Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

So I'm putting a bit of effort back into the design of my AA skirmish game (small/medium quantities of elite models, acting individually not in squads) and I'm currently wrestling with achieving my goals for the damage system!

The main goals I'm putting into this:

• I want the combat system to be resolved quickly - not like 40k with hit, wound, save, fnp, plus rerolls, plus invulns, plus whatever. I want it to be quick - Ideally one meaningful roll.
• I don't want the system to be bogged down by multiple shots - they should make a mathematical difference to the chance of success, rather than needing to be resolved one after the other. As said above, one meaningful roll.
• I want the damage to be delayed - I don't want anyone to know how much damage they've done to the enemy, as it's all supposed to be taking place at the same time. I want an "and then the smoke cleared" sort of mechanic.

To that end, I've devised this system, which seems simple in my mind but I'm really struggling to write it down as simply! It always seems too complex!

Summary of resolving damage:
Playing cards are randomly dealt face down for damage. At the end of a turn (all units have activated), the damage cards are flipped over and resolved. Units have a "Toughness" stat which is the required card number to inflict damage. This is modified by being in cover, so models can dramatically dive for cover if they are taking more damage cards than they like, in an effort to survive. Cards equal to or over their toughness cause wounds, kings cause double (possible all face cards, pending playtest). I might combine Toughness with Defense, as they both function in a similar way and I expect they will have the same range of numbers (1-10). I'll see if units tend to end up with the same Defense as Toughness!


Now, onto the more complicated bit; Causing the damage cards!

The Attacker:
• Attacking models have a Ranged Attack value, being their skill with a ranged weapon.
• Weapons have an Armour Piercing value, being self explanatory.
These are added together to determine the Power of the Shots.

Weapons also have a Shots profile - the number of shots. The Power of the Shots is multiplied by the Shots to give the Attack value.

In this example, we have Ranged 1, Armour Piercing 2 and 3 Shots, for a Power of 3 and an Attack value of 9.

The Defender:
• Defenders have a Defense value
• Defenders have an Armour value, indicating the number they have to roll on their defence (EG. 4+) (this may end up being smoothed out of the game in favour of a flat 4+)

In this case, the Defender has a Defense value of 4 and an Armour value of 3+.

The Attack:
• When an attacker makes an attack against a Defender, the Defender rolls a number of D6 equal to the Attack Value, plus their Defense value.
• For every dice which rolls equal to or higher than the Defenders Armour, that dice is added to the Success pool
• The defender then spends successes to cancel out Shots, needing a number of successes equal to the power of the Shot to cancel it.
• Uncancelled Shots then cause damage.

In this example, the attacker makes an attack with 3 shots at a Power of 3, for an Attack value of 9.
The Defender rolls 9+4 D6 in defence, looking for 3+ results in the rolls.
for every 3 successes, the Defender can cancel a Shot.
Let's say the Defender rolls the 13 dice and gets 8 successes. The Defender can cancel 2 Shots, meaning 1 Shot inflicts damage.


Onto damage:

Weapons have a section indicating the Damage they inflict per successful Shot. This can be in the form of Panic Tokens or Damage cards, or a mixture thereof. Panic's still in the works, so let's focus on Damage.

• Let's say the weapon deals 3 Damage. 3 cards (from a normal deck of cards) are placed face down beside the model (or it's tracking sheet).
• The Defender has a Toughness of 4 and only 2 wounds left, so doesn't want to risk it. In their activation, they move into cover and end the turn there.
• Cover grants +1 to Toughness.
At the end of the turn, the 3 face-down damage cards are flipped and show a 2, a 4 and an 8. One of these equals or exceeds the models Toughness, as it is increased to 5 by cover, so it loses 1 wound.



I think that this is novel enough to make my game unique and simple enough to play, but I'm worried it takes altogether too much explaining to convey - but it is a simple system, which is built around tactics, unit skills, weapon stats, targets armour (both thickness and hardness) and toughness, and allows responses to incoming damage, combined with an element of gambling (will 5 cards bring that tank with 1 wound left down? what if they're all below 8?), but manages to deliver it all in one roll and some randomized cards!


(for info, there will be an element of a hand of cards in here, probably based on the highest leader stat in the army. Cards in hand can replace any cards dealt randomly, and replenish at the start of the turn).
(more info, I had considered just having the armour value added for each attack, but that actually meant armoured units were more likely to survive multiple shots than single ones, even from the same weapon! That's why I'm having them roll defense against the attack as a whole, that way overwhelming firepower can make it impossible to completely succeed. An unarmoured model would add 0 to their defence, and so would have to succeed on every dice to negate the whole attack!)

