Monday, April 22, 2013

Killing the Armor Class

Here are the bare-bones of an alternate combat system:
 - there is no armor class
 - all attacks hit; roll damage immediately
 - armor provides damage reduction (usually on a scale of 1-4)
 - dexterity bonuses provide that number of free "dodges" usable per fight
 - increase in fighting skill is represented by an increase in damage die

Think of hit points as representing combat endurance. It's your character's ability to keep ducking and weaving, ignoring small wounds, parrying blades, etc. Whenever someone swings a weapon, your hit points are reduced, because you had to put energy into evading that blow. Once your energy is exhausted, you start taking hits for real, and are debilitated by whatever rules you have for negative hit points.

Damage, then, is really a measure of how much energy you have forced someone else to expend, either through having a big fucking sword, or a lot of skill with it (or both).

Armor allows you to absorb some blows, so you don't expend as much energy. Dexterity gives you a couple "get out of jail free" cards, to evade damage you didn't want to take.

Shields Shall Be Splintered.

All weapons start out dealing either 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, or 1d10 damage. Gaining levels allows the character to pick specific weapons that deal more damage. Here's an example of the way damage would progress in various weapons:

1d4 --> 1d6 --> 1d8 --> 1d10 --> 2d6 --> 2d8 --> 3d6 --> 3d8, etc.

Fighters can pick a weapon to increase in damage every other level, starting at first. Clerics/Thieves can pick a weapon for damage increase every three levels, starting at second. Mages can pick a weapon for damage increase every four levels, starting at third.

I came up with this system out of a desire to both represent exhaustion wearing down on a character during battle, and to decrease the number of dice rolled per turn in combat. Let me know what you think.

12 comments:

  1. I like the idea of armor as damage reduction, rather than dodge chance, because it matches my mental picture of combat much better. I can easily imagine a heavy dude in armor taking hits that would kill other warriors, but still trudging his way across the battlefield. I can't imagine a guy in a full suit of plate nimbly dodging attack after attack. It's just illogical. Sometimes I try to change my description from "you nimbly dodge the swinging blade" to "the sword glances off your steel gauntlet" depending on how much armor the character is wearing, but it's just dressing, and it's completely meaningless, because it's obvious to all my players that I don't actually distinguish. It's what I like to call an "Imaginary Rule": a situation where the player is forced to pretend that a rule exists for the sake of immersion, even though it clearly doesn't. I try to eliminate them as much as I practically can.

    Dexterity as dodge is an interesting idea. I'll have to try it out before I can pass judgement on it though. I can see it making every fight much easier for people with high dex, and furthering the min-maxing of physical stats over mental.

    Now, about hit points as exhaustion and increasing damage dice, I'm not quite sold. I like the feel of damage being consistent across levels and easy to picture. I feel like it's unrealistic for either damage or hitpoints to increase too much. It just doesn't track to the real world. Even the best warrior can only take on a couple other guys, and the number goes down if they're well armed. One of the main things I like about old school games as opposed to fourth edition or videogames, is that they're rooted strongly in reality, and you can easily put your self in the place of your character. This system is more abstract, and I'm not sure if you could get the same visceral feel from it that you get from the classic system.

    There are some good ideas here, but I think it needs more work.

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  2. Alrighty, let me further my reasons for considering this system:

    The reason I like increasing damage dice is because I feel that it represents skill increasing rather well. In typical DnD, hit points increase but damage stays the same. This means that two fighters of equal level will have combat take longer and longer when fighting each other, which doesn't make sense to me. Two sixth level fighters facing off shouldn't take six times as long two first level fighters facing off, but if damage stays consistent while HP increases, it certainly will take that long.

    As far as your concern that a high level fighter will be too overpowered, I would doubt this will be the case (though testing is needed, of course). Let's say we have 1 seventh level fighter against 4 first level fighters, all unarmored, all with longswords. The seventh level fighter deals 2d8, average 9 damage per round. The 4 fighters each deal average 4.5 damage, or 18 damage per round.The big fighter probably has 32 HP, each of the little guys 4 or 5.

    I'll spare you the math, but on average the 4 little guys win. The biggie will kill 1-3 of them, but then they overwhelm him, sans armor or dodging.

