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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9063928" data-attributes="member: 7040941">Why its important to read your design notesSo somewhere along the way in the past 6 months, I more or less lost the plot entirely on what combat was meant to look and feel like, and because my brain is the dumb it didn't really occur to me that not only had I inadvertently morphed the design out of its original intent, but that as a result of doing so I ended up causing all the problems Ive been having lately as I continue to plug away at my Mages.The idea behind Combat is still the same. You roll 2d20, assign them to Act/React, and go from there. Now, where I lost the plot I believe happened when I was working on my Warrior, and got a brainworm going about them being designed around, at max level, running a 4-move combo to get a 5th effect.This brainworm basically brainwashed me into giving the Warrior 4 explicit attacks in their Act, and this bled over into my Rogue as well, and at no point did it occur to me that I had originally not given the Barbarian any extra attacks for a reason.And that reason, simply put, is that combat is supposed to be fast and brutal; for most of the game, only one attack is all that characters get. There is no "hit ratings" or any of that. You attack, your opponent might be able to defend themselves. All that matters is whether or not your opponents React is high enough to face your Act; if it is, they can roll to delete some of the incoming damage. If it doesn't, they get all of it. Its simple, its super quick, and it feels great.This is a pretty important distinction, and one that was lost on me until a few days ago when after being stumped I started digging through my design notes just to find the solution to all my problems.So what does this revelation mean for the game? Well for one, it means that what I originally envisioned, confirmed via low level playtesting (if we had spent more time at high level Id have realized it eventually...i hope), and have been asserting about how combat feels are now all in-line with what the mechanics provide for. And for two, it gave me a lot of the original ideas I had for mechanics that make things easier to deal with, even at higher level.But for three, this all also handily evaporates all the hang ups with a couple of mechanics Ive been chasing; namely, Durability and Ammo mechanics that not only blend easily into the proverbial woodwork, but are also fun and desirable to have in of themselves.To put it simply, I managed to reinvent the Usage and Armor dice from The Black Hack, but my take on it goes quite a bit farther.For any given weapon, armor piece, or shield, you have a number of dice under it representing the damage these items can potentially deal out or defend against. Each die gives their respective item 2 Points of Durability. When you use these items, you would want to note two things about the outcome of your roll. First, any 1s that roll on the dice means you lose Durability in your item, so you simply begin to tick up on your sheet for that item; every 2 points you lose one the dice, and when all are spent the item is broken. But secondly, and most importantly, you also should note which dice come up as their max value. Every single one will provide some sort of stacking Boon to your next attack. These could be +1s to your Act/React, more damage, or some other neat thing; these will be customizeable. This is the addition that makes it worthwhile to want to track this stuff, as you have just as much potential to snowball into very potent attacks as you do to break your sword. And for Ammunition, the same idea is in place, with an easy way to account for ammo without having to do any extra bookkeeping. Essentially, any ranged weapon and its ammunition both provide the damage dice that make up the overall "weapon", with the weapon dice always being at least one die size bigger than its ammunitions Ammo dice. (Ie, 1d12 paired with 1d10) Done this way, you not only know immediately whether or not your ammo has been affected (roll 1s and you lose an ammo, as its assumed to be unrecoverable) but can easily track it as it happens without having to worry about counting your shots or anything like that.As long as you know to pay attention to what you roll (which you should be doing anyway as you'll be adding them all up), you have the simplest path to tracking your items as you use them. So, realizing that system lead to a number of other improvements. Firstly, Ive fully eliminated the null result in my combat; with the 2d20 roll, rolling poorly on both dice was a very possible occurrence, and this could potentially result in an entire round of nothing happening. While I already knew to bake in abilities that would help mitigate this problem, as they wouldn't be reliant on your rolls to be useful, not all of these are going to be available all of the time for various reasons.So to fix that, I ended up reading my notes again and some late night laying in bed and spamming out ideas, I had the thought that lead to me making Weapons and Armor their own skills; a player should be able to make use of their Skill Action to make a basic attack. So with a little thought and some quick and dirty testing, that got refined into the ability to not only make use of your Skill Action in that way (though whether you use it to attack or defend, none of your Class abilities work on it. Just straight weapon and armor rolls), but to also take your cruddy 2d20 roll and use it as a bonus to your Skill Action, which you could use for any sort of Skill Action; if you roll a 1 and a 2, take +3 to Conditioning to get a movement boost and gtfo of harms way. And better still, if even that doesn't seem worthwhile, you could instead simply Hold, and gamble on keeping your 2d20 roll as a bonus for your next turn, assuming you aren't hit by something in the meantime. If you aren't, then you get whatever you rolled as a bonus to one of your dice rolls. (Even damage; gambling a Nat 40 by holding it is going to be a possibility, though you may not roll that well a second time)Essentially, the whole idea is that rolling low comes with the potential to swing them back into really useful boons. This not only eliminates the null result, but overall I think makes combat more exciting. And indeed, these ideas are what ended up making the Warrior itself, which got me into the mess originally, fulfill more of its intent as a relatively complex and hard to master class. While as a standard every character just gets one "Class-Action" (those being Attacks, Casts, Commands, and Channels for martials, mages, summoners, and mystics respectively), they get two by the end game. This naturally puts the Warrior in a predicament, as they need 4 Attacks to pull off their Battle Combos. To that end, the idea is going to be to allow for characters to forgo their Skill Action, and get two more Attacks instead. As Skills in LNO are being designed to be quite substantive in and out of combat, this is I think a worthwhile tradeoff that, in the scheme of things, would be something that people would expect to be possible. (And in fact, Im also contemplating allowing Doubling Down on your Act to let you do the Actions twice; giving you even more options and more destructive output if you fully commit, basically mirroring Action Surge from 4e/5e). Another simplification along these lines was eliminating the separated Initiative roll; instead, when you begin your first Combat round, you simply announce your Act rating, if you've assigned a die to it. Highest goes first, and any who don't assign their Act die would slot in as though they rolled a 1, and their React die would decide the order between any others who did so. If they've assigned neither (Holding), they go last, simultaneously with any others who take that option.This is pretty straightforward and intuitive, and Im surprised it didn't occur to me earlier, but, we've got in there now. Woohoo!And I think thats about it for now. Theres some neat stuff going on with my mages, including some unintended parallel design between the Magic system and the new Durability system, but those are still cooking, as is the necessary revisions to basically everything to carry these changes through everything.Hopefully this should be the last time I upend much of the system's core rules. Everything I have left should be straightforward to design and shouldn't be prying up anymore floorboards, so to speak, but we shall see.</blockquote>

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