Friday, April 6, 2012

Tired of Missing

How hard is it to hurt an unarmored man?

I mean, let’s think about this for a moment. I’m 5’9” and about 155 at my optimal “fighting weight” (right now, I’m close to 15 pounds over that). I’ve no real military experience or “combat training” to speak of. I can probably jog a little more than a mile without being too winded.

Now give me a hand axe. Hell, make it a spiked or flanged mace, so I don’t need to worry about getting the edge on target. Put me within “melee range” of a dude NOT wearing armor, NOT carrying a shield, NOT wearing a helm. What’s my chance of hitting him hard enough that he’s hurt? Not killed, not incapacitated with pain but simply HURT…call it the equivalent of 1 point of damage. All I’m doing is swinging a heavy club and trying to connect. Assume he has the same (lack of) training that I have myself and he is unarmed. But I have him backed into a corner so he HAS TO fight me. What’s my D20 roll to hit? Personally, I think it would be pretty good. Given 10 seconds for a “go,” I figure I’d get at least three or four swings, at least one of which should give the guy a nasty bruise…at least if I was really trying to hurt the guy.

In D&D, my chance of doing ANY noteworthy damage would be 50%.

0 level character (a “normal human” in B/X) attacking AC 9 (unarmored) does damage on a D20 roll of 11-20 (one-half the time). If my opponent decides to run I’d get a +2 upping my total chance to 60% (12 chances in 20).

Now what if instead I was a stout fighter, trained to kill, a 1st level “veteran,” armed with a long blade and the guts (or Chaotic temperament) to slay an unarmed foe. A foe standing right there: in arm’s reach. Say, I’m wearing a suit of chain so I’m not even worried about a return attack. Given a 10 second combat round, what’s the percentage likelihood I’d be able to HURT this duck…just do 1 point of damage (or more)?

55%. I need to roll a 10 or better on the D20.

How about a 3rd level fighter…a “swordsman?” Still 55%.

That means I miss almost half the time…and my chance of wounding better protected folks simply decreases.

Man, I am waaay tired of ineffective attacks. Tired of missing.

Ended up playing Labyrinth Lord last night due to all my play-testers bailing for one reason or another (too short notice for Red, family and work obligations for two others). That was fine…I actually ended up calling it a night early due to the excruciating back pain that has once again reared its ugly head. But ANYway, I did play a bit more in Randy’s LL game where our low-level characters continued to get into scrape after scrape and whack-whack away, trying to hit giant schmucks of one sort or another. This session I was noticing more and more the high number of missed attack rolls…something that has been grating on me more and more the last couple sessions.

[have my posts been a bit negative this week? Sorry…the chronic pain does something nasty to my attitude]

Remember waaaay back in May of 2010 (wow...almost two years now), when I proposed this "grand idea" of cutting To Hit rolls out of the D&D combat sequence? Well, maybe you don't and that's totally forgivable since play-testing the idea showed it to be a silly one...mainly due to being proposed as a time-saving shortcut and ending up being overly complex.

But, hey...just because the idea was poor in execution doesn't mean my gripe from two years ago is less valid. In fact, I've just added more fuel to the old fire...before, I was trying to make combat quicker and more expedient and thought cutting out attack rolls would do that. Now, I'm wanting something else:

Realism.

Fantasy realism, but something modeled a bit better on reality all the same. And the reality is this: when two people get to brawling, two people get hurt. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. But even if one person is sooo skilled that he (or she) avoids taking a single scratch from an opponent, he still expends energy (fatigue, exertion) ducking or blocking or dodging to prevent that scratch from landing.

Once again, I find my attention drawn to the war game Chainmail, where the attack roll in man-to-man combat was simply a die roll to determine if one's opponent had been killed. Not a roll to attack plus a roll for damage...ONE roll...to KILL. Now, of course, this is too simplistic for an RPG...Chainmail is a WAR GAME, and one is dealing with many dozens or scores of miniatures on a side and a method of deciding the outcome of engagements quickly is imperative. But the simple concept has been percolating ideas in my brain...ideas that I'm not exactly sure just how to implement (let alone where and when).

Ugh...I'm extremely tired and my brain is shutting down for the night. More later (probably).