So, what does everyone think? Is it overly complex? Is it overly simple? Is there a significantly easier way to describe it? Does it make sense at all? Is it really necessary to include the Armour stat or should I smooth it to 4+ (I will probably decide after lots of playtesting!)

Your attack system doesn't require the attacker to do anything? Thats a... bold choice. I'm not sure how I would feel about it as a player, I'm not big on dice-heavy game designs, etc. but I would feel robbed of the dopamine hit that comes with dice rolling if the person rolling my attacks was my opponent. Doubly so when the payoff for the attack is delayed.

I think that this is novel enough to make my game unique and simple enough to play, but I'm worried it takes altogether too much explaining to convey

Its novel, its unique, its fairly simple and straightforward... but is it fun? My gut instinct says that a lot of players wouldn't have positive reactions to the mechanic, you're both denying the active player the pleasure and excitement of actually doing anything other than point-and-clicking at a target as well as denying them the instant gratification of knowing the outcome of the attack is - thats an ascetic approach to game design if I ever saw one and probably not what most audiences want or are looking for.

targets armour (both thickness and hardness)

Where does this factor in? I reread through the description but I'm not seeing how the system accounts for two variables? I don't know that this is entirely important, meaningful, or relevant unless you're designing a simulationist game with a significantly more detailed armor penetration model than what you've detailed. Generally speaking these two concepts are basically aggregated together in most games, in 40k for example a model with a 3+ armor save might have it because they have very thick slabs of softer armor or very thin sheets of very hard armor or anything in between.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Your attack system doesn't require the attacker to do anything? Thats a... bold choice. I'm not sure how I would feel about it as a player, I'm not big on dice-heavy game designs, etc. but I would feel robbed of the dopamine hit that comes with dice rolling if the person rolling my attacks was my opponent. Doubly so when the payoff for the attack is delayed.

I think that this is novel enough to make my game unique and simple enough to play, but I'm worried it takes altogether too much explaining to convey

Its novel, its unique, its fairly simple and straightforward... but is it fun? My gut instinct says that a lot of players wouldn't have positive reactions to the mechanic, you're both denying the active player the pleasure and excitement of actually doing anything other than point-and-clicking at a target as well as denying them the instant gratification of knowing the outcome of the attack is - thats an ascetic approach to game design if I ever saw one and probably not what most audiences want or are looking for.

targets armour (both thickness and hardness)

Where does this factor in? I reread through the description but I'm not seeing how the system accounts for two variables? I don't know that this is entirely important, meaningful, or relevant unless you're designing a simulationist game with a significantly more detailed armor penetration model than what you've detailed. Generally speaking these two concepts are basically aggregated together in most games, in 40k for example a model with a 3+ armor save might have it because they have very thick slabs of softer armor or very thin sheets of very hard armor or anything in between.

Thanks for the response!

1: I'm hoping to make the game veer more toward achieving objectives and a bit away from all-out murdering. I'm hoping that with AA mechanics I players will have the enjoyment of rolling the dice in defence regularly, though I am now starting to wonder - a low damage high defence army will be rolling all of the dice compared to a glass cannon army!

2: I guess I'm trying to aim more toward a simulation & cinematic style game. I always felt it somewhat unusual for games to feature people who have only half a chance of hitting their target, and felt that ballistic skills would be better served as maximum ranges, but I'm not using that for this game.

3: It's the Defence (being the thickness of armour) and the Armour (3+, being the hardness of the armour).

Interestingly I have just been going through my notes and came across an entry which was stipulating that the weapons have a Strength and AP value, where the Strength is the amount of dice it uses and the AP is the value to equal or exceed to save. As a result a weapon with an AP of 4 would require 4+ on defence dice to save against it. I'm going to lean towards this over the Armour value as it means weapons get a bit more variation, and defenders have one stat to worry about -Defence. Streamlining!


I will have a think as to how I could re-jig my system to offer similar results but rolled by the attacker. I see how it could be upsetting to have a massive cannon that rolls all the dice, only for your opponent to be the one rolling them!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I am now quite convinced that I've over-complicated this, and feel like I'm loading the rules and damage resolution into the wrong place!

New option:

• attacker rolls 1 dice per shot.
• Dice have to each exceed the targets Armour value to score a hit.
• Hits inflict damage & tokens.
Then
•Damage and tokens are resolved at the end of the turn.

This is significantly simpler, and gived the defenders two lines of defence (Armour prevents being hit, Defense (or Toughness I might call it) reduces the incoming damage, and Hitpoints soak up the damage taken.

