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So I am making a game, if you haven't seen my cards already somewhere on the site. I am still in the prototyping phase, but the game actually plays pretty well.

Right now though, I am feeling like there is a tad too much book-keeping for the pace of play I'd like. Units have an attack strength vs enemy toughness, and how much you exceed it by is how many hitpoints they lose. Mid-tier stuff generally has between 20-30hp.

I like this, because it has quite a bit of granularity, and there are special moves in the game you can line up for huge damage; I also think doing huge damage is cool and fun.

Tradeoff is that there is lots of addition and subtraction during the game, and this can bog it down a bit.

So I am curious what you guys like in damage systems in other games, and maybe I can find some sort of middle ground that is a bit easier to keep track of, while retaining the 'fun' of being able to line up giant special moves for big damage.

Well, I play Savage Worlds, and while the damage system is similar to the one you use, I like it. It's a similar system in that you are trying to hit or exceed the target's toughness, but character's in Savage Worlds only have three wound levels- after that they're dead. And all but the most important NPC's get only one wound. So there isn't the slow slog of subtraction down to zero like most RPG's. Several occurrences in the die-rolling can cause more than one wound, so I have seen NPC "main bad guys" get taken out with one bad-ass lucky roll by a character.

The particular rules-light game I am using as a basis for my future foray into GMing is a D6 dice-pool game (Arcane Heroes by Michael Wolf). A situation, for instance using a sword with a Melee stat of 4 (pretty good) lets you roll 4D6, with +2D6 for the sword. Each 5 or 6 rolled is a success. An opponent rolls with their Health Stat plus their worn armor (which might be '3' and +2 for Scale mail for a total of 5D6), and the number of successes the attacker rolls over what the defender can roll is the Wounds caused by the attacker, with a low-cap Wound system that might see a normal, semi- experienced character having 10-12 wounds, and something like a Goblin having 6 wounds.

It's a refreshing alternative to high-damage, high HP systems. Much more of a "beer and pretzels" level of math involved.

My favorite damage allocation system come from Paranoia (of all the ridiculous rules light games to pick for this...)

I obviously don't know the actual rules, because that would be treason against Friend Computer, but if I were to guess...

Each weapon has a "damage threshold" and a "max damage". Take your attack roll, subtract the target's defense, and divide that number by the weapon's damage threshold. The target moves that many steps down the damage chart (fine->dazed->ko->maimed->dead->vaporized) up to the weapon's "max damage" value.

It really helps to get rid of what I feel to be a huge redundancy in most games which is separate attack and damage rolls. I would think that how well you hit someone would directly factor in to how much damage the strike does. Traditionally this is done with either critical hits or hit locations.

I was building a game around this mechanic once, supposed to be a squad level skirmish game with a strong cyberpunk feeling. It combined the above damage concept with separate damage levels for each body part and a hit location roll (was a dice pool system with character stats by dots like in White Wolf stuff). People didn't have a hit point total, but they would suffer penalties as their limbs got damaged to the point they were basically useless, or else die if their head was destroyed (or not if they bought the right upgrades), or die of blood loss.

I gave up on finishing it because I realized how horribly overused dice pool systems are these days and also because it was turning into "Phoenix Command light" (i.e. something I would immensely enjoy playing, but too complicated for the kind of "pick up and play" game type it would need to be. Imagining playing a RPG where each player controlled an entire party, that was the level of complication it was turning into).

It really helps to get rid of what I feel to be a huge redundancy in most games which is separate attack and damage rolls. I would think that how well you hit someone would directly factor in to how much damage the strike does. Traditionally this is done with either critical hits or hit locations.

That's one reason why I quite like my above Arcane Heroes method of opposed die rolls. How well you can hit the opponent is the exact factor in how many wounds they take. It's not even a positive modifier to a second roll. So if you have a swordsman of strong skill going up against a goblin, the fight automatically favors the swordsman before how many more HP of damage he can take over the goblin even becomes a factor (though that plays the biggest part in staying-power of course, especially if the die rolls are not with you that night.)

Honestly I'm kind of against most games that have a "dodge skill" or some other way for a character to actively mitigate damage, because in most cases it ends up being the kind of situation where some character will have (say) a 30% chance to completely negate any hit, regardless of the hit's source or its potential damage. That just seems wonky to me.

I like the idea of opposed attack and defense rolls though, although it might take a little more time it keeps everyone involved through the entire combat.

also, this damage allocation system is completely horrendous and wrong, but it deserves mention because of how over the top awesome it is:

There was one game (World of Synnibar I think) where damage was handed out on what basically amounted to a log scale (where an average person does 1-10, a giant punching you does a couple hundered, and an orbital laser does over 1000).

Your "defense" was a number between 0-100, and that was your percent chance to completely negate any attack that came your way. On top of that, you had a secondary defense called "tenths" where you basically chopped off a number of digits from any damage you took equal to your number of tenths. Different armors gave more tenths, and weapon materials could negate tenths.

Combat in that game was always a constant swing back and forth between "in no danger whatsoever" and "oh sweet jeebus if he scratches me I explode".

I just realized I mentioned World of Synnibar and Phoenix Command back to back in two different posts. I seriously need to go re-evaluate my life now.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
P.S. In that Synnibar game it was perfectly possible to build a character with such a massive modifier to his "jump" skill that he could put himself into orbit by jumping.

That fact, combined with the fact that "achieve orbit" is actually an entry on the jump table, should tell you everything you need to know about world of Synnibar.

Mantic's Kings of War, easily.

You have X attacks and a fixed Y+ hit chance. After you hit, you have Z+ chance of damaging the enemy, which is just the enemy's "defense" stat. Each one that goes through is one 'damage', and after all damage is calculated you roll 2d6, add the damage, and if it exceeds a certain amount the unit routs from the board.

IE, my Dwarves have ten attacks, 4+ hit chance, and your Goblins have a 3+ damage chance. I roll ten dice, get five 4/5/6 results, and then roll those five dice and each 3+ is one damage to the Goblin unit. I end up doing two damage, so roll 2d6, add it to its current accumulated damage, and try to beat something like 14.

Its a little simplistic but god is it fast and easy.

Leaning towards adding attack skills, like WS/BS; this will allow me to knock down HP across the board considering there will actually be misses; not to mention the active mitigation from toughness.

Will also be nice to differentiate units a bit more as well.

Edit: Ended up totally changing my mind on this. WS/BS when a unit only gets one attack is dumb.