Dealing damage

[spongeknight]

So there are a few ways to deal damage that can be found in various RPGs right now. The question, of course, is which one is the best. We've got:

1) Rolling for damage vs. fixed hit points. A classic that has been around since the beginning of the hobby, it emphasizes the good feeling players get when they roll high on damage and drop foes earlier than expected. Often features critical hits that lead to very impressive performance for the tier of power the character is currently at.

2) Static damage. When you hit an enemy you just deal your damage without fuss and without variation. Supports faster resolution and consistency. Players are less vulnerable to enemy luck with this system.

3) Rolling toughness vs. damage. You have a toughness value that you check against incoming damage to see how badly you are hurt by the attack. Largely similar to #1 except the defender is making the check instead of the attacker. Emphasizes keeping people engaged when it's not their turn.

4) Rolling vs wounds. In at least one game I've played every hit stacked one or more wounds on your character and eventually you started rolling every turn to see if you collapsed from the damage, with increasing penalties for each wound. This style emphasizes longer combats and "every point of damage matters" mentality during fights.

5) Variable damage based on attack roll. The system nWoD uses, where your extra successes on the attack roll translate directly into damage with no more steps. Supposedly it speeds up turns. It might not have to be terrible, though I'm not sure how it would ever be good.

I might have missed some, but those seem like our options right now. Which one of these do you prefer (or, if you're confident, which one is objectively better) for combat-heavy games? Which of these do you think should never be used again?

[Schleiermacher]

I think #3, toughness vs. damage, is best because it scales best, although you have to be careful that Your RNG isn't too swingy. Hit Points have the advantage of being quick and, as you say, having more of a marker for a "good hit", which players like. Rolling boxcars with your greatsword just feels different from Your enemy flubbing their Toughness roll.

[deaddmwalking]

Keep in mind that some systems may apply 'soak'.

For example, in DeathWatch, your damage roll is applied to your opponet after reduction by Armor Value and Toughness.

Soak could conceivably be applied to any of the options you've provided, but it certainly makes a difference.

[Stubbazubba]

There's nothing mutually exclusive about some of these. Many systems use degrees of success along with static damage, so its not totally static, just mostly.

Take The One Ring, for example; you roll d12 + Nd6 vs. Opponent's static Defense, where N = your skill with the weapon you're using to attack. For every natural 6 on a d6 you roll, you deal your weapon's (static) damage again (assuming you hit). If you roll a crit (a certain value or above on the d12), you also threaten a Wound. Your opponent rolls their Armor against your weapon's static Edge (Wound TN). Most enemies die if they take a Wound, some can take 2.

So that has static damage, degrees of success, and toughness against wounds.

[Neurosis]

I'm going to add a #6.

6) Static Or Variable Damage - Armor. You apply your damage minus the appropriate defenses which directly reduce damage. This is how HERO System handles damage (the default is that all damage is variable, but there is a "make damage static" checkbox you can click, it being HERO system).

[PhoneLobster]

At one point I had a system where there was, effectively a damage vs armor roll. And it had two potential outcomes on successes.

1) Margin of success was huge (some specific arbitrary number, I think it was a margin of 10 or 20 or something), target KO/Death/Defeat whatever you wanted to call it.
2) Success but smaller than the defeat margin? Margin of success contributes to a penalty for the target on this roll in future.

The "Damage Penalty" however didn't additively stack directly, and just replaced prior damage penalties if the damage penalty/margin was larger (which it generally would be iteratively).

I no longer use that mechanic. But it was interesting.

I use flat damage now and haven't looked back. Flat damage is awesome.

[OgreBattle]

There's a question almost every damage system needs to answer and that's "how quickly does it resolve 10 people getting hit by an explosion."

[silva]

2) Static damage. When you hit an enemy you just deal your damage without fuss and without variation. Supports faster resolution and consistency. Players are less vulnerable to enemy luck with this system.

This. Its the only