Weapons can have an Armour Piercing value which reduces targets armour, which can make it easier to score hits on an armoured target.

Weapons have Shots, Damage and AP, then.
Attackers skill is reflected in the AP stat the weapons have on their specific cards.
Defenders have Armour (2-6) and Toughness (2-10).

So our original example:

Attacker makes 3 shots with AP1 and Damage 3.
Defender has Armour 4 and Toughness 4.

Attacker rolls 3 D6 and each that rolls a 3+ (
AP1 reduces the targets armour by 1, to 3) scores a Hit, dealing 3 damage cards to the target. Let's say they get 2 hits, for 6 cards.

Target has 2 Hp left, so runs to cover for +1 Toughness. At the end of the turn, they flip the 6 cards and determine how many are a 5 or higher. all that are cause damage, and the target is probably dead.


I'll have to work out how best to balance the damage vs defence but this could be an awful lot simpler than my original plan!

Its worth playtesting as its written to get feedback from players live, reading a mechanic and experiencing it are different things. Don't get me wrong - its an interesting approach and worth exploring further, but reading it I can't imagine that I personally would find it fun to not get to really participate in the resolution of my own attacks, and having been around the block a few times I can imagine that this would be a huge source of complaints for you from others as well. I think you could get away with the defender roll if damage was immediate, and I think you could get away with delayed damage if the attacker made the roll, but I think trying to get away with the defender rolling AND delayed damage is going to be a tough sell.

I would *definitely* keep the delayed damage aspect of the design, at least through the first few rounds of playtests. Its a cool and interesting approach to combat resolution and it deserves exploration. I can't imagine it should be too difficult to re-engineer the roll to be attacker based. I'm thinking the attacker rolls a number of dice equal to the attack value - the defenders defense value, looking for rolls that beat the defenders armor value. Then cancel based on the shot power, with the defender taking damage cards/panic tokens, etc. from uncancelled shots.

On that note though, the cancelling aspect feels kinda funky. Nothing inherently wrong with it, just the fact that its based on an attackers stat rather than a defenders stat feels weird, as it reduces the effectiveness of the attack so its like a "betrayed by my own weapon" kind of thing. I think theres room for improvement here - earlier you said the defender "spends" successes to cancel shots. "Spending" a resource in game design more often than not implies the existence of a decision and/or a choice and typically also a tradeoff, as you wrote it there is no decision or choice to be made here and no real tradeoff to be had, the defender would never not spend those successes to reduce the amount of hits (unless they wanted to accelerate their death, I guess?) - but what if the defender did have a choice?

Maybe instead of panic tokens being a damage type, instead panic tokens are the tradeoff to spending successes? I.E. If the attacker gets 8 successes on a power 3 shot, the defender can either let all 8 successes through, or can reduce those successes by the power value in exchange for a number of panic tokens? I.E. Cancel 3 successes and take 3 Panic Tokens (and 5 successes worth of Shots) or cancel 6 successes and take 6 Panic Tokens (and 2 successes worth of shots), etc. It forces the defender to make interesting decisions to try to counterbalance physical damage with their units mental state, presumably to avoid the unit falling back or becoming less effective in combat, etc.

Or, what if, the choice was the attackers? I.E. The attacker could reduce the number of successes for some other benefit, maybe to decrease the defenders toughness/increase the card value, etc.

Just some ideas, you'd have to play around with it. Also worth pointing out that the Power stat will cause some weirdness no matter which option you take - lets say you have an attack with Power 2 and you get 9 successes - 8 of them are canceled and 1 would still be able to convert to damage, but if you have a power 3 shot all 9 are canceled and 0 would be able to convert to damage, in this case the attack having lower power might actually more beneficial to the attacker/the attack having higher power is more beneficial to the defender depending on how that correlates with the weapons shot value

chaos0xomega wrote:
Its worth playtesting as its written to get feedback from players live, reading a mechanic and experiencing it are different things. Don't get me wrong - its an interesting approach and worth exploring further, but reading it I can't imagine that I personally would find it fun to not get to really participate in the resolution of my own attacks, and having been around the block a few times I can imagine that this would be a huge source of complaints for you from others as well. I think you could get away with the defender roll if damage was immediate, and I think you could get away with delayed damage if the attacker made the roll, but I think trying to get away with the defender rolling AND delayed damage is going to be a tough sell.

