Uniform Weapon Damage

[Chaot]

Help me out here folks. I was driving back from Ohio to New York today and this got knocking around in my head. I'm actually looking for feedback on the third idea.

So, anyone every want to drop individual weapon damage and instead tie the weapon effectiveness to the skill of the character? I do sometimes. It goes through cycles.

Sometimes I want to make all damage default at 1d6 but include Slashes, Crushes and Impales to give some character.

Sometimes I want to stat the weapon in effectiveness against armor.

Mace: 1d4 leather, 1d6 chain, 1d8 plate

Short Sword: 1d8 leather, 1d6 chain, 1d8 plate

(completely pulled from my but just now, but you get the idea)

Then there's my good friend Roll Table for Demons & Elementals. It breaks down magic points invested into a summoning and what skill and damage level the sorcerer gets for their demon out of it. What if that were just tied to a generic combat skill though?

10% - 1d2

20% - 1d4

30% - 1d6

40% - 1d8

50% - 1d10

60% - 1d10+1d2

70% - 1d10+1d4

80% - 1d10+1d6

90% - 1d10+1d8

etc.

So what if you still used individual weapon skills to see how effective you are with a given weapon, whether you hit or not and if you got a fumble, critical or special? Then you used a general combat skill to see how much damage you can actually do with the weapon?

Let's just call it Prowess for now and adjust the demon table to increments of 30%.

Prowess

01-30% - 1d4+db

31-60% - 1d6+db

61-90% - 1d8+db

91-120% - 1d10+db

etc.

I haven't nailed down the fine points on it yet but I could see taking it a few different ways depending on desired outcome.

The ultimate goal of the system is to set rules that regulate character's combat effectiveness while allowing gear that the character has picked to be window dressing.

[SDLeary]

Interesting. I think for me though, you've just added another roll, especially if someone is using Hit Locations.

Roll to hit -> Roll for Prowess -> Roll resulting damage -> Roll location (if using)

Alas, I can come up with no other methods to achieve this at the moment.

SDLeary

[Evilschemer]

I'd be more likely (and have considered) condensing all melee weapons into:

light melee weapon: 1d4 damage+db, +10%, short

small melee weapon: 1d6 damage+db, +5%, medium

melee weapon: 1d8 damage+db, +0%, medium

large melee weapon: 1d10 damage+db, -5%, medium

heavy melee weapon: 1d12 damage+db, -10%, long

You might be able to trade off +/-5% for a longer reach.

[MrJealousy]

Looks to me like this is an expansion onthe random armour points used in stormbringer.

While i can see what you're trying to do I think I have to agree with SDLeary its an extra roll I could do without.

Also, this seems to be a rule for melee weapons only and I would find it more difficult to apply the same concept to firearms. Leaving you with two seperate damage systems for all weapons...

[Chaot]

Interesting. I think for me though, you've just added another roll, especially if someone is using Hit Locations.

What if there's no skill roll? In combat Prowess is only used as a metric of how much damage the character can do.

I'd be more likely (and have considered) condensing all melee weapons into:

light melee weapon: 1d4 damage+db, +10%, short

small melee weapon: 1d6 damage+db, +5%, medium

melee weapon: 1d8 damage+db, +0%, medium

large melee weapon: 1d10 damage+db, -5%, medium

heavy melee weapon: 1d12 damage+db, -10%, long

This is how I would break down the weapons categories but the damages stills weighs the weapons against each other. In the right hands, I want that dagger to be as dangerous as a gun.

Also, this seems to be a rule for melee weapons only and I would find it more difficult to apply the same concept to firearms. Leaving you with two seperate damage systems for all weapons...

I was actually thinking about it holding across the board. Swap out missile damage for Prowess damage. Of course, the level of tech that I tend to get up to is flintlocks and blunderbusses, so that's the scope. Still the thrust of the rules is to emphasize the character's adroitness and not the equipment they use. Someone picks up a high powered rifle and they have a high Prowess then they're going to do significant damage with it. Someone with low Prowess and a high powered rifle might make their shot but, because of their low Prowess, only clip the target or inflict a flesh wound.

[icebrand]

What if there's no skill roll? In combat Prowess is only used as a metric of how much damage the character can do.

This is how I would break down the weapons categories but the damages stills weighs the weapons against each other. In the right hands, I want that dagger to be as dangerous as a gun.

