This is a follow up to this post. Thank you if you shared your ideas/opinions there.
I have a dice pool combat system ready for feedback. It's inspired by the Riddle of Steel -- it starts with splitting your dice across offense and defense, and declaring your dice commitment before your maneuver -- but the maneuvers have been totally redone and rebalanced.
I made a web app to help test it. Please have a gander and let me know what you think: https://combat-sim-397bb.web.app/
The rules are in the app: click Rules on the top right.
There is a toggle in Settings to switch between Simultaneous and Sequential exchange modes. I haven't decided yet which of these I like better. One of my in-person testers prefers one mode and another prefers the other!
- Simultaneous: Attacker and Defender secretly choose their maneuvers and reveal at the same time.
- Sequential: Defender declares maneuver first, then Attacker chooses after seeing the Defender's choice.
I have a set of basic maneuvers so far, with advanced maneuvers in the works. The basic maneuvers have a rock-paper-scissors relationship:
- Parry beats Simple Attack,
- Feint beats Parry,
- Counter beats Feint,
- Simple Attack beats Counter,
- Dodge floats outside this as a desperate option against strong Attacks/Counters
But even so, the Attacker's decision in Sequential mode isn't trivial: your relative dice commitments matter. If the defender throws up a strong Counter, there's no point Feinting, but you might want to Dodge instead of Attack. If they show a weak Parry, you don't want to Dodge, but it might be better to Simple Attack instead of Feint.
Balancing the maneuvers was *not* intuitive! I needed the help of a evolutionary algorithm that pits strategies against each other thousands of times to find the most successful ones. I kept tweaking the rules until the top strategies held back some dice for defense and showed a mix of maneuvers.
There were four keys to achieving this:
- Dice refresh at the start of your turn. Before your first turn you have only half dice.
- Parry is better than canceling out attacker successes 1 for 1. I have each parry success canceling 2 attacker successes.
- Some maneuvers are better with *low* dice commitments (Feint and Dodge).
- Damage is nonlinear. Some sort of extra wounding effect at higher damage does the trick. For now, I have 2 damage = a Serious Wound (x2 = 4 HD lost) and 3 damage = a Grievous Wound (x3 = 9 HD lost). This makes it scary to be totally defenseless.
With these adjustments in place, it's not very productive to attack into parries. You have to throw in some feints, which leaves you vulnerable to counters, which are vulnerable to simple attacks, and so on. And it's risky to blow all your dice attacking, because then you're defenseless on your opponent's turn (when they get a refresh), which significantly increases your chance of taking a serious wound.
I'm confident that the basic maneuvers here are pretty well balanced. But I'd like to know if they *feel* that way to others.