The Gaming Den

So it occurred to me to run it past the people here before chucking this mechanic into GAR. Basically, I was thinking about Hero Quest and Blood Bowl, and had an idea that might be really fucking terrible, but could possibly be "an unusual mechanic that kind of works for this", the sort of thing people talk about as "the cool thing in X system".

The idea is, on a basic hit, you roll a Damage die, which is a d8. For every Boost to the attack roll (degrees of success, whatever) or every bonus-to-damage from the weapon, you roll another. But you only pick the highest one (or whichever you want, it needn't be the highest) to apply. If you get a huge amount you might start doing rollXkeepY, like "1-4: apply 1. 5-8: apply 2. 9-12: apply 3. And so on", or have "Rolling over 8 dice? Great, you can pick the number you rolled", or some kind of "If you roll 3 dice that say Dazed, you can swap them for a Stunned. Three Stunned dice can be swapped for an Injured one." thing.

But it would generally take a really good roll to actually get beyond just rolling 1-5 dice.

And wearing armour would subtract Damage dice. If the subtraction is bigger than the number of dice, then after going back down to "1 die", you add again, but this time the Defender chooses which to apply.

So you could have:
1: Graze (no effect)
2: Daze (-2 to all actions 1 turn, another Daze in the meantime Stuns)
3: Shove (Daze and also move them away X distance)
4: Prone (knock them over, they have to waste a turn, another Prone Injures)
5: Stun (lose a turn, attacks against them are at +4, another Stun Wounds)
6: Injured (lose a HP/progress along the damage bar 1 step)
7: Wounded (Stunned and Injured)
8: Critical (Prone and lose 2 HP/progress 2 steps of damage)

So, Bob hits Joe and only just hits, with no bonus from weapon, and no armour, so he rolls 1 die. He gets a 4, so Joe is knocked prone. Timmy then attacks Joe and gets an extra degree of success, so he rolls 2 dice. He gets 1 and 4, discards the 1 and says "Prone again, lose 1 HP!" Then Betty runs up and hits Timmy, and rolls so well she rolls 4 dice, getting 1, 3, 3 and 7. So Timmy is Stunned and also loses 1 HP. Then Bob has another turn while Joe stands up, so attacks Betty, who has full plate. He barely succeeds, for 1 die, but her full plate reduces it by 3, so he has to roll 4 dice and she picks the one to apply. He's lucky, with 5, 5, 5 and 8, so she goes "Stunned".

Could it work? Or would it be pretty shitty?

I am aware that the above chart means it's possible to do the oWoD thing where you roll a million damage dice and have no effect, which is the exact reason I hate the SR/WW style dice pool mechanic, so I should definitely toy with it so hitting them really well always guarantees *some* effect.

It seems a bit complicated to me. The basic resolution is:

1) Check for hit
2) Consult table or do math to figure out how many damage dice to roll
3) Roll damage dice, but only use some of the numbers
4) Consult another table for the effect

The idea is interesting, but couldn't you just use the first attack roll to generate the effect, or something?



When I saw Hero Quest mechanic, I was totally picturing the old MB game with the skull/shield dice.

RobbyPants wrote: When I saw Hero Quest mechanic, I was totally picturing the old MB game with the skull/shield dice. :awesome:

Yeah, that's the one. The slimmed down alternative to 4e. With the cool dice.

I disagree with using d8s when rolling more than two dice. People simply are less likely to have a bunch of d8s on hand. As such, I suggest something like rolling 2d6 and adding them together (as an added bonus, this gets a curve). So something like this.

No matter what: Pick two dice from whatever pool you have. A basic hit is 2d6. Each extra degree of success (up to three) adds another die to the pool. Special powers/abilities may add between 1 and 3 dice to the base pool. So a specialist getting three degrees of success rolls 8 dice. Armor is a number and it subtracts a number of dice (from 1-4) off the top highest first.

Total from the 2 dice you pick:
2-5: 1 damage
6-8: 2 damage
9-11: 3 damage
12: 4 damage

Any double grants a status condition:
1s or 2s: Knocks the enemy prone
3s or 4s: Daze a turn
5s-6s: Stun a turn

Something like that. Basically, people might plausibly choose to deal less damage in order to daze a turn if their dice come up 1,3,3,5,6.

I dig the idea. I always enjoyed Blood Bowl, though sometimes those dice hated me. Rolling triple skulls and then rerolling the same f*cking triple skulls SUCKED, and happened way more often than was statistically likely.

(Odds are about 1 in 47,000 and I've seen that particular scenario happen over a dozen times. I know I haven't rolled 100,000 dice throws in that game either).

More critically, combat seems padded sumo slow. Blood Bowl characters get hit A LOT and aren't expected to die or get knocked out very frequently (there's an extra damage roll past the blocking dice). I'd include a damage threshold, which could knock out characters after they've taken X number of status ailments. Otherwise a crappy string of luck could stretch out a fight for way too long.

However, the system works for environments where you just want to beat the snot out of the other side, and not necessarily kill them. It wouldn't fit into D&D say, but I could totally see it fitting in a kung fu setting.

Well I like Ubernoob's idea better than mine but here it is anyway; You have a threshold number on how many damage dice you roll. Like, 8 or something manageable. Once you go past that threshold, instead of rolling more dice you just add 1 to your other rolls. Either make it the minimum number you can hit (so 4 extra dice becomes a minimum of 5 no matter what you roll) or add to your lowest rolled die, or to the average of all your rolls (but thats extra math). Whichever one has the best math to it I guess, I'm not a math guy.

I sort of chose d8s largely to be obnoxious, but yeah, that 2d6 idea is probably best.

Still, I'm putting it on hold until the main dice rolling thing is decided. I may just end up making the whole game 2d6+number.