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[professorlamp]

Evenin' all

I've been working rather meticulously on a boardgame/rpg and whilst I'm happy with the majority of it, combat seems to fall short all the time. Right now the combat system is more or less the D20 system

"My attack minus the opponents defence = the number to roll or higher on a D20"

The problem with this method at the moment seems to be that it's all or nothing, almost all attacks hit with this system and the opponent doesn't get a chance to defend and reduce damage.

What other combat mechanics could you think of that implement an actual defence ?
I'd like something similar to the (crude) example below
Attacker rolls a dice in order to see if he hits the target
Attacker successfully hits
Defender manages to reduce some of the damage with a dice roll

I can't seem to think of any method to do it though, any thoughts?

[GreatWyrmGold]

How about this:
Attacker rolls an attack roll and can hit.
Defender can parry/block and/or dodge.
Defender rolls skill for action.

Or, have an opposed roll of attack vs. defense, and have armor reduce damage.

[GlyphGryph]

Forget hitting and dodge, and just have attacker roll damage, and defender roll damage reduction?

Weapons decide die cast (consider normalizing with 2 die) while defender rolls a defense dice and adds their bonuses.

[professorlamp]

The problem is I'm not sure how to implement the damage reduction, ideally that's what I'd have. most of the creatures in combat have a different defence statistic so it's difficult trying to incorporate a variable defence reduction if you get what I mean.

Here's a small selection to show what I mean

               Hp     ATK  DEF    MOV
Halflings   5     3     3       1

vs

Harpies   10    3     4       5



In order for the halfling to hit the harpy you'd have to roll a 1 or higher (ATK - DEF = to hit, 3 - 4 = 1) which is obviously always going to happen but thankfully we have a critical hits/fumbles table. Anyway... If the halfling was to hit, was sort of mechanic could I use that could vary and go up and down with the DEF statistic?

[Wolfy]

Have a complex thing such as this

A. how far you are form the person (A dagger wont do so well at long sword range)
Body part among for (Hitting his toes requires you to bend down and get down there
C. have "actions" not just attack and defend, have dodge, take, block, overpower\ over skill\hit him before he hits you
etc
and each one depending on class is a certain die  you roll, a Ranger can dogde better and then go in for the attack etc.

[professorlamp]

Hey Wolfy thanks for the reply.

We already have a few combat options available

Defend - Raise your defence by half your attack

Berserk - Lowers defence down to 0 whilst it raises your attack by half of your defence

There are also penalties in the game aswell (I probably should have mentioned this earlier). The only one we have at the moment is a ranged penalty, if they are more than half the total distance away, the attack damage is halved.

Ideally I don't want to bog the game down with too many complexities, it's meant to be a rules lite game played on a hex world map. Sort of a mix between a board game and rpg.

I'm definitely not willing to include tables and charts including ANY of the following 

Dodge/parry
Wounds/bleeding out/unconsioucness
Damaged weapons doing less damage

Whilst all of those are things that I would like to implement. They would bog the game down unnecessarily so and really slow down combat (Combat on a board is already quite slow before you add all the 'fun' stuff)

[Lovechild]

               Hp     ATK  DEF    MOV
Halflings   5     3     3       1

vs

Harpies   10    3     4       5

How about this: The basic roll to hit is 11 or more, but that is adjusted by the difference between the attacker's ATK and the defender's DEF. So in this case the halfling would need 12 or more to hit the harpy.

But your system is using such small number that a D20 maybe is a too large die. A D10 might be better, with 6 or more as the basic roll to hit.

[Sergius]

Try not segregating attack from defense. Each player rolls his attack, whoever rolls higher damages the other, depending on the relative difference of rolls. Maybe substract a defense value from this difference.

Something like:

Player 1: attack 3. defense 3
Player 2: attack 5 ,defense 2

Both roll a D20 + attack. Player 1 rolls 14, player 2 rolls 3. so that's 17 vs 8 = player 2 gets 9 points of damage, minus 2 for defense, 7 damage.
This tends to work better with a bell curve like 3d6 I guess. Maybe each player can roll 2d6 (this would give a bell curve similar as if a single player rolled 4d6).

Tweaking and testing would need to be done, of course.

[GreatWyrmGold]

How would you make "iron wall"ey creatures that can take huge amounts of damage? Just high HP?

[professorlamp]

The game has gone over a major-ish revision and now a D6 system has been implemented instead.
Now, everytime there is combat, you must roll 3d6 and roll over the creatures defence, thankfully the bell curve of 3d6 works very well. Here's our stats for now

Level    defence
1         5
2           7
3          9
4         10
5         11
6         12
7         14
8          15

I think it'd be good to factor in attack maybe somewhere just so that extremely skilled heroes can land a hit more often, either way though this system is working much more smoothly than the D20 system we were using previously.

[chaoticag]

You might want to look at Ironclaw. All actions are resolved by using different dice, traits have one die, skills can have multiple, depending on training. Attacker and defender roll multiple dice, and the attack lands if the attacker has dice over the defenders highest roll, with each die adding at least one to damage, depending on the weapon, plus the weapon has a flat damage bonus. Then armor and any extra dice soaks damage by beating a target number, one damage less per success.