So with all the help from fellow Forgers, I managed to hammer out the basic outline of a system I'm working on (shown below in maroon). The problem I'm having is deciding how weapons should deal damage. I basically want characters who are spending lots of Action Dice on one attack to deal crippling blows, while the people who only use 1 or 2 on an attack can get more attacks in, but do less damage with each hit. Any suggestions are welcome.

Action Dice are d10s.
Stats are rated from 1 to 10.
Skills are rated from 1 to 10.
Task resolution: roll x d10s equal to/less than the Skill, this counts as 1 success. If no Skill applies, use a Stat instead.
Your Stats limit the amount of successes you can get. So with a Strength of 3, melee attacks wouldn't benefit from having more than 3 successes achieved on one attempt.
Perks (feats) can raise the amount of successes allowed on an individual skill by 1 at a time. (So with 3 Strength, and the Melee Success Perk +1*, that character can achieve 4 successes at a time, and they all count)

Combat initiative: Whoever has the most unspent Action Dice may act. Initiative counts down from the highest to the lowest amount of unspent dice. Characters get a starting pool of AD equal to their Speed stat + 1d6. At some point, this pool regenerates.

*not working title, lol

I've thought about this a couple of times since the last thread...

How about making duplicate die results much more significant. Weapons do damage at a couple of basic levels...light (worth 1pt), medium (worth 2pts), heavy (worth 4pts), instant-kill (worth 6pts), overkill (forget the points).

If you successfully hit, it typically does the minimum damage. Death is 6 points. So six successful hits from a weapon dealing light blows will take you out, three hits from a weapon dealing medium blows, 2 hits from a heavy weapon, and 1 from an instant-kill or overkill.

If your attack attempt hits and any two of your dice show a matching pair, upgrade the damage by a degree (light to medium, medium to heavy, etc.)

If your dice show a matching triple (or two matching pairs), upgrade the damage by 2 degrees (light to heavy, medium to instant-kill, etc.)

If your dice show a matching four-of-a-kind (or a pair and a triple, or three matching pairs), upgrade the damage by 3 degrees (light to instant-kill, medium to overkill, etc.)

Then we throw in a defense roll, if it's successful, it drops the damage by a degree...players scoring pairs and triples on their defensive rolls may reduce the damage to less than a light wound (which will basically count as a glancing blow with no real effect).

Just the first idea to come to mind.

V

That's a pretty intuitive idea V, I like it. I still want to use different HP for the different target areas on the body (head, torso, left arm/leg, right arm/leg), and I think that could work well for this. This also means that weapons would be pretty similar I'm assuming, so anything small like a knife would deal light, and then small caliber guns medium while all rifles would probably deal heavy damage. I could see just about all melee weapons dealing light damage, any thoughts on how/if the character's strength should/could factor into this?

[font=Verdana] I could see just about all melee weapons dealing light damage[/font]

I would suggest that a melee weapon do more than light damage. A sword/axe/mace against uprotected flesh woul dbe pretty devastating with a reasonable hit, even knives, when they've hit the right place. your counter action and armour worn would then reduce that.
best
JW

I had a little time to think about it (I was at the Jeep dealership getting a tune up), and I had an idea based off of Vulpinoid's suggestion in a way. Assign a base damage to all weapons. So a Knife might be 2, while a .50 caliber rifle round would be 12. On any amount of successes, the weapon deals base damage. On matching pairs, it deals base damage plus an extra 2 damage per pair (1 damage per matching die). On triples, it doubles base damage, and on quadruples the base damage is tripled.

Just a thought. Not sure if that's too static/ not random enough, or if it gives a good idea of how lethal weapons are.

Assigning weapons a damage value rather than a damage band is probably better for differentiating between different types of weapons.

As a flip side to this, armour could be given a similar rating to show how much damage it naturally absorbs.

Knife [2] versus a leather jacket [1] does less damage than it normally would. Knife [2] versus Riot Armour [6] does nothing, unless someone manages to get enough successes to push the knife's damage rating above 6 (or unless they've got some kind of supernatural strength that automatically boosts the damage from melee weapons).

.50 caliber rifle [12] versus a leather jacket [1] is still pretty much an instant kill if it connects. The same rifle [12] versus Riot Armour [6] has a decent chance of killing, and will probably do some grievous damage even if the target knocks the damage down by a degree through a successful defence.

