On "Clashing"

I realized that the work I do on my world and my rules is a form of research - it uses exactly the same mental muscles as my graduate Musicology program. Hence, after a long day of reading academic articles and looking up sources for seminar papers, those muscles I want to use for my game are exactly the ones most fatigued. So, my work has come in fits and bursts.

I'm at a conference right now, so I don't have the time to flesh this out fully, but I wanted to share the bones for a better combat system, based upon a comment on an earlier post of mine. From a combat perspective, the "roll to attack" thing has always bugged me. The roll represents a series of attacks between two individuals, and usually we get one roll per direction of the attacks (Jane->Mercedes and Mercedes ->Jane or Jane->Mercedes and Mercedes->Balpreet and Balpreet->Mercedes). But the conflation of roll to directionality encourages players of thinking of each attack action as a single strike - this is encouraged when we give more martially-skilled players multiple attack rolls in a single turn. While I understand from a mechanical standpoint why this works the way it does, it has always kind of irked me.

This morning, as I sat in the speaker ready room working on the paper I'm presenting tomorrow, a much more elegant solution came to me. I jotted some notes down and will run some tests later (in my copious free time...) to see how they actually play out. As a reminder, I have a custom skill system that I use to adjudicate character-skill-based interactions (like combat)

"Clashing"

Characters can move to engage or disengage w/ other combatants

If folks are engaged, player rolls

Success, target takes damage

Failure, player takes damage

Ties go to side w/ more combatants

Or side that engaged first, if combatant numbers equal

1 roll per clash

If multiple players, use best combatant skill

And player w/ best skill chooses who takes the damage if their team loses

If not wielding melee weapon, can't deal damage

On success, just avoid taking any

Ranged weapons - don't engage, just target somebody and fire (like D&D combat)

Once engaged, can't disengage without roll

Can run away, but gives attacker major bonus

Weapons each have engage range (usually 1 hex)

When engage ranges intersect, characters clash

Still have team-based initiative

Movement

Can move where you want, up to movement speed (jogging, running, cartwheeling, whatever also fine)

When engagement ranges overlap, can choose to clash or not

If yes, movement stops

If not, can keep moving

Clashes w/ more than 2 combatants

If n v 1, defending combatant takes penalty based upon max angle between combatants

Minor for pi/3-2pi/3

Major for pi

If tree, treat every person engaged with more than 1 combatant as a separate clash