Experimental Rules Workshop

[Clovenhoof]

This thread is for the discussion of more or less heavy modifications of the D20 system. Normally I'm not a fan of heavy mods, and prefer minor tweaks instead. But our current GM is bent on changing the system rather drastically, so I decided to jump on that bandwagon in order to influence the direction this is going.

One feature of the D20 system that is certainly arguable is the increase of iterative attacks, which certainly make any given battle last fewer rounds, but each round takes longer to roll all the attacks, so in the end no time is saved.

So we are fiddling with an idea to condense the action in a fight by rolling several attacks into one roll. Somewhat like this:
* there is no Massive Damage, or at least not in the normal Conan way. Possibly there's a way of forcing MD by taking away at least half of a character's HP in one blow.
* you get a damage bonus when fighting opponents of a lower level than you. (Exact type and size of this bonus is yet to be determined.) The idea is to reliably kill low level opponents in one blow.
* when making a Full Attack action, you just make your primary attack normally and roll damage. You get a damage bonus of varying size for each iterative attack you are entitled to.
* If you hit your opponent and drop him in one blow, any overflow damage is immediately carried over to the next opponent within reach, provided the attack would have hit that opponent as well. This can be repeated as many times as you have regular attacks ("target maximum").
* If you miss at first, you simply make your second attack at the usual -5 penalty. Damage bonus and target maximum are reduced by one step.
* The Cleave Feat increases your Damage bonus and Opponent Maximum by one. The Great Cleave feat doubles your normal damage bonus and target maximum.
* Two-weapon Fighting doesn't grant you extra attacks, but bestows bonuses (attack and possibly damage) to your regular attacks.

Example:
Conan is surrounded by four Picts on the Warpath. He has 3 regular attacks per round and is a higher level. He rolls to hit with his great sword and connects, rolls for damage and gets a 65 (arbitrary number). The first Pict has 25HP and drops. The remaining 40 damage are carried over to the second Pict, who has 18HP and drops. He automatically hits the third Pict who has 15HP and kills him as well. Theoretically Conan has 7 points of overflow damage left but has reached is target maximum, and thus can't carry these over to the last Pict.

Voilà - 1 attack roll, 1 damage roll, three mobs down.

Unsolved issues:

* How to calculate the damage total. Statistically, your average damage per round by number of attacks goes roughly as follows (against a like-levelled opponent):
1 Attack: x1 average damage
2 Attacks: x1.7 avg. dmg
3 Attacks: x2 avg. dmg
4 Attacks: x2.15 avg. dmg
(The 3rd and 4th attack get much more important against lower-level mobs with bad Defense; against these your damage factor can easily climb to x3 or x4.)

These factors are rather uncomfortable; you simply can't ask of a player to roll his damage and multiply it by 1.7 or 2.15. On the other hand, simply making these factors straight x2, x3, x4 would ignore the reduced hit chance for iterative attacks. However, since Massive Damage is out of the equation, this might in fact be acceptable. I don't know.

* How to calculate the level-dependent damage bonus. A possible approach might be the level difference multiplied by some factor. It shouldn't look arbitrary, and it should ensure that a fighter can at least reliably drop an opponent 4 levels lower than him in one blow.

* how armour should work in this scenario. After all, if all the damage goes into a single opponent, that's up to 4 hits worth and thus he would normally deduct four times his (probably pierced) DR. Or what if most of the damage goes into one opponent and a small overflow is carried over to the next? Tricky.

Any feedback and suggestions welcome.

 

[treeplanter]

Some good tought

I would say additional attack is just +X damages. You don't need the extra damages for low level opponent with the new mechanic you propose. As for armor, just one time the DR.

 

[Clovenhoof]

Concerning damage multipliers: actually the probability of a critical hit may be the solution to our problem. By factoring in the average extra damage over time into the iterative attacks (ignoring odd weapons like Scimitar), we get quite manageable damage multipliers for the system proposed above:

4 hits: damage x3
3 hits: damage x2.5
2 hits: damage x2

Cleave triggers when at least one opponent is dropped and adds another damage roll to the total. (this should be the fastest way)

Alternative: potentially roll the same number of attacks, but start with the _lowest_ BAB and work your way up. As soon as one attack hits, all remaining attacks count as auto-hit and you just roll up the damage.
This somewhat mitigates the time saving factor, but never worse than in the original system.

So for example, if someone has BAB 13 and thus 3 attacks, he might attack but miss on the first blow, and hit on the second blow. Thus the third blow also counts as hit. The attacker rolls double damage and can affect up to two targets. If he got lucky and hit on the first (lowest) attack he'd get triple damage and affect up to three targets.

This concept also fixes the problem of enemies dealing insane amounts of damage to the PCs with a single roll, as their highest attacks are pretty likely to hit.

Remaining problem: different Defense scores. The system remains uncomplicated as long as all foes have the same defense, but it becomes complicated if for instance one has 18 and one has 22 and the attacker rolls a 19. If you want to simplify combat, you could say that the attacker automatically targets opponents that he can hit.
So what happens when you have killed the first opponent but still have 40 overflow damage left?
Maybe just roll the next attack and if that hits, don't roll new damage but assign the remaining overflow damage to this target.

Two-Weapon Combat:
Option 1: you get +1 to Hit for every offhand attack you are entitled to. Attack rolls and damage are always made with the main hand. The type of your offhand weapon becomes unimportant; a dagger works as well as a short sword. However, any attack bonuses you would normally get for your offhand weapon (Weapon Focus etc.) might also be added to your attack roll.
This option also means you can use Power Attack with TWC without gimping yourself.

Option 2: you never roll offhand attacks, but simply add the offhand damage to the mainhand damage. This can be quite a freebie if you think of a Zingaran with Akbitanan Arming Sword and Weapon Focus for it in the main hand (+3 to attack) and a regular poniard in the off hand (normally +0 to attack). Power Attack may or may not be useful, I'm not sure.