Combat: I hates it...

It started out as a pretty hectic morning and then the day got busier, but this monday I still managed to design a basic set of mechanics for a game. Simple and intuitive, it allows for quick and easy conflict resolution with a degree of success mechanic that can be used or dropped without . All in all I was quite happy with it. The guts took less than a day to do in between serving customers on one of the busiest days we've had this year.

Then it hit me. I had no combat resolution there. No way of assigning or resolving damage. Attacking your opponent was easy. Determining how well you hit them was easy and already incorporated. That was all there anyway and it could be handled the same way as everything else in the system. The real problem was damage and the associated complications with combat.

That took a lot longer to resolve. I think I'm there now, but it all needs playtested. It needs soooo much playtesting, and I'm still not sure it'll work.

The real problem is that combat feels like it gets in the way of the essence of the system. Everything else about it is so simple and fluid, but then combat wasn't.

I guess this is an inherent problem with game design. I don't really know and would value comments from others who have tried designing systems. I think combat is the hardest part of the game because it is also the most mechanically intense part of the system. It's where the most stress gets put on the system and it also generally requires other factors to be added to the system that don't exist elsewhere and don't often interact with the rest of the system.

Damage is the most obvious example here. In a lot of systems they fall back on the old standard of Hit Points by whatever name the designers choose to give it. Wounds, hit points, damage points etc. You have to choose how many points a character should have and how many are appropriate for different creatures in comparison.

Then you have to decide what damage weapons and punching etc do. How does this scale with the amount of damage your characters can take. Does a shotgun do an appropriate amount in comparison to say a pocket knife?

In short, the interaction of social and mental skills traits and attributes seems to be easy to design a system for. Combat is a lot harder and I wish it wasn't. It would be a whole lot easier if we could just do away with combat altogether but then what would all your players do when they're in a tavern...

- Liam