Introduction/ Class Mechanic Thread:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php?topic=30612.0

In the Legacy of Heroes role-playing game, all checks (combat or out of combat) are done by making a d100 test. Most checks are made by adding the ability score (or ½ the ability score, I’m not sure), directly to the d100 test.

As far as attacking goes, rather than attacking against AC or Defense, the target makes a defense check. There are three different types of defense checks.

Parrying: Blocking a melee attack with a melee weapon
Blocking: Blocking a melee or ranged attack with a shield
Dodging: Avoiding a melee or ranged attack

Which type of defense check a character does probably depends on the character. High agility characters will probably prefer dodging, characters using or specializing in shield will prefer blocking, and characters that are skilled with parrying or are using parrying weapons will, obviously, prefer to parry.

If the attacker beats the defender’s defense roll, he scores a hit. Furthermore, by how many 10s he beats his attackers defense roll determines how damaging a hit he lands. This is called degrees of success.
What do people think about attack roll versus defense roll? For one, it certainly keeps characters active when it is not their turn, and gives them different options to avoid attacks. However, does it give too much to chance with the possibility of a defender constantly rolling poorly and getting major wounds more often than necessary?

I’ve got back in forth of how much of an ability score is added to the d100 test. I’ve jump back and forth between 100% and 50%. For example, most stats at level 1 will be between 25-35 (as of right now, anyway). It depends on whether the result should be based more on the roll and passive combat talents (passive combat talents will grant much smaller bonuses than ability scores at low levels), or by the characters natural characteristics. Right now I’m leaning towards 100% of the ability score, but I’m open for feedback.

Dice stuff

d100 + skill vs. target is no different conceptually than d20 + skill vs. target (which is the core of D&D 3.5, 4e, etc.). However, d20+5 is hella easier to do in your head than d100+27. Do you really need the finer-grained resolution of a 1-100 roll? Why?

You're talking about halving the skill before adding it to d100. Why not just halve the skill range to begin with?

I suspect you're starting with a certain fine-grained skill advancement system and pushing it outward to the resolution mechanics. This is backward. You will use the resolution mechanics much more often than you'll use the advancement system. Make the resolution system easier.

Combat stuff

What is your goal for the combat system? How much of your game play do you expect to be in combat? I thought this was a game of political intrigue and corruption (and yes, warfare, too, but personal combat isn't warfare).

Attack roll vs. defense roll is a lot of rolling and the handling time is higher than a straight up attack vs. attack. Is there a way to roll once and then apply skills to see what happened? Maybe you swap the digits of the two d10's you roll for the d100 attack to get the defense (rolling 95 means a 95 attack, 59 defense). It still seems unnecessarily fiddly to no good effect.

Food for thought: You seem to be aiming for a more "realistic" combat system. Is real combat like this at all? My attack vs. your defense and your attack vs. my defense, with damage getting through? Not in my experience (fighting, wrestling, fencing). It's a lot of posturing, intimidation, probing, and then committing all-out to an attack strategy. In some cases (fencing, for example), you might be able to recover from a failed attack. In other cases (brawling/fist-fighting going to the ground), the strategy works or doesn't and then it's a crazy brawl.

Does it have to be realistic to be fun? Can a system be unfun while being realistic? What kind of system are you creating?

I concede that it would be simpler to reduce the system down to d20. As such, I will begin reworking the numbers to make it friendlier. Initially, I started aiming a d100 because it was different.

The roleplaying explanation of the defense mechanic and how it ties into the degrees of success:
You attack an opponent with your sword. He attempts to doge the attack. You beat the doge check by 5, just a hair. In explanation, he moved enough out of the way to doge a full hit, but he did move far enough away to get scratched and sustain minor wounds. If the defense check won, he completely dodged the sword swing. Apply the example to parrying and blocking and you get the drift.

It’s not supposed to be perfectly realistic, just ‘somewhat’ more realistic than the static ‘hit the AC amount’ mechanic. Furthermore, it gives options.

Personal Combat does play its role in the system. I prefer to look at it more like squad combat. After all, the world as dangerous as it is corrupt (likely more so since it is so corrupt). Characters might be force to fend off assassins dispatched against them by a corrupt noble, fend of raiders while on a mission to gain approval of a powerful patron, or be attack by a hungry Durwyrm Dragon while wandering through the forbidden mountain passes of the Eastern Ring.

