No rolling to hit? (d20 systems)

[Evenglare]

I recently made a topic that talked about each player rolling to attack and defend to make the combat more active and engaging. Now on the opposite end of the spectrum, what if no one rolled to hit, every attack would have a +11 to it while ac (and other defenses/saves) had the standard +10. This would obviously make battles much - much faster, however there is an obvious limitation to this. What happens if your attack does not succeed, he would always miss by default. Been thinking about how to off set this.

There are a variety of different ways to do such a thing. Of course you could roll a d20 if your attack didnt hit, and simply play the game normally. A few other ways I have been tinkering around with include an advancing die. This mechanic would be equivalent to a move action . It would simulate studying your opponent until you can find "cracks in the armor", an easy way of thinking about it would be to pit a fighter against some sort of turtle or something. Let's say the fighter's attack is +6 and the turle's AC is 19. The fighter would have to use 3 move actions (or standard actions) to successfully fight the turtle.

There is a very big problem with this as well. A person is useless until the hit the AC. So my proposal of this is to simply do half damage with all attacks. Another possible idea is to give the monster damage reduction based on how far under the attack is on the AC or more simply is give the damage a -x. x being the difference between AC and attack. As in my example above with the fighter's 16 attack and turtle's 18 AC , the first method I mentioned would be to take a move action for "studying" and the standard action attack would simply do half damage. The second and third methods would give a penalty to damage inflicted based on the difference of attack and defense , with the fighter's 16 attack and turtles 18 AC , you would dead your damage - 2.

Has anything like this been attempted ? I'm aware there are probably things I am missing, but this is just another brainstorming session.

 

[Hautamaki]

One question you need to ask yourself is whether doing all this math is actually faster than just rolling a die....

 

[Croesus]

I suppose one possibility would be to gather one or more decks of cards, and deal the cards to the players and GM. The player/GM can choose to play a card and add its value to the attack roll.

You'd want to limit the card values (many more 1's than 10's) and I expect the GM would limit his play to special creatures. You'd also have to decide how many cards a player could have at one time and how often they can refresh the cards per adventure/day/encounter (one refresh per level?).

A crit could occur if a card is played and the total is a certain amount past the target's AC, perhaps 5 or more.

This allows players to have considerable control over when they "get lucky", but remove much of the fiddly math.

 

[Evenglare]

Well, about the math. It's quite fast if you read , it's just picking one way of dealing with higher ac. My group consists of physics masters students so most of that math is pretty much instant to our group...

 

[ggroy]

Another system is instead of doing attack rolls, is doing saving throws instead.


In the case of a melee attack, the save could be the target rolling something like:

d20 + (AC-10) + situational modifiers

vs. an appropriate DC.


Though such a system feels very different from D&D/d20 type systems.

 

[Evenglare]

I had been messing around with that idea, infact I wanted to do both an attack roll and an "ac save". This was just the other way around.

 

[ggroy]

I had been messing around with that idea, infact I wanted to do both an attack roll and an "ac save". This was just the other way around.

I did something like this as a houserule back in the day in a few games.

At low levels, it was easy enough to reverse engineer the to-hit combat tables from the AD&D DMG, to get the base attack bonus for the attack rolls.


A lot of it depends on whether the players like it or not.

 

[Evenglare]

It just occured to me, this no roll to hit thing would be fantastic on a PBP game.