While most people would think this to be a simple subject, Attacks, Defenses, and Damage (and probably health systems because that's what damage damages) are not that simple. I'll probably just lay down the groundwork of ideas here and come back with more solid rules later.
First thing, the main basic die is the 20-sided die, or d20 for those who know tabletop gaming terms. This determines everything but damage. You roll this kind of die for pretty much everything that isn't damage. Sorting out a complicated knot? Throw a d20 at it. (Or, you know, just do the Gordian Knot trick.) Sorting out an annoyingly stuck door? Throw a d20 at it. Sorting out a petulant informant? Throw a d20 at it. There's a life lesson in here somewhere.....
On to Attacking! Be aggressive! Attacks use the basic d20 to resolve whether or not the attack is successful. One of the biggest things I need to think about with is how characters gain "attack bonus". This will most likely be more solidly determined under the character and character abilities section, but I'll start putting my thoughts of how it should work down.
As I have said before, I do think that everything that affects combat should come from the character's class. Everything that affects exploration comes from skills. Everything that... well I guess I don't have much else to cover. There's probably going to be a bit of overlap between skills and class abilities, with a few skill perks affecting small bits of combat and a few character abilities affecting exploration. But, I don't want to go all the way to making attacking completely skill-based as some systems do. I've noticed that this encourages characters to min-max for specific arenas, like a diplomancer (someone who only has social skills) is completely centered on the social arena, and wouldn't really be able to preform in other arenas. This effectively cuts people off from certain parts of the game, so you have to have one or two people in the party completely devoted to each arena, building a team of savants that are completely retarded in the areas they aren't specialized for. I don't particularly enjoy that sort of dynamic, as I prefer to have players involved with everything that's going on. If players are at least competent enough to participate in multiple arenas, then everyone is happier because everyone can be involved. And that's why I don't want to integrate the character's proficiency in combat with the skill system.
The character's proficiency in attacking in combat does need to come from the character's chosen class, but I'm still thinking how I can do that in an interesting and fun way, rather than the way that D&D has done it in the past. In D&D, you simply have a flat Base Attack Bonus that's determined by your level in a class. I'd like to give the character a bit more choice on how they raise their ability to attack. This bears more thinking about.
On to defenses! The best defense is a good defense! Defenses are active, as of my last post. You actively guard with your shield or parry blows with your sword. You actively roll with the blows to take less damage or nimbly dodge attacks. So, defenses should act a lot like attacks. They should be gained and improved in a similar way to offensive capabilities, such as being determined by the character's class abilities rather than by what kind of armor you felt like buying. Yes, you probably want to use different kinds of defensive abilities if you're only using padded cloth armor than if you're using full plate with articulated joints. The cloth does afford you more mobility (well, unless your armor is extremely well fitted; one of my friends made a set of fully articulated plate that he could do jumping jacks and cartwheels in without problem), so you're probably going to focus more on dodging blows rather than trying roll with the blows so that your armor takes so much of the force out of it that you don't even get a bruise, since your armor is more likely to get cut open along with your bowels if you do that. If you're in the full plate, it makes more sense to learn how to use its weight and its ability to take the force out of blows rather than dodging everything. And if you're going to be using a shield regularly, it's probably best to learn how to use it to catch, deflect and even parry blows with it.
I'm still thinking about this will all work out, but I'm thinking that players will have more of a perk tree setup for how they gain their class abilities, or how those abilities are modified into a specific role. Each class having its own tree, and probably some general abilities that they can purchase, like everyone could learn how to use a shield. This will need to be determined more in the characters and classes section.
Now, for damage and health. This is perhaps the most solidified of the ideas I'll be putting down here today. There are two measures of "health". The first is your Vitality. Vitality is your energy to keep fighting and how many minor injuries or almost injuries you can sustain before taking serious damage. Vitality can also be spent to fuel certain abilities that would definitely take a bit out of you to do. For example, going into a battle frenzy would exhaust your strength a bit at the end, and your endurance would likewise be sapped by attacking all out with an extremely powerful blow.
The next is your Wounds. Wounds are a measure of how many serious injuries you can take. Most of the time, you can only take a single wound at a time, unless you're suffering truly massive damage (e.g. having a dragon's corpse fall on you, falling from orbit, having a grenade explode in your stomach, etc.). If you would take over a certain number of vitality in a single blow of damage, you instead take up to that many points in vitality damage and take a wound. And that hurts. If you would take over double that number of points in vitality, you instead take double that many points in vitality damage and take two wounds. And that hurts more. This continues until you take too many wounds and are instantly turned into paste.
Whenever you take a wound, you are also afflicted by negative status effects for a certain amount of time. For example, you take a heavy wound and are made nauseous by the pain. Or you get a hand chopped off and can't use that hand until it's put back on. It's not good to take wounds, and taking wounds is an indication that you're in a very challenging situation, and probably need to not be as aggressive as you were being.
Anywhen, on to damage. I would really like to standardize damage dice into a single die type. I've thought about making that the 6-sided die, or d6. But there's some problems with the d6. The biggest one is the average damage jump from 1d6 to 2d6, which is 3.5 to just under 7, if my math is correct. That's nearly double the amount of damage. If I standardize to the d6 and have light weapons do 1d6 damage, while the next class up does 2d6, and the next does 3d6. That 3d6 weapon does an average of about 10.5 damage, which probably cuts through people's vitality at level 1, giving people tons of wounds and cutting down enemies way too easily.
I'm going to call this a post for now, and do a lot more thinking about how to average health and damage so that you're not going to cut enemies down immediately because you have a big stick and not do any damage because you don't. Next post will probably be more about damage and a lot of math on damage dice averages. Hopefully you guys like that.
Song of the Post: "Set to Destroy" by Parkway Drive (I figured I'd start including the songs whose titles I'm using as the names of these posts at the end of said posts.)
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