Okay, let's talk squad combat, because that's really cool. Right?

This isn't one-on-one personal combat. Not exactly. Sure the actual fights probably break down to a bunch of chaotic mano-a-mano battles, but cinematically, more than that is happening. There's a sort of orchestration to it. Imagine you're a movie director. What's the fight look like?

There's a rush of battle. Men (and women?) charge into battle against each other. The PC is just one of the soldiers, or maybe she's a captain shouting orders to the others. Swords clash. Spears jab from the back lines. People are falling all around the PC who might take wounds but nothing fatal yet...

How do you turn that into a game mechanic?

First of all, make NPCs tools for the PC. I talked about putting characters right on the sheet as stats. What if one of the stats is My Gang or Squad of Elite Soldiers or even ten names of people who fight for you?  When the character loses a die roll in combat, the player can choose to take that injury to the PC or inflict an injury on one of the NPCs. That arrow narrowly misses you but your buddy Friederich takes it in the chest and he dies. The Saracen charges your PC but two of your soldiers stop him; both are badly injured.

One-on-one melee becomes a very special case of this squad level combat. It's squad combat without any help, any escape valve. When the characters have their posse, they're invincible (if they're willing to let their allies get slaughtered relentlessly). Without their posse, they're vulnerable.

A quick word on dice. I wasn't saying give up d100 for a d20. I'm saying, both can be boiled down to [some linear random distribution] + [some skill value] vs. [some target number, perhaps based on another roll of some kind]. Some take-aways:

1. The linear random distribution can be 1-100, 1-20, or 1-6. Doesn't really matter, right? You just need to scale your skills and targets appropriately. The smaller the numbers, the easier it is for players to work with them in play. Scale only matters for certain specific currency concerns, like advancement math and so on.

2. The comparative scales of the random part vs. the fixed skill part determines (somewhat) how whiffy your game is. How much is left to chance, and how much is based on character skill?

3. Linear random distributions aren't the only way you can go. There are bell curves, dice pools, bidding systems, and all kinds of other ways to handle the random part of the equation (if it even needs a randomizer!). For example, roll a handful of d10s (one for each point of skill) and count the number of the highest dice: 1 3 5 7 9 9 9 9 is four 9's, which beats three 9's or ten 8's, but not even a single 10. This is the basic die mechanic in Sorcerer. It's super fast in play, too.

Just food for thought.

Swordplay and Realism
This is sort of a piecemeal observation derived from personal fighting experience (boxing) and the research I've done on historical swordsmanship for my own game.

1. Dodging a sword is damn near impossible.  Swords move fast, contrary to the popular belief of heavy, cumbersome tools of war.  You can evade easily by moving away, sure, but that doesn't put you in any tactically-advantageous position.  In my opinion, if you're able to dodge a sword blow, it's because the opponent has no idea what he's doing and tries to swing his sword rather than make cuts.  The difference between a swing and a cut is like the difference between a swung punch and a hook.  The former is loose, sloppy, weak, and difficult to recover from; easy to see and dodge if you have good reflexes.  The latter has a very tight path of movement, yet is very quick and powerful.  Thus, it is in my opinion that a dodge should be modeled as a high-level maneuver that's tough to pull off, but grants you a distinct combat advantage if successful. 

2. If evading is the easiest to pull off and dodging the hardest, then parries are in-between.  A parry usually follows a smaller trajectory than a blow, and you don’t need very quick reflexes to make short defensive movements unless if it follows a recovered blow to defend against the opponent’s counter.  Therefore, I believe it is realistic that parries would have a higher rate of success than an attack, considering an attack roll vs. defense roll combat model.

3. Swordsmen rarely just attack; they typically have to control the other opponent’s sword first so that they don’t get skewered while making their own attack, which segues into my next point…

4. Attack vs. Defense is not as realistic as you may think.  To begin with, combat never has the sort of rhythm to feasibly allow for such back-and-forth exchanges, as opposed to the movies.  And oftentimes, it’s very difficult to distinguish between attack and defense, as an attack can also be defensive and vice-versa.  To make an example, there is a parrying technique with the longsword that simultaneously attacks the opponent.  To do this, the defender makes a cut in response to his opponent’s cut, but is at such an angle that it deflects the oncoming blow while following a path to the body.

