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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 7627221" data-attributes="member: 63">I certainly enjoy grid-based tactical combat, but I've done it for over 20 years.Does anyone know games that have, like, good rules for naval maneuvers with broadsides and boarding actions? Or dogfighting with airplanes or space fighters? Or nuanced duels where the players actually have some way to 'counter' that isn't just more dice rolling? Or rules for resolving social encounters, mass combat, mindscape psychic battles?I've rather enjoyed playing the new FFG Legend of the Five Rings RPG, where you have two parallel 'health' tracks: fatigue and strife. "Hits" in combat cause fatigue, and once you reach your limit, further attacks cause real wounds. Meanwhile you accumulate strife with your own actions, and sometimes can inflict strife on an opponent, and once you reach your limit of strife, your mask of composure slips.The game uses a dice pool system where custom dice have some combination of icons for success, opportunity, and strife, and you can pick which dice you use. So you might go for more successes but accumulate strife, or get lucky and get no strife, or choose to pick a die with an 'opportunity' instead of a success. And opportunities let you do stuff other than directly succeed.In a physical duel, you can use opportunity to make it harder for your opponent to attack you with certain techniques, or to cause *him* strife, or to cause a wound even if he hasn't reached his fatigue threshold. If your foe hits their strife limit in combat, they drop their guard and you can get a killing blow, which is a cool way to capture the samurai aesthetic of clashing blades until finally someone slips up and gets disemboweled.In social encounters, you have several different ways to 'win.' You might pursue your goals by making skill checks and accumulating successes, or you might try to thwart your rival's plans, or just antagonize him. If you reach your strife limit in a social encounter, you lose your composure somehow -- you might lose your temper, or make a gaffe that causes people to mock you, or flee in shame, or admit a secret that harms you in the long run. It's a fun system, though getting the hang of it takes a while.Do you have a favorite rule set that lets you resolve conflicts in a different way than we're used to with D&D-derived RPGs?</blockquote>

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