Thursday, October 21, 2010

Three combat options

Here are a few more options in combat for the world's most popular frpg, and similar games.  The rules in the block below are Open Gaming Content.

Hits and Misses
  • Every time you roll a natural 1, a complication occurs. It wont necessarily hurt, but it will complicate matters. 
  • Every time you roll a natural 20, something happens that's good for you. Roll damage as usual, and then double it!
Being Hurt
After your HP reaches 0, the Hits and Misses rule no longer apply. Now you are Hurt. When you suffer enough hits to reach the negative of your initial HP you're finally dead.


Damage by level
To speed up play, especially if you have many players, roll one less die and just assume you do your level amount of damage. If you are Hurt, you do half that.

These rules came from me thinking on combat in 7th Sea. In that game you have flesh wounds and dramatic wounds. The former you can rack up as many as can be dealt, and only after failing a save do you get serious damage. I thought that maybe that could be used, in a way, to give characters in other games some more staying power.

Pairing that with Hits and Misses, you will probably adjust the power up slightly. Any kind of crits and fumble rule are going to affect the player characters most, since they are present in all fights. But if they also can take some more damage it wont be so hurtful to once in a while be the victim of double damage.

Doing damage by level might be less fun, since it is actually fun to roll dice. On the other hand it do take a while for some people to find the right die, roll it and tell you the result. Having ten players I'd imagine it would be a time saver, though.

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