To fuse attack and damage, or not?

[xBlackWolfx]

Its something i've been chewing over for a while now. Is it really necessary to have an 'attack bonus' and 'damage' be seperate stats? Some systems out there (like tunnels and trolls) don't bother with such. Its also difficult to balance the two, with high-attack characters typically being superior to high-damage characters.

Is there really any benefit to seperating attack from damage, outside the fact that having a single 'attack' stats looks sorta amateurish?

[Altair_the_Vexed]

Plenty of systems turn your attack success directly into damage.

I assume you're asking cause you're making your own system, or a homebrew variant of something.

What you'll need to deal with is the idea that weapons that deal more damage will need a bonus to attack of some sort - or alternately, I suppose you could add the extra damage after a successful hit... but that may reduce the elegance of having just one attack resolution mechanic.

I suppose if a small weapon (dagger, perhaps) grants no bonus damage, then a large weapon (greataxe or whatever) might grant one step of extra damage.
Or you could have larger weapons deal a minimum damage threshold, perhaps - so that massive damage tends to be based on skill, rather than on the weapon, but a realistic bottom end applies. You don't want a big axe dealing piddly little injuries, I guess.

[Deepbluediver]

I'm a little confused, are you are asking if it is possible to combine attack rolls and damage rolls into one single action? Our are you just asking if there should be one single number like a "melee combat bonus" that applies to both attack rolls and damage rolls?

[NichG]

There are some weirdnesses if you aren't careful. For example, often smaller creatures are considered to have a bonus in attacking bigger, slower creatures. If you have a combined stat, this translates to smaller creatures effectively doing more damage.

The other thing is if you want to have things that add a bit, you have to worry about everything going into one to-hit number when using attack. For example, if someone strikes a creature using a log that has been set on fire, it would do some bludgeoning damage and some fire damage in D&D and resists/DR/etc would apply separately. In an attack-only system you could still do this by having conditional bonuses (+3 to hit if they aren't immune to fire) but it gets a little conceptually weird.

You're also sacrificing mechanical hooks - things to differentiate weapons, abilities, etc. Its harder to make a sword and a mace different now, without adding some other system to replace the complexity you got rid of.

In some sense a damage-only system might work better than attack-only system. Assume all attacks hit, and the only thing is how much damage the attack does. Then you can keep something like miss chance as a special/rare thing to retain some mechanical diversity without having to track increasing hit bonuses. Since damage feels like it more naturally divides out into multiple sources, I think that works a bit better.

All that said, I'm currently working on a homebrew system that was initially sort of attack-only. Generally speaking, a successful hit just kills the target, but you have resources you can use to dodge the hit after you see the attack roll. As such, the attack roll essentially determines how much you have to bid to not die, and the points you're bidding act like a hitpoint track. I ended up relenting a little bit and had something akin to damage - a hit didn't necessarily immediately kill, but instead it basically did stat damage; if you had a resistance to the type of damage you might take two or three hits to drop instead of one.

[Yakk]

I think "soaking" a hit and "dodging" a hit are sufficiently different things that I'd want some in-system support for them being different.

As an example, suppose you generalized hit dice. Instead of being HP, you kept your pool of dice. Hit dice are what you use to "soak" hits.

When you take damage, you roll your hit dice until you exceed the damage you took. You then lose those hit dice until you recover them.

You would also have dodge dice, which you could use to avoid being hit. The enemy would roll their attack dice, which determines how accurate their attack is. You'd roll your dodge dice, plus circumstance dice (you have cover, so +1d8, and it is long range, so +1d12). Dodge dice would similarly be "used up" until recovered.

In order to defeat an attack, you have to defeat either the accuracy OR the damage with your defensive dice -- dodge it, or soak it. So the attacker rolls both, and then you pick how you defend.