>>97550603
What guarantee do I have that the time and effort taken to explain it will be returned in kind?

Roll to evade/block/parry/whatever else option.
An enemy hit is assumed, unless the character succeeds with their roll.
We don't care about PvP in this household

>>97550757
Even without considering PvP, it is nice when a ruleset can handle NPC vs NPC interactions without a bunch of handwaving. A system where PCs always roll regardless of whether they are attacking or defending doesn't deal with this too well, especially when such systems also usually have massive differences between PCs and NPCs.

>>97550603
I like the idea of different values for
>armour reduces damage, and can totally mitigate it
>different kinds of armour are different
>evasion is not entirely all or nothing, but is significantly more swingy than armour
>taking a heavy blow to your shield arm throws you off
>magical bullshit is magical bullshit

but I find that in practise that is way too much mechanical effort that gets spent on things outside of player control - you have invested in your build, and you have statistical outcomes and roll to work out whether you meet the statistically expected result.


Lemme give you an example of where simplifying was good, but it's not exactly tabletop.
I'm a LARPfag. Can provide pix of my larpsord and wizarding stick if my credentials are questioned.
UK larp traces a lot of its heritage all the way back to the late 80s with Treasure Trap. Treasure Trap was run in an actual castle because the 80s were a cooler time even if the dweebs were lamer.
In TT, damage was indicated by being hit by a weapon that had been lightly coated with coloured dye. You had defense values as a player, and after a combat the game referee would look you over, and had a clipboard ("battleboard") detailing how many HP you had on each body location and what your defenses were, and would do the maths required to work out how close to death you were, and would either tell you
>You're OK but hurt
>You're close to death, if you take another hit to the chest start dying
>As the adrenaline of combat wears off, you lose consciousness and begin bleeding out

that was not great because it took the immediacy of combat death away.
Years later we were doing it with vocal damage calls ("single" "double" etc) and players reported their damage amounts to refs, who did crunchy number stuff on the battleboard and told you the same

Eventually we did away with the under the hood crunch that made battleboards necessary and performed a numbers squish.

>>97551432
Now the under the hood stuff that necessitated battleboards was that, in post-TT battleboarding, we worked with numbers in multiples of five or ten but then cut them down, so when a monster hit you and said
>Piercing Double!
that meant you took two units of damage, with a damage type. You might be wearing leather armour as a rogue type, so you have an evasion defense score and a leather/padded defense secore on each location, and those may vary, so when you say to a ref
>I took two of those piercing doubles to the left leg and one to the torso
the ref might have to work out "OK it was piercing so your leather armour only counts for half, you have leather ac value 2 and evasion value 3, meaning each hit was mitigated by (1/2 x 2) + 3 so you took 1 point of actual damage for each of those hits that you took, so you're down 1/5 of a HP on the torso and 2/5 of a HP on the leg, meaning your feedback is "barely a scratch"

The upside of battleboarding was that much more granular numbers under the hood meant that you could take a hit and it be "not a big deal" but not *nothing*. When we moved to using truescale numbers, a small hit either has to be "zero" or "one", not "one fifth".

In the end it was a lot easier once we cut off the festering limb that was battleboarding, battleboarding came from translating more crunchy tabletop autism from the 1980s into LARP.

I know this isn't exactly what OP wanted but it's weird ancient lore I like.

>>97551460
We also moved evasion to an active thing you can run out of, so that you get more immediate feedback. A player with dodges has them as a resource and chooses to use them on a per-blow basis, and if they choose to spend resources dodging lighter blows and then get hit with a heavy blow, that's on them.