    ANYWAY. Across the board in DnD, losing HP has no bearing on actual combat ability, until you hit the negatives. Therefore, hit points don't REALLY measure serious wounds being dealt. I'm simply positing that HP is a simplification of general combat endurance, rather than positing nothing at all about it. I see this as consistent with "orthodox" DnD (lol). Given this, damage is not actually how awful the wounds dealt are, but how much you have threatened your opponent with said wounds. Increased skill means increased threat, which I read as damage.

    Thanks for posting, Oz!

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  3. I see what you're saying. But how does this system account for ranged attacks, magic, traps, and poison/sickness? What about sneak attacks? What about fatigue? How does it handle HP regeneration?

    The classic system is a bit clunky, but it's intuitive and easily applicable to a variety of situations. It seems to me that if you want to use combat fatigue, you'll need a separate variable or two for different kinds of health.

    Sorry to be giving you a hard time about this, I just like a good discussion.

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  4. Haha, no such thing as a hard time! I should be able to defend myself, or give in to other folks' notions. We need debate.

    Ranged attacks I'd like to say work the same as melee. Call it just barely dodging, or glancing hits, or even the adrenal exhaustion that comes from knowing you're being shot at.

    Again, I want to say that I don't think this version of HP is actually different from standard DnD! Hit points are a very abstract system. Most books don't describe really at all what they mean. A "measure of how hard your character is to kill" is a fair paraphrase of most attempts at describing them. This definition is exactly what I'm using. "Combat endurance" is probably a little bit too specific a phrase for what I mean, but I intend for hit points to be applied in exactly the same way as usual.

    So I'm tempted to say nothing changes. Traps work the same way, but obviously never make attack rolls. Magic-induced damage is the same. Poison, where it deals damage, certainly applies here. Sneak attacks I might say deal double damage and ignore armor's DR. HP regeneration remains the same (though I like the idea that fighters regain hit points faster, a little house rule of mine).

    The basic point that I'm trying to get across is that a miss deals damage just as surely a hit. That's the fundamental change. When someone swings a sword and "misses", the fight has still progressed. You NEED those misses to finally get to the hits, and not just in a statistical sense. In classic DnD, we don't really know the difference between a miss and a hit. If someone bypasses my dexterity, my armor, and my weapon and actually lands a strike, why do I only lose HP? Why isn't my arm hanging by a thread, or my chest laid open, or my intestines on the ground? My combat ability is not all affected until I hit 0 HP, and therefore I have to assume that loss of HP does not equal taking a serious wound. And if not, why should I think of misses and hits as being different? They're both just chipping away at strength my opponent has left.

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  5. Hm, that's not a bad case. I can see the merits of the system if HP is your general measure of combat readiness, including injuries, exhaustion, and even mental health, like Alexis's been talking about. An arrow whizzing by your head does put you off your game a little, I'm sure.

    But how does a fight in this system actually look? It's pretty easy to imagine a normal fight: you swing your weapon, then either miss, or do something in the range of 1-10 damage, with a small enough variation that you can imagine the attack in real world terms. I can buy it that it doesn't matter numerically if an attack hits or not, or exactly how hard it hits, but how does the DM or the players form a clear mental picture of what's happening?

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  6. Alright, try this grittiness on for size:

    0 dmg dealt: absorbed by armor completely
    1-[armor rating] damage dealt: combination parry and armor
    [armor rating+1]-[quarter current hp-1] damage dealt: parry
    [quarter current hp] and up: wounded, take a wound counter

    Each wound counter gives -1 to everything

    Now that's a mental picture! Not actually as complicated as it looks.

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  7. Well that doesn't seem too crazy, if you can handle the math. But what about non humanoid monsters? What if they're mentally or physically incapable of parrying, or don't have armor in the normal sense? How does a fight look against a pterodactyl, a gelatinous cube, or a giant snail?

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  8. Okay strap in...this might be long...

    First, there is nothing wrong with your base assumptions about armor class and how to logically implement and manipulate it in a game. A few concerns and points for you:

    With no Armor Class you will have difficulty coming up with a meaningful way to represent "touch" based effects. Similarly, spells will have to be massively re-written as things like Rays will now always hit. This makes some spells more powerful.