If you were going to push the extremes in this type of this system, you could go up to vehicle and mecha level damage using pretty much the same types of number. Depleted Uranium Rail Gun [20] versus Titanium Alloy Reinforced Assault Armour [18]...The gun is an instant kill on even the most heavily armoured regular trooper, the armour can withstand the attacks of virtually any melee weapon, and even .50 caliber rifles have only a tiny chance of getting through. But when matched with each other, the weapon and armour become a more interesting fight again.

Basically, for every 3 or 4 points of weapon damage progression, the potential kill factor doubles (in an exponential fashion)...which is also useful because it keeps numbers from getting too unwieldy.

But to keep this kind of effect happening, you'd have to avoid the notion of doubling and tripling damage on dice multiples. Any doubles would add 2 damage, any triples would add 4 damage, any "four of a kinds" would add 6 damage. Keep the modifiers as integer additions rather than multipliers.

[hr]

On a related note about keeping the hit locations, you can give character different levels of armour protection on different parts of the body, like in the old Cyberpunk 2020 (I'm not sure if this concept was maintained in the Fuzion system). In this way, combat can get a bit more strategic. Do I add my extra degree of success to apply a bit of extra damage to this location, or do I use my extra degree of success to move my damage from his heavily armoured torso to his lightly armoured abdomen?

This sort of links back into the concept of different areas of the body having more or less impact when it comes to hit points.

Since you're using d10's, lets work on the assumption that a human body can take 10 damage levels before it passes out. The hit location system could provide a maximum damage for a certain body part hit. 3 for an arm, 4 for a leg, 6 for abdomen, 10 for torso or head.

Combined with the other system, if a weapon does huge damage but it only hits the arm [maximum of 3 damage], then the arm might be amputated or vaporised, but the character might still be able to run on adrenaline for a round or two before the shock kicks in.

If the same weapon sliced right through the ribcage [maximum of 10 damage]...dead.

Again...just some more ideas.

V

Vulpinoid wrote:
Assigning weapons a damage value rather than a damage band is probably better for differentiating between different types of weapons.

As a flip side to this, armour could be given a similar rating to show how much damage it naturally absorbs.

Basically, for every 3 or 4 points of weapon damage progression, the potential kill factor doubles (in an exponential fashion)...which is also useful because it keeps numbers from getting too unwieldy.

But to keep this kind of effect happening, you'd have to avoid the notion of doubling and tripling damage on dice multiples. Any doubles would add 2 damage, any triples would add 4 damage, any "four of a kinds" would add 6 damage. Keep the modifiers as integer additions rather than multipliers.

Vulpinoid wrote:

On a related note about keeping the hit locations, you can give character different levels of armour protection on different parts of the body, like in the old Cyberpunk 2020 (I'm not sure if this concept was maintained in the Fuzion system). In this way, combat can get a bit more strategic. Do I add my extra degree of success to apply a bit of extra damage to this location, or do I use my extra degree of success to move my damage from his heavily armoured torso to his lightly armoured abdomen?

Statistaically you're far more likely to die from a knife wound than a gunshot. There's a reason - knife wounds are large and messy. A pistol wound can also be large and messy (large caliber, dum-dums, explosives, shot-guns) but often it's a small hole precisely made. A machine gun obviously makes lots of holes and so does more damage (but you may want ot work this out as more hits rather than bigger hits).

Baseball bat would be the least deadly - more likely to knock you out than kill you. Realistically there are al ot of other factors -like the angle of entry (you've seen ganster movies where they point the gun downwards from up high?) which afects how much of your body the bullet travels through and how much bouncing around it does inside. So widely varying results based on attacker skill and chance are actually pretty realistic - someone can kill you with a rolled up newspaper (really!) while people have survived mines/grenades and machine gun.hits.

This stuff is often counter-intutive so if you want realism, then do some research into ballistics, if you want something that feels realistic, then just base it of movies/books you consider realistic.You may find realistic to be unplayable if for example if there's a lot of action but heroes aren't disposable (ie charcter creation is long and PC's are expected to be fully rounded characters).

I would have said something very similar.

Realism, good for gaming and good for story are often three very different things.

