AWW: Dicey issues.
May. 10th, 2013 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI'm sitting in a bookstore cafe working on the combat rules for A Wilder World, and I think I know why I have so little confidence in them: they're wrong, and always have been.
The structure of a fight scene is just fine. The whole fight points/wound points thing, the simultaneous unfolding of action, the abstract distance... all of that's great.
But the attack roll/defense roll mechanic is wrong. Even with escalating attack bonuses nerfed, it's too easy to have a character who has no chance of hitting another who has no chance of missing them. And I don't think there's anything wrong with a game where some people are good at fighting and some aren't, I don't think you actually need to have everyone in a party on the same footing in that area any more than they all need to be equally good with locks and traps or whatever, but it's just too easy. Making natural, obvious choices for a fighting character basically turns out combat munchkins. (This is the kind of insight that having a bunch of people making characters helps me notice.)
The other problem is that with equally matched opponents, the most likely outcome is little or no damage on every attack. I don't see this as a huge problem because the typical fight scene in a fantasy adventure story shouldn't be featuring equally matched opponents, but the ones that do should be climactic, not tedious and decided largely by random swinginess.
I have some thoughts for how to fix this. They all lean towards turning AWW into a fistfull o' dice kind of game, at least for combat... this is a sharp departure from the out-of-combat check rules, which typically use only one die, but maybe that's good. As things stand, attack and defense rolls are almost-but-not-quite identical to checks, and having them be completely different might be less confusing. Once a player understands that they're not the same thing, there would be no chance of mixing them up.
The mechanic I'm leaning towards would also make a sharper division between attack bonuses and damage bonuses. More accurate attacks would still equal more damage, but damage bonuses would effectively be put on a different scale.
The structure of a fight scene is just fine. The whole fight points/wound points thing, the simultaneous unfolding of action, the abstract distance... all of that's great.
But the attack roll/defense roll mechanic is wrong. Even with escalating attack bonuses nerfed, it's too easy to have a character who has no chance of hitting another who has no chance of missing them. And I don't think there's anything wrong with a game where some people are good at fighting and some aren't, I don't think you actually need to have everyone in a party on the same footing in that area any more than they all need to be equally good with locks and traps or whatever, but it's just too easy. Making natural, obvious choices for a fighting character basically turns out combat munchkins. (This is the kind of insight that having a bunch of people making characters helps me notice.)
The other problem is that with equally matched opponents, the most likely outcome is little or no damage on every attack. I don't see this as a huge problem because the typical fight scene in a fantasy adventure story shouldn't be featuring equally matched opponents, but the ones that do should be climactic, not tedious and decided largely by random swinginess.
I have some thoughts for how to fix this. They all lean towards turning AWW into a fistfull o' dice kind of game, at least for combat... this is a sharp departure from the out-of-combat check rules, which typically use only one die, but maybe that's good. As things stand, attack and defense rolls are almost-but-not-quite identical to checks, and having them be completely different might be less confusing. Once a player understands that they're not the same thing, there would be no chance of mixing them up.
The mechanic I'm leaning towards would also make a sharper division between attack bonuses and damage bonuses. More accurate attacks would still equal more damage, but damage bonuses would effectively be put on a different scale.