order to make simple combat which you didn't even really need to learn in order to play. I've been wondering if the system has sufficient merit to use for something else, or should simply be left, dead and sleeping.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

It all depends on the goals and plans for the game you're working on right now. Are you working on one?

If not, then we should move this thread to another forum, to continue the discussion there. Let me know.

Best,
Ron

[DulothS]

The goal is to make the system both simple enough that you can pick it up as you go along instead of spending a good while learning it beforehand, flexible enough to handle a wide variety of possible tactics and abilities, as well as open-ended to the point it can handle things as powerfull as gods or as weak as microbes without significant adjustment.