Shall We Test Some Combat?

In my experience all of the best tabletop games provide players with a strong sense of two things. The first is a sense of self, or who they are in the context of that game. The second is a sense of how they interact with the world. For a lot of games the second point is what the game mechanics define, while the first is mainly set dressing. But for a tabletop RPG you'll typically want to make both of those effects mechanical. My goal with this still-as-yet-unnamed project is to have clearly delineated mechanics that define both how players interact with the game world and who they are within it, as well as how they grow in both respects.

So eventually I'm going to deal with the mechanics of defining and expanding a sense-of-self within this universe, but first let's define the crunchy mechanics surrounding combat. There's two sides to this too, because you have the rules that say what you do when you fight, but there need to be separate rules that say how you get better at doing those things. And unlike the sense-of-self mechanics these need to be pretty well-defined before anybody can really play the game.

So, let's start by tossing around some terms. The first crunchy mechanic you need for combat is personal stats you track as a player. This is your proficiency bonus, your HP, your skill slots, your mana, etcetera, etcetera. I'm still kinda operating under the idea that I want to mimic Descent in some fashion with this game, so here are the stats I'm thinking of right now.

• Accuracy roll - how good you are at overcoming your target's engine power
  
• Efficacy roll - how hard your weapons hit this turn
  
• Recovery roll - how effective you are at fixing your armor or engines
  
• Armor integrity scale - what stands between you and death
  
• Engine power scale - what stands between you and getting hit
• Ammo store scale - what keeps you firing at your target

In favor of objective #1 from my last post, my thinking is that there won't actually be a "turn order" the way there are in most games. There's no initiative, everyone reacts basically simultaneously and again, I'm really interested in keeping combat moving quickly. So everyone takes the same turn. You pick a target, then roll three sets of dice for Accuracy, Efficacy, and Recovery. If your accuracy beats the engine power of your target, then you hit them and do damage based on your efficacy. If somebody targets you and hits, then your recovery lets you repair some of the damage they did.

When you receive damage you can choose where to take it, spreading it between your armor integrity and engine power. Remember that if your engines drop to 0 you won't be able to dodge additional shots, but if your armor drops to 0 you blow up and die. So having some ability to recover those systems is important. Then, at the end of the turn, everybody who shot something, whether they hit or miss, will subtract 1 from their ammo store. Once you hit 0 you're done shooting. If there are still people attacking you all you can do is dodge and repair.

So that's all theoretically fine, but it hinges on getting the right numbers into those buckets. Currently here's where I've landed; 

• for each of the rolls you can have up to 4 points, each of which represents 1d4 that you can roll during a combat turn. 
• you will start with 4 total points as a character which you can divide between your rolls however you would like.
• you will start out with 4 points in each of the scales, which represents ammo in your store or damage you can take.
• upgrades for your vessel can take the form of adding points to a scale, adding numbers to a roll to increase the end value of the roll, or adding points to a roll for extra physical dice.

So aside from the fact that I haven't defined stuff like what those upgrade paths are and what enemy types look like, everything is peachy. Right?

Well, not so fast. I like this as a starting point, but here's my concern. If you, a starting character, come up against someone similarly spec'd out, there is a remote possibility that they can one-shot you. If they have one point in accuracy and two points in efficacy they can roll a 4 against you to hit (because your scale is at 4) and then an 8 for efficacy, which will completely wipe your two starting scales for armor integrity and engine power. The odds are low, but a challenging first encounter could be very frustrating as a result.

There are ways around this. Maybe in cases where the accuracy roll ties the engine power, you just halve the final efficacy roll. And it's worth noting that unless your GM is kinda a jerk, you'll probably get fed pretty easy enemies at first. But that leads us to another problem, because between having to overcome engine power to hit and also do enough damage past a potential recovery roll to kill, combat could take a while. Which is kinda the opposite of what I'm after here. That's why the ammo store scale is a thing, of course. Because once everyone runs out of ammo, combat is over.

But what does that mean if there's still combatants standing on either side? They just retreat? It's a draw? And how does that fit into the fiction of the game? Are players gladiators in some kind of sci-fi combat arena? Is this some kind of UFC-style fighting tournament?

Those are all questions for another time. For right now I need to write down some stats and roll some dice to see if I can't shake out the issues with this combat system that I haven't considered yet.