I would *definitely* keep the delayed damage aspect of the design, at least through the first few rounds of playtests. Its a cool and interesting approach to combat resolution and it deserves exploration. I can't imagine it should be too difficult to re-engineer the roll to be attacker based. I'm thinking the attacker rolls a number of dice equal to the attack value - the defenders defense value, looking for rolls that beat the defenders armor value. Then cancel based on the shot power, with the defender taking damage cards/panic tokens, etc. from uncancelled shots.

On that note though, the cancelling aspect feels kinda funky. Nothing inherently wrong with it, just the fact that its based on an attackers stat rather than a defenders stat feels weird, as it reduces the effectiveness of the attack so its like a "betrayed by my own weapon" kind of thing. I think theres room for improvement here - earlier you said the defender "spends" successes to cancel shots. "Spending" a resource in game design more often than not implies the existence of a decision and/or a choice and typically also a tradeoff, as you wrote it there is no decision or choice to be made here and no real tradeoff to be had, the defender would never not spend those successes to reduce the amount of hits (unless they wanted to accelerate their death, I guess?) - but what if the defender did have a choice?

Maybe instead of panic tokens being a damage type, instead panic tokens are the tradeoff to spending successes? I.E. If the attacker gets 8 successes on a power 3 shot, the defender can either let all 8 successes through, or can reduce those successes by the power value in exchange for a number of panic tokens? I.E. Cancel 3 successes and take 3 Panic Tokens (and 5 successes worth of Shots) or cancel 6 successes and take 6 Panic Tokens (and 2 successes worth of shots), etc. It forces the defender to make interesting decisions to try to counterbalance physical damage with their units mental state, presumably to avoid the unit falling back or becoming less effective in combat, etc.

Or, what if, the choice was the attackers? I.E. The attacker could reduce the number of successes for some other benefit, maybe to decrease the defenders toughness/increase the card value, etc.

Just some ideas, you'd have to play around with it. Also worth pointing out that the Power stat will cause some weirdness no matter which option you take - lets say you have an attack with Power 2 and you get 9 successes - 8 of them are canceled and 1 would still be able to convert to damage, but if you have a power 3 shot all 9 are canceled and 0 would be able to convert to damage, in this case the attack having lower power might actually more beneficial to the attacker/the attack having higher power is more beneficial to the defender depending on how that correlates with the weapons shot value

Thanks for the feedback!

I'll definitely try it out with both techniques. With the AP of the weapon being the target value for the attacker to roll, it would make the attacker feel a little more involved, I think!

I like the idea of choices - allowing a defender to round up instead of down but take panic tokens for each point needed would be an option. EG if they roll 8 successes and cancel 2 power 3 shots, they could then gain 1 panic token to add 1 to their result, meaning they got 9 and can cancel all 3.

I will have to make sure panic tokens are sufficiently interesting and not boring rubbish!

As for lower strength being better, I'm pretty sure I math'd it out to make sure it wasn't. For example, 3 P2 shots and 3 P3 shots vs Def. 4 means:

• 3P2 means 10 dice to defend, needing 6 successes to avoid all damage, assuming needing 4+ average is 5 successes so 2 damage
• 3P3 means 13 dice to defend, needing 9 successes to avoid all damage, assuming needing 4+ average is 6.5 successes so 3 damage

I will have to map out the curves for massed low strength vs single shot high strength, but then there's the amount of damage to consider as well - a single shot could inflict massive damage, and the higher its Power the less the targets armour matters...


I need to make some tables, methinks!

So what is all that meant to achieve? Does stuff move around on the board or do anything beside increment/decrement markers beside the models or something?

Edit: In a less dickish way, how does this fit into your game?

Nurglitch wrote:
So what is all that meant to achieve? Does stuff move around on the board or do anything beside increment/decrement markers beside the models or something?

Edit: In a less dickish way, how does this fit into your game?

The goal is that the game will be built around mobility and achieving multiple objectives within the game sequentially rather than repeatedly achieving the same objectives or just wiping out the enemy (A la 40k). The game is aiming to be inter-gang competition where they are in conflict but are set on achieving their objectives and trying to stop the others from achieving theirs.

My aim is to use AA to give people engagement throughout the turn, and then to use delayed damage to ensure that every model gets used every turn, and that if a model hasn't activated yet then it has the chance to affect its chances, for example by diving into cover.

The reason I'm wanting to reduce the rolls is to speed the game up, allowing more turns and so more objectives can be attempted during the game. Where 40k expects 4-5 turns, this might involve 10-20 turns (no idea exactly how many is realistic yet) and that means combat can't be a slog through umpteen dice with subsequent rerolls etc. I don't even want to have separate shots rolled individually as this will mean multiple resolutions each time a multi-shot weapon attacks.

