Postby Benedict Haefeli » Wed Apr 06, 2011 3:11 pm
I must warn you all, this is a bit of a lengthy read. It is the full concept draft for the melee phase of the combat. Combat will generally be played in two phases, one used for movement, ranged attacks and other melee unrelated actions. If a character steps near an enemy in this phase, the two of them cannot do any other actions anymore. For all intents and purposes, they have begun a melee, from which they cannot disengage anymore unless one of the fighters dies, passes out, or for some reason lets the other withdraw (maybe because he's facing multiple oponents and is glad if there's one less). Once both parties have completed their movement phases, the turn ends. At the beginning of the next turn, the first thing happening is the melee phase for all characters involved in a melee (it is at the beginning of the turn so all characters start the fight with their full pool of action points). The mechanics and workings of this Melee phase is described in the following text. I'd be much obliged if those interested in computer rpgs could give this a read and tell me where my abstraction of reality is too simplyfied or just plain wrong.
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Primary atributes important for combat:
Courage
Agility
Strength
Awareness
primary atributes have a range from 50 to 180, although max and min values can be different for different races and are not quite definite yet. I'll have to run some statistic tests to check for propper balancing for various atribute sets. Unlike D&D, these physical atributes are trainable. 50 would be a person with a notable disadvantage in this area, 180 would be unheard of in the physical world (but often enough encountered in songs and poems. This is a fantasy game, after all), with your average, basicaly trained joe being somewhere around 100.
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The skills:
Melee (main skill)
Weapon skills:
cutting swords (one-handed swords majorly used for cutting, mostly shortswords)
thrusting swords (one-handed swords majorly used for thrusting, most prominently rapiers)
two-handed swords (for all techniques that have to be performed with two hands)
long polearms (Haleberds, Spears, aso)
short polearms (Poleaxes, quarterstaffs and similiar)
blunt weapons (onehanded weapons without an edge)
chained weapons (flails in all their flavours)
daggers (all blades too short to be considered a sword)
unarmed (punching, kicking, wrestling, grappling)
shields (doesn't have its own techniques, is usually trained together with swords, but still gets its own skill. Is also used for bucklers)
ambidexterity (doesn't have techniques either, gets always used when the main and offhand perform simultanious or near-simultanious actions)
all combat skills can range from 0 to 200. When a skillcheck on the major atributes is performed (see bellow), the skillpool, that is the total available skillpoints, are calculated by averaging the skillpoints of all skills employed in the move. For any melee action, that is always at least the melee skill and the used weapon skill. Some techniques (techniques are described towards the end) might well incorporate a third or even fourth skill, like for example wrestling someone to the ground while half-swording. In this case, the skillpool would be calculated (melee + twohanded swords + unarmed) / 3. Or someone might try to wrestle someone to the ground with sword and shield, then the skillpool would equal (melee + cutting swords + shields + unarmed) / 4. As you see, the range of the skillpool is still 0 to 200, although it is composed of all the skills involved in the current action.
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Skillchecks:
In a combat action, there's always 1d200 thrown for any of these: Courage, Strength and Agility for attack, Awareness, Agility and Strength for defense. First courage or awareness is checked to see if the character dares to carry out the action or judges the attack correctly at all. Then agility and strength are checked to determine wheather the action is carried out succesfully. If an action consists of both defense and offense (a counter), awareness and courage are both checked (i.e. the skillcheck for a counter involves FOUR atribute checks as oposed to three for simple attacks or paries).
A check is successful if it comes up lower than the attribute. If it is higher, the difference has to be made up by the skillpool (see skills above), which ranges from 0 to 200. So, for the three (or four) rolls there's a maximum of 200 points to level out the results. It isn't hard to note that an action that carries both defense and offense in itself is harder to pull off because of an aditional skillcheck that can go bad. This seems intuitively justified, however I don't know if things are like that in reality. I'd like some second and third opinions about that.
failures of an attack can have varying results, depending on how big the fluke was. Effects can range from simply missing the enemy or delivering a powerless blow to tripping (losing AP), letting go of your weapon or even falling to the ground. failures of parries usually result in getting clobbered.
