Hi Folks,

I finally got to do some writing, and I have a very rough beta version of the Luna System now available. for download at http://heraldicgame.com/luna_04.pdf. You'll notice there are some large holes currently in it. I will be filling those in with the next version. I mostly needed to get some feedback on the skeleton I currently have and see if I am headed in the right direction with it.

One of the biggest missing sections is on Conlficts (i.e. Combat). I have been thinking of going a couple of ways with it, but I am leaning toward the following version:

1.) The Defensive hand is subtracted from the Offensive hand.

2.) Any Effect or Resistance dice are added and subtracted from the totals.

3.) If the Offensive total is higher, the number of dice the Defensive hand is exceeded by is subtracted from the defender's dice total.

4.)The first character to run out of dice loses the Conflict. The winner of the Conflict narrates the fate of the loser.

Example: Tom and Dick are engaging in an old-fashioned knife fight. Naturally, they are fighting to the death. They are both Normal characters with 5 dice totals. They wear no armor, but the knives give them both a +1E onto their offensive hands.

Challenge 1: Tom wins the initial roll. After detailing, he ends the Challenge with a roll of 6,6,4,3,2. Dick lost the initial roll, but ended up with 6,4,3,3,3.

Since Dick lost the initial roll, he must allocate his dice to offense and defense before Tom does. He decides to be aggressive about it and uses his three 3s for the attack and his single 6 for defense. Tom goes on the defensive and puts his two 6s on defense and uses his single 4 for offense.

Tom's weak attack doesn't get through Dicks' defenses, so Dick doesn't suffer any loss. However, one die of Dick's attack tears through and Tom loses two dice from his total because of the of the knife.

Challenge 2: Tom now has a total of 3 dice while Dick still has 5. This time, Dick wins the initial roll and ends up with a fantastic roll of 6,3,3,3,3! Dick loses the initial roll and ends up with 6,5,5.

Tom decides to go down fighting and allocates his two 5s to offense and his single 6 to defense. Dick decides to put Tom away and allocates his four 3s to offense and his single 6 to defense.

Dick swoops in with his devastating attack. Even after subtracting Tom's single die of defense, 3 dice get through and wipe out Tom's dice total to 0. The knife will reduce it even further to -1. Tom's attack gets through Dick's defense, and Dick loses 2 dice, but the fight is over.

Conflict Finale: The intent stated was to have one of the character's dead, so Dick now lies in a pool of his own blood at Tom's feet.

Given the fact that I'm at work and doing this instead of working, I only had time to skim the rules. But some comments anyway.

1. You state in your introduction that part of your goal is to reduce prep time and overhead during gaming, and get into the adventuring. While your combat example seems quick, you've still got the old 'make character', 'GM creates a plot' thing going, as far as I can see. You've got aspects of character creation that will hopefully make for pro-active characters, but your method of play still seems 'old school'. Is that impression correct? That will still leave one person with the burden of prepping.

2. Are you trying to make a 'generic' (world- or setting-less) system? If so, I presume you're keeping the rules you find work for your group - and that's great. If you're coming up with rules from scratch, though, you might benefit from checking out (using?) some other generic systems.

3. I think your combat system would work, but it's of the type that once one fighter has the initial upper hand, odds favor him heavily. That's not a bad thing a priori, but is it what you want? Also, it seems to me that Tom's not fighting all that intelligently - but that might be a result of me just skimming.

4. In your section 'playing the game' you have a definition of roleplaying that many might not agree with. That's fine by me, if that's your interpretation, but I thought I'd mention it. I'm more intrigued by your 'there are winners and losers' comment, though. What would 'winning' and 'losing' be? Achieving or not achieving goal? Do characters win and lose, or do players win and lose?

I hope I'm not coming across as too negative, here - there's stuff I like as well. I like life paths and traits, for instance, since they'll help make characters more accessible and distinctive. And that you seem to have read Marcinko books. :)

Tobias:

No, you're really not being all that negative. And I'm not the kind of man to flame you into the stone age and then follow up with,"You'll be sorry when I'm rich enough to have Peter Adkinson as my butler and light my cigars with hundred dollar bills." Let me go ahead and answer the points you made. Many of them are quite valid.

