Bunp. Getting into actual rules now, like numbers.
Attributes are on a percentile scale like Warhammer and Call of Cthulhu. When you test an attribute you roll 1d100 and try to get below your attribute. When the metagame is developed you'll progress the way you do in Call of Cthulhu; completing a challenge or whatever gives you an opportunity to increase an attribute. You pick one and it rolls against it, if it's higher than your attribute you gain +5. That way it gets harder to advance the more skilled you are, and I'm planning on some kind of barrier to go past 70 in an attribute. Being part of a special school and completing a master challenge probably. So a practitioner of a style focused on agility would be able to master agility but not strength. Or just make 70 an all-around maximum for stats and add special traits for mastery, like rerolls.
Anyway, the challenge right now is contests. Sometimes the fighters have to test an attribute against each other and I have to figure out a way to have them test against each other while still making their own attributes meaningful. I'm looking over some of my d100-based RPG books for inspiration, but my immediate (and probably overly complex) solution follows:
Take the 10s digit of your attribute and roll that many d10s. A success is 5 or greater. The fighter with the most successes wins.
It's functional, I'd need to look into the hard stats of it though, but I feel like it diverges substantially from the regular rules for tests. I'd really prefer something with a similar "feel" to the regular tests.
At the same time this is a computer game not intended to be playable on pen and paper so maybe it doesn't matter if the dice mechanics are unintuitive; the computer will be doing them for you.
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Topic: En Garde! ASCII Swordfighting Game -- Heating up the Forges (Read 3581 times)