Dynamic combat engine

[Day_Dreamer]

I'm working on an engine for a game, and am interested in getting feedback.

The system:

Each player has a pool of 6d6 they can allocate to various actions per turn. They can't allocate more than a set limit (generally 4 dice, some skills have other restrictions) to a single action. Actions are things like attacking, defending, moving, coordinating people, or trying a combat maneuver.

Players add the result of the rolled dice to a set value based on a relevant skill; moving could be climbing, swimming, or acrobatics, and players would gain a different bonus to the roll based on their score in the relevant skill.

There are a bunch of other add-ons; various abilities cost dice to activate, or limit the ability of an enemy to use their dice.

Thoughts? Curious about more details?

[Epsilon Rose]

Interesting, but I would think you'd end up spreading your dice way too thing if pretty much everything you can do requires them.

[Day_Dreamer]

Interesting, but I would think you'd end up spreading your dice way too thing if pretty much everything you can do requires them.

Depends on the context, really. Looking for stealthed people can be difficult if you're in a pitched battle, and being a barbarian in rage dramatically increases your base attack stats at the cost of your pool, but if all you're doing is standing and fighting you really only have 2-3 pools you care about period (initiative, defense, offense), and everyone is forced to make the same tradeoffs. Allocating 2-3 dice is totally viable and encouraged even for significant things if you have good base stats in it.

Its also worth noting (I forgot before), combat is fought in a zone-based system somewhat similar to that from the Dresden Files RPG. Basically, you're only going to be rolling dice to move if you're trying something fancy, engaging a tricky enemy, or crossing into a different zone. Once you're in the thick of it, movement isn't important except for rogues or similar builds, who get tricks to conserve dice. There's a group of class features whereby certain pools can be used for more things, or you can take back some of the dice of a pool after a successful action.

[Dornith]

I like the idea. For defending you'd have to replace the armor class with an armor modifier or something, but that's doable.

The only thing I can think of is that this would make combat a lot more involved (which is probably what you're going for) but it could start to overshadow non-combat portions of the game.

Also, I read a variant somewhere about using 2d10 instead of a d20 to increase regularity. Something like that could work better to help it scale with normal modifiers. So instead of 6d6, you could have 4d10, thus a player could split into 2d10 for attacking and 2d10 for blocking which would be very similar to how D&D is at the moment.

Also, how would spells work? Would you allocate dice for that, but then not use them? Or would you have to roll a DC equal to the spell level?

[Kree West]

The initial description is a little confusing, at first I thought that the players on character creation rolled 6d6 to determine how much they had to spend. I think to fully evaluate it we would need more details. How do offense and defense interact? Do you have stats that act as bonuses to a lot of skills? It seems like a good way to make combat less 'roll to hit, roll for damage'. However against a single big monster, you would need to give the creature a lot of dice to compensate.

[Day_Dreamer]

I like the idea. For defending you'd have to replace the armor class with an armor modifier or something, but that's doable.

The only thing I can think of is that this would make combat a lot more involved (which is probably what you're going for) but it could start to overshadow non-combat portions of the game.

Also, I read a variant somewhere about using 2d10 instead of a d20 to increase regularity. Something like that could work better to help it scale with normal modifiers. So instead of 6d6, you could have 4d10, thus a player could split into 2d10 for attacking and 2d10 for blocking which would be very similar to how D&D is at the moment.

Also, how would spells work? Would you allocate dice for that, but then not use them? Or would you have to roll a DC equal to the spell level?

This isn't actually a D&D mod, so defending is actually more like using a save; different skills are used on defense depending on the exact nature of the attack. They system really needs >=6 dice in your base pool, because you can easily have 4 or more things you want to do in a given action, and choosing how to allocate your dice is kind of the point of the system.

This is definitely a combat engine. I have some ideas of how one could adapt it for more social or intellectual feats, but it is a bit clunky.

The spellcasting system I'm currently mapping out (although I ultimately want two) is a bit... weird.

Sorcery (the spellcasting system) lets you learn new spells. Each spell has its own skill that you'll want to invest a bit in. Casting a spell increases your Flux, which makes your spells more powerful but harder to control.
There are two different spellcasting pools: power and concentration. Power is based on your Flux, and it the attack your enemy will need to defend against. Your control is based on your skill with the spell, and if your roll is less than your Flux, something bad happens.

(example: Jill the pyromaniac casts a fireball spell to hit everyone in an adjacent zone. Her current Flux is 11, and fireball adds 3. She decides to invest ONE dice in power, and rolls a 4. Her total power is (11+4). Her fireball skill is 6, so she decides to roll TWO dice in control, but only rolls a 1 and 2 (6 + 1 + 2). Since that's less than her Flux, she suffers Feedback, and the spell explodes in her face).

The other spellcasting system is designed to be more like Avatar the Last Airbender meets Naruto, based much more in existing skills and using elements in the environment to power effects, but is too much of a WiP for me to talk about right now.

