I'm attempting to create a new RPG system. I haven't done this exercise in a long while since I assumed the proverbial 'it' has all been done. But the things I have wanted in an RPG that had not been done. I waited and waited for a simultaneous resolution combat round, a la Robot Rally. It never came, or at least, not in a product I played. Could it be done? I am trying to find out.
Some aspects of the game I am making is rote, or at least been done before: attributes are "Facets", roll to succeed where higher is better (on d12s this time around), instead of hit points we have White Wolf-like wound statuses. Free Actions can be taken in combat, like running or dropping prone.
I do want to say as an aside here that I chose d12s for a specific reason. In my attempt to "remove mental labor", I wanted to keep the numbers as low as possible: dice with less sides, less numbers to count, etc. Facets only go up to 3 (not counting more precise skill areas called specialties), bonuses outside of character skill is given as bonus dice (a sort of D&D-like advantage, but stackable). All in the name of doing less math during a roll. However, the simpler I made it, I ran into a problem - the gradations of result modification got less and less granular. Roll a die with too few sides, and the result can only be manipulated so much. Also, players may not get asmuch satisfaction from a good roll if it happens too often. (Is every sixth roll on a d6 is a crit?) So, a compromise: a d12 is used. It offers less numbers than a d20 in order to keep the math simple, but offers enough numbers where a top success (rolling a 12) is infrequent enough to maximize the joy of rolling it. Also the math is simplified a tad from having smaller numbers.
The combat round will be play tested tonight. Simultaneous combat resolution, will it sink or swim? There's a few things that result from using this system. The most obvious is that initiative is abolished. Maybe people must go around the room if people must speak their action declaration, but what if everyone must type it in? Then everyone CAN go at once. That would make combat faster, theoretically. Another aspect is that resolving everything at once means that reactions to things that happened (healing an injured person, chasing after someone trying to escape) must occur in the next round. Rounds have been shortened to the length at which a person would reasonably react - 2-3 seconds. People who are faster have the ability to do action that would cause them to take another action after round resolution, such as a quick draw skill. This is a workaround to people who still may want to make a speedy character.
There are rules for conflicts of simultaneous resolution, such as wanting to move into the same space as another character. Then the two people in conflict roll a sort of initiative. This could also be solved by simply comparing a Facet score; I am not certain which is better - speed versus the chance of a slower person being able to outmaneuver a faster person by luck. So this one is up in the air.
I have made a damage system where a character has several different body statuses: Wounded, Incap, Unconscious, and Dead (with Sick and Exhausted being equal to Wounded in how they lead to Incap). People who see this call it "brutal", but almost every other rule in combat is meant to mitigate the damage in some way: damage is not rolled, and almost always does one body status at a time (first Wounded, then Incap). Armor soaks damage, you can dodge and take cover, "Destiny" points can negate damage from an attack, etc. I feel that high numbers can be unnecessary: if you have 13 hit points and take two attacks for (rolls 2d10) 8 and 5 damage, then you can similarly take two Wounded Statuses without rolling dice or doing any more math than two minus one. This does mean differences in play, but not necessarily in the more brutal direction. Incap never automatically means death unless the opponent seeks to dispatch you after you are down (which, since this is a scifi game of spacefaring aliens in a civilized society, means that many defeats do not necessarily end in death.) More thought is put into mitigating damage beforehand (armor, dodging, positioning) that magically healing it afterward. This means that the game is more for thinking than for bumbling around, which I think is a plus. Every combat can be a Metal Gear-like puzzle and a team-building exercise. And finally, lasers burning holes straight through fleshy creatures just doesn't leave much room for soaking the damage and walking it off.
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