Yeah, there is something about hearing more rumble on the table the more dice are being rolled for damage.

That was always part of the appeal of not just multiplying damage results on a double or triple damage result, but multiplying the dice rolled! Oh my god! He rolled double damage on a halberd charge! 8d6 damage - (rumble rumble!)

He falls off the cliff ... it's a 20 meter drop! Roll 20d - 40! (RUMBLE!)

You can hear the characters die! ;-D

Which brings me to another question...

Random or Static Damage? Should that be another thread?

Quote from: tenbones;1119804Which brings me to another question...

Random or Static Damage? Should that be another thread?

I'd say it's interdependent enough with attack rolls to stay here.

For example, a margin of success based damage system is greatly dependent on the attack mechanics (and is neither static nor random in the sense that D&Ds damage is random). Also relevant is whether you want linear (just to-hit or damage) or quadratic (to-hit and damage) scaling and how much you want (ex. It's trivially easy to cap attack/defense on a starting character in the classic World of Darkness rules vs. the abilities of a level 1 vs. level 20 D&D fighter).

Quote from: Chris24601;1119821I'd say it's interdependent enough with attack rolls to stay here.

For example, a margin of success based damage system is greatly dependent on the attack mechanics (and is neither static nor random in the sense that D&Ds damage is random). Also relevant is whether you want linear (just to-hit or damage) or quadratic (to-hit and damage) scaling and how much you want (ex. It's trivially easy to cap attack/defense on a starting character in the classic World of Darkness rules vs. the abilities of a level 1 vs. level 20 D&D fighter).

Yes, it very much depends on how the attack roll works.  Though I doubt I will ever consider static damage.  I enjoy rolling for damage so much, that it skews my appreciation of the associated attack roll system as well.  It's why I don't much care for "damage as margin of success" attack systems--nothing against the math or elegance of the system, just such a huge preference to roll the damage.  Exception would be some dice pool games where the scale is coarser than attack/damage, though even then I have a love/hate feeling for the system.

Quote from: tenbones;1119804Which brings me to another question...

Random or Static Damage? Should that be another thread?

For the type of game I usually want, it should model the situation well. So if it's about someone being, say, hit with a melee weapon, that can happen in a variety of ways that are more or less injurious such that it almost always makes sense for the amount of injury from each hit to be random over an appropriate range.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1119838Yes, it very much depends on how the attack roll works.  Though I doubt I will ever consider static damage.  I enjoy rolling for damage so much, that it skews my appreciation of the associated attack roll system as well.  It's why I don't much care for "damage as margin of success" attack systems--nothing against the math or elegance of the system, just such a huge preference to roll the damage.  Exception would be some dice pool games where the scale is coarser than attack/damage, though even then I have a love/hate feeling for the system.

Yeah, dice pool games were the first games where I encountered the idea of damage based on margin of success, and it works well for them cuz it's tied to the number of dice rolled (that succeeded), so it becomes like a substitute for rolling damage. Plus I really like the idea that the quality of the attack affects its effectiveness.

You could still have damage by margin of success and also roll damage, though. One example would be to make damage a roll based on the weapon or attack type, but modified based on the margin of success. Another would be to base damage rolls on damage levels (like maybe 1d6/level or 1d6/2 Levels, +2 at odd levels), with each weapon or attack type having a base damage level. Then modify the attack's damage level based on the margin of success.

Another possibility is to roll damage based strictly on the attack, but add some additional effect based on degree of success. Marvel Super Heroes RPG (FASERIP), for example, used static damage based on the attack's rank number (this could be changed to a random roll, though), but the attack's degree of success would trigger an extra effect on a yellow (complete) or red (critical success) result, based on the attack's damage type. Edged or Energy attacks could potentially stun or kill an enemy, Blunt/Force attacks could knock or slam them, etc.

Granted, this goes beyond Static vs Random damage, but still ties to attack roll methods and attack effects based on degrees or margins of success.

The best attack is undoubtedly D20+stat+base attack+misc vs armor class.

Quote from: Shasarak;1119535I wonder if the increased speed is because DMs do not inherently care as much about their NPCs then the Players do about their PCs combined with NPCs that have less options then a PC does.

NPCs having fewer options is system dependent. Usually I run systems where there is no mechanical difference between PCs and NPCs. And I almost always have an advantage when I GM since I know the system better than most (and often all) of the players.

But I think you are right that caring effects the speed of decision making. I'm pretty sure that I make faster decisions when I GM than when I play. But it's not just the caring/risk. Decisions are more fraught for players in another way. As the GM I know how tough the NPCs are, where they are, how many of them there are, etc. and I also know the same information about the PCs. But the players have far less information. The fog of war is much thicker for the player than it is for the GM.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1120455The best attack is undoubtedly D20+stat+base attack+misc vs armor class.

Let us not mistake "best" with "most common"...

Quote from: RPGPundit;1120455The best attack is undoubtedly D20+stat+base attack+misc vs armor class.

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While that is most accurately the 3e method (5e method also applies advantage/disadvantage), it's still very traditional. Growth sometimes trying something different. It may not work, but growth cannot happen without taking such chances.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1120560[ATTACH=CONFIG]4108[/ATTACH]
While that is most accurately the 3e method (5e method also applies advantage/disadvantage), it's still very traditional. Growth sometimes trying something different. It may not work, but growth cannot happen without taking such chances.