    Concepts of range modification "to hit" go the way of the dodo. Do you modify damage instead?

    If all attacks hit, you are eliminating the majority of rolling from combat. As it stands, every attack requires AT LEAST one roll. That is, there is a roll to hit and then, if successful, a roll to do damage. You have no switched that to one roll AT MOST. That is important to consider. Combat may be faster but you are also removing any enjoyment derived from the "roll to hit" factor which is a very visceral die interaction. This is important to consider from a satisfaction stand-point.

    Dexterity providing "Dodges" is odd in that you will have to determine what is a "fight" per se...and that can get weird. You would, thematically, be better off making Dexterity bonus add to HP as it represents your ability to keep from getting hurt, right?

    If your goal is to reduce rolls and represent HP as fatigue then you will be successful but there are many other factors to consider for over-all game balance. This is the tip of the iceberg. :)

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  9. Excellent points, Yagami, I had not started to consider spells. Even my dodge ability renders certain spells useless against dextrous characters. The problem is really that a touch attack is a single hit-or-miss proposition, which the rest of this system has attempted to avoid. I'd be tempted to use a subsystem to represent such effects, related to hit dice, say. A tentative solution: roll under your dexterity, modified by the difference between yours and the target's levels. If they use a "dodge", subtract their dex bonus from the toucher's dexterity, or something. This is basically a to-hit roll, but it makes sense for touch attacks to use them to me.

    I would certainly apply range modifiers to damage! Say, -2 at medium range, -4 at long range, or some such thing.

    I admit that eliminating the to-hit roll was my primary motivation here. The combats in my campaign have started lasting rather longer than any of us would like. When hit points AND armor class are even moderately high, the to-hit roll starts having very little meaning, and is mostly an impediment to the fight progressing. I prefer "Did I deal a little damage or a lot?" to "Do I even get to deal damage?". On the flipside, I prefer "holy shit that's a lot of little guys who can all hit me each turn" to "heh, they're all mooks, they'll barely ever hit me anyway".

    I agree that the fight/not-fight distinction is a bit arbitrary, but I really like dextrous characters having a little extra something to slide out of harm's way. I want to avoid adding both constitution AND dexterity to HP, because someone with penalties in both will be doubly penalized in their HP advancement, which would be sad. A compromise: one dexterity dodge comes back after using a 10-minute turn to rest.

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  10. By the way, I think I only have two readers, but you guys are great.

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  11. Two months after I read this post,I found myself in need of a combat ruleset that allowed significant but realistic character progression that would also scale well to mass combat. I ended up coming back to some of the ideas we discussed here when I designed the new system.

    In the new system, there are two kinds of HP: actual HP, which represents your vitals, and Defense, which represents a combination of your armor, endurance, and surface level damage. Hit points can only be damaged once defense is completely gone. The defense score is higher at the start and increases at a much faster rate, to represent increase in fighting skill, while HP increases much more slowly. Likewise, defense regenerates completely between fights, and even during fights if you rest momentarily, while a few points of HP can take over a month to heal.

    The results have been good so far. The players get more excited during combat now, and the two kinds of hit points allow more strategic options. Pikemen, for example, hit straight at HP instead of defense, and commanders can increase defense of troops by boosting morale.

    So even if I have a lot of disagreements with your rules, our discussions help me think about the game more deeply and inform my own design choices. I just wanted to let you know that this post and conversation helped me a lot.

    (I've also been using the rules I discussed in the comments of "Increasing The Metallicity of Warriors", with larger monsters having larger dice. I've also been experimenting with mental/social and other forms of these roles. For example, to sneak past an Illitth you'd need to get your sneak skill or lower on a d20, while on a half asleep kobold, it would only be a d4. Anyway, this isn't related to this post but I wanted to give you an update.)

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  12. I'm glad to hear of it, Oz! Your system actually reminds me of the Star Wars d20 game (which was the first RPG I ever picked up), in which there are wound points (equal to constitution score) and vitality points, which increase as being representative of skill and endurance in combat. I'm considering such a method myself, where crits and sneak attacks go straight to wounds (otherwise, it would continue to use no AC and increase of damage dice). How do you think the increasing damage dice with combat ability would fit your current system?

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