Types of wounds can be vary dramatically, and this can be reflected through a shock system in addition  to "hit points" (maybe like the "Mortal Wounds" thread that's also going around at the moment)..or a fatigue system where lots of little hits build up and can knock someone out but not damage them severely in the long run...hit point loss to represent bleeding.

And that without even getting into toxins and infections.

A good quick combat system is a bit of a holy grail. But I think you've gone some good steps along the way at this stage.

[Of course, that might just be because you think some of my ideas are good...so I'll naturally share a synergy with something who seems to think on my wavelength.]

V

Hi! I've been following this idea for a while now, seems a really neat way to handle combat, given enough polish.

My suggestion isn't a damage mechanic per se, but maybe you'll find a use for it anyway.

Regarding the Action Dice refresh mechanic - you weren't too specific, so correct me if I'm wrong: every once in a while, a time comes when a certain number of AD are given to player, right?

Now, what if you could spend some of your ADs to add to this number? Say you have a refresh rate equal to 6. You spend 2 dice out of the 7 you have, so for the rest of the round you have 5 AD left... But for every refresh after this, you'd get 8 AD instead of 6. My thinking is this - when you're in a fight, you don't just dish out and take in damage - there's manouvering, playing with cover, trying to trick the opponent, and so on and so forth. When you spend ADs to add to your refresh rate, you're essentially spending time to establish a long-lasting advantage (fiction-wise, this could be getting some cover, or getting a really good aim at your foe, or studying the enemy's fighting style, or whatever).

What does this have to do with the damage mechanics you were looking for? Well, when you get criticals, as according to Vulpinoid's suggestion, you get extra damage (I'll leave the exact mechanics for you and the pros in this thread to handle)... And you get to knock off some of the foe's AD refresh rate. This can work either in conjuction or parallel with your HP for bodyparts scheme.

Lessay Joe aim's for Pete's arm with baseball bat and gets three-of-a-kind or some such, which ain't too shabby but is no insta-kill either. Pete takes whatever damage he's supposed to take, AND loses 3 AD refresh to boot. If you ditch bodypart HP, the 3 AD may mean that the Pete is slower precisely because his shoulder's out of its socket. If you keep bodypart HP, well, whether the arm is healthy is established independently of that one particular hit... So that'd mean Joe's hit made Pete lose his concentration 'cause of the pain, or maybe pushed him straight into a pile of brahmin dung, or whatever. Either way, Joe's hit just made Pete move about that much slower.

You wouldn't even have to do damage to get some effect in. Lessay Joe has a knife, and Jack has "Titanium Alloy Reinforced Assault Armour". Well, Joe probably can't really hurt the guy, but he CAN jam that knife of his into one of that thing's joints, making it hop helplessly on one foot, which is not only funny as hell, but also maybe gives Joe enough time to run away or some such.

Dunno if this is useful to you at all, but I hope it is. G'luck with your project either way, I'll be keeping an eye on it!

DWeird wrote:
What does this have to do with the damage mechanics you were looking for? Well, when you get criticals, as according to Vulpinoid's suggestion, you get extra damage (I'll leave the exact mechanics for you and the pros in this thread to handle)... And you get to knock off some of the foe's AD refresh rate. This can work either in conjuction or parallel with your HP for bodyparts scheme.

How about this for a refresh mechanic:

You have a set of dice. Each unspent die is put on the table, with a certain number showing of a player's pick. Every player also has a die of different colour - lets call it an Opportunity die. You roll it at whatever time seems appropriate, and then everyone involved in the battle at hand gets as many new ADs as they had ADs of a number that equaled that of the Opportunity die.

Lessay Joe has a 1, 4, 2, 2, 6 and Karl has 9, 10, 4, 3, 6, 6.

Joe chooses to roll an Opportunity die, rolls a six, and lets out a muffled swear as he gets one extra die and his opponent gets 2.

Um.

I guess this setup would be too random, and can easily produce an avalanche effect (whoever gets the most ADs initially will be more likely to get even more ADs in the future), but maybe that can be fixed by allocating them into a separate pool?

Like, you have Action Dice and Preparation dice, and you can add from Action Dice to Preparation Dice whenever you want but not the other way around. And the only way to get Action Dice is from the Preparation dice with the Opportunity die, as per the mechanic described above.

Hope that doesn't sound too complicated?

