Attack Role Complexity

Matt Miller

The more complex combat is, the more time it takes, the more it becomes the focus of the system.Would it be possible to have three distinct steps in an attack? Mayhem  coupled the two together (one step) so that the margin of hit resulted in more damage dice.

Rob Hicks 

In Mayhem, the roll to hit and the roll for damage were two separate things, but they were interconnected based on the "crit" range, the number by which it the die hit. It worked fairly well, but I was always eyeing it wondering if I couldn't streamline things somehow.

Matt Miller

D20 has two steps for damage: Roll to hit, and then and (independent) roll for damage. My object is to get the final damage number down as low as possible.

What about...a roll to hit, a damage roll, and an armor roll? Roll 1d20 (vs AC), then roll damage (vs. Armor). Rolling damage vs armor is very different from Armor subtracting from damage. Subtracting armor from damage generates 'false hits', where your attacks succeeds...but does not damage.

Players dislike those. But players like critical hits. So the trick is to make the damage roll translate into a count of criticals, with values of 1, 2, or 3. (Call them 'wounds') And that...I am not sure how to do. Not in a balanced, mathematically simple way. DMG minus armr causes 'false hits', while damage/armor is mathematically complex. Presume our damage dice will be regular polygons (d4-d12) with some use of multiple dice.

 A ranked table might work, where >0, >10 and >20 determine if its 1, 2, or 3 wounds. But the 'margin' number would vary by armor, not weapon..

Tom Vogt 

There are many dice mechanics that accomplish exactly this. Cortex Plus has a system where you roll 3d6, take the highest two for the success (hit) and the low one for damage. Or Godlike with its height+width, it evolved into the aptly named One-Roll-Engine. As soon as you look outside the boring mainstream games, you find a lot of very interesting and innovative game mechanics. I'm working on another system right now that will also have one roll to resolve both hit and damage. It's by no means a first

Travis Casey 

Quite a few older games have a roll to hit, a hit location roll, and a damage roll. Some throw in other rolls as well. BRP, in the complex case, has roll to hit, roll for the opponent's parry or dodge, roll for damage, and roll for hit location.On the opposite end, you have systems like Torg, where there is no separate roll for damage - the margin of success of the attack roll is instead added to a weapon damage value to give the damage done. Thus, each attack requires only one roll.

Paul Goldstone 

Rolemaster accomplished a lot with one roll (plus possible crit) which works nice, though a lot of tables.... I suppose there is a need to consider how important or how much of a focus is combat for the game, as well as whether the skill system will follow the same rolling premise. Finally how long it takes to work out and complete every roll. Played a few games where a "quick combat" takes over an hour for a couple of rounds for 4 players and 6 opponents can be a bit much. Finally how deadly/realistic is the combat system intending to be which is another important factor.

Rob Hicks

When I was working on Blueshift, that one used a single attack roll to speed things up, but that was also because I wanted to do automatic gunfire, which meant multiple combat rolls simultaneously, and I didn't want to have to roll multiple damage damage dice separately for each attack, and didn't want to create a huge variability in possible results by counting up lots of damage dice. If course, the other option involved multiplication, so go figure.

Travis Casey 

My own homebrew uses multiplication for damage: the amount you hit by is multiplied by a damage factor for the weapon used, with the adjustment that a zero (just barely hit) is multiplied by 1/2. The numbers involved are usually small - less than 10, so they're in the range of the multiplication tables most people have memorized.

Jesper Anderson
 Roll to hit, roll hit location, roll damage, depending on armor at hit location roll glancing (to further reduce damage). That's essentially how Phoenix Command Hand To Hand does it.