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AWW: I just put my finger on it.
May. 11th, 2013 12:14 pmI figured out what was wrong with the combat system... I changed one of the fundamental assumptions behind it and didn't change the numbers to match.
For most of the years I've been developing this game, I was using the idea that attacks and defenses were interchangeable actions... i.e., if you had two actions in a round, you could attack twice, or defend twice, or attack once and defend once. There are some problems with how such a system plays out in practice... it makes ganging up on one target with many attackers even more attractive of a strategy because their ability to defend will actually run out, it encourages builds that focus on offense and ignore defense because in a real way defending yourself means cutting your offensive capabilities in half and you can't win a battle by defending... so I dropped it in favor of a system where defending doesn't count as an action, you can always do it as long as you're free to act.
And that's a good solution, but not with the numbers I was using where defense was a conscious choice and something you could run out of. Since a defense roll works exactly the same way an attack roll does (same numbers, same scale), then if every attack roll is met with a defense roll, this means that--all other things being equal--every attack will be met with an equal and opposite reaction, making the most likely outcome an attack will miss/do no damage and the second most likely option being it will hit by 1 point (and do 1 damage).
The "fistful o' dice" approach would have gotten around this by making the whole thing more complicated and bringing more dice into play. My actual solution is going to go in the opposite direction: fewer dice. Unless the target is going all out to defend, then every attack will simply be resolved with an attack roll, with the target's defense bonuses being subtracted from it.
For most of the years I've been developing this game, I was using the idea that attacks and defenses were interchangeable actions... i.e., if you had two actions in a round, you could attack twice, or defend twice, or attack once and defend once. There are some problems with how such a system plays out in practice... it makes ganging up on one target with many attackers even more attractive of a strategy because their ability to defend will actually run out, it encourages builds that focus on offense and ignore defense because in a real way defending yourself means cutting your offensive capabilities in half and you can't win a battle by defending... so I dropped it in favor of a system where defending doesn't count as an action, you can always do it as long as you're free to act.
And that's a good solution, but not with the numbers I was using where defense was a conscious choice and something you could run out of. Since a defense roll works exactly the same way an attack roll does (same numbers, same scale), then if every attack roll is met with a defense roll, this means that--all other things being equal--every attack will be met with an equal and opposite reaction, making the most likely outcome an attack will miss/do no damage and the second most likely option being it will hit by 1 point (and do 1 damage).
The "fistful o' dice" approach would have gotten around this by making the whole thing more complicated and bringing more dice into play. My actual solution is going to go in the opposite direction: fewer dice. Unless the target is going all out to defend, then every attack will simply be resolved with an attack roll, with the target's defense bonuses being subtracted from it.