Broken Blade Publishing
Villager
That is correct! The goal was to create narratively intuitive combat rules. An attack roll determines if an attack physically lands on the target. More successful attack rolls deal more damage, reflecting the differences between grazing strikes and accurate blows. The armor roll determines if the attack slips into a gap, completely deflects, or maybe causes a minor wound. There is a tradeoff between defense and armor. Heavily armored characters are usually easier to hit, though trying to bypass their armor is more difficult.
This is different than say D&D where an attack is more abstract. A "miss" could mean the attack failed to land completely or it landed on an armored location. Because all forms of defense are combined into a single statistic (Armor Class), it is difficult to present interesting mechanical differences between lightly armored combatants that are difficult to hit and heavily armored combatants that can wade through melees. In Oath Hammer, fighting styles are meaningfully different and each excels in different scenarios. Because dodging/parrying is different than armor, we can also incorporate armor penetration mechanics.
I think hex-crawling makes travel feel more substantive. Players can think about the routes they want to take and acquire gossip about clearly defined regions.
The domain rules for things like diplomacy and warfare were designed to be simple and easy to use. We want the players to engage with these rules early on in a campaign and we offer the GM tables to randomly determine faction activity.
