Clockwork City: Need help with combat system

[Vulpinoid]

One roll to determine to hit, initiative, and damage. Very fast system!

This could work really well in an objective based system rather than a task based system.

GM: What's your objective for the round?
Player: To plunge my dagger into his heart.
GM: O.K...that's the action you plan to take in order to achieve your objective. But what do you hope that this will achieve?
Player: For him to die.
GM: So we can say that your character is just going to look for the best opportunity to take him down, and if you roll a natural 6 we'll say that you dagger goes through his heart.
Player: O.K. Sounds fair.

Players describe their aim for the round, if they roll a natural 6 they get to describe a really cool mortal kombat style FATALITY, or something more appropriate to the genre (perhaps killing their opponent without causing too much noise and summoning the local constabulary).

In this type of combat set-up, you'd only need a single combat skill. Being faster makes you better at combat, so does being stronger, and so does being more skilled. It's all reflected in the same number, it's just flavour and descriptive roleplaying that give unique and interesting combat styles.

As for that last comment...

The defender could also roll two colours of dice:

white to avoid the blow - dodging / parrying / etc:
red to ressit the blow - armour etc.

That's exactly what I was thinking when I suggested this idea.

V

[Riot]

Here's a mechanic I'm playing around with for my system, but you're more then welcome to give it a try.

The relevant combat skill provides X dice.
These X dice are split into two dice pools. One for accuracy, one for damage.
Weapons then modify this as necessary. Big unwieldy weapons might add a lot to damage, but subtract dice from the accuracy, while things such as daggers might just add +1 to each.

[BWA]

Rolling for how bad you got hurt and then modifying the dice is weird to me. But maybe that's just because it seems counterintuitive.

It might be *too* bloody for what I'm looking for though.

[David C]

I'm gunna throw this out there, just in case you're not quite happy with your damage mechanic.

Armor has a rating of 2-6 (with unarmored being 1, and something like steam powered plate mail being 6, or being behind a barricade while being shot at with a powerful rifle)
Weapons deal Xdice damage.
In order to wound the target, damage dice have to come up equal to or higher than the opponent's armor rating.

This is more lethal, as one shot from a rifle can now instantly kill someone, whereas in the current system (as far as I understand it) a stick of dynamite or a punch will deal the same damage. The downside is that it involves an additional roll against any armored target.

PS. A good steampunk read, as rare as those are. http://www.amazon.com/Whitechapel-Gods-S-M-Peters/dp/0451461932/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218522046&sr=8-1

[imago]

I'm just wondering why you'd have the two options? Why would you bother to dodge if armour only provides benefits to blocking...?

I was thinking there'd be no inherent mechanical difference, but you'd have to use Dodge instead of Block to avoid a ranged attack. Maybe that's an unnecessary level of complexity for a rules-light system though...

I agree that it seems to be unnecessarily complex. However, you have quite a point about Dodging for ranged attacks. So, I thought "what if Dodge has a different mechanic effect?"

For instance, Dodge always lets you add your two highest dice but doesn't let you re-roll 6s. When having armor (higher defense dicepool, as presented), it is better to block, since there are more chances to get 6s, perhaps more than just on 2 dice - if I understood you right, when a player rolls a six on 3 dice, for instance, that player rolls those 3 dice and adds their value to 6; that should be better than two dice granted by Dodge, even if those add to 12.

On the other hand, if you are unarmored, it seems better to try and Dodge, because chances of getting a 6 are lower, while adding 2 highest dice seems a better option.

I just thought that the main effect for firearms (and perhaps all ranged weapons) could be that they cancel armor bonuses - very good armors would still work (since ranged weapons shouldn't remove as many dice), while light armors are near to useless against them, making Dodge a better tactic/strategy. Accuracy can be reflected by a higher Armor Cancellation bonus, while more Damage is still represented by more dice on the attack roll.

Does something like this work for you?

[Riot]

Rolling for how bad you got hurt and then modifying the dice is weird to me. But maybe that's just because it seems counterintuitive.

It might be *too* bloody for what I'm looking for though.

Assuming this was towards me, I meant total up your dice pools (say 4 accuracy and 3 damage), modify based on weapon (steam-powered chainsaw: -2 accuracy, +3 damage) and roll (so 2 accuracy / 6 damage) and check for success / failure.

[Marshall Burns]

Several people suggested having a weapon add dice to the attack roll, and armor add dice to the defense roll. initially I felt that was too "D&D" (ie - "Why does armor make you harder to hit?")

Hi, I'd like to make a point on that.  I'm not a fan of D&D's various systems, but, even though they call it a "miss," what they mean is "fail to do damage."  I have never played a game where it was relevant whether or not you hit; all that is relevant is whether you do damage.  Armor makes you harder to damage, which is what I was getting at with my suggestion.

[JoyWriter]

No-one seems to have mentioned it yet but healthy and dead can bracket the four level system like this:
Healthy: don't record any damage
The four you have...
Dead: strike their name of the npc list or put away their character sheet!
You keep the alliteration in damage categories, because it should be quite obvious when someone is dead.
More generally the wound levels are there to define character internal traits, particularly those that players will not remember, so whether that person is still in the game or not can be recorded elsewhere.

Now for all of this I am assuming that dead is the last stage, but there is a different attitude where broken corresponds to final defeat, and puts the character out of the game completely unless their crippling can be defeated. So when they get taken down, the owner of the character decides the form of their broken-ness, within the limits of the actual action and the assumption that the character should not be able to come back from it without intervention. This then means that you can go back and find them living in a slum somewhere, and find some combination of steam powered lung and inspiration/finding old foe to get them fired up again. This should be a big mission in itself, and allows you to keep the "stick it to em" idea at the forefront; when they hit broken they just loose their "fight", for whatever reason.

You can expand this to all of the damage levels, so bruised by a bullet means you need to get it out etc, so the types of weapon specify not the negative effect, but how difficult it is to remove. You could put the injuring event on the side next to the level, so that people remember to keep it appropriate.

I also like the idea of armour breaking when used say 3 times, so people who use it are always fixing it. It just fits that whole punk crafting-recrafting ethos to me!

[dindenver]

Hi!
  If you really want 6, try this:
Bodily Sound
Bruised
Battered
Bloodied
Broken
Bereft of Life

  On a more serious note, how goes it?