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Ozfer
2013-02-07, 05:51 PM
So, I am writing my own RPG system, and I was hoping my fellow playgrounders could give me some advice. I am aiming for a gritty system with detailed injuries, but this leads to a lot of rules (Note: This system is extremely lethal, and is meant to be so). This is a D6-pool success system (1-3 is a fail, 4-6 is a success. 6's are exploding. Successes are referred to as hits, and fails as misses).

Combat is done in six steps. When I say that, I look at the number six with horror. This is probably too much, but we'll see.

First, the attacker rolls a pool of dice equal to his skill in fighting.

Then, the defender rolls.

If the fighter got more hits than the defender, he rolls a D6 to see what body part he hit, then he rolls damage.

The amount of damage dice you roll is your Strength + EH. EH stands for extra hits (So if the defender got 2 hits and you got 3, you would have 1 EH). The amount of hits on your damage roll determines the degree of the injury.

Next, the defender rolls his armor dice, hoping to mitigate the damage. Armor may or may not be damaged in the proccess.

Finally, the defender marks the injury on his character sheet, and rolls "Pain Dice", which determines weather he falls unconscious or is weakened or whatever.

These are the melee rules. The rules for ranged fighting are slightly different, but close enough. Another thing to keep in mind is that while each attack consumes a lot of time, there is high risk of the fight ending with each turn, so a regular combat would probably last around 3 turns. Now... Is your head spinning with confusion? Or is a head-ache coming on imagining the endless rolls?

FreakyCheeseMan
2013-02-07, 07:19 PM
So, Hard Truth time... yeah, that system is too complicated. Unless this is a game system were combat is actually very rare, it's gonna bog down play too much.

That being said, I have a somewhat similar system that I've been developing, in a number of respects - I can tell you what I did, to simplify some of the steps.

So, first, no rolls to determine where a wound lands; the attacker says what they're aiming for, and if they hit at all, they hit that body part. Some attacks are limited to certain parts- a low kick, for instance, can only be delivered to the legs. Different body parts react differently to being wounded, which informs what parts you'd choose to aim at; leg wounds limit mobility but are unlikely to kill, head wounds kill faster but also have a bit of DR. (So, if you can do massive damage, you want to do it to the head, but if you're peppering someone with light blows, you want to aim for the torso.) Characters can choose to block, and take a wound to their arms instead - this costs them actions, however.

Damage rolls are the same as to-hit rolls - if you get more successes, you do more damage. Armor is applied directly as damage reduction, so if a target has armor, you need to get more successes in order to do damage.

Not sure what to tell you about pain, except that you might integrate it into the wound system - for example, I have nasty head wounds give you a 50% chance of losing your actions each turn.

Your chance system isn't bad, and that really just depends on how you want the probabilities to fall out. What I settled on is a little bit similar, but revolves around flipping coins. When you make an attack, you flip a coin until you get a different response than your initial; how many heads or tails you got in a row determines your successes or failures. So, HHT is 2 successes, TH is 1 failure, etc. Offensive and defensive bonuses are then applied directly- so, they make it more or less likely that an attack will succeed, and more or less likely that the effects will be devastating. So, even if your defensive value is too low to prevent an attack from succeeding, it's still worth having- it decreases the chances of a critical hit.

Grod_The_Giant
2013-02-07, 07:33 PM
Yeah, I'd consolidate some of the rolls, FATE-style. Giving you something like:

The attacker calls his target.
Attacker rolls his fighting skill.
Defender rolls his blocking skill.
Damage equals extra hits + Strength - Armor. No rolling here.
I guess then you'd roll your "pain dice." (I'd fold armor damage into this step somehow)

ArcturusV
2013-02-07, 07:59 PM
I'd actually suggest an either/or split as well. You can either try to dodge/evade an attack, or you can try to block, armor up, roll with the blow, etc.

Now if you want to replicate some sort of intricate dueling or something, you can end up having positional and attack types. Historical Note: AD&D 2nd edition at least had this in one of it's supplements.

It really slowed down the game, but was good for showing off a man to man fight as sort of cinematic climatic battle, where Luck, Skill, and Tactics mattered.

