Rules design survey - saving throws and defences

[Ashtagon]

I'm at the stage where I need to make some fundamental decisions on my rules set I am devising, and I want to know what's more popular

My pet idea is for characters to have "defences" 4e style, for Fortitude (affects health type effects), Reflex (dodging, and touch attacks), Will (mental attacks), and Armour (broadly equivalent to AC). Classes also gain attack bonuses in three different areas (melee, missile, and magic). Attack and defence bonuses vary in each area depending on class and level, and multi-classing is free, subject to RP/campaign expectations.

All attacks, including spells, are resolved as (relevant attack bonus) + (relevant ability score bonus) + (relevant misc. bonuses) + 1d20 vs (relevant defence).

For example, a basic melee attack is (melee + Str) vs (armour). A hit does damage, a missed does nothing.

A fireball spell would be (magic + Int) vs (reflex); a hit does full damage, a miss does half damage.

Magic missile would be (magic + Int + 10) vs (reflex); a hit does full damage, a miss does nothing. The additional +10 noted in there reflects the extremely accurate nature of the original version of the spell.

----

Other stuff that probably needs deciding on sooner or later:

save or die/suck: My favourite idea I've seen so far is ongoing damage against an appropriate ability score until either the ability score is at zero or a certain number of attack rolls fail. Status conditions may also appear (such as slowed or immobilised for flesh to stone) after a certain number of attack rolls succeed.

Multiple attacks: Rather than having 9000 attack rolls in a round for an optimised character, I'm thinking to limit it to one attack with the primary weapon, and one with an off-hand weapon. Add a damage bonus equal to your melee attack bonus instead of multiple attacks. It's less damage overall, but feels more believable for a 6-second round.

[Pronounceable]

Before starting on crunch, you should decide the "feel" of the game. What's the "tone" the finished ruleset should evoke? There's a whole spectrum of tones from wuxia to heroic fantasy towards gritty realism all the way to ridiculous lethality where style and ruleset are tightly bound (eg: HP and damage mechanics is decisive about the tone). No matter what PR people of gaming industry says, there's no one ruleset that "caters to any and every gaming style".

The taste of fluff dictates much on the crunch, especially in personal rulesets. So, more popular options aren't necessarily good for you.

If you have decided on that, you should include it here.
...

As for my pet peeves, I hate hardware. Minis, grids, tokens, dice... Hate it all. If I can't play a game with only pen, paper and no more than a few dice it's not worth my time. Even extra dice irritate me to no end, therefore my personal ruleset runs on a single d20. Merging attack and damage rolls got rid of all those stupid tetrahedrals nicely...

Being someone who has neither time, nor people with time for true campaigns, I game in oneshots. Obviously no one will be advancing, so there goes classes and levels. Being a gritsucker, my combats are dangerous and people die or get permenantly crippled in a few hits. There's no such thing as "balance" either, seeing I run games chiefly on fluff. So on and so forth... What I'm saying is, there's more to personal systems than simple number crunching. Always keep real life considerations in mind.
...

Finally getting to the point:
I'm a fan of 4E defenses (and hater of the rest of it). F/R/W+AC is as good as it gets, afaic.

And since I can't resist trying to convert people, I have a mechanic you can refuse. Merging attack and damage rolls results in a neatness. The more attack result exceeds defense, the more damage attack deals. Actual crunch requires ironing, but the main idea is to reduce the amount of time wasted by rolling dice on the table. Which is a win for timely challenged people.

For all extra attacks, it's possible to convert them into extra damage (or bonus to hit or whatnot) for the single attack. Which actually works much better than multiple attacks in the already heavily abstracted DnD environment.

For saveorxes, I remember a thread around here in which someone offered that precise solution. I like that one.

[Draz74]

My pet idea is for characters to have "defences" 4e style,
Good, I'm curious to see what people's responses are, as I'm debating a similar adoption of 4e principles for my game.


For example, a basic melee attack is (melee + Str) vs (armour). A hit does damage, a missed does nothing.

A fireball spell would be (magic + Int) vs (reflex); a hit does full damage, a miss does half damage.
My latest idea, to unify the system even further, is that even misses deal a minimal amount of damage, representing wearing the target down by making it dodge. I'm still figuring out how that works, but it's an interesting combination with my VP/WP system.

