The Gaming Den

When I first began designing a new RPG it was under the assumption that it would be for computers and tablets. The idea was to create a new RPG for gamers who don't always have access to a group in their area, and a program that would include all the rules, handy tooltips/tutorials, battle map (not needed but useful), multiple ways to communicate, character building tools, dice, etc. It was designed to be played at a slow pace similar to playing post by post on a forum. Long story short, things got fucked up and the program is scrapped, but I still have the workings of a rules set on my hands which can be made into a TTRPG without all the online goodies.

The health system works like this: Everyone has an Endurance score (a static number) which represents armor and toughness. Whenever you take damage you divide by your Endurance (round down). If the result is 0 than you successfully soak all the damage and nothing happens. If the result is 1 or greater you take a wound with a severity equal to the resulting number.

Wounds do things. The greater the severity, the worse the effect of the wound. Once the total severity of all wounds equals 10, you're incapacitated. This means that you could have 10 wounds giving 10 minor penalties on you before you go down or you could have a small number of nastier penalties from more grievous wounds.

Everyone also has a Mettle score. If you aren't doing anything exciting, then this score just stays at 1. While in combat, this score is manipulated by players and enemies and moves up and down often. If your Mettle is reduced to 0 then you take a penalty to your Endurance score. Higher Mettle scores make your attacks and abilities more effective and grant access to higher tier attacks/abilities. In that regard, its a little like CAN.

So if a soldier attacks a goblin, the current setup is this: The soldier bashes the goblin on the head with his club. The goblin rolls a dodge attempt and fails. The soldier does 20 points of damage. That number is then divided by the the goblin's Endurance score, which may have a penalty if the goblin's current Mettle score is 0. For now, lets just say the goblin has a 6 Endurance. 20 / 6 is 3. So the goblin gains a wound with a severity of 3. So, finally, now the soldier looks at his "bash" ability, in the wound line and sees that severity 1-3 is Dizzy, 4-6 is stunned, and 7-10 in unconscious (or some such).


So here's my question: How salvageable is this system now that the player is expected to do the math in his head every turn instead of having the computer do it? How much math are people willing to do on a round by round basis?

Sounds like it could be fine.

The homebrew system a bunch of my friends played in college had you calculate damage by dividing percentile rolls by 16, 20, or 24 depending on weapon. This was for guns with separate damage for every bullet in a burst. It was still pretty manageable. Although this was a "get shot once, you're quite possibly dead" kinda game, so drawing out the damage rolls helped to build tension.

(Note: it wasn't like the system only worked because my friends are better than average at mental arithmetic, because jesus fuck the DM / system creator couldn't do math to save his life. The actual damage mechanic was "divide by four, and then divide again by 4, 5, or 6 depending on weapon." I once tried to explain to him that this was the same as dividing by 16, 20, or 24, and he seriously didn't believe me.)

Human beings are not good at division. Asking people to divide damage numbers by defense numbers on the fly is just a non-starter all around. Computers can do that shit fine, but humans really struggle.

If you want to do something similar, I suggest taking advantage of properties of Logs. Then you can have a "defense number" and a "damage number" and subtract the defense from the damage and compare the unsoaked damage to a table and get the wound level out. Because subtraction and tabular lookup are simple operations that people don't fuck up all the time.

That's what I did with After Sundown, it works OK.

-Username17

I appreciate the feedback. Looks like it it'll work for my needs. I'll play around with it a bit.

WPharolin wrote:So if a soldier attacks a goblin, the current setup is this: The soldier bashes the goblin on the head with his club. The goblin rolls a dodge attempt and fails. The soldier does 20 points of damage. That number is then divided by the the goblin's Endurance score, which may have a penalty if the goblin's current Mettle score is 0. For now, lets just say the goblin has a 6 Endurance. 20 / 6 is 3. So the goblin gains a wound with a severity of 3. So, finally, now the soldier looks at his "bash" ability, in the wound line and sees that severity 1-3 is Dizzy, 4-6 is stunned, and 7-10 in unconscious (or some such).

So on a 10log10 system that's 13 damage, -8 endurance = severity 5. where severity is 0-5 dizzy, 6-8 stunned, 9-10 unconcious. To copy the total damage back your 10 hit points system, you can convert back (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10), or fiddle the numbers to approximate (say 14 in sum or 10 in one).

1, 1.25, 1.6, 2, 2.5, 3.2, 4, 5, 6.3, 8, 10, ... [=0..10]. All you ever need for division in your head.

If it's on a tablet though, the tablet program can provide the actual math for the situation.

Assuming you're not able to come up with something you're happy with using logs and charts.