Of course, what you do is only half the fight, so let's take the oponent into consideration: the opponent can react to an attacking move in several ways: strike out and counterstrike, block, evade, or evade and counter, or use a specific technique he knows that can be aplied under the conditions. A succesfull action will lead to different results based on the action. Simple block will put the initiative back to the other fighter, while a succesfull counter will leave the opponent in the defense where he'll have to chose to counter, evade, or whatever. To symbolise that every parade or counter is always pitted against an attack of varying quality, the parade only succeeds if the remaining skillpoints are equal or higher than the remaining skillpoints of the attacker.
This has implications I'm not quite sure I want, so I'd like some opinions on it. First of all, first attacker gets an advantage, since he has only three atribute checks (Courage, Strength, Agility), while the counterattack meeting it has four (awareness, courage, strength, agility), leaving it at a disadvantage (the skillpool might have to be spread out over four atributes, and have much less points remaining than the attacker). It might get tough to counter a first attack even against an equally skilled oponent, and makes it quite a task to counter a first attack of a more skilled oponent. Block is an action that promise more success, although you can't take the initiative that way and will lose if you do it for too long, which is ok as it would be realistic. While I like skill being a major factor trumping armor and weaponry, I'm really not sure if it is adequate to give such an advantage to first attack. As far as I understand it, first attack is nearly irrelevant in a fight of equally skilled warriors.
Depending on the armament, there are other possibilities to counter, though. For example there would be "parry with shield/dagger/hand and strike" if the combatant has a shield/dagger/free hand. To a normal counter this has the advantage that defense and offense are rolled seperately, that is a defense with 3 atribute checks oposing the attack and an offense with 3 atribute checks that has to be matched by the oponent in his next move. the possible disadvantage is, of course, that these get checked against different skills. There will be a skillpool from Melee and shield (or dagger, or unarmed, or blunt weapon, or whatever you happen to carry in your offhand) AND from the ambidexterity skill. The same aplies for the attack (so blocking with a buckler and simultaniously attacking with your sword would result in a (melee + shields + ambidexterity) / 3 skillpool for defense, and (melee + cutting sword + ambidexterity) / 3 for offense. Depending on how good your skills are in these areas this might be preferable, or it might not.
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basic combat actions and turn evolvement:
This is probably the part where a lot can be improved, so I'll be glad for the input.
There's basic actions that can be performed by anyone and with any weapon (although depending on the weapon with various effectivity, see "weapons and armor" at the end), although even they have not much chance of success if somebody simply sucks at fighting. At the beginning of a melee phase initiative is determined by a simple d6 roll. Higher one gets initiative (although he might still badly screw his courage check and not dare to attack). He may then choose from the basic offensive actions which are swing, thrust (both only available if a weapon is in hand), rush (rush on the enemy to engage him in wrestling), or wait for the oponents attack. Depending on the weapon, he might have a throw option (spears, most obviously) or he might choose to use an opening technique, but that's not basic actions anymore (see below about techniques). For all attack moves a bodypart can be targeted.
The defender can choose between counter-thrust, counter-swing (this means an attempt to displace the enemies attack and launch one of your own at the same time), block (an attempt to stop the attack without launching one of your own) and evade (an attempt to completely evade the attack. If succesfull, the fighters take a breather and roll again for initiative. evade comes with a penalty on the agility check, to make it more difficult than block), or "parry with offhand and strike", depending on your "loadout". Again, a counter attack can target body parts. Alternatively, he can choose from a counter-technique he knows that is aplyable to the current situation.
This goes until both fighters have run out of action points. It might happen that a significantly slower fighter will find himself without AP to defend against an attack at the end of the turn, which would be the equivalent of an attack coming too fast in the real world. All actions also consume endurance (see "hitpoints and endurance" below). The fight is picked up exactly where it was left in the melee phase of the next turn.
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Techniques:
Techniques will be at the heart of the combat system, and this part will be most of the work initially. In short, it'll be a library with moves and counters from historical manuals for various weapons that can be learned from teachers, and are aplyable in certain situations. In contrast to the basic action of countering they cannot choose a body part, since they were developed to achieve a quite specific goal in a specific situation. Only the techniques that can be employed for the current weapon in the current situation are available to choose from during combat. These techniques (as you all probably know) frequently involve multi-skill use and if succesfully carried out have significant effects on the fight, like a critical hits, the oponent thrown to the ground, or his weapon wrestled from him. Some techniques offer counter techniques, so if someone uses a technique on another and he happens to know the counter-technique he might choose to use it. Otherwise he'll have to roll a parade with a penalty to awareness if he doesn't know the technique used, or a normal parade if he knows it, to thwart it.
