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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hautamaki" data-source="post: 5471518" data-attributes="member: 42219">Thanks for the response.  My design goals is to provide the dreaded 'realistic' combat system--what this really means is I'm going for a realistic feeling, mostly by being internally consistent and doing my best to avoid rules that inevitably lead to rulings that would completely defy common sense; for example in D&D if a character roles higher initiative, he goes first, period.  In my game, a character with higher initiative may begin his actions first, but if it's not an instantaneous action that doesn't mean it can't be interupted by other players who are doing an instantaneous action.  What this means in actual combat is that ranged weapons are a lot more useful than in D&D because a character with a readied and loaded ranged weapon always gets to fire before enemies can run a whole 30+ feet and smack him with a melee weapon.  Of course reload times are also more realistic meaning that crossbows in particular are often times a single use per combat anyways.  That said, what I'm really going for in combat is to have the players have lots of interesting and balanced choices available to them not only from a character building perspective but also from actual battle tactics.  This means that I have large lists of weapons, armour, feats, etc, and characters upon gaining levels can rapidly increase their options in combat.  What I don't want to happen though is bloat to the point where it takes hours upon hours to resolve combats, so I have made sure that damage keeps pace with the ability to absorb damage, and tried to design the character sheets well enough that relevant information about options and modifiers is available at a glance.  It's not that combat in my system is any more or less lethal than another system because after all I think that depends entirely upon the magnitude of challenge the DM feels like throwing at his players, regardless of the system.  It's just more that what I'm going for is that characters can die with a lower required amount of dice rolls and mid-game rule referencing than very high level D&D.  That said the chance of an unlucky roll resulting in sudden player death is no higher in my game as the randomness of the die has been mitigated in other ways (for example 3d6, and later 4d6 at higher levels, is rolled for checks instead of d20s--you still have a chance to get a 3/4 or 18/24 but it's a much much lower chance than a 1 or a 20).  Overall the system's rules and my own tendencies as a DM would probably fall on the side of more combat-heavy than RP heavy but I enjoy RP too and I think that combat, even if it is tactically interesting, is not exciting unless it is meaningful to the players because they are trying to win the battle for a greater cause than simple survival or accumulation of resources with which to faster and more effectively engage in the next battle.I have gone with low magic mostly because of how easily the unintended consequences of many magical spells ruined the balance of D&D, but also simply because I find world-building a high magic world where spell casters are a mundane element to be extremely difficult in terms of maintaining that feeling of realism.  Mundanity of magic makes pretty much every other element of the world obsolete.  Armies, soldiers, castles, horses, farmers, craftsman, almost everything... who needs that crap when you can do anything and everything with magic? So to me it's just way way easier to design, imagine, and role-play in a world where magic is something extremely rare, limited, and special.  We can picture it by just imagining a standard medieval-tech society and adding in only a few mysterious witches, warlocks, etc, as we desire.  Sort of like a Merlin and his evil rivals in the Arthurian legends and so on.  Society as a whole functions independent of magic, and only certain individuals on rare occasions ever have contact with magic at all.  This means that the PCs themselves are not magical, but the possibility of them facing magical antagonists remains.Not really sure what else is relevant to help you understand better what I was going for.  But thanks a lot for the starting points to further discussions!</blockquote>

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