So it'd go like this:

Okay, Fighter McSwordington is dueling with Darth Evil McBadguy. Both pull out their blades and go at it. Both characters write down their defense, attack, and position. Then you resolve actions in initiative order.

So it'd be something like Fighter: I step forward and to the right, sweeping cut to Darth's right, forward and down, then pull back for a parry.

Darth: I move left, and riposte, then go for a thrust to Fighter's center mass.

The further away the attack is, like Fighter's being 4 steps away, the more his attack in penalized. On top of penalties for the type of defense that Darth is using.

It was really a pain in the ass system. But it existed. And once you got over the initial hiccup of how to do it, and knowing the mechanics, some fighters enjoyed it.

Jack of Spades
2013-02-07, 08:37 PM
A lot of systems that use locational damage base the location hit on the attack roll. Deathwatch keeps it mostly random (inverts d% attack roll to get a different d% result), and Deadlands requires another die roll (d20, modified by how well the attack roll went).

Most systems don't require an armor roll, and abstract armor as reduced hit chance (D20 systems, mostly) or as "soak." I personally prefer the latter. Armor degradation in systems that use armor as direct damage mitigation sometimes allow armor to break or become less effective by reducing the amount of damage soaked by some number each time the armor's soak value is exceeded/doubled/tripled depending on how brutal the system wants to be.

Deadlands (which I gush about pretty regularly around here, so bear with me) has each attack break down thusly:
1. Attack roll.
2. Defender has the option to make a dodge roll at the expense of their next action, before seeing the result of #1.
3. Roll for location, modified by #1. Cover either deflects hits or counts as armor to affected locations, determined randomly. Any other invalid locations (target doesn't have that arm, leg hit on prone character from the front) are misses.
4. Damage is rolled, with the die type being lowered by any armor. Head or neck shots add dice to lethal damage.
5. For nonlethal damage, target rolls Vigor and takes the difference as Wind (nonlethal damage). A nonlethal attack is considered resolved at this point.
-OR-
5. For lethal damage, target takes Wounds equal to the damage rolled divided by the size of the target (6 for regular humans), rounded down. 5 Wounds in a given location kills/maims character permanently, 3 or more is enough to start bleeding out.
6. Target rolls Vigor to check for stunning if they took one or more wounds-- factoring in their shiny new wound penalties at this point.
7. Target suffers some Wind. More if they took multiple wounds' worth of damage.

So, yeah, Deadlands (an actual published system which achieved some success) has you beat on steps. And that was just an overview, leaving out all the things that happen between attacks that make the combat even longer. However, as much as me and the other 3 Deadlands fanatics on the planet love this system, it is way too complicated. A 1- or 2-round combat in Deadlands easily takes as long as 5 or 6 rounds in any other game. This is balanced a bit by the fact that 1 or 2 rounds is all it generally takes for someone to be down and bleeding. But dear lord is the system clunky.

Basically, what I'm saying is this: If you're looking to make a system more realistic, you'll be losing yourself a good chunk of your audience just because combat will end up cumbersome as all hell. But, if you really want realism (or some approximation thereof), that's a choice you'll have to make.

Other clunkiness in Deadlands includes: rolling for initiative each round, having 10 basic attributes, needing different numbers of different kinds of dice for skill rolls, using a 52-card deck instead of dice for a bunch of different things, and the chance that anything more complicated than a pistol will break/explode with each use (mad science). But I love this system for its very awkwardness, like a baby walrus.

</gush>

More simplified, still-kinda-realistic system: Deathwatch.

1. Attack roll (d%).
2. Chance for defender to parry/dodge/react.
3. Damage roll.
4. Damage is soaked by armor at location (location determined by attack roll-- attack roll of 37 would yield a location result of 73, which was I believe one of the legs). One point of armor soaks one point of damage per attack.
5. If damage reduces a character's wounds to the negatives, something gory happens to the location hit, culminating with death at -9/-10 or less.

There's also an optional rule where if the damage left unsoaked by armor is equal to or greater than that location's armor value, the armor value will be reduced. Or something like that.

CarpeGuitarrem
2013-02-07, 08:38 PM
Actually...

You're remarkably close to Burning Wheel, but you've added a couple layers of complication.