That sets it apart from armour which changes your damage reduction. In our current system, the way shit works is
>If you have static DR from armour or magic, you do not need to announce it
>DR cannot reduce a blow to zero unless you have resources to spend on it, and you have to announce it when a blow does *nothing*
>Evasion reduces a blow to a single point of damage, and you have to announce it
>Higher level evasion allows you to reduce a blow to zero and you have to announce it
>If you dodge, full dodge, or full-mitigate a blow, any secondary effects are also nullified, such as poison

the idea is that no fight should ever just be two dudes wailing on each other doing NOTHING, so any case of a player character being straight up immune to something should be made clear and ideally should cost resources per nullify, rather than being "I'm just fully immune to X". If you are fully immune to X, it's the main thing your character has worked towards over the course of his career, and is a late-career thing, and that immunity is something like
>Immune to flaming damage
not
>Immune to swords

We also got rid of classifying blunt/piercing/slashing because it took one word off every instance of calling your damage grade, but kept elemental damage types because they're unusual and cool not "literally impossible to not have" like physical damage types.

all in all it's been a slow march of shedding what isn't necessary, examining whether the game's soul has been hurt by that change, and then putting it back if it was actually important.

>>97550750
Just call him a fag and move on, it's less soul crushing than pointing out how communication is effectively meaningless here
You fag

>>97550750
>explain it
Explain what? You don't have an "it" to explain

>>97551432
>LARPfag
>UK
Sweet, where abouts? I'm in the North West but my friends and I are talking about going to Curious Pastimes this year.

>>97551613
Also northwest, but I'm on sabbatical at the moment.

>>97551634
Sweet, I'm around Preston. Local group is small but okay.

>>97551432
>>97551460
>>97551497
Funky. Probably could translate to P&P easy enough.

>>97552499
desu it's not worth it, LARP has these very specific design problems/limitations
>as much as possible, it must take place in realtime
>your combatants determine base hit/miss by literally hitting each other
>the rule system and calculations must be able to be held in the players' heads

to that end, when I wrote my own larp system for this local scene I made sure that any more complex player options were kept internal. If you wanted to play a complex character that's fine, but you should not be outsourcing that complexity to the monsters and other players. For example, the mana system for my psychic guys was literally
>You have this many points. They do not regenerate on their own.
>You can buy abilities that regenerate some amount of those points, and each ability is usable once per adventure. You can buy the same one repeatedly if you want.
Because I felt there were already enough moving numbers in the game that having to remember "oh shit I forgot about my psi backlash, how many encounters has it been...?" would've been one moving number too many, so I moved to a much simpler one that removes some granularity.
The trade-off that was nice, was that some of those methods of regaining psi were usable in combat with a downside (inject yourself with a cerebral stimulant, and you are hard-stunned for ten seconds and then dazed for the rest of the fight, BUT you get back some psi power that you might need right now)

While there absolutely are moments that you *want* to stop play and have the game ref do some description of the cool shit, most of the time you are keeping pauses to a minimum because any pause takes you out of the scene and breaks your flow. The system itself has to be simple enough that the average player can at least hold the basics in their head, and then add in any extra shit they want.

It's a very different beast, and much more so than in tabletop, you need to take the limitations and constraints of the game into account when designing.

>>97552499
Wow, what an insightful and worthwhile response.

>>97550603
Roll to hit. At a base, the difficulty of hitting any given target is zero. The target attempting a dodge/parry increases the difficulty to hit, possibly causing the attacker to miss. With most weapons, degree of success on the attack roll grant additional benefits to the damage or weapon property. Thus, a dodge always provides some benefit through damage reduction.
Dodging/Parrying requires the spending of Effort to achieve. Effort is the generic name for spending resources. Unlike other systems, rather than having dedicated extraneous pool for the expendable resource, Effort is spent from the character's health and adjacent statistics.

>>97550603
Actual defense and damage mitigating should be different.
A knight is easier to hit than a rogue, but when you hit the rogue it should be hella painful to them.

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116 KB JPG

>>97550603
The way pic related does them
>Size is a factor to how easy to hit you are and how much HP you have
>Smaller targets are harder to hit, but have less HP
>Large targets are easier to hit, but have much more HP
>There is just a single attack roll, so whatever overcomes difficulty of being hit is direct damage
>It might be tough to aim that shot at a monkey, but if you do, it drops dead
>It might be easy to aim that shot at a T Rex, but your revolver barely grazed it

Also
>Concentrated attacks makes it easier to land consequent attacks

>>97550603
What's your preference?