23 comments:

  1. In my d&d variant the result of an attack is always someone taking damage. If the attack mosses the defender hits with a counter attack, so at least something happens. In your example the cornered opponent obviously managed to get a few shots in on you before you could hit him.

    This isn't portable over to standard d&d as is, but it might help your process.

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    1. Is there such a thing as "standard D&D?"
      ; )

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  2. This is an interesting topic.

    What about changing the to hit ratio from a line to a curve or different slope? In other words, make it easy to hit low AC and very difficult to hit high AC.

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    1. In an ascending AC system, this can be accomplished by rolling 3d6 instead of 1d20 to hit. Sadly, we haven't play-tested it enough. So I can't say that it "feels" right.

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  3. As players gain in level the number of hits that miss diminishes greatly. But oddly enough as they gain levels those blows that split foes in half are less and less common.

    I suspect a lot of players are perfectly happy with their characters being missed and would really like their blows to strike and defeat foes more often.

    It's all a matter of character longevity and what you want the PC to be in your games. You want that characters wading through hordes of baddies every session, someone had better miss often and not do much damage (and it best not be the PCs).You want careful characters that seldom engage in combat, get killed in one or two blows should be common.

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  4. Arneson's original D&D rules had a chart to hit which compared the PC's level to the monster's hit dice. So your chance to hit was based on your opponents skill. Armor was a saving throw to avoid damage. (this is how Warhammer/40k works).

    However, even in D&D you aren't just trying to swing at a man-sized object, you're trying to hit someone who is actively trying to avoid getting hit either by dodging or parrying.

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    1. Are you talking about the Blackmoor supplement, or Arneson's personal campaign?

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    2. His personal pre-D&D campaigns. One version is present in Dragons at Dawn, although from my understanding he switched from a 2d6 roll to a percentile roll (before switching again to a percentile level vs AC chart that got switched to d20 for D&D). All that within about three years.

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  5. Also, keep in mind that it's not a roll to hit. It's a roll to (potentially) kill. All you have to do to add more realism is not describe a low roll as "you swing and miss".

    I narrate each "attack" as actually being multiple strikes, many of which graze or mildly bruise the target. If the attack roll succeeds, the attacker struck home; the dagger slips through a crack in the opponent's armor, or the hammer came down on the opponent's head with a sickening crack. The damage roll, compared to hit points, then determines whether the opponent shakes off the injury and keeps fighting or collapses to the ground, dying.

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    1. @ Talysman:

      I do the same...but there's a disconnect between needing an 17 (for example) to hit the plate-armored guy through the eye-hole and then rolling a "1" for damage.

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  6. Tunnels and Trolls for the win.

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  7. Sounds like you need 4th edition D&D! Hitting unarmoured foes who don't have preternatural Dexterity is very easy. A 1st level Fighter might have +8 or +9 to hit; 1st level mook monster has +6. Unarmoured AC without a stat or level etc bonus is still 10.

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  8. The trouble with trying to make D&D combat more realistic is that the focus tends to be on man-to-man when in game the combat is as likely or more likely to be man-to-giant rat dog thing or taloned shadow or whatever. I think D&D's combat system works because it's abstract and trying to make it more realistic slows it down and reduces fun, unless your really into weird tiny combat specifics which most people, even gamers are not (except people who play Riddle of Steel, those guys are nuts)
    What works for me is to disassociate injury from Hit Points. You can be hit and bruised and not loose any HP, and you can loose HP and not get a scratch.

    Also, I'd give you a bonus to hit if you had somebody cornered.

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  9. A few points to consider:

    1) In the abstraction of D&D combat, which takes place in 5'x5' or 10'x10' squares, there's no such thing as "backing an opponent into a corner." A 5'x5' square is an awful lot of room to move around and dodge in -- hell, unless you have a fairly long sword, if you're standing in the middle of a 5' square, you can't actually hurt someone in the middle of an adjacent 5' square.

    2) In the world that generic D&D presupposes, your average common farmer is going to know a lot more about fighting than your average modern American. Why? Because he lives in a world of violence, even moreso than in the "real" medieval world. Even if he has no formal training, he's going to have a pretty good idea of how to get out of the way of a blow -- he grew up scrapping with the other farmhands as one of his few leisure activities, and his farm is raided every other week by goblins.