Of course people are welcome to experiment and try new things, but there's also a lot of "reinventing the wheel" going on, and in many cases what you get is something that doesn't work as well as if you based your work on what was already proven and viable.

There's an elegance to the standard attack roll that has been hard to beat.

That's the real gist of what I'm polling for.

The abstraction arguments are important, obviously, but so is the gameplay. There is an undoubted elegance to the AC mechanic... in that it abstracts so much into the procedure alongside HP that it's pretty clean in play.

But I'm gauging what people here are willing to put up with in terms of the procedure vs. abstraction based on what's been established all these years in gaming. The results have been pretty interesting (as has this discussion).

Quote from: tenbones;1119282It's a bit meta - but how *many* calculations are you wanting to have in a combat exchange to determine the act of simply hitting a target?

Cooking in the abstractions into the task resolution is what we're really discussing here. And I'm interested in finding the sweet spot(s).

I had been mulling how to answer this, and forgot about it.  Time has let me focus on what was causing my initial hesitation:  For me, the bottleneck is not the number of calculations but rather the number of GM/player interactions--as well as where those interactions occur and the player uncertainty about success.  (The difficulty of the calculations is still a concern, of course.)

In general, I want to minimize the number of player interactions while having a rapid, almost ad hoc back and forth between GM and players, and having players uncertain about when they will next get to do something effective.  If that adds one or two simple calculations to what I'd otherwise need, then I'm more than happy to make that trade.

How I run D&D 5E combat gives a partial example of what I mean.  Instead of the usual--roll initiative up front, everyone goes in order in the cycle, do character at a time, effects last until "end of your next round", attacks, then damage, I've got something more akin to controlled chaos:  

- Players roll initiative every round to go before or after the monsters.  Roughly half the characters will thus go early, in a round, of Players A, Monsters, Players B.
- Players in A all go at once, and cannot wait to see the results of what others are doing (though they may hear what they intend, of course).  You want to see what happens, you can go with Players in B.
- After a couple of rounds, if the target ACs aren't already known, they'll be announced.  
- Back and forth is thus more about intent and targets.  Then I'm rapidly moving onto the next person in that group of players.  As players determine hits and damage, they start letting me know.
- When the monsters go, I frequently announce targets and then have the players roll most of the smaller attacks against their own characters.  So they know the attack bonus and damage of the foes fairly quick.
- "End of round" is the end of the round for Players A effects, but end of the next round for Players B effects.  However, death saves are all done at the end of the round.
- I narrate in chunks, not individual player actions.

The overall effect is that I can run a chaotic but fast combat with 10-12 players and easily 2 or 3 times that many creatures in about 20 minutes, unless a majority of the creatures are complex ones to run (or I've just got a good reason to keep their abilities hidden or those handful of cases where the fight is so tight that it drags from the sheer death struggle).  You'll note that I've got an extra roll in the sequence (initiative every round) but have farmed some of my rolls to the players.  I reserve the option to roll as the GM or not on a round by round basis depending on the situation, which changes the flow as well.  Not knowing when you'll go next round is definitely a thing that keeps the players worried and interested.  (Also funny at times.  "Oh boy, good thing the cleric lost initiative, because we needed that healing at the end!"  We've even had a player deliberately lose initiative a few times because they suspected they'd need to pick up the pieces after the monsters went.)  The stop and go pacing from the multiple characters at once and the end of round is also different.

The whole thing is set up to magnify the D&D trait that the first few rounds are a little slower, but it gradually picks up speed on each round as effects and damage take creatures out, the players know what they need to hit, and the players take over more of the rolls.  This frees me up to inject more uncertainty via the actions of the monsters.  That is, I can still run a very fast combat by spending my attention on having the monsters do interesting things that will make the players sweat instead of making a bunch of rolls that have lost their punch.

Overall, I don't mind attack calculations (D&D style, GURPS or Hero style, Rune Quest style, etc.) nearly as much as I mind having everything go into slow motion while they GM/player get into this sequence of:  Ask something, get answer, do calculation, roll, report results, etc."  We've got 10+ brains in the room.  I want the calculations to use the inherent parallel processing available.  Obviously, past a certain point of complexity, the calculations break the parallel processing, because the players don't get them well enough, and go back into a wait state while they clarify with the GM.  Though of course that is true of any system.

Aside #1:  A lot of my own system design/development work is in finding better way to make the mechanics support the flow I want.  There is something very tricky about bridging the gaps between initiative/attack/effects/conditions in mechanics.  I think a lot of the fault lines are precisely in the communication/sequence process more so than the attacks.

Aside #2:  I'm very interested in seeing what Skarg has to say about the above, since I suspect that some of this will be very off from what he prefers and some of it very on.  Though maybe I'm projecting since one of the reasons for the focus is to put more player decisions, such as meaningful maneuver choices, into that framework.

It appears we are both in the same boat! I'm working on a project and mulling over creating my own house-system, and I'm not interested really in novelty as much as I'm interested in field-testing whether or not a "better mousetrap" is worth my time. There are certainly systems I can use an simply tweak - some like Savage Worlds are made for that. Others not so much, but they have elements that I find really solid for a certain kind of gameplay.

The key is finding the mechanics that "rub" the assumptions of the setting the right way.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1121005

I find myself largely in agreement. One reason I found Runequest combat didn't take that long despite the need to roll both attack and parry is that the players knew what they needed to roll and they rolled it, tracked their result, and then told me when it was their turn during the round. Initiative was Strike Rank based so they also knew when they needed to give me the results of their rolls.