[Day_Dreamer]

The initial description is a little confusing, at first I thought that the players on character creation rolled 6d6 to determine how much they had to spend. I think to fully evaluate it we would need more details. How do offense and defense interact? Do you have stats that act as bonuses to a lot of skills? It seems like a good way to make combat less 'roll to hit, roll for damage'. However against a single big monster, you would need to give the creature a lot of dice to compensate.

Stuff!
There are a number of skills. About 30. Skills have logarithmic return for investment in character creation (1 point for a +2, 3 points for a +4, 6 points for a +6, 10 points for a +8). Maybe 12 skills are directly relevant in combat, depending heavily on build choices, but you won't need all of them.

An Attack hits if it is equal to or surpasses the opponent's Block roll. You may allocate dice to your Block pool upon being attacked, and reroll them with each attack. If an Attack hits, it inflicts some damage based on the weapon, and possibly some special stuff happens.

Dice are a measurement of flexibility rather than power. Powerful entities have really good base skills. Something that's can rapidly swap between expertise might have poor base skills but more dice. An ogre, for example, might have a huge bonus to attack, but only have four dice to use per round. Combat would revolve around trying to bait out attacks against the best defending player while the rest take advantage of the notable lack of defense and flexibility.

[Dornith]

Stuff!
There are a number of skills. About 30. Skills have logarithmic return for investment in character creation (1 point for a +2, 3 points for a +4, 6 points for a +6, 10 points for a +8). Maybe 12 skills are directly relevant in combat, depending heavily on build choices, but you won't need all of them.

I would avoid using any form of upper math (upper math being anything above Algebra 1), If players have to do all kinds of calculations to figure out their stats, they're more likely to see it as work and just lose interest. Heck, with D&D I see new players get confused just figuring out what stats to add together; I can't imagine teaching someone a system with logarithms.
I found that if you want something to get harder, it might be better to look at what else you can change that the player doesn't have to worry about.

[Day_Dreamer]

I would avoid using any form of upper math (upper math being anything above Algebra 1), If players have to do all kinds of calculations to figure out their stats, they're more likely to see it as work and just lose interest. Heck, with D&D I see new players get confused just figuring out what stats to add together; I can't imagine teaching someone a system with logarithms.
I found that if you want something to get harder, it might be better to look at what else you can change that the player doesn't have to worry about.

Logarithms are the backend stuff. From a player's perspective, they need to spend a lot of points to get a skill to a high number, and a lot less points for a base investment. I've run a system with the same mechanic, and it wasn't that big of a deal.

[Kree West]

The logarithms don't seem like a problem at all. All the players see is something similar to the point buy system. This defiantly seems like fun to play. Not sure about the high stats but low dice. Once they get into melee its just a matter of 3 dice to attack and defense and 1 to maneuvers. One question though, if you spend 3d6 in attack is that +3d6 to one attack, 3 attacks with +1d6, or is it like D&D and this acts a bit like BAB?

[Day_Dreamer]

The logarithms don't seem like a problem at all. All the players see is something similar to the point buy system. This defiantly seems like fun to play. Not sure about the high stats but low dice. Once they get into melee its just a matter of 3 dice to attack and defense and 1 to maneuvers. One question though, if you spend 3d6 in attack is that +3d6 to one attack, 3 attacks with +1d6, or is it like D&D and this acts a bit like BAB?

You can do it as either. Some abilities let you split more favorably. Since damage generally doesn't care about threshold successes, a flurry of weak blows can be effective against an enemy with poor defenses, but is a risky maneuver.

The combat can result in a 3 attack 3 defense model if two melee combatants fight each other, but there are pretty strong incentives to be doing other stuff in a group fight, or if you're a ranged character.

Some zones also have "challenges" in them that give the winner a bonus to things. Think of this like, say, the sword-fight from the Princess Bride; the environment itself has a bunch of parts you can interact with to try to get an edge on your enemy. Combatants can try to succeed at the challenge and if they win by enough of a margin, they get a bonus on certain actions until they enemy manages to take it away. The core engine tests I did had enough circumstantial variation for people to want to mix up their dice allocations, so I'm pretty confident once all the class stuff is in place there'll be serious decisions about how and when to commit dice.


High stat is going to be +10, btw. That represents mastery of a field, and is worth about 3 normal dice.

[MoleMage]

Is it cool if I use a modified version of this for a personal project? I'm not sure which one yet but I like where your head's at so I'm sure I'll want to try it at some point in the future.

[Day_Dreamer]

Completely. If you want to exchange ideas for where to go from the core engine, shoot me a PM. I'm pretty far into development with the thing I'm running on top of this, and am curious where other people can take it.

Is it cool if I use a modified version of this for a personal project? I'm not sure which one yet but I like where your head's at so I'm sure I'll want to try it at some point in the future.

[AttilaTheGeek]

Actually, I've recently been thinking about a combat engine that's similar to this. However, in my idea, dice wouldn't be an abstraction of how you spend your turn, they would literally represent the amount of time you spent on various actions, and there would be modifiers to how long different actions would take. For example, if a round is four seconds (though a round could be defined to be shorter or longer), then each person would have eight dice to spend per round because each die literally represents a half of a second.