1.) The main goal of the game design IS to reduce prep time. I'm a middle-aged roleplayer, and I really don't have the time to prep an entire adventure from scratch. On top of that, I have a highly improvisational style and sometimes come up with concepts that aren't easily pigeonholed. Luna is a sytem that I want to be able to to be able to work the way I tend to think.

Luna 0.4 is very old school. You are correct about that. But I haven't added on the prep-saving stuff yet. That will be coming in Luna 0.5. I wanted to make sure I had a solid dice mechanic in place before moving on to the next stage. The concepts I will be adding on will be variants of Universalis. If it works, this system will encourage the players to add their own facts onto the setting of the adventure as well as allow the GM to improvise with greater confidence and balance.

2.) Luna itself will have no setting. However, I am designing it with my Outsider Chronicles setting in mind. OC is a supernatural/conspiracy setting involving travel to alternate Earths. So the system must be very flexible and improvisational.

I am not working on this game for my own amusement. I am going to publiish it when it is finished. I have considered other systems, but I would either have to pay a fee or use a system that squashes the goals I hvae in mind.

3.) The Conflict system I described does lead the participants into a death spiral. This seems to me to be the most realisitic, but could be unsatisfying for the players unless I work in some ways that they can reverse their fortunes or use a method that doesn't hinder their ability to fight.

No, Tom wasn't playing too intelligently, but it was late at night and I wanted to get the example done quickly. Besides, who hasn't had a brain fart when involved in combat?

4.) I think those parts will be rewritten when I think of something better to replace them wtih.

Then I'm looking forward to 0.5

I was thinking about 'death spiral' combat mechanics vs. 'no effect until you die' mechanics (hitpoints) and it occurred to me they're almost opposing extremes of a scale of combat realism (although insta-kill would be more extreme than death spiral, and 'never die' more extreme than hitpoints, both tend to leave the traditional simulationist realm where there's an exchange of attacks and defenses - I think).

If anyone's got a link/reference/whatever to 'other' combat systems - or an explanation/investigation of that aforementioned scale of combat realism, I'd be interested.

The dice allocation does seem to generate a death spiral, but more than that, there seems to be no real incentive to not put everything into offense, and you never want to pick a fight with someone who has more dice than you. I ran into this with my Epiphany system a number of years back, but it wasn't a problem then because if someone was better than you, you knew it and did everything you could to avoid conflict.

I think if you haven't already, you should have modifiers that affect -only- offensive or defensive totals. Being defensive is +1d on the defense side. A weapon is +1d or more on the offensive side. A shield or armor is +1d or more on the defense. You could use say red dice for offense dice, green for defense and black for skill or general dice.

So, if I'm wearing a +6d armored space suit and you have a +1d knife, you better hope you've got a god-awful high skill, or my default defense dice won't give you a chance in hell of doing anything to me, even if allot all my skill to offense.

Greg Porter
BTRC

Tobias wrote: I was thinking about 'death spiral' combat mechanics vs. 'no effect until you die' mechanics (hitpoints) and it occurred to me they're almost opposing extremes of a scale of combat realism (although insta-kill would be more extreme than death spiral, and 'never die' more extreme than hitpoints, both tend to leave the traditional simulationist realm where there's an exchange of attacks and defenses - I think).

If anyone's got a link/reference/whatever to 'other' combat systems - or an explanation/investigation of that aforementioned scale of combat realism, I'd be interested.

Guys... Thank you! You have been an incredible help with the conflict problem.

The difficulty I have been having with Conflicts is that what I have needed isn't just a combat system, but a mechanic that could be applied to just about any clash of opposing forces. Not only would this involve combat, but also chess games and political debates.

I think the key to this would be to keep the death spiral but to alter it so that it doesn't hinder the character's abilty to fight.. just his ability to resist further damage. If an attacker wishes to hinder the opponent's ability to strike back, he might state that he is targeting an arm or a leg.

I'll get something more solid written and post it soon.