Damage Control - Designing a Combat System that Works

Oh, boy. It's been a while. Real world events, health concerns, crossing the Pacific twice, a flourishing romantic entanglement, teaching, and studying to certify in a new field have kept me at bay. I have been poking at SSS in the background, but no serious progress until recently. My recent involvement in someone else's project has set me reading a bunch of gaming blogs, which has lit the fire under me again. Expect a mad flurry of activity in the next two weeks as my self-set deadline approaches!

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There are a million and one guides and tutorials on worldbuilding - whether tweaking a setting to work for your campaign or building a world from the ground up. There are almost no guides to designing a mechanical system. Why is that? It's probably that everyone does a bit of setting design sooner or later, and the principles of worldbuilding are fairly universal. What's good design for you is good design for me. But system design is only attempted by a few, and it's often so idiosyncratic that it's unlikely that the principles you used will be of any use to me.

The process of design is mostly just an extensive and detailed exercise in "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" Don't get me wrong, worldbuilding is work (believe me, I know), but conceptually it's pretty straightforward. Mechanics, on the other hand, are like the special effects of role-playing games - everyone appreciates them when they work seamlessly, but only a few people care how they were made.

Designing a combat system provides a number of interesting mathematical challenges. It has to be realistic enough that it's not silly, simple enough that it doesn't take long to compute by hand, and cool enough to want to play. I had already decided the bounds of potential skill levels and attribute totals as compared to the range of dice results, so things were random but not too random. So, step one, having the core mechanic of action resolution in place, was already done.

Step two for me was a mental experiment of two perfectly average and equal people punching each other in the face, making perfectly average die rolls and seeing how long it takes for someone to fall down. I haven't been in a lot of fights, but I've seen plenty of fight scenes in movies, so I have a kind of intuition for what's cinematically 'right'. Then I try the same scenario except one person is the strongest man in the world. Then I try an average person against the toughest person in the world. I add and remove weapons and armor and training to see if it scales well.

Every time I run a scenario, I tweak the system if it's too deadly or not deadly enough. I keep extensive notes and my coworkers think I'm insane because I'm rolling dice and filling out a spreadsheet, and occasionally laughing, cursing, or pumping my fist. But these little numbers are as vivid, meaningful, and entertaining to me as Rocky or Zorro. I haven't worked all the kinks out yet, but I'm getting close. The system design is not finished, but the design system seems to be working.