Saturday, February 21, 2009

Proposal: Alternative Combat Rules

Fails 4-2. Combat needs to not be unwieldy.—DDA Agent Rodlen

Adminned at 23 Feb 2009 15:39:59 UTC

Too tired for flavour text. Let’s just make this combat work nicely.

Replace the first paragraph of Rule 2.1 Skirmishes with the following text:

At any time when there is not currently an active Skirmish, the General may create a Skirmish by posting a story post with [Skirmish] in the title, known as a Skirmish Post. Inside the Skirmish Post the General shall list each of the Enemy Combatants, including their initial Health, Armour and Damage scores. When a Skirmish is created, that Skirmish is active.

Change the text of Rule 2.1.1 Combat to the following:

As a daily action, a Soldier who is a Friendly Combatant of an active Skirmish may combat the Enemy. To do combat, they must select their Weapon (a specific weapon in their holster), then their Number of Shots (an integer between 1 and 6) and their Target (an Enemy Combatant who is not dead). They must then spend their Weapon’s Ammo Rating multiplied by their Number of Shots in Ammo, to fire once as the paragraph below describes.

A Soldier firing rolls XDICEY, where X is their Number of Shots and Y is the Damage Rating of their Weapon. If the roll result is above their Target’s Armour, the Health of the Target is reduced by the roll result.

If the Soldier’s Target is now dead, they may continue firing by reducing their Number of Shots by 1, selecting a new Target (another Enemy Combatant who is not dead), then firing again as the above paragraph describes. Otherwise they complete their combat.

If the Soldier’s Target is not dead after the Soldier has fired at it, the Soldier must roll DICEX, where X is the Damage score of the their Target, and subtract the roll result from their Health. They then complete their combat.

The Soldier completes their combat by posting a comment to the Skirmish post, including their Weapon, Number of Shots, a list of Targets they fired at, the damage (if any) they dealt to each Target, and updated values for the scores (including but not limited to Health), or the dead status, of their Targets, if any.

Example combat completion report (Battle Droids are 5 Health, 3 Armour):
Weapon: MP5SMG
Number of Shots: 4
Targets:
- Battle Droid, dealt 9 damage, Dead
- Battle Droid, dealt 7 damage, Dead
- Battle Droid, dealt 4 damage, 1 health remaining

An Enemy Combatant is dead if its Health is 0 or below. If all Enemy Combatants for a particular Skirmish are dead, then the Skirmish ceases to be active, and is said to have ended.

Checklist: Firing is no longer time-unlimited (it is a daily action). Combat includes an extra choice, Number of Shots, that significantly alters the effectiveness of weapons - oldiers who fire many shots with a high-power weapon can almost guarantee avoiding retaliatory fire, for example, at the cost of enormous ammo. Less individually-commented shots means less comment-spam and less breaking-the-blog. Enemies can have Armour that makes them resistant to low-powered weapons like the Service Revolver (but the revolver remains a handy finishing tool or minion-killing device).

Comments

Wakukee:

21-02-2009 21:35:31 UTC

imperial Hmmm… no XP…
arrow

Klisz:

21-02-2009 21:40:58 UTC

imperial  arrow

Devenger:

21-02-2009 21:45:28 UTC

the weird thing is why I get flavour text arrows when I don’t include non-explanatory flavour text.

Experience remains handled by Rule 2.6 Experience, and was beyond the scope of this proposal (it was too long already and I wanted as few things to disagree about as possible). Feel free to propose an extension that includes XP changes if this passes (the rule is structured to allow XP for kills by expanding paragraph 3 of the new Combat rule).

arthexis: he/him

21-02-2009 23:13:55 UTC

for

Kevan: he/him

22-02-2009 00:35:04 UTC

The decrementing shots seem a bit odd; if I fire six revolver shots at once, I get to do 6 damage to the first target, 5 to the second, 4 to the third…?

Rodlen:

22-02-2009 00:46:06 UTC

against per Kevan

Darknight: he/him

22-02-2009 00:49:56 UTC

imperial

Wakukee:

22-02-2009 01:04:52 UTC

I was kinda cofused by that too…

Qwazukee:

22-02-2009 03:04:20 UTC

imperial  arrow It’s better than what we have now, even with the bugs.

Amnistar: he/him

22-02-2009 06:39:46 UTC

don’t look at me on this one guys. I proposed my combat rules, you guys nixed em (which is fine) we took kevans and you had issues.  I’ll wait for you guys to find ruules you like and we’ll run another test skirmish to see if they work.

Igthorn:

22-02-2009 06:41:06 UTC

imperial

Devenger:

22-02-2009 11:16:20 UTC

Yes, Kevan, that’s exactly what will happen - but surely that’s an interesting mechanic in itself?

Assuming you can’t change weapons in skirmishes, the Service Revolver is a tactical choice that allows you to, for 6 ammo, definitely kill 6-x enemies with x or less Health and x-1 or less Armour (and if you continue firing past that point, you’ll take retaliatory fire as you won’t score a kill). However, it will always be unable to hit an enemy with Armour of 6 of above.

The other extreme, the M249LMG, has the potential to deal a whopping amount of damage to enemies with a lot of health (if you expended 60 ammo, your first shot would be 4DICE10). However, due to the nature of dice, you could do as little damage as the Service Revolver (if each die gives you only 1). Nonetheless, larger weapons will be needed to break through Armour values of 20 or more (the SMG is only just capable of this, and only on 6 shots first round).

Don’t think of the decrementing shots being you’re only using one shot on each target; think of it as you killing an enemy giving you additional (but limited) opportunities to shoot more enemies before you are forced to take cover again.

It’s a quirky system, I’ll give you that, but it’s a sight more interesting, and a sight less spammy, than ‘I fire with MP5SMG at Grunt and deal 2.’ 60 times in a row.

Kevan: he/him

22-02-2009 12:09:24 UTC

Agreed, it’s an interesting mechanic, but it feels very unintuitive, and that makes it harder to build intuitive rules on top of.

Would we be losing much by dropping the “continue firing by reducing their Number of Shots by 1” paragraph?

Devenger:

22-02-2009 12:45:06 UTC

I don’t know… the number of enemies a Skirmish could realistically have would be decreased, as no Soldier could kill more than one enemy per day. I’m not sure how the balancing would work out for the weapons either (there was quite a nice interaction between the three variables, Shots, DR and AR, with DR limiting hittable armour, AR limiting number of shots per week and Shots limiting number of kills per day). This won’t pass unless there’s a significant shift in votes because Amni refuses to be decisive, so I don’t know what the next step is.

ais523:

22-02-2009 13:37:13 UTC

against It’ll be almost impossible to tell if someone’s made a mistake or not; trying to go over the logs to see what happened will just be confusing.

Devenger:

22-02-2009 14:32:47 UTC

The above fact is also true with our existing rules, or it would take just as long to check everything.

Qwazukee:

22-02-2009 19:08:24 UTC

CoV for  arrow

Wakukee:

22-02-2009 23:35:47 UTC

CoV for  arrow

TrumanCapote:

23-02-2009 00:09:23 UTC

against

What 523 said.

arthexis: he/him

23-02-2009 06:04:44 UTC

CoV Actually, even I misunderstood the decrementing shots part there. Now that I understand it against  Otherwise the rest of the proposal seems fine.

Wakukee:

23-02-2009 21:41:01 UTC

4 against, 3 for. It fails.