Special abilities like the Elusive Target feat might let you turn an attack on you into a truly harmless "whiff," but generally, getting attacked is dangerous whether it's a solid hit or not.


save or die/suck: My favourite idea I've seen so far is ongoing damage against an appropriate ability score until either the ability score is at zero or a certain number of attack rolls fail. Status conditions may also appear (such as slowed or immobilised for flesh to stone) after a certain number of attack rolls succeed.
Ewww, ability damage is like the most paperwork-intensive aspect of the game. :smallyuk: Unfortunately I don't have a nice catch-all alternative to offer you as far as save-or-sucks are concerned.


Multiple attacks: Rather than having 9000 attack rolls in a round for an optimised character, I'm thinking to limit it to one attack with the primary weapon, and one with an off-hand weapon. Add a damage bonus equal to your melee attack bonus instead of multiple attacks. It's less damage overall, but feels more believable for a 6-second round.

Yep, I definitely approve of getting rid of iterative attacks. One attack per round, plus opportunity attacks, plus perhaps one more attack on your turn via special abilities like TWF or Flurry of Blows. That should be all.

[Drolyt]

I'm actually pretty amazed at the support for 4e defenses. For my system I was looking at player's roll all the dice, so that for PCs even AC would be like a saving throw and even spellcasting would require a roll, whereas for NPCs it would be the opposite. My reasoning is that most PCs like to roll dice. Some, including my typical group, are obsessed with it. Mind you I've done both Playing and DMing equally, and I also feel its easier for the DM to not have to roll so much. So while the 4e system was more consistent, I felt it took away too many rolls from the PC.

On Save or Die/suck, I was looking at something like that, but I was just going to have a single hit to a score and I was going to simplify what ability damage does so you don't have to recalculate all your stats. Also I wasn't going to apply it to every save or suck.

Multiple Iterative attacks: I don't know. It slows down gameplay, but I find alot of Players like it. Maybe allow melee types at higher levels to roll more dice on their weapon? Like a longsword in the hands of a level 20 Fighter would do 4d8 damage instead of 1d8? That would allow players the feel of a fist full of dice.

[Knaight]

I personally like using opposed rolls, with a skill based system, where a fireball would be something along the lines of "fire magic" skill against the "agility" "reflexes" "dexterity" or "calculation speed" attribute. Then just take advantage of a system where beating a check by a little does less damage than going way over the necessary amount needed to beat a check. Other than dice, I also hate hardware, and even with dice I don't like rolling handfuls of dice, such as systems where you might roll 20-30 dice frequently. 3-4 is as much as I really want to roll.

You can always break away from d20 too. Take a look at savage worlds, burning wheel, GURPS, and Fudge. Not necessarily in that order, and you actually have to pay money to look at burning wheel, where as everything else is either free(fudge) or has demo versions(savage worlds, GURPS).

[Kensen]

I like the idea of using opposed rolls, and I like the 4e style defenses. One of the gripes about using four defenses instead of AC & three saves is that you as a player cannot actively defend yourself (i.e. roll a die) vs magical attacks, you lose some control over your character. But then again, few people ever complained about AC even though it works just like the 4e defenses.

What I like about 4e is that the rules are so much more consistent than the 3.5 rules. Now, using both opposed rolls and the 4e style defenses, you achieve two things: everyone gets to roll dice and the rules are consistent. Best of both worlds, I'd say. :smallsmile:

The only problem I see here is that resolving attacks becomes slower because you'll have to make twice as many calculations. However, if you plan to limit the number of attacks per round, that'll be much less of a problem.

[lesser_minion]

The only real issue as far as who rolls the dice is concerned is that some people feel like they aren't really doing anything unless they roll the dice for it - this leads to weird complaints like "you can't resist 4e spells". In pretty much every sense there is no real difference.

My favourite ways of handling this are active defences (rolls for everything, sometimes slows down gameplay) and players roll all of the dice.

A dice roll on its own doesn't slow down gameplay if the rules are written to cut down the amount of effort needed to resolve the effect - active defenses tend to work pretty well as long as you avoid opposed rolls.