Anyway, methinks that could work well, especially if coupled with hard-hitting damage mechanics, which'd make a guy's hand a wee bit shaky when he raises a fistful of AD and starts thinkin' "...what should I DO with these?".

*incoherent rambling mode activate!*

There could be issues, like... people keep rolling numbers that don't match anything of anyone? You could fix that by... allowing people to roll some/all of their Preparation Dice as ADs (which means losing Preparation Dice, of course) when an Opportunity roll is made.

And... in case people have a really low number of dice, meaning they can't refresh via Opportunity and can't dump their stock? Maybe you could have it so that, when you do the Opportunity roll, you roll all of your Preparation Dice along with it, and get as many new Preparation (Action?) Dice as as the lowest die result rolled.

*incoherent rambling mode end*

Hope it's not like I'm designing your game for you. For some reason, I get long-winded when I write. Hope you find this useful!

That's an interesting idea, DWeird, I might try it out though it seems a little cumbersome. I was thinking along the lines of The Elder Scrolls games use of fatigue, where it just regenerates constantly, but optimized for the tabletop and the fact that turns don't have a set time. Maybe characters should get 1 AD every turn, or 1d6 every few turns or something, then critical hits would damage the character, and also destroy a few AD (accounting for fatigue and weariness from taking a massive hit).

Well, if you don't use it, I'll poach it for my own ends some day. :3

Now, uh, the reason I suggested what I did is because you don't really have turns. <.< Time flow (in terms of when you get to move and how much you get to do) is decided entirely on the number of ADs you have, right? So "turn" seems sort of out of place, unless I misunderstand your mechanics completelly. Which can totally happen!

So. Um.

How does your turn system operate?

DWeird: You're right. There are no turns. The idea is to forget about turns in the "I attack; you attack; I attack" sense, and focus on the fluidity and chaos of combat.

Yah, so.

How is the "characters should get 1 AD every turn, or 1d6 every few turns or something" thing supposed to work, then?

I'm sure there's a way - and as you've noted, the thingy I proposed is rather cumbersome - I just have no idea what it'd be like.

Which sort of matters... How you get ADs -> how many/how strong attacks a char can give out -> the damage dealt.

DWeird wrote:
You wouldn't even have to do damage to get some effect in. Lessay Joe has a knife, and Jack has "Titanium Alloy Reinforced Assault Armour". Well, Joe probably can't really hurt the guy, but he CAN jam that knife of his into one of that thing's joints, making it hop helplessly on one foot, which is not only funny as hell, but also maybe gives Joe enough time to run away or some such.

DWeird wrote:
Yah, so.

How is the "characters should get 1 AD every turn, or 1d6 every few turns or something" thing supposed to work, then?

I'm sure there's a way - and as you've noted, the thingy I proposed is rather cumbersome - I just have no idea what it'd be like.

Which sort of matters... How you get ADs -> how many/how strong attacks a char can give out -> the damage dealt.

The game "Chill" from Mayfair [circa 1990] had a system where weapon's dealt two types of damage. Vaguely it was divided into stamina and wounds.

Characters had fatigue points and wound points, if you took enough stamina damage you passed out. If you took enough wound damage you died.

When a weapon hit, it did a substantial amount of stamina damage, and a little bit of wound damage unless a critical was scored.

In this way, a character had a good chance of passing out before they were killed. Certain types of creature were immune to wound damage unless certain weapons were used...For example, werewolves only took stamina damage unless the weapon was silver [meaning that you could stun them with regular weapons but never kill them].

Conversely, it was possible to get killed with serious wounds without taking too much fatigue or injury if the victim suffered a whole heap of wound points, but not much stamina damage....[a shot with a silver bullet doesn't look like it should kill, but it does double wound damage to a werewolf].

This type of concept could be applied to a damage system like the one being worked through here.

Let's assume that a character has a chance of regenerating their action dice after every action (if the natural result of the die is even it returns to the player's pool, if it's odd the die is lost). A maximum number of dice may be returned to the pool equal to the character's current Endurance/Fatigue stat. Taking hits over time may reduce this endurance/fatigue stat, causing the maximum number of replenished dice to drop. The character is just suffering the effects of a battering. This effect is completely separate to damage actually sustained by the victim. In this way Endurance/Fatigue covers the battering effect on the whole body, while you can still have specific hit points for different body parts representing physical wounds.

