I asked about people's favorite RPG combat systems on Twitter and got some excellent answers.
So I thought to myself: "Maybe I should go through each of the recommended combat systems in a series of blog posts?". So this is the start of that series! My main goal for doing this is of course to find inspiration for new ways to do combat for the Mythos Engine.
I will focus on some specific elements from each system:
- Actions: What can you do during combat? Are the actions predetermined? Other approaches?
- Rolling Dice: How many dice rolls are needed to resolve combat?
- Complexity: How hard is it to follow the rules and how often do you need to consult the rulebook, reference sheet, flowchart, cards?
- Tactics: What sort of tactics does the system support? Does it require tactical skill by the player? Or maybe it only requires a roll of the dice without much thought?
So let's do this, in no particular order.
Dungeons & Dragons
Initiative
Roll for initiative.
Actions
Standard, bonus, full, crap?
Rolling Dice
d20+Attack bonus
Damage & Lethality
Polyhedral dice. 100s of HPs. Looooong fights.
Weapons
Pretty boring stuff.
Properties
Slashing, bludgeon, piercing.
Tactics
Uuummmm. Move and attack, attack and move. And flanking! That's pretty much it.
Conclusion
It's shitty as shitty can be!
Pathfinder 2e
Pathfinder is built from D&D 3.5e and most of their combat system is pretty similar. But I feel Pathfinder 2e has managed to streamline it considerably.
Actions
Gone are the standard, move, and swift actions. Instead, PF2 has 3 unspecified actions you can do during your round. This could be move, attack, aid an ally,
Rolling Dice
Complexity
Tactics
Shadow of the Demon Lord
Initiative
SotDL has an extremely streamlined approach to initiative. There are no rolls, instead, each round has a fast turn and a slow turn. Players always choose first which turn they will act. What you can do during your round is then determined by the turn you choose to act in.
- Fast turn: If you choose to act during the fast turn you can move or do an action, in addition to a triggered action and 1 minor activity.
- Slow Turn: If you choose to wait for the slow turn you get to both move and do an action, in addition to a triggered action and 2 minor activities.
Actions
The four types of "actions", as you might've discerned from above, are the action (duh!), move, triggered action, and minor activity.
- Action: The action is the main thing you do in your turn. You typically only have one action in a turn, although talents gained from paths can give you more actions in certain cases. The action can be spent to make an attack, hide, help someone, prepare an action when a trigger happens, cast a spell, and such.
- Triggered Action: All triggered actions need a trigger. For example, if your opponent tries to move away from you without using the disengage action, you get a free attack as a triggered action, unless you've already spent it. Or if you use the aforementioned prepare action, the thing you prepared uses your triggered action. There are also talents that give you more stuff you can do with a triggered action, like reloading with a triggered action instead of with the action and such.
- Move: Pretty self-explanatory, you move up to your speed.
- Minor Activity: Very minor stuff uses a minor activity. Things like drawing or sheathing a weapon or pulling out an incantation scroll from your prepared scroll case.
Rolling Dice
SotDL uses only two types of dice, the d20, and the d6. Rolling dice in SotDL is done in one of two ways, either a challenge roll or an attack roll.
- Challenge Roll: Challenge roll is always a d20 + one of your stats or characteristics + any boons or banes (which uses d6 and is added or subtracted from the d20 roll). The target number for a challenge roll is always 10+.
- Attack Roll: Like the challenge roll above, attack rolls are done with a d20 + one of your stats + boons or banes. The difference here is that attack rolls always target a stat or characteristic. So a melee attack roll typically needs to roll equal to or higher than the opponent's Defense characteristic.
Dealing Damage
First of all, Damage is a separate characteristic from Health, so taking damage increases your Damage characteristic instead of reducing your Health. This makes it a lot easier to handle penalties to Health, healing, and such.
Damage is dealt with dice rolls and your attack roll typically has no effect on the damage done, unless your attack roll results in 20 or higher and you have a talent that triggers when that happens.
All damage in SotDL uses d6s with some weapons having a fixed bonus, like the sword that deals 1d6+2 damage. Talents gained from paths often increase the number of d6 you roll for damage, so at higher levels, your sword could deal 5d6+2 damage for example.
Weapons
SotDL uses a more generalized set of weapons than most systems. For example, the sword, battleaxe, and morning star all share the same traits. And they're all separated into six categories: basic, heavy, melee, ranged, shields, and swift weapons. Some talents gained from paths only affect certain weapon categories and some categories typically have shared properties. For example, swift weapons have the finesse property which gives the wielder the choice of using Strength or Agility when making the melee attack roll.
Properties
Speaking of properties, many weapons have properties that make them unique like the aforementioned finesse property, but also things like range, cumbersome that gives 1 bane when using it, defensive that gives a bonus to Defense, and others.
Tactics
There are some good tactical choices in SotDL combat in the form of melee and ranged attack options and special attacks against an attribute.