An idea for a combat system that occurred to me in the bath. The goals are 1) to reduce the need for hit-counting, and 2) to cope better with larger power-differentials, so that a horde of peasants attacking an armoured knight can achieve very little but not absolutely nothing, without needing to resort to damage calls like "one sixth".
It works as follows:
- Everyone has a damage grade and an armour grade.
- The first blow you land on an enemy in an encounter, you call your damage grade.
- The second blow you land, you call that number plus one, the third blow is that number plus two, and so on. (N.B. these blows don't all have to be on the same enemy, but do all have to be on enemies)
- If you take a blow with a call equal to or below your armour grade, you ignore it; if you take a blow with a call higher than it, you take a Hit.
- Hits could be administered in any number of ways - the simplest would be that you have one hit per location, and if you take it then that location is out of commission; more hits per location would also be possible but probably superfluous.
Some side effects of this would be:
- All you have to keep track of is your own current damage call and your armour rating.
- A competent knight with a high armour rating can wade through a horde of peasants unharmed, but it is still theoretically possible for them to hurt him.
- In a fight with a boss (hard to kill, i.e. high armour rating) and minions (easier to kill), it makes sense to fight the minions rather than the boss while you are "charging up".
- Where the end of an encounter is becomes more important to mark.
- Continuous respawning encounters would be far less of a challenge - by the time you're past the first wave, you're powerered up and can chew through all the others. Discrete wave encounters would work fine, though.
It's also fairly easy to bolt on limit-use effects, buffs etc for a more gamist experience, if you want to:
- Add N (large) to your damage call for one blow, for samurai-type first-strikers - this is extremely powerful unless you're using a version with multiple hits.
- Add n (small) to your damage call or armour rating for a time period (one day, one encounter etc)
- Ignore a certain number of blows
- "Weaken n" - subtract a certain number from a target's armour and/or damage
- "Zap N" - an Nth level blow, resisted by armour as usual.
- "Drain" - your damage grade is set back down to its base level.
- For one encounter, power up two levels for each blow you land
The mental processing, it hurts my poor brain. Especially if I'm in plate (value ten, say), and am being hit by 'onetwothreefourfive', 'fourfiveweakenthreeseveneight', 'eleventwelvethirteenfourteenfifteen' and 'threetwelvefivefourteenseven' all at once. (Some of which I actually parried, or hit my shield). --I
- In that situation, you ignore the first person, take one hit per hit (i.e. lose a location each time they hit you, probably) from the third, and complain to the refs that the other two are is cheating or confused (except possibly for the weaken call, which may well be an overcomplication). Damage calls will always come at you in increasing sequences - "sixseveneightnineten" or similar - so that you'll get forewarning that you're about to need to start paying attention, and then you'll start losing bits pretty much the moment you actually do. --Jacob
- I was throwing in some 'add N' effects to make it more complicated. The fact that I need to mentally adjust downwards the scores of everyone who has tried to hit me and missed is just going to make it worse. At any rate, I think *I* would have serious trouble doing all of the above fast enough to work out whether I fall over now, or can run off after the McGuffin?, and I'm quite tolerant of that sort of thing - so I doubt it would be popular with our system-phobes. --I
- The idea is that you seldom if ever need to think "how many of those numbers were above X", just "ooh, there was a number above X, I am down". I think it only works if you take people's calls at face value, even if you think they didn't actually hit - anything else is, as you say, too complicated. --Jacob
- I think you'd be better off telling people to call nothing if their blow was below 4, 'leather' if it was below 6, 'chain' if it was below 8, and 'plate' otherwise, and have them do the counting internally, in that case. Or some equivalent call system which has only as many damage grades as there are armour grades. At that point, I refer you to Inquisitor/ProjectAwesome?, which does something not that dissimilar. --I
Valtiel: I think I'm generally a lot better at taking calls than I am at keeping track of my hits, so I think this seems pretty good on principle. Problems are as follows:
- It's often hard to know if your blow actually connected or was parried. It would be a lot easier if people said "ouch!" and suchlike, but they never do. In TT it only matters if you have something like Bladesharp up, in this system it always matters.
- If the PCs arrive half-way through a pitched battle between a horde of goblins and a troll, they get kerb-stomped because the goblins have been building up their damage calls to the low teens on the troll.
- The "sneaky bugger" style of combat - skulking around avoiding a straight fight and looking for backs to stab - fails, because you don't build up your damage call and when you do find an exposed back your damage call is a paltry "three". Note, there might be powerups that fix this.
- I suspect combat would be very, very "swingy" - one tiny little mistake changes everything. Imagine two groups of four equally-statted opponents - let's say soldiers and orcs - facing off against each other. Most of them fight fairly defensively, but one soldier and one orc go at each other hammer and tongs. The soldier falls to a lucky blow, and the berserk orc - now sporting a damage call high enough to drop all the soldiers in a couple of hits - proceeds to mop up while the others are still on low damage calls due to parrying rather than getting solid hits in. I admit it's a slightly contrived situation, but it should illustrate that one mistake can change the course of battle much more than in TT. In the equivalent situation in TT, the mistake leads to a tough fight - four orcs on three soldiers - but one of the orcs is badly injured already (due to concentrating on dealing damage rather than parrying), and they're all only calling SINGLE. Now imagine that the extra orc was on full hits and calling QUAD, and you'll see why it's nasty.
- Ooh, yes, I hadn't thought of that. One possibility I considered originally was that you use a different damage track for each opponent, rather than for each encounter, which would fix this, but make keeping track of things much harder in situations where you're switching between opponents. Possibly a different damage track for each opponent, resetting every time you switch opponents, so if I hit A three times and then B once, I'm then back to where I started if I start hitting A again - although that has it's own set of drawbacks. --Jacob.