Here's how BW does it. First, the attacker and defender assemble dice pools (it uses a d6 dice pool system, just like your game), and roll them. Second, if the attacker scored more successes, they potentially injure the defender. Third, there is no damage roll. For every two extra successes (i.e., if the attacker rolled 5 and the defender rolled 3 successes, that's two extra successes), the attacker may bump their weapon's damage up; it starts at the weakest rating and goes to "better" and then "best". Fourth, there is no hit location. Attacks go to the chest by default, and the attacker may spend a success to shift the attack to a limb. Finally, the defender rolls armor dice, and tries to get a single success (armor is usually one or two dice), which would negate all damage.

That's a long explanation for what's a very simple process. In practice, here's how it goes: Attacker and Defender roll; if the attacker wins, they assign extra successes to get a beefy wound (or to hit a limb, if they feel like it); the defender rolls armor dice to maybe negate the wound.

(Armor can be damaged: if you roll a 1 on the armor roll, you lose one die from that part of the armor.)

Ozfer
2013-02-07, 08:50 PM
Wow, thank you so much. I really appreciate the hard truth :smallbiggrin:. Honestly, I knew the system was too much, I think I just needed someone to confirm it for me. One issue in particular are the chances within chances within chances to deal damage.

All of your tips are really helpful. I will never cease to be amazed by how great this site's community is.

And Carpe, Burning Wheel is actually a major inspiration for this system, but I disliked a few things about it that I won't go into now. Also, there were some things I didn't necessarily dislike, I just felt they could be better.

Jack of Spades-
That's certainly encouraging, but I still think I should cut down on steps. Or maybe even include this as an alternate system for people who do want that extra layer of realism. In fact, I even had that system with the dodging until I cut it for streamlining!

I guess I'll just keep working at it :). Again, thank you so much.

FreakyCheeseMan
2013-02-07, 08:50 PM
Actually, one of the best RPG experiences I had was with Deadlands, even though we only played for a few sessions.

I don't remember the combat being that bad, but that was mostly because we avoided most fights by virtue of my character's crazy eyes. The one fight we did get into ended so quickly that none of our enemies even got an action.

Jack of Spades
2013-02-07, 09:00 PM
Jack of Spades-
That's certainly encouraging, but I still think I should cut down on steps. Or maybe even include this as an alternate system for people who do want that extra layer of realism. In fact, I even had that system with the dodging until I cut it for streamlining!
A very wise choice. :smallbiggrin:

prufock
2013-02-08, 10:48 AM
Yeah, I'd consolidate some of the rolls, FATE-style. Giving you something like:

The attacker calls his target.
Attacker rolls his fighting skill.
Defender rolls his blocking skill.
Damage equals extra hits + Strength - Armor. No rolling here.
I guess then you'd roll your "pain dice." (I'd fold armor damage into this step somehow)


This is VERY similar to what I did with my D6 homebrew system (used for one-shot games - horror, space adventures, etc). Much of it was copied from the official D6 system. Six stats like D&D. Roll STR (melee) or DEX (ranged) to hit vs opponents DEX to dodge. Number of dice on which you beat the defender is damage, which decreases their CON score.

Basically in my system, every type of "attack" - be it a fist, a gun, magic, psionics, horror - targets a stat, and lowers it based on comparing the attacker and defender's rolls. It's simple, rules-light, quick to generate, easy to make decisions, and (usually) fun.

Ozfer
2013-02-08, 02:27 PM
That's a really interesting way to do it.

HC Rainbow
2013-02-08, 07:04 PM
Phew man, I read about half of your system and knew it was too much, The best advice I can give is look it over step by step and think which parts of it sound redundant, which ones sound like they arent needed.

Personally I dont think it should ever been a straight battle of rolls. One of my Players right now rolls 20's on a bi-roll basis. Its quite obnoxious being a DM when he natural 20's nearly everything.

Back on topic. Numbers are better than chance usually. and if its a bunch of rolls with a bit of numbers on top, I would try to flip that.

Ozfer
2013-02-08, 08:46 PM
Huh. That too is an interesting insight. I mean, some of the finer points I didn't explain here, so there are more tactics and such, but I see what you're saying. Thanks :).