Hello folks,

I've posted here a couple of times about the heroic fantasy success-counting dice-pool PnP I'm cooking up with couple of friends. Having received great feedback from y'all so far, I want to ask for your thoughts on my most recent iteration of the combat system. My goal is to create a system that will emphasize tactics and active defenses. Combat will be zone-based (a la FATE or Edge of the Empire) rather than grid-based; the exact size of a zone varies, but the rule of thumb is that creatures in the same zone are within melee range of each other.

The main innovation I'm trying to bring to the table here is the concept of "combat resources." All creatures on the battlefield have two such resources: Position (representing tactical advantage, high ground, the element of surprise, optimal range, &c) and Endurance (representing reserves of physical and mental energy). By default, a character's Position at the start of combat is equal to its Agility+Perception, and its Endurance is equal to its Might+Spirit. These values made be modified based on the situation; a character that has been ambushed will start with reduced Position, while a character that has seized the high ground before the start of combat will begin with extra Position.

These combat resources each serve a couple of purposes.

• They indicate relative advantage on the battlefield: for example, if your Position is greater than your target's, you may be able to flank or backstab them, and if your Endurance is greater, you may be able to overpower them.
  
• They can be spent to gain a bonus on attack or defense rolls. This represents actions such as falling prone to dodge a javelin, retreating in the face of a furious onslaught, or being fatigued after deflecting a rain of blows with your shield.
  
• They act as ablative defenses. Every success rolled by the attacker removes one point of either Position or Endurance (attacker's choice) from the target; once either Position or Endurance are reduced to zero, a damage roll is made, with any remaining successes from the attack roll "rolling over" as bonuses on the damage roll.
  

Because the attacker chooses which combat resource to target on a successful hit, it behooves the defender to make an active defense; for example, if a PC has Position 5 and Endurance 1, they may wish to sacrifice a point or two of Position to boost their active defense, because if the attack lands, the attacker can target Endurance and almost certainly inflict an injury.

Position can be fairly easily recovered in combat (especially if the character has good Agility and/or Perception); likewise, characters with good Might and Spirit can recover Endurance without too much trouble. Injuries, however, are serious business; they are location-specific, assign steep penalties to subsequent defense rolls, and take some time to heal. Thus, PCs must use their combat resources wisely (and occasionally sacrifice them) to avoid suffering serious and long-lasting consequences.

So yeah, that's what I've got so far. Does this sound tenable? Does it sound fun? Play-testing will obviously be needed to identify all the kinks, but do there seem any glaring problems that I've overlooked? Lastly, I'm still trying to figure out if I should have more combat resources (possibly adding something like Spellpower) or fewer. What do y'all think?

(If you'd like more info on the system as a whole, I'm happy to spill the beans. You can find a decent rundown of the main mechanics here).

I've been building a system surprisingly similar to this. It is also position based rather than grid based. The players in my game also have two resources (combat tokens for physical energy and tactics tokens for mental energy)

What a strange coincidence. Needless to say, I think the premise is a really interesting one, and yes it does sound tenable and fun.

In my systems combat and tactics tokens do not indicate advantage, though that is an interesting idea. In mine players get intrinsic bonuses to certain kinds of rolls to encourage them not to spend all of their tokens at once (because of the bonus, attacks get less efficient the more tokens you spend on them).

There are a couple other differences in the way that combat plays out but I won't go into them. I'm glad to know that the idea isn't completely out there. Reading the rundown of the main mechanics, my system seems like a much simpler version of yours.