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.

ORE (One Role Engine)

Matt Miller:
Uses d10, could likely use d6. Biggest problem I can see is the dicepool problem, where you've got 10 dice, arranging them into sets is time-consuming. Not sure I understand 'Hard Dice'. They act sort of like criticals, making a successful roll even more successful? Expert dice are clear--pick a number when you get them--seems highly suitable for 'specialist' abilities. Wiggle/Trump/Master dice boost the...'width' of any set, making the action faster, but not necessarily more successful...

Jesper Anderson: A hard die is always 10. So if you have two hard dice and four normal dice, you roll 4d. You are ensured to always have one set of 2 10's in that case, but it could be wider, or you could have more sets. Wiggle dice are really powerful. You get to pick their value after you have rolled. If you have only one wd it will ensure you get at least one success. Arranging in sets is not time-consuming. It's pretty much instant, even with a 9d pool.

Travis Casey: I've had Godlike since it came out, but never gotten to play it. I have, however, run a few sessions of A Dirty World, which uses the same dicing system. We found that quite often, rolls gave no matches at all. Part of this is probably because ADW is meant to be a gritty, low-powered game, and quite often, my players were rolling 4 dice or fewer. This also meant that the fun features of the system, where you get multiple sets and have to choose how to allocate them, almost never came up. If you're going to use the system, I recommend making sure that attributes are assigned in such a way that players tend to have fairly large dice pools, in the 6+ dice range.
Jesper Anderson 
... or have wd and hd. That makes a difference!

Travis Casey: Yeah, I'm sure it would have. ADW doesn't use those aspects of the system, though. I might do some thinking about how to incorporate them, for when I use the system again. Since it *is* low-powered, I as GM didn't really have a problem with the constant "no success" - to me, it meant the PCs just hadn't accomplished their goal yet. A few of the players were noticeably frustrated, though, so I had to reassure them that no match doesn't mean failure when you're rolling against an opponent.We only got to play three sessions or so, and by the third one, I think they were settling into the system comfortably. It did take an "adjustment period", though.

Jesper Anderson Yes, with 4d you will get a match half the time or so. It's how the system works. Even in Godlike most rolls are with low pools, and the attrition rate tends to be very high. ORE as a whole takes an adjustment period. My present group has not tried it, and they have a firm opposition to it. Which is rather strange, considering how many weird systems we've successfully run.

Scott Rhymer 
I've been playing in a Wild Talents game, and while the mechanics work adequately, the wiggle/hard/other dice was -- IMO, so take that as you will -- overly complex. We all found character creation a hot mess. The general consensus for our group is that, in trying to make things simple and fast, it paradoxically introduced more complexity than it probably needed to.

Travis Casey 
I do recommend checking out the "A Dirty World" version - it's very different from Wild Talents/Godlike, with only the resolution system being shared. Character creation is totally different, and much simpler... and what you do with the outputs of resolution is also very different. From a game design point of view, ADW vs Godlike is an excellent example of how different two RPGs can be while sharing the same resolution system.

Paul Mitchener 
I've run a lot of Wild Talents and Reign. The One Roll Engine is one of my favourite mechanics.
And the Wild Talents settings (I'm thinking of Kerberos Club and Progenitor especially) are fab. Though the writer of Blood of the Gods is a complete jerk, so that's better missed.

One Roll Engine (ORE)

Have you read up on ORE? I provides two statistics in a single roll (*Tuple magnitude and numeric magnitude. Needs a chart on how many success you can expect, given X dice, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Roll_Engine