For the sake of stopping all the mental mathematics and mass dice pickup, I'm thinking the fastest way to resolve this now is to use this system (I'll still test out all the systems I've come up with, but this sounds like the smoothest so far):

• Weapons have Range, Shots, AP and Damage (tokens/damage cards).
• Models have Armour, Toughness and Wounds.
Attack Sequence:
• Attacker rolls 1 dice per shot made, adds the AP of their weapon to each one, and needs to equal or exceed targets Armour.
• Each successful shot inflicts damage cards and tokens to the target.
Damage Sequence:
• Damage is resolved at the end of the turn, after all units have activated
• Toughness is modified by the terrain you're in, perhaps also auras and whatnot
• Damage cards ( a standard deck of cards) are flipped over, and any exceeding the models Toughness reduce the models Wounds.

I'm going to start coming up with some mock-up statistics for generic soldiers and see if I can give this a test run to see if it works out properly!

Cool, good to have some context.

Dumb question.

If you have a formula to resolve that a weapon is Attack 9, why not just make the weapon attack 9 and leave the formula in the "magic box"? Player's do not get to see into the magic box on how you come up with the weapon being Attack 9, it just is Attack 9.

 Easy E wrote:
Dumb question.

If you have a formula to resolve that a weapon is Attack 9, why not just make the weapon attack 9 and leave the formula in the "magic box"? Player's do not get to see into the magic box on how you come up with the weapon being Attack 9, it just is Attack 9.

Its because the Attack value requires the Power value x Shots value. Power is a factor of the model stat added to the weapon stat. Presumably the weapon and the model are independent of eachother (in the same way as in 40k a bolter is a bolter is a bolter regardless of whos wielding it).

But you make up a good point, if you can give your player the stat instead of forcing them to derive it mid-game, then you should. Warmachine/Hordes has the solution to the problem here, weapons are standardized but require a derived stat reliant on a stat that varies from model to model in order to work. They provide you the models statline (in which case the relevant stat is the STR stat), and then they provide you the weapon stat, which tells you the Pow stat of the weapon and is standard for all other weapons of that type, and then it povides you the P+S stat which is what varies, being based on the weapons POW + the models STR.

In other words you might have a specific weapon, like the "upside-down inside-out ogre sword" - this is a common weapon and every one of them is identical. It has POW 8 and comes with its own standard boilerplate special rules - this is true of every upside-down inside-out ogre sword, regardless of whether its being wielded by a red mook with STR 5 or a blue mook with STR 10. BUT, on the statcard for the red mook the upside-down inside-out ogre sword displays P+S 13, while on the blue mooks statcard the same weapon displays P+S 18. This is done so that players have an understanding that every upside-down inside-out ogre sword is identical, but the reason one of them is hitting harder than the other is because of a difference in the STR stat, and not because they named two different weapons with different stats identically.

The same approach can be taken here. Eliminate the need for players to do the math.

Are weapons modular, like inter-changeable, in Warmachine? Otherwise it seems like providing the final number of P+S seems like it would free up lots of space on cards and in rules.

Yes, as a player I do not want to do a calculation. One of my biggest gripes of a game like "In Her Majesty's Name" is that they use a somewhat convoluted system so you can make a single attack and damage die roll.

I would rather just make two quick die rolls then spend the time to calculate the "magic number" in game. Too much player effort for a game effect that reduces my fun/immersion in the moment.

I think removing the P+S for the player makes your game more streamlined and reduces player effort to game.

Keep in mind, I have no idea what other people like to play, only what I like to play so your mileage may vary.... a lot.

I think that you're all quite right, and that the best approach I've got for this now is:

• Number of shots = number of dice you roll
• enemy armour is what you need to equal or exceed to succeed (IE armour 5 needs 5+ to inflict damage)
• Weapon AP is added to the rolls, so AP2 means each roll is at +2, meaning this weapon needs 3+ to damage armour 5.
• Damage cards dealt face down and resolved at the end of the turn
• Damage cards compare to Toughness, which can be affected by terrain and unit abilities.

So I will be simply featuring shots, AP and damage to each weapon.


Further to this, Close combat will be more rare and more difficult to pull off than shooting, but it also removes the "smoke clears" effect - in CC, damage cards are dealt face up and resolved immediately - swinging a rocked powered axe into someone and cutting them in two is going to be more immediately obviously deadly than seeing them disappear in a cloud of dust as an explosion may or may not have killed them!

Much cleaner.