[Note: I've refined the regeneration of dice into a single die roll with the attack result, by looking at whether the dice are odd or even, rather than making a separate check later...this should reduce the amount of die rolling and streamline things a bit more.]

Maybe every roll of a 10 on the attack roll automatically saps a point from the opponents Endurance/Fatigue stat (regardless of whether hit point damage is actually scored). This would be separate from the [weapon damage]/[armour absorption] calculation, to provide characters with a new strategic option in combat.

Again just throwing another idea into the mix...

V

That idea seems pretty solid, V. So far, I'm going with this:

whenever a die comes up Even, 1 AD is replenished
Endurance stat = max number of AD that can be replenished at one time
weapons deal damage to the defender's AD and their hit locations (head, torso, legs, arms)
(the following is still under consideration:)
doubles = 1 Endurance damage
triples = 2 Endurance damage
quadruples + = 3 Endurance damage

For the doubles, triples, and quads, I think it would be neat to allow the attacker to "spread the dice" so to speak. So on a double, he may choose to forgo the 1 Endurance damage to instead deal extra Wounding(HP) damage or maybe change the hit location (like Vulpinoid suggested earlier). And expand these options for triples:      2 End damage    -or-    2 extra Wounds  -or-    1 End and 1 extra Wound    - or-      1 End and change hit location  etc.

For random hit location, the lowest (or highest) die would be used to check a chart: head 1, chest 2-5, legs 7-8, arms 9-10
I suppose weapons could deal different dice of AD damage (dagger d3, sword d6, bullet d10) and then deal a static amount of Wounding damage, too.

Heya

I know I'm coming in late, but a couple ideas:

1) Maybe stats could give you the number of dice you get to roll, and skills the TN? Kind of differentiates them so stats are not just "back-up skills" (altho you might want them to be that)

2) you could break combat into arbitrary chunks of time (call them "bursts" or "turns" or whatever you will) separated by "lulls". A Lull occurs organically, ie maybe whenever ANYONE reaches 0 action dice, OR when EVERYONE reaches 0 AD? I'd adopt either one or the other--depending on how you build the support mechanics around it, to give the kind of feel you want to combat.

Initiative here goes to the char with the most dice left. They spend, their target has the option to retaliate, then look again at who's got the most dice. Don't worry about order except to determine who acts right now (ie, has the most dice). Ties can be resolved as simultaneous actions (or you can throw a dice or look at stat scores or whatever). To avoid the guy with the most AD just spending 1-2 AD at a time to always keep the initiative, how about giving the target a right of reply: if the attacker just 1 or 2 successes, the defender has the chance to cream them.

The lull is when AD refreshes happen: everyone gets a full refresh of AD: maybe equal to whatever stat they nominate they'll be using for the next "burst"? This has a few implications, namely a) you are doing actions that relate to one kind of stat per burst, and b) that you can mix-max different action types in a combat (ie magic users use "magic" stat, shooters use "prowess" stat,  close combat uses "might" stat and so on. Plus, no reason you can't have someone using "intelligence" stat to try and cajole or negotiate or verbal their way out of a combat (I like this kind of concept of "omni- combat" myself). Of course you can just rule that only certain (even 1) stat is useable in "combat" if you want to retain the narrow focus.

A lull could (if you want) offer some different options (taken from Donjon's "free and clear" concept) such as, I dunno, trying to get away or negotiate or whatever, or you could say certain actions need to wait for a lull like reloading or what. You can put any "end of turn" housekeeping stuff in here if you want it.

The thinking behind the "lull" concept is that it's a kind of mix between the dynamic, flowing "turnless" combat and the simplicity of having an break in  combat for housekeeping. An advantage of the latter is that it can obviate the need for ongoing housekeeping after each action.

For damage, I'm kind of in the camp of seperate damage from AD. That is, AD are lost by performing actions, not by taking damage. In the scenarios I've posited above, dmg = AD loss would create a serious death spiral.

charles wrote:
2) you could break combat into arbitrary chunks of time (call them "bursts" or "turns" or whatever you will) separated by "lulls". A Lull occurs organically, ie maybe whenever ANYONE reaches 0 action dice, OR when EVERYONE reaches 0 AD? I'd adopt either one or the other--depending on how you build the support mechanics around it, to give the kind of feel you want to combat.