    3) From a "modern American vs modern American" perspective, sure, neither of you has a good idea of how to manage a weapon. Swinging seems really easy, and it is, but after the first swing, what happens when he grabs your arm? Tackles you? Moves backwards in such a way that you have to run after him just to make sure your weapon can reach him?

    4) Presuming your average couch potato has 4 HP, even a 1 HP "nick" represents 1/4 the injury necessary to kill that person. Given that people are actually surprisingly sturdy, that 1 HP hit might represent a good solid knock on the skull, a deep slash across the leg, or even running him through in a relatively non-vital area. You have to be both serious and fairly accurate to inflict that kind of injury on a person, and even in a six- or ten-second round, you can't make that many quality strikes with a weapon without some serious training. This isn't "cautious poke with the butt end," this is "overhand swing that eats dirt if it misses."

    TL;DR, I'm not sure the abstraction is as unreasonable as you think it is. Isn't to say that the D&D difficulty curve isn't borked in some places, just I think that a fifty percent chance of an untrained fighter seriously hurting another untrained fighter in a ten-second period is actually reasonable, maybe even a bit on the generous side.

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  10. That's the cool thing about systems where armor is damage reduction, and if it is heavy enough, actually makes you easier to hit--but harder to hurt. I like that abstraction better than the all-or-nothing method.

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  11. I agree with Cid's post on this topic. The reality is that most folks don't want to get hurt, especially "normal, untrained folks."

    If you had a person cornered and you had a small axe or sword, the first thing they would do is try to grab it - or more likely grab your arms or hands. Most real fist fights very quickly devolve into one of two things: Two guys dancing around shouting insults but not committing, or two guys rolling around on the ground grappling because a close opponent can't get a solid hit.

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  12. I think that by "backed into a corner", JB is probably referring to "sticky" engagement - if you're in melee, you're stuck that way without a drastic change in the circumstances. You can back up, but your opponent advances to match. You can run, but you get smacked in the back for your cowardice.

    Which, all told, is a fairly accurate way to represent armed combat. Even a naked, dodgy acrobat won't necessarily be able to slip away from a plate-clad soldier before that longsword comes into play.

    As for the meat of the post... I like where you're going with this, JB. I get the impression you're not looking to radically alter how HP and to-hits work, but simply to tweak the probabilities. I look forward to how it shakes out.

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  13. I think someone up-thread proposed something like this, but if the problem is that misses suck and are boring, then the solution is to eliminate misses - have combat be an opposed roll, you and your opponent both roll d20 or whatever plus mods versus the opponent's same, and high roll hits the loser. you could even bake weapon damage into the contested roll and have everything hang on a single turn of the die, as nature intended

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    1. Opposed rolls are supported by quite a few games, it adds an element of randomness to defense that I love but I've found some players don't enjoy.

      We tried it for a while, but it started to slow games down. There were (of course) twice as many rolls per game since every attack warranted a defense roll.

      And while they sound nice, opposed checks tend to work in favor of the dm simply because the dm gets the opportunity to make many more attack rolls in a given session than any player. With a static number for AC players can stack armor more strategically- hedging their bets a bit.

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    2. attack roll versus defense roll is not quite what I was thinking - I was thinking more along the lines of you roll to hit, I roll to hit. high roll damages the loser. so every round has an outcome of someone taking damage, with no more rolling than is done currently.

      whether or not the second point is true depends on how you handle multiple opponents. If I get a 13 on my combat roll and the three homies I'm bashing with my club get 9,11,and 17, then I just took a hit and dished out two. In such a system, the player does roll fewer times than the dm, making each high roll or low roll count more, but I don't think there's any predictably inherent advantage in either side - though it does magnify the effect of modifiers where players are concerned

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  14. @ Matt and Frijoles:

    For what it's worth my thoughts on a way to "adjust combat" more to my liking does use a type of opposed roll...for melee anyway. I WILL post on this eventually.
    ; )

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  15. I like the fact that you can miss a lot. In my opinion it adds tension. When there are three 1st level PC's and three Gobs, whoever hits first will probably score a kill. The first "oh crap" moment is init (who goes first) and then every miss adds to the "oh crap" feeling of the bad guy still being up...

    I suppose at higher levels when it is a factor of "I just want to mow these gooks down so I can wack on the boss man in the back row" excessive missing can be an issue.

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