5. It is very easy to block with a shield.  This is because it has a large surface area and because you don’t have to move along a large path to intercept an oncoming attack.  However, shields are typically held in a forward position.  This makes it more difficult to attack with the sword, which now must follow a longer path.  The benefits of a shield should (usually, but not always) outweigh the offensive penalty to the weapon: you don’t have to evade much, so you don’t have to sacrifice much ground, and you can open up the opponent’s defenses with shield strikes, making it possible to land a blow with the poorly-positioned sword.

6. To prevent combat encounters from lasting inordinate amounts of time, you can have attack methods suited specifically for opening up those tight defensive measures, rather than just attacking for wounds.  This has the added benefit of allowing for a realistic death spiral without necessarily requiring a complex wound and fatigue system.  Furthermore, a death-spiral modeled in this manner is not as game-breaking - in order to take advantage of it, you need good timing, otherwise your opponent can recover his defensive posture.

This is of course assuming you want realism.  If you don’t want to be so granular, then I would at least suggest taking point #4 and #6 into consideration.

Realism wasn’t particularly my goal for the combat system. Functionality, being different, and give people a chance to role while wasn’t their turn was my goal. The realistic aspects, the sparring and probing and such, doesn’t need to be handled in game mechanics, more like is assumed to be going on. However, there is definitely place for feints and counterattacks to be introduced into the system, maybe as abilities purchased with combat points. However, the system is by no means trying to capture the full art of dynamic realism sword play. It’s simply an alternative method of doing attack vs. defense.

If you want them to be able to roll when attacked, you could make it a maneuver roll, with successes putting them in advantageous potions, and failures putting them somewhere . . . poor. :) Just a thought on a way to NOT be using an opposed roll, but also allowing players to do something when attacked. Handling time does of course go up as there's a roll involved, but it might og pup less than it would with an opposed roll.

Based on community feedback, I have reworked the attack system. Here are the major changes:
-d20 instead of d100.
-The system is no longer attack roll versus defense roll. It is now attack roll versus a static defense value.
-Attacking and defending now takes into account the targets Combat Balance

Combat Balance: This is a gauge of the strategic positioning of a target in combat. It is gauged by a single number which can be either positive or negative. The number is the bonus (or penalty) to the character’s defense score.

The Combat Balance constantly goes up and down constantly during battle. Character’s have access to different combat actions, such as feints, guards, recoveries, and such that increase your own combat balance score or decrease your opponents combat balance. Furthermore, this also separates standard attacks and all out attacks. Standard attacks have no effect on combat balance. All out Attacks gain a bonus to hit, but decrease your own combat balance.

This adds a strategic value to combat, that instead of simply attacking you try to keep your own combat balance high while keeping your enemies low. The higher you break an enemy’s defense, the more substantial a hit you land. 

Can you give us an example of combat balance in action?

Example:
Two adversaries are fighting. At the beginning of the fight, they both have a combat balance of +0. Warrior A runs up to Warrior B and attacks, missing. Not needing to use and action to move, Warrior B makes a feint check, succeeding and reducing Warrior Bs combat balance to -1. He then uses his other action to increase his guarded stance, increasing his own combat balance by 1. Warrior A uses his two actions to rebalance his positioning, increasing his own combat balance back to 0, and making an attack. Because Warrior B has increased his bonus to +1, he has the advantage and is harder to hit and the attack narrowly misses.
And so on. This is still in development.

I love the combat balance mechanism. Very cool.

If actions are only affecting the balance by increments of 5%, wouldn't it ultimately be more advantageous to just use your actions to attack?

Agreed. +2 sound better point of balance? +3?

+3 would certainly make combat balance more valuable to develop.

I was thinking about the concept in general.  You have your separate wounding and attack system, which appears to focus on individual attacks, and yet you have combat balance which actually zooms out and abstracts combat a bit.  I'm wondering what it would be like if you ditch the nagging details of the former entirely and have combat based upon maximizing the balance to your advantage.

There used to be this old Dragon Ball Z import for the playstation that did away with health bars entirely and the point of the battle was merely to shift combat balance all the way to your side.  The end result was that the game was more fun and more action-packed.  You might have a good thing going here if you dive in deeper.

Alright, you've got the beginnings of some kind of dice mechanic for combat.

The dice have to hit the table.  There is only so much that forum-talk can really do.  I'd think that at this point you want to make up characters, get some friends together and brawl using these rules, see what works and see what is fun.  Things will emerge that you hadn't considered.