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Combat Systems:
2. Melee Combat
Melee combat is a complicated business. Combatants make strikes, and parry and dodge strikes against them. But these are not isolated events. A fighter putting more effort into attacking can spare less effort for defending. A fighter at a disadvantage, with a shorter reach in his weapon for example, must put more effort into defence, sparing less for attack. A fighter in better armour has less fear of a hit on him doing damage, so has the confidence to press home the attack more stongly. A strike, blocking move, step or body movement may be the preparation for an attack to come.

A fighter of greater skill is likely to penetrate his opponent's defences more effectively, landing a better-placed and harder blow to cause greater damage; conversely, a defender of greater skill when he does get hit will tend to get hit with weaker and less well placed blows, reducing damage. So combat skill should increase the damage you inflict and reduce the damage inflicted on you.

A good melee combat system should simulate at least some of these factors. In particular, choosing how you split your effort between attack and defence can give the player a great sense of involvement in combat.

DISCRETE ACTION SYSTEMS

A discrete action system tries to simulate each action in combat separately, handling each blow, dodge and parry with a separate resolution. System 2A is an example.

2A. A character has attack and parry skills with different weapons (%). A weapon has damage dice, eg. 1D6 or 1D10. In a combat round, a character may do any two actions: strike and parry, strike and dodge, parry and dodge, two strikes, two parries or two dodges. When a character makes an attack, roll his attack skill as a percentage. If he succeeds, and the blow is not defended against with a successful parry or dodge, then he hits with a Hit Damage Bonus equal to the first digit of the number he rolled in the hit roll: so a hit roll of 23 would give a Hit Damage Bonus of +2, and 05 would give +0. A successful hit inflicts damage equal to the weapon's damage dice plus the hit's Hit Damage Bonus.

System 2A has a major problem in that it has simple to hit rolls: this means that the blow can miss even if the target makes no defence, which is ludicrous. 2A must involve the assumption that everyone is making a certain amount of basic innate defence or 'autododge', which creates all sorts of problems. For a detailed discussion of this issue see Simple To Hit Rolls.

Aside from that, it does simulate a lot of things quite well. It gives a character a level of choice between putting all his effort into attack, all into defence, or a fifty-fifty split. This is a choice of splitting effort into attack and defence, but it's a very crude all-half-nothing choice: you can't choose a 60:40 or 30:70 split. It makes a fighter of greater skill more likely to inflict more damage, but doesn't decrease the damage against a more skilled target: a failed defence is no defence.

OVERALL ACTION SYSTEMS

An overall action system treats all the action of combat between two opponents in a single combat round as a single entity. 2B is an example.

2B. A character has a Combat Skill with a weapon, eg 8. A weapon has a Damage Bonus, eg +4. Rolls use the Dicex system. When two combatants fight, make a roll for each using his Combat Skill as the input value. If the output values are equal, neither combatant hits the other; otherwise, the higher hits the lower. Add the difference between the two output values and add the hitting weapon's Damage Bonus. This is the input value for the damage roll.

2B has a lot to recommend it. A more skilled combatant is more likely to hit, and likely to do more damage when he does. A more skilled fighter is likely to suffer less damage when hit.

Overall I think the probability distribution of its results is more realistic than that of 2A: a slight increase in a combatant's skill leads to a slight increase in his chances of hitting and the damage he inflicts, while a slight decrease in his skill leads to a slight decrease in his chances of hitting and the damage he inflicts. This 'sliding scale' of slight effects could never be simulated by 2A without the addition of a hellish number of little modifiers to compensate for the adjustment of one stat for another. That would make the system unplayably complicated. 2B achieves it seamlessly because that 'sliding scale' is part of the basic fabric by which it works.

But 2B does not allow the combatant to choose how much effort he puts into attack and how much into defence. 2C overcomes that problem:

2C. A character has a Combat Skill with a weapon, eg. 8. A weapon has a Damage Bonus, eg. +4. Rolls use the Dicex system. When two combatants fight, each divides his Combat Skill into Attack and Defence scores. Each then gets to attack the other: make a roll for the attacker using his Attack as the input value, and for the defender using his Defence. If the Attack output value exceeds the Defence output value, the target has been hit. Add the difference between the two output values and add the hitting weapon's Damage Bonus. This is the input value for the damage roll.

This keeps the sliding scales of 2B while allowing a choice of effort.

LEVELS OF COMBAT SKILLS

I often find that in RPGs, little thought is given to why characters should have particular levels of stats: see Character Stat Levels).

What makes a character more likely to win in combat? Strength, agility and skill must all be factors. In unarmed combat, strength gives a big advantage. A strong fighter can often overwhelm a more skilled but more lightly built opponent in unarmed combat (I've done this a lot in sparring). I have no experience of fighting with weapons, except play-swordfighting with bits of wood and plastic when I was a youngster, but I imagine that as the reach of weapons increases, the advantage of strength becomes less significant. Having said that, if weapons are heavy to lift, lack of strength could be a major obstacle.

Overlooking the loss of strength advantage with different weapons, 2D is a stab at trying to get it right.

2D. A character has physical abilities Strength and Agility, and a stat called Combat Experience representing how well learned he is in the ways of slaying. A weapon has a Hit Bonus related mainly to its length, and a Weight which is the lowest Strength value needed to use it effectively. A fighter's Combat Skill with a weapon is equal to: Strength + Agility + Combat Experience + Hit Bonus If a weapon is used by a wielder whose Strength is less than its Weight, he suffers a -2 penalty to Combat Skill when using it. When two combatants fight, each divides his Combat Skill into Attack and Defence scores. Each then gets to attack the other: make a roll for the attacker using his Attack as the input value, and for the defender using his Defence. If the Attack output value exceeds the Defence output value, the target has been hit. Add the difference between the two output values and add the hitting weapon's Damage Bonus. This is the input value for the damage roll.

2D gives us a lot of useful things on a plate. Strength, agility, experience and weapon reach now all contribute. When the GM has to work out the Combat Skill of a charging bull or a nine-foot-tall ogre, it's simply a question of looking at the creature's abilities to come up with an answer.

Compare this with other games, where values have to be assigned arbitrarily. Call of Cthulhu has a simple % skill to hit. Suppose I'm GMing and I want my players to face an angry bull or even for that matter an Ogre. How do I decide on its % skill to hit? The attack skills of creatures in the book make little consistent sense, so I just have to make something up. Attack skills for humans are even more senseless: an untrained human has 50% to hit with a fist, but only 20% with a baseball bat: getting a better weapon reduces your chance of hitting! This is an example of a game whose stats have been very poorly thought out.

But 2D is still flawed. Imagine a fight between a nimble but weedy Elf and a huge, lumbering Ogre:

2E. The Ogre attacks with huge powerful swings of his club, and would easily kill or incapacitate the Elf if just one blow made a successful hit. The Elf has to dance away, dodging the Ogre's blows, putting most of his effort into defence. Still, he gets to make a fair number of attacks against the Ogre, which generally hit because the lumbering beast has little defensive skill in either dodging or parrying.