[Game Unnamed Yet] My Combat Model is Running Out Of Control
Amphetryon:
This is a fantasy RPG I'm working on. Link to the combat rules. Specific issues I'm grappling with to date:
This system will need additional tweaks to handle combat outside the presented 1-on-1 model, as it would just get ugly, quickly, in its current state.Rules for ranged weapons, both fired and thrown, are sorely lacking because I'm unsure how to model them without changing some of the established parameters significantly.As the designer, my own perception of whether the combat is balanced, or heavily weighted toward either one-hit kills or painfully prolonged fights, is suspect.
I'm particularly looking for feedback on the above points, though I'd obviously appreciate folks pointing out glaring issues not addressed above. Design influences for the combat model are primarily Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game, 2e, and Wu Xing: The Ninja Crusade, if the references are helpful.
stefoid:
Admission: I only scanned your doco. but multi-character conflicts ARE hard. I can offer the solution I used, maybe it can give you some ideas.
I categorised all possible actions as being either: 'acting neutrally', 'acting directly against another character', 'retaliation against another character', and resisting (defending only)
The arbitrary rule I added, purely to simplify the kind of out of control complexity you are worried about is 'a character may only have one type of action/retaliation per round, but as many instances of resist as required"
ORDER OF PLAY:
Often the order of play occurs without having to think about it much, but when complex, multi-character conflict occurs, the following is the suggested order:
1. GM asks “Who is acting neutrally ?” Every character that wants to do something that isn’t a direct attempt to overcome or interfere with another character must state their intention now.
2. GM asks “Who is acting offensively?” Every character that wants to overcome or interfere with another character must state their intention, and their target now.
3. GM asks “Who is reacting or resisting?” Now every targeted character must state their intended reaction or resistance now. This includes characters who were intending to act neutrally – they have a chance to change their intentions in light of being targeted.
4. Any character that hasn’t got an intention by now does nothing of consequence. At this point, either the GM or the character’s player can narrate why that is the case.
Your additional complication is that every type of action is timed to 0.5s granularity. Perhaps that is the first thing you can look at abstracting away, in order to reduce complexity?
Chris_Chinn:
Hi Amphetryon,
Welcome to the Forge!
Have you had a chance to playtest or try any of this in play?
Actions
There's a lot of games that have really detailed combat rules that are ideal at 1 vs. 1 combat, and can scale up to 5 vs. 5, provided the GM is organized, so if you're looking to stay within that scale, this seems manageable. If you're looking to go larger than that, that's when things start to get complicated.
One thing that might be worth considering is this: is it necessary to track 20-segments of actions or would it be easier to simply track 4-5 "possible actions"? In a way, this is effectively what D&D has done since 3rd edition with "Standard/Move/Full" being basically a 2 section combat action - except, of course, with 4-5 you actually have a lot of tactical options to use.
Ranged Combat
It seems like ranged combat would fit into your system just fine. The two big questions are:
1. Do ranged attacks work at the same "speed" as melee? That is, would just making an "attack action" cover it, or would you want to make ranged attackers spend a "Draw/Load" action and/or an "Aim" action before they could attack?
2. Does ranged defense depend primarily on an opposed roll, the target's distance, movement, and cover, or what?
Judgment
So, a lot of games range from one-hit fights to long battles- where do you want your game to land? Do you want to see one or both ends of the scale occasionally, and if so, how often? It's your game, you set what you want it to be, and you can playtest and adjust until you have something you're happy with.
Pretty much the big question everyone gets here at the Forge is "What do you want your game to do?" - because when you tell everyone what your goal is, then we can start giving good examples of games or mechanics that do similar things, or bring up ideas that might meet that.
Chris
Amphetryon:
Thanks for the input so far, guys.
@Stefoid:
I will consider further the "aggressive/neutral/passive" model you've posited, but right now I'm not sure how much further tweaking its inclusion would require.
@Chris_Chinn
All I've had the chance to do so far is brainstorm combats with some other helpful critique-providers.
