I have tweaked the combat system--yet again. And it seems to finally balance ease of use with rule-based drama. The idea of the game is to allow for head-to-head RPG game play, so the rules themselves have to lend some of the storytelling aspect, so the game isn't a matter of I hit you and you hit me.

For example, in a game I played the other day, the villainous Red Warlock used his magical powers to attempt to steal a military truck carrying a prototype weapon. He has a power similar to the Green Lantern, but it is all based on elemental powers and at the time it was cold energy.

So he used his cold energy to lift the truck and start moving to the edge of the game board where he would make his escape and win the game. But Brimstone flew to the floating truck and scored a Hold, which means he wrestled control of the truck away from the Red Warlock, thwarting his evil designs.

This seems simple enough, but when there is no GM to describe the action, the rules need to take into account what can be done and what has been done.

My broader question is if the combat system is too crunchy.

Basically the attacking character rolls 2D6 + modifiers. The defending character determines a defensive TN using a base score of 6 + modifiers. The attack action roll is open ended, so the higher you score, the more hits and wounds you can score. You can use hits to cause damage or to select a combat effect. You can use wounds to only cause combat effects.

There are a number of situations that can either double your total action roll and/or reduce your opponent's TN. So the range of what a character might roll is far greater than 1-12.

So for example, Brimstone might roll 2D6 +8 to attack the Warlock with a defensive TN of 14. If Brimstone rolled double 5 (a critical), his total attack would be 36. 36 is 22 points higher than Warlock's TN, resulting in a 2+2 (2 hits + 2 wounds).

Now you have to decide what to do with the hits and wounds scored. There are a variety of wounds to choose from. Some cost 1 point, others cost 2 points. For example, Brimstone could choose to cause 2 hits of Damage, Stun, and Slam Warlock.

In the prior incarnation of the system, players had to choose to either do damage or wounds. Now, the system rewards a little bit of each, so it is only to your advantage to take advantage of a subtle knockback, knockdown, stun, disarm, etc.

So it kind of functions as a one-roll, inline combat, damage, and critical system.

Hey, I'm glad to see this still being worked on.  I've been following your threads since it was called Monster something or other. 

Do you have a link to the current iteration of the rules?  What you've posted here sounds pretty functional.

I actually just about launched the game, but I just wasn't happy with the rules. So I went for, what I hope will really be, the last rewrite. And I hope to have the rules out late spring / early summer.

But I think I finally hit on what I have been attempting to do since the start.

Thanks.

What if the player controlling the character who gets hit/wounded decides how the hits and wounds are allocated?  Have you tried it that way?

-Marshall

If you mean the character that scored the hit, yes that player uses the hits/wounds scored to pick an chooses what Damage or other wounds the character scores.

If you are talking about the character that was hit, I think everyone will do what they could to minimize the impact of the hit.

matt

What I mean is, character X attacks character Y, and let's say the attack is good for 4 Hits and 2 Wounds.  What if Y decided how to divide those 4 Hits and 2 Wounds between the various effects?  He must still take a total of 4H and 2W, so his ability to minimize the impact would be close to nil, if the various effects are equally distributed in their point-value/intensity ratio. It also makes him a partner in the damaging, and thus a partner in creating that moment of the storytelling(rather than just watching someone else do something to his character) which, I would think, would make it easier to reach a consensus about what exactly happens.

I do something similar to this in my game The Rustbelt and it seems to work; by the latest system, a character gets hurt for an amount of damage, and that character's player decides how to divide it up between Blood, Sweat, and Injuries, but no more than 5 Sweat is allowed.  The attacker decides where the attack hits, which puts some strictures on what manner of Injuries (qualitative damage effects) can be substituted. The GM decides how much damage a given Injury is worth, but that could be easily substituted with a chart.