Quote from: hedgehobbit on April 15, 2025, 01:19:18 PMAnyway, no game writes skills down this way

It wasn't %-based, but Alternity did skill target #s in a similar way.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on April 14, 2025, 06:04:35 PM

Quote from: tenbones on April 11, 2025, 05:49:57 PMI want armor to absorb damage.

I want "to hit" numbers to reflect the fighting ability of the *opponent*.

I want deathspiral mechanics that are adjustable and easy to do on the fly in order to replicate different genres of play. So while HP are not ideal, it could work if you have a wound-track.

No "dead levels". Whether it's a level based system or not. Any and all advancements should be meaningful.

Sounds very Palladium Fantasy.

1.  Armor is extra hit points, though a high roll to hit will bypass it because armor has a second stat called Armor Rating. Roll equal/under AR, the armor absorbs the damage.  Roll over the AR, you hit the guy.

2.  Strike vs Parry.  Your strike, his parry.  If he has a big parry bonus, it's hard to land a hit.

3.  Armor loses AR as it takes damage.  Palladium is a D20 game, so AR is generally between 10-17.  At half of its own HP gone (called Structural Damage Capacity to differentiate between living and inanimate stuff in Palladium aka poison does HP damage, but does nothing to a door's 35 SDC), it drops by 2.  When you're at 1/3 of the Armor's Structual Damage Capacity, you lose another 2 AR.  So, your fanciest full plate armor starts as AR 17, but if you wear beat up full plate, the AR is only 13.  Better go see an armor smith. 

4.  Generally each level you will get a bonus to either your sword or shield strike & parry skills, and non-combat skills all go up by 5% as they're percentile based. Wizards get more spells every level, typicall two.  Leveling up is rare.  Palladium only goes up to level 15, and that takes a lot to reach.  Highest level we saw in 5 years playing was 13.

That is certainly accurate. However... Palladium as a system has a whole bunch of abstraction that goes into it that bogs the game down unless as a GM you're *really* savvy with it.

Yes, you can do Armor as extra HP. Or you can do it as pure damage mitigation with/without armor attrition. Depends on the abstraction.

If I were doing it in d20... I might say your Parry rating is equal to 10+ your opponents "to Hit" score (which takes into account whatever weapon he has in his hand which might be magic/specialization etc). Armor absorbs incoming damage. Heavy Armor (Plate mail) absorbs a flat 4-points off of any attack. And instead of HP, you have a toughness rating equal to your Con bonus + 4. And in order to do damage you have to equal or surpass this with your damage roll. Your Con bonus is a threshold, so that every iteration of damage above that threshold does another Wound. And you have a wound-track equal to 2-Wounds + Con bonus. Your last two Wound states give you -3 penalties to all actions which stack.

This keeps it all connected and easy to manage with little guesswork. Further, its very scalable. Instead of having *massive* HP balloons to slog through, you can have class-based and gear-based mechanisms to scale damage/defense up or down that is more intuitive than discrete abstractions like Palladium (and D&D's HP/AC).

I've been toying around with an OSR system that removes HP/AC with these kinds of mechanics. in my solo-playtests, it operates much faster than standard d20. Feels... more kinetic.