New Combat System

By Jane Crilley and Antony Sidwell
Initial draft (0.1, incomplete)

Introduction

This is a rough sketch of how a combat system could work. The "to hit" calculations need a lot more work than the damage ones, which seems to be a good system with variety and a system relatively easy to balance.

Damage calculation

Armour (and skin) has a rating for its resistance to cutting damage and another for its resistance to blunt damage.

The rating represents the amount of damage not absorbed - i.e. a rating of 0 indicated total imperviousness to damage of that sort. 100 indicated that it doesn't absorb any damage at all.

Skin and armour ratings can be combined by multiplying the ratings together and dividing by 100. (Division could be left until the end if it speeds up the algorithm.)

For example: Monster has skin ratings of (30, 50) and wears an armour of (50, 50). Its total ratings would be (30*50)/100 = 15 and (50*50)/100 = 25. Only 15% of cutting damage would get through, but 25% of crushing damage would get through.

As such, weapons would need a cutting value and a crushing value. This could be expressed as a ratio of curring:crushing, or as two seperate numbers, depending on what is easiest/quickest/best. It could be done as two damage ratings, expressed as (2d2:3d6), though this may be too complex or hard to balance.

It may be desirable to include a modifier for the "accuracy" of a hit, so that a glancing blow would do 10% damage, a proper hit would do 100%. This can be determined as part of the to-hit calculations.

Another option is including a modifier for the strength of the person wielding the weapon and the speed of the attack. This could be calculated in the hit calculation along wih the "glancing blow" calculation, leading to e.g. 20% damage for a glancing blow and 200% for a direct hit.

Thus an armour description would be a pair of values (xx, xx), and a weapon description would also have a pair of values and hit dice ("2d4 (80, 20)"), a pair of hit dice ("(2d4, 2d2)"), or hit dice and a ratio ("2d4 (4:1)").

"Hit" calculation

Factors: dexterity on both sides, speed on both sides (encumberance?), skill level?, "their" weapon's defensive properties, "your" weapon's attacking properties.

Some algorithm which, if everything is equal, produces two identical values. If attack > defence, the attack has "landed" to some extent. if attack > 2*defense, it is a good hit, attack > 4*defence, exceptional? some sort of scale here.