>>97550788
Deals with it just fine.

One thing I see almost everywhere, which I dislike, is the simultaneous existence of "opposed rolls" for contests between PC and NPC and "attack rolls" which are not contested. In each case, based on the system's more general rule, one would think that combat and attempts to hit, parry, and dodge would be the modal instance of contests that demand opposed rolls. Practically, 90%+ of contests between two characters happen in combat, and if one is designing a coherent rules system from the ground up (i.e. not inheriting rules with long traditions like D&D), it seems to me that there ought to be one general rule for combat and non-combat contests.

>>97554766
Indeed, and there is.

>>97550603
hippo is literally me

bump

>>97550603
As I get older, I want it simpler and faster. But I was brought up with classic World of Darkness. Attack roll -> Defense roll -> Damage roll -> Soak roll, and I do still appreciate that approach. But perhaps defense and soak could be made into static or mostly-static values, as in Exalted 2e, save some time.

>>97551432
Thank you for sharing this ancient lore, anon. It was worth coming to this thread entirely for this story.

>>97562134
this article gives you a fair amount of TT history from someone who was there
https://www.levelup.pub/treasure-trap-and-larp
happy reading

>>97550750
I like GURPS

>>97550603
D20 roll, single dice per combat. GM assigns number values that are for various players based on character skills, traits, etc.
After the dice stops rolling all involved players must attempt to grab the dice asap. First player to get the dice wins the combat.
Winning a dice scrum that is a number appropriate to the player's character causes a hit.
Winning a dice scrum that is an opposing player's character is a dodge.
If 3 rolls in a row are a natural 1, the first player to throw the dice at the gm and hit them in the face with it gets to narrate a special combat scene.

>>97550603
I like the way GURPS does it. You have active defenses (Dodge, Block, Parry, Power) and passive defenses (Damage Resistance/Reduction).
>Dodge
Dodge scales with speed, which scales with DX and HT, and is hard to improve. It also takes encumbrance penalties. But it is valid against all forms of attack, and gets extra bonuses from having space to jump, dive, retreat, etc.
>Block
Block scales with your Shield skill, and is the easiest to improve because skill is cheap and big shields give a defense bonus. But it suffers when fighting multiple opponents, or opponents who can attack multiple times per turn. Against area attacks, it can sometimes be better than Dodge, since a Dodge still requires movement to escape the AoE, while some optional rules allow shields to totally block area attacks if your shield is large enough or you duck down low enough.
>Parry
Parry scales with your weapon skill, and like Block, is easy to improve. But only a handful of weapons (mostly just staves) actually give bonuses to Parry. Like Block, it suffers against multiple attacks. Unlike Dodge and Block, it normally doesn't work on ranged attacks unless you have special skills or advantages.
>Powers
There are also Power defenses, which work like above, but using superhuman abilities like magic, psionics, etc. You can get really creative with these. Power Dodges might involve shapeshifting or teleportation. Power Blocks might involve projecting, strengthening, or refocusing force fields. Power Parries might involve shooting down a fireball with a freeze ray.
>Extra Options
Many of these defenses can often also take additional options like acrobatic movement, cross parries, extra effort, and so on, to either improve defense or add special effects (e.g., an aggressive parry that destroys your foe's weapon) on a success. Parries generally have the most complex defense options, with some of the most potent yet risky effects like Ripostes and Grabbing Parries.

>>97566447
Lastly, your passive defenses (e.g., Damage Resistance) will come mostly from armor. DR often varies by damage type and hit location. So this adds yet another dimension to combat. Strong or wealthy fighters might be able to armor their entire body. Other fighters might only armor their most vulnerable locations, or those parts which are easiest to hit, and save their active defenses for only those attacks which target their unarmored parts. Modern combatants may rely on light-weight flexible ballistic armor, effective against firearms but little else. Some might forgo armor entirely, staying light on their feet while relying entirely on active defenses to stay alive.