Combat Ideas from Pendragon
When they attack and beat your defense roll, they'll get one or more attack successes. A Partial Success grants 1, a full Success 2, Critical 3, Extra 4, etc.. These can be used to do stuff like:
- Do your regular damage. If you apply this one multiple times, each additional one adds another d12 to your regular damage.
- Force the target to roll Speed & Acrobatics to remain standing. Each additional success spent on this increases the difficulty by 4.
- Force the target to roll Speed & Melee or be disarmed. Each additional success spent increases the difficulty by 4, but a "failure" just means that they fumble with their weapon and have to roll again next round. It takes a Critical Failure (fail by 4+ or botch) to actually disarm them outright.
- Ignore their largest armor die.
- "Feint", so that you get a +2 bonus to a follow-up attack next round. You can apply this multiple times to get a bigger bonus. Basically, if the success you got this round isn't good enough to do what you want to, you can trade it in for a bonus on your next roll.
- Anything else that the GM considers appropriate and reasonable.
You can also use special, "called" maneuvers. You have to specify them beforehand. The basic one changes Partial Successes to Failures and Successes to Critical Successes. The more difficult one changes Partial Successes and Successes to Failures, but increases Critical Successes to Extraordinary Successes and Extraordinary Successes to Extra
2.
An alternate way to handle special moves would be to apply a -2 penalty now, but grant an extra attack success if you hit. You could also take a -4 in return for 2 extra attack successes.
When you get hit for damage, you'll roll a contest between their damage dice and your Durability (normally Muscles & Guts). If they beat you, you take 1 wound. You have to roll a partial success or better on a Willpower check or be stunned. If they get a critical success, you take 1 wound and get knocked down and have to roll a Success on a Willpower test to avoid being stunned. If they get an extraordinary success, you get 2 wounds, get knocked down, and start bleeding to death. It takes a Critical Success to remain conscious.
On tied parry rolls, you have to check the quality of each character's weapon. Crappy weapons will tend to break if hit with good ones. The scale will probably be something like:
- Artifact (ancient super-metals)
- Good quality modern metals
- Poor quality metals
- Wooden or stone weapons
- Flesh (ouch!)
Dodging is the best defense, but if you only get a Partial Success then it'll cost you your next half-action. Crits and better might set you up for a follow-up attack. On a tied Dodge, you
must retreat or be hit. [Should a failed Dodge eat up a half-action too? Or only a successful one? Is that "realistic" or "adding insult to injury"? For a really lenient one, it just prevents more movement actions next round, instead of using up actions. You can't lose more than 2 half-actions, but you can keep using Dodge if you need to. Maybe you shouldn't be able to lose more than 1 half-action, no matter how many times you dodge.]
Posted by Kiz at July 21, 2004 10:55 PM