What I'd call a design goal of the 20 segment system and the 'buffet table' of actions is to make a combat round both well-defined and fluid. Well-defined means that we know how long it takes for everyone to get a turn. Fluid means that actions that don't fit neatly into those time packets feel less artificially constrained than the 3e D&D model you mentioned, where, for example, a good enough Jump check causes you to take 2 rounds to land. Let me know if that doesn't make sense, please.
re: Ranged Combat... I would ideally like to model a 'Draw/Quickfire' option as well as a 'Draw/Aim/Fire' option that makes Ranged Combat marginally less efficient than normal melee attacks, as a price paid for being generally less vulnerable to counterattack. Ideally, most of the actions of the game - in and out of combat - will depend primarily on opposed roll, and secondarily on skill, with range and cover and such being tertiary concerns.
As far as combat lethality is concerned, the intent is to make a combat system that feels inherently dangerous while only being truly deadly in exceptional circumstances; I would like "running away" to seem a viable, intelligent option without making it the default. (On that note, the movement in combat rules probably warrant additional scrutiny, as situations where it's effectively impossible to engage in combat may be too likely at present). To refer back to the 3e D&D model, I do not want injuries to work on the binary system of 'full capacity or dead' model they used, which is why I wanted an Injury Threshold system. Combat of 3 rounds or more will, ideally, be a dangerous thing, but dying before you get a chance to respond should be all but impossible. I'd like combat against multiple foes to get exponentially more difficult for every instance in which you're outnumbered two to one.
btrc:
I may be the biggest rule, mechanic and realism geek here, so I'll chime in on the rules so far:
Generic first things for anyone trying to model something, either "realisitically" or "genre-realistically":
1) Know your limits. Example: If your ability to model something is not at a 1% level, don't use percentile dice as a resolution system or a 1% scale of skill or attribute improvement. It would just add complexity without adding any realism.
2) People do not want to leaf through rules in the middle of a fight. Make as much of the situation as intuitive as possible, and failing that, make it as structured and straightforward as possible (i.e. step 1, step 2, step 3), with as much consistency as you can manage.
Attributes:
I can envision situations in which balance and coordination are entirely separate attributes, but most of the time this would be due to a physical defect rather than an inherent bodily nature. Very few Stradivarius players are fumble-footed (low balance), and I imagine most Olympic gymnasts have no trouble tying their shoes (low coordination). In a melee-heavy system, the correspondence between the two attributes should be very high, so is it necessary to have both attributes?
Round structure:
Half-second seems a bit fine for a melee-heavy system. Granted, this allows for a lot of neat, specific actions, but a melee combat is going to resolve in aggregate based on the overall skill, armor and weapon differential. If the final outcome is the most important result, then the fewest steps that get there with the most drama is more desireable than a lot of mechanical steps that get there with the most number-crunching.
Combat:
I can add, subtract, multiply, divide and do cube roots in my head, so personally, I have to strongly curb the urge to put complex math into mechanics. Anything in multiplication that involves rounding is probably not a great idea in a combat step.
I concur with others that your system can bog in other than 1-on-1. Since your attributes are already reflected in your chance to hit (I presume), a separate comparison step with each opponent does not seem to be necessary prior to the die roll. Just have your attribute affect your die roll and their attribute affects theirs.
Muscle modifier: Is this always a positive value? If not, then you get unusual damage results because of your weapon use limits.
Dice rolls: Need to do what they are supposed to do, but with as few dice rolls as possible. Sometimes it is possible to combine rolls to do multiple game mechanic functions, sometimes it is not. For instance, you could have the chance that a gun jams be part of an attack roll, or link damage to the quality of success on an attack roll. I'm specifically looking at your criticals, which tack an extra roll onto things, but which you might be able to do without. Similarly, you have a 1 to X spread on weapon damages and a 1 to X combat roll. You might be able to get away with something like:
weapon damage is the amount your roll beats your opponent's roll:
+2 if you are using a light weapon
+4 if you are using a medium weapon
+6 if you are using a heavy weapon
+0 if making a "light" attack
+muscle mod if making a normal attack
+muscle mod + 2 if making a heavy attack
At first glance, this might give you most of the variability you desire in damage effects, but with several fewer rolls and no multiplying. I'm not sure if it gives too much variability on light weapons and not enough on heavies, but I'm just throwing it out as an example of streamlining.
Greg Porter
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