I was actually thinking about it holding across the board. Swap out missile damage for Prowess damage. Of course, the level of tech that I tend to get up to is flintlocks and blunderbusses, so that's the scope. Still the thrust of the rules is to emphasize the character's adroitness and not the equipment they use. Someone picks up a high powered rifle and they have a high Prowess then they're going to do significant damage with it. Someone with low Prowess and a high powered rifle might make their shot but, because of their low Prowess, only clip the target or inflict a flesh wound.

On our last draft of house rules we used just two weapons:

"melee" and "war" where melee did 1D6+DB and war did 2D6+db (a dagger, club, pole, hatchet, etc is a melee weapon, and a war sword, spear, mace, battle axe etc is a war weapon).

Two handed weapons do +1 damage

I think there ARE better weapons than others (the weapons people used to war with are better than civilian weapons, you don't see armies with daggers as main weapons!) and thats why we have two damages.

As for the prowess thing, we are working at a "static" defense (-% to hit) to eliminate multiple rolls on combat.

[KingSkin]

I've built something similar into my own homebrew system which uses D100 as the base dice roll but isn't BRP-based. The way I work it is that your base damage is equal to the 10's digit of a successful attack roll (which limits low-skill characters to low-damage outputs and ties your overall skill level into how good you are at hurting people). Then, each weapon has a damage multipier so a fist is x1, a knife x5 and an assault rifle x10, for example. It actually cuts the damage roll out of combat (and I use the units dice to determine hit location so to-hit, location and damage are all covered by a single roll) so speeds things up quite nicely. I keep thinking about porting it over to BRP properly but I'm too busy fine-tuning my overall system to bother at the moment.

Anyway, hope that helps.

[Atgxtg]

One thing that you could try to simplify this would be to use something like what the old Tosp Secret/S.I. system did for Hth combat. In that RPG the tens didgit was the damage result. So a 46 did 4 points of damage (to location 6); a 82 did 8 points od famage (to location 2) and so on.

Weapon and/or armor mods could be a flat modifier, usually +1 or -1. Based on the average damage rolls, here is a short breakdown of the modifiers.

1D3+1 = -3

1D4+2 = -1

1D6+1 = -1

1D8= -1

1D8+1= 0

1D8+2= +1

1D10 = +0

1D10+1 = +1

2D6+1= +2

The only tough bit would be the critcs and specials. The easy fix would be to use a fixed value for crits and specials (probably 10 points plus modifiers).

This variant would actually reduce the number of rolls. If we change the hit location table to a d10 or used an odd/even split on the tens digit we could use the attack roll to determine hit location too, as in TSSI, and eliminate yet another roll.

Edited December 30, 2011 by Atgxtg

[deleriad]

One thing that you could try to simplify this would be to use something like what the old Tosp Secret/S.I. system did for Hth combat. In that RPG the tens didgit was the damage result. So a 46 did 4 points of damage (to location 6); a 82 did 8 points od famage (to location 2) and so on.

Weapon and/or armor mods could be a flat modifier, usually +1 or -1. Based on the average damage rolls, here is a short breakdown of the modifiers.

1D3+1 = -3

1D4+2 = -1

1D6+1 = -1

1D8= -1

1D8+1= 0

1D8+2= +1

1D10 = +0

1D10+1 = +1

2D6+1= +2

The only tough bit would be the critcs and specials. The easy fix would be to use a fixed value for crits and specials (probably 10 points plus modifiers).

This variant would actually reduce the number of rolls. If we change the hit location table to a d10 or used an odd/even split on the tens digit we could use the attack roll to determine hit location too, as in TSSI, and eliminate yet another roll.

That would potentially work quite nicely. Using the 7 hit locations for humanoid bodies only really has one solution if using units as the hit location:

R Leg 1, L Leg 2, abdomen 3-4, chest 5-6, r arm 7, left arm 8, head 9-10

I would say having to use an odds/evens split would overload the amount of stuff you needed to read from the roll.

You could treat damage bonus in a similar way: e.g. +1 for STR+SIZ 25+, +2 for STR+SIZ 30-45, each +15 equals +1 damage etc

I suspect the difficulty with this is that it actually gets oddly slow having to read multiple results off the same dice roll and there's a certain pleasure to rolling dice for specific purposes.

I would say

Special: damage equals maximum for skill (e.g. skill 73 implies special is 7 damage) or you can ignore a parry effect or a source of armour

Critical: damage equals maximum and choose one from ignore parry effect or ignore a source of armour or choose a hit location.