Deadly Combat

Submitted by Obnomauk on Sun, 2008-02-17 17:43. Feedback | Mechanics

In general I tend to favor systems where combat is lethal. Meaning one or two blows from a sword can kill a character or average monster. But finding that balance where the PC's aren't dieing on a regular basis nor is combat taking four hours to complete proves difficult.

I wonder what the preference is for everyone:

as I see it there are a few options to increase survivability

1) decrease damage done
2) increase Life Force
3) use passive and active resistance to lower damage to characters.

Just looking for thoughts on the subject.

-Obnomauk

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luck points

Submitted by Extreme gb4evr on Tue, 2008-08-19 05:26.

sometimes characters have a bad roll, and some characters are so weak they need a hand, in any case a luck system would help. one luck point equals a reroll or a bouns to damage or whatever, hand out three and hope for the best. also dial back the bad guys, cut the damage they deal or create something like an event ie a barrel of oil to shoot at or something to do in a last stitch effort.

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Damage and Death

Submitted by Chainsaw Aardvark on Mon, 2008-02-18 15:45.

Two other options might fit your needs:

First, you could use a hero point mechanic. Players could have a meta game ability that can be used to reduce or negate damage. This could mean spend a point to avoid a lethal blow (or to reduce a lethal hit to mere unconsciousness + some penalty), use X points to negate Y damage (with the ratio and size of pool being other variables), or a similar concept. Some games have you spend Experience for such an event, while others have a specific mechanic.

Secondly, the damage inflicted or negated could be somehow related to skill. Perhaps the skill itself is added to damage/subtracted from wounds, or the degree of success/failure comes into play. Dream Pod 9's house system works to this effect - the damage of the weapon is multiplied by the degree the attackers roll beats the defenders.

Of course, all of these methods can be combined as you see fit.

Just increasing HP will tend to drag things out as players watch for points to ablate. While resistances are nice, and help show different types of armor - their problem is that you can have situations where foes can't damage each other, or possibly worse - where only some players are effective and others aren't. (D20 offers an illustration of this - when you have a fighter with +15 and a mage with +2 - the latter has no chance to hit targets that challenge the warrior, and anything the mage can deal with is a pushover for the other player.)

One of the aforementioned hero mechanics means that technically their still on par with everyone, they just have the power of the spotlight to help them.

Depending of how cinematic you want things to get, there are a number of other fun ways to mod the system. Perhaps armor while adding some protection, represents a large penalty to strike and defend so the emphasis is on light unarmored individuals. (As with movies - mooks wear face concealing armor, heros don't...)

There is a fine line between hobby and obsession. I seem to have lost sight of it some time ago.

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Damage the Damage

Submitted by Obnomauk on Mon, 2008-02-18 22:43.

Currently the mechanic in place is this:

Passive resistance from armor is in place, from 10 - 25 points

Active resistance in the form of a skill can reduce damage if used sucessfully

skills are used to attack with a weapon, the effectiveness of that skill is applied as such: Efectiveness - Passive Resistance - Active resistance

Life Force can range from 30 - 150 (or so)

Effectiveness can range from 1d10+5 for unarmed attacks to 6d10+5 for attacks with powerful weapons.

On a particularly good success the character can score from 1 to 3 "finesse" increasing the effectiveness by 1d10 each to give a max damage of 9d10+5 so a max of 95 points of damage.

But even given active resistance (up to a max of 45) and passive resistance (up to a max of 25 so 70 points total) the characters (and monsters) prove to be amazingly mortal.

there is a mechanic for the expenditure of points to modify success (potentially giving a finesse) or to allow for a re-roll of a failure. It may be easy enough to also allow the players to use points to reduce damage inflicted on them or require the attacker to re-roll...

Thanks for the feedback!

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