Thursday, June 2, 2011

The New Combat Procedure

In theory, combat already works the same way that non-combat checks do. In our playtest, however, the players never tried to do more than one thing at a time when making non-combat checks, so that similarity never appeared. However, once we got into combat, people were splitting their pools and rolling all over the place, which was exactly how it was supposed to work.

Fluidity was a problem though, so this is an attempt to make it a faster, simpler resolution system. Here's the new proposed combat procedure:
  1. Declare your actions
  2. Roll your Pool
  3. Apply modifiers for talents and trainings
  4. Sort out your successes
  5. Allocate your successes toward your declared actions
  6. Compare them to your target numbers
  7. Record the consequences based on margins of success and/or failure
Seven steps seems like a pretty involved process, I know, but have a look at that list again. It's pretty granular (I'm a technical writer by trade; I'm trained to write instructions in a highly detailed fashion and leave little in the realm of assumed user knowledge). In a nutchell, you're rolling like you would for any other check, the only difference here is that you might be splitting your successes among multiple actions like attack and defense. Otherwise it's identical to a standard roll, and playtesting has showed the standard roll works beautifully.

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