Castle Defense Combat Engine (Rulebook)

Welcome. Please, take a chair.

The fairly generic draft that's being typed here is what's left of the CDCE -- a game engine ment to a specific gameworld (Yes, Castle Defense) I was developing before an HD crash took everything with him. Understand that I do intend to someday to publish this stuff in paper and reap the profits, but I'm not looking much foward ever taking down a free version of the book. Mebbe even in a proper PDF.

Surprisingly, how the gameworld was isn' much important for this book; the engine in itself is meant to be portable but not necessarily generic. Therefore, all 'gameworld-specific stuff' will be made as another book, at a later date. To put in context, it was a 'future fantasy' human-centric world, with the characters as soldiers; but by itself, the Combat Engine is meant to work in anything around Modern settings.

Well. Enough chit-chat, eh?

Principles and Concepts

The Castle Defense Combat Engine (from now on, referred as CDCE) is ruleset in development, inspired mostly by Shadowrun, GURPS and D20 (in that order). The point is trying to get a scalable abstract ruleset - something you could use both in a one-on-one encounter, and a dragon-versus-platoon situation.

The characters (or group of characters) are measured by its abilities in many situations (fighting, athletics, social, survival, driving, repairing and simply knowing), augmented or hindered by non-mensurable characteristics (habit with lasers, ability to run on fours, trained to snipe, incapable of picking pencils). While part of their sheets is rollable numbers, most of the engine works with steps or levels of some kind.

Dicerolling follows the principle of 'the harder the task, the more dice you roll' -- which has a corollary you'll see alot, 'the more dice you roll, the better'.