Quote from: tenbones;1120993That'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).

Indeed it has been.

I've always felt Palladium had the best rule.  It's not just the opposed roll, but the controlled range of modifiers through skills and the armor as conditional hitpoints verses roll.  There are better and worse implementations and really high attributes can break it but that's my vote.

Quote from: David Johansen;1121595I've always felt Palladium had the best rule.  It's not just the opposed roll, but the controlled range of modifiers through skills and the armor as conditional hitpoints verses roll.  There are better and worse implementations and really high attributes can break it but that's my vote.

I'll definitely agree on the more limited modifiers; it's one of the reasons I opted to heavily restrain my system's attack and defense numbers (to about +3 over 15 levels) while scaling damage and "hit points" pretty linearly with level.

The biggest advantage of that is that it allows weaker things in larger numbers to remain a threat at higher levels and for powerful things to at least potentially be survivable long enough for a party to flee (or overcome using strategy and tactics if they're of that bent).

A group of orc warriors in Palladium was always something you at least had to be on your guard about (even if the odds of them actually beating you are near zero, quirks of probability happen and they'll at least attrit some resources you'd rather have for elsewhere).

The opposed rolls I'm more indifferent to in a mechanical sense. Any combat is already going to involve multiple rolls so the overall outcome will be a bell curve distribution regardless so static numbers will be faster compared to opposed rolls.

But psychologically, what opposed rolls do is give the illusion of control to the player. The monster didn't hit them with nothing they could do about it, they failed on their parry roll.

My general preference in this regard if players really want that feeling is to adapt the rules so the players roll everything while opponents use static values.

The monster has a 16 attack (11 damage) and 16 defense. The player has +5 to hit, +5 to defense and their armor soaks 1d10 damage. Mathematically that's the same as the monster having +5 to hit for 1d10 damage and the player having defense 16, but the player rolling the dice feels like they have more control because the dice are in their hands.

Where both sides rolling for both makes the most sense to me would be a system where a fair amount of PVP was expected (say RPing a martial arts competition where players will sometimes have to face each other in the ring ) and you wanted to maintain that illusion of more control.

I feel you could resolve things with a single opposed roll, and that would include parry, AC, etc.

Which means, ALL possibilities at once...

For example, if you roll higher you win and your AC/parry is ignored, but your foe's AC and parry might diminish the damage, etc.

Quote from: Eric Diaz;1121752I feel you could resolve things with a single opposed roll, and that would include parry, AC, etc.

Which means, ALL possibilities at once...

For example, if you roll higher you win and your AC/parry is ignored, but your foe's AC and parry might diminish the damage, etc.

You could, but then the trick would be whether you can satisfyingly take into account enough of the situation, that everything in the situation has appropriate effects on the chances of various outcomes.

I have even done this to convert some GURPS matchups to single die rolls. ... But in order to satisfy my own tastes for detail, I did it by playing out (and/or applying analysis to) a variety of fights between specific figures with specific stats doing specific things, using the full GURPS rules. And then that only would give me an estimate of the odds of various outcomes if two figures with those stats fought each other the way I had them fight in the tests, and weren't interfered with. But it was close enough for me for use with NPC fighters fighting each other some distance away from the PCs. This let me simulate pretty well the outcomes of a bunch of NPCs fighting each other, extremely quickly.

But I'd not choose to do that for PCs, since it's fun and interesting and immersive to play out the PCs' combat in detail and let them choose exactly what they do and determine exactly what happens etc. Simplifying that would be throwing out one of the main reasons I play.


On the other hand... I have been testing out a system for doing single contested rolls for combat in TFT. Which is actually a step UP in complexity for TFT, since usually there an attack is just a roll against the attacker's adjusted Dexterity, sometimes with modifiers for the target's fighting skill or attempt to defend themselves, but more often not.