A dagger is a light, fast weapon, so maybe it only takes half a second (one die from your pool) to attack with a dagger. But, since a dagger is small, it only deals a small amount of damage: one die. If a character is instead wielding a bigger, heavier greatsword, maybe it takes two seconds to make an attack (four dice), but it also rolls four dice for damage because it's bigger. Weapons that are bigger take more time (that is, dice) to attack, but also deal more damage, so the dice rolled for attack and for damage could even be the same.

There'd have to be a table that says "for each weapon, it takes this long to attack and is this good at blocking", and some way to represent that you can't possibly block a greatsword with a dagger, but that was the basic idea I had. Maybe you want to incorporate it into your system?

[Day_Dreamer]

Actually, I've recently been thinking about a combat engine that's similar to this. However, in my idea, dice wouldn't be an abstraction of how you spend your turn, they would literally represent the amount of time you spent on various actions, and there would be modifiers to how long different actions would take. For example, if a round is four seconds (though a round could be defined to be shorter or longer), then each person would have eight dice to spend per round because each die literally represents a half of a second.

A dagger is a light, fast weapon, so maybe it only takes half a second (one die from your pool) to attack with a dagger. But, since a dagger is small, it only deals a small amount of damage: one die. If a character is instead wielding a bigger, heavier greatsword, maybe it takes two seconds to make an attack (four dice), but it also rolls four dice for damage because it's bigger. Weapons that are bigger take more time (that is, dice) to attack, but also deal more damage, so the dice rolled for attack and for damage could even be the same.

There'd have to be a table that says "for each weapon, it takes this long to attack and is this good at blocking", and some way to represent that you can't possibly block a greatsword with a dagger, but that was the basic idea I had. Maybe you want to incorporate it into your system?

Similar mindset, but not sure how applicable a lot of the ideas are. What I'm trying to do is let players have a lot of choices and decisions involving what they can and want to do in a given turn. Locking them into spending X dice on a given action seems a bit restrictive. Plus, it'll result in some weird math depending on how DR and such works. Also, I'm not sure how this would work if you can spend dice on things like Initiative.

I'm definitely looking a lot of weapon types and interplay between them though. Currently I have five different Melee Weapon Types (short blades, long blades, bludgeons, polearms and heavy weapons) each of which has a different Main Trait. Heavy Weapons get a bonus against Blocks and Parries. Polearms have Reach. Short Blades give Dodge Bonuses. Long Blades have Weapon Trick (like disarm, etc) bonuses. Bludgeons get a lesser bonus against Blocks and Parries, although I might mix that up. Within each Weapon Type, specific weapons have tradeoffs of attack bonuses, parry bonuses, misc. traits, and damage.

[Doorhandle]

Speaking of combat engine ideas, I have a fairly brillant one:

Conservation of ninjutsu: each side in a conflict has the same number of dice.

So for instance, if 5 players were fighting 5000 generic ninja, each player would have six dice for a total of 30 for their side, while at most 30 of the ninja could act, and not very copetently at that as they would have 1 die each. Likewise, if it was 5 verses one über ninja, said über ninja would get 30 dice and could easily keep pace with the action economy of the players. Thoughts?

[Day_Dreamer]

Speaking of combat engine ideas, I have a fairly brillant one:

Conservation of ninjutsu: each side in a conflict has the same number of dice.

So for instance, if 5 players were fighting 5000 generic ninja, each player would have six dice for a total of 30 for their side, while at most 30 of the ninja could act, and not very competently at that as they would have 1 die each. Likewise, if it was 5 verses one über ninja, said über ninja would get 30 dice and could easily keep pace with the action economy of the players. Thoughts?

Given how the pure math stuff works out, 30 1-dice enemies would be pretty trivial to beat, but the idea is totally right and exactly what I'm looking for. One of the issues with the system is it makes tracking tons of enemies a pain in the ass; managing groups of foes by giving them a single dice pool (somewhat like a Swarm) just makes sense. For a new system if you wan't to make this, it might be a totally awesome base engine, but not sure how it would work in the framework I'm operating in.

How about this: there are three types of enemies: mooks, foes (name?), and bosses.

Mooks act with set stats, and don't get to allocate bosses. A mook might always attack with 6+1d6, and defend with 4+1d6. Mooks all die in a single hit, probably.

Foes are smaller groups of enemies than act with one collective dice pool. A group of six Foes might have 6d6 total to play with, but collectively allocates dice. Foes might also share a Hit Point track, but one dies immediately upon taking a Wound (Wounds reduce your Dice Pool), and their Hit Points reset.

Bosses are single characters who allocate their dice on an individual basis. They function basically like a PC, but with overall better stats.

This would let a GM fill a room with the Six Ninja Lords and the agents of the Clan of the Black Claw fairly easily, only needing to keep track of the number of generic ninjas left alive, and a single Character worth of other stuff.