I'll also do my best to deliver picturesque text-descriptions of these to add some fun to the combat.
Techniques get a repetition penalty that increases progressivly if used multiple times against the same oponent, to represent that even the best trick gets lame if done too often, and to discourage players from abusing a particular technique that works exceptionally well for their skills over and over again.
The techniques also have atribute modifiers. For example, a technique that requires you to deflect an attack while closing in on the oponent might have a courage penalty to symbolise that this requires more courage than just waving your sword towards the oponent. Every technique also has an actionpoint cost as well as an endurance cost.
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Skill increase:
If one gets training by a teacher, one learns new techniques, and improves skills. If one just goes out and fights, only the skill increases, although there is some chance to learn an unknown technique if an enemy uses it (if you survive, that is). every skill has a "level bar" that increases one point for every succesfull skill check and 2 points for every unsuccesfull (since mistakes are the best learning expieriences). Once this bar reaches a certain value which is not defined yet (that will be one of the major balancing decisions during a late state of the developement, since it is a major regulator for how fast a skill increases), there is a d200 thrown. If the result is larger than the current skill value, the skill gets increased by 3 points. Skills closely related to that skill get uped by two points, skills not so closely related get 1 point. However, no weapon skill can ever be higher than the melee skill. After the increase check has been performed, the level bar is reset to zero, no matter wheather the increase was succesfull. That means that it can take a loooong time to level up from 199 to 200, while lower skills increase pretty fast.
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endurance and hitpoints:
Every character has a certain amount of AP which get refreshed every turn, representing faster and slower characters, as well as endurance, which only gets refreshed after a battle. A fighter looses endurance by fighting, but also by being hit. Attacks that don't penetrate the armor can still inflict endurance loss, while attacks that penetrate the armor inflict loss of endurance and strength as well as potentially inflict wounds that bring penalties to agility or awareness or even cause continous strength loss by bleeding. The exact nature of the possible wounds inflicted is not yet in the scope of this concept. The mechanics, however, become clear: Strength serves as hitpoints, which means that getting seriously hit does not only diminish your health, it actually decreases your ability to fight. That seems pretty in-line with the overall realism aproach (and is actually stolen from Darklands, I admit. I just love that game...). Who runs out of endurance passes out, and will awake again after the battle if his comrades were victorious. Who runs out of strength dies.
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Armor and weapons:
(note: only the concept here's important for the moment, the numbers are only exemplary)
Let's not forgett to mention the equipement here. Armor usually comes with some agility penalties, depending on how heavy they are. It will be possible to reduce these penalties by an armor skill. Armor will probably be in four parts: Arms, Legs, Torso, and head. I haven't bothered too much yet with researching historical armor, but it seems that the main factor of armor is resistance to different types of mistreatment: piercing, cutting, and smashing attacks. Armor will have an armor class, which doesn't play into hit calculation as in more traditional RPG rulesets, but simply states how much the armor can take.
Weapons will have three different damage types: piercing, cutting and smashing. apart from this, they also have an armor penetration factor, that modifies the damage types for armor. For example, a tappering sword has a piercing damage of 20-100, a cutting damage of 20-40 and a smashing damage of 10-20. This immediately tells you which kinds of attack will be most effective with this weapon. And then, it has a penetration factor of 0.1. To get the armor penetration, multiply damage with the armor penetration factor, and you get armor penetration 2 - 10 for piercing, 2-4 for cutting and 1-2 for smashing. Chainmail has an armor class of 8, so our tappering sword can pierce through the chainmail, but it cannot cut through it and it certainly cannot smash it.
The trick of this is that damage is independant from actual effectiveness against armor. For example, a rapier might have also a piercing damage of 20-100, but only a penetration factor of 0.02. This makes our rapier excellent against unarmored enemies, but with an armor penetration of 0 - 2 (rounded down) totally useless against any kind of heavier armor. Makes sense?
