5th Age Combat

[danny]

It may help to show you how I ended up with the basic structure of 5th Age -- (pasted from the old rulebook…)

Summary of the combat structure:

The Combat formula uses the 4 factors of actual fighting:
1) Attack roll minus the Active Defense (“Pull Down”) equals either a miss or a hit (meaning an amount of damage).
2) If worn: Damage minus the Armor Absorption equals either some or no damage to the body.
3) Damage to the body is cross-referenced in the Body Point chart according to how many BPs that character has. A resulting Wound Level is given to that character.
4) Wound Levels give Wound Points to characters with resulting Impairments. These Impairments affect all combat rolls until they are healed at a later time.

There were no “HPs” in 5th Age. There was a BP structure that only rose a little bit as you became a better fighter. The wounds characters took was proportional to the amount of damage of an attack contrasted to their BPs.
The philosophy behind the WP system is that a person cannot be pin-pricked to death. Only a number of moderate hits or one or few grievous wounds kill someone. Therefore, relatively smaller wounds do not threaten life unless they are numerous (leading to bleeding to death). Instead, they cause impairments, just as in real life.
So, based on how many BPs you had, the damage that reached your body was cross-referenced with your BPs to give Wound Levels, which then gave Wound Points a la the attached pic…

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2pA4OuTjIqAZWpBX0lVV0FLT0k/edit

[JordanMercer]

i think sticking to the d20 system will be best. i think more opposed rolls are in order though. each attack, including AOE and mental attacks and everything. each person in combat rolls a 20 to attack and a 20 to defend for each attack. im thinking that the thing that needs to develop is bonuses to damage for exceeding the person's defense. im thinking 1 for every five over, but that would need to be play tested. that gives an edge of the idea that a better hit is better damage.

[danny]

At one stage I did convert all of this to D20... The attacks had been %rolls, which were turned into D20. The defenses (active defense // "Pull Down") were rounded to the nearest 5 and then appropriate dice were used for the pull-down #.

The big change came from removing "HPs" and going to the BP structure. Everything became how well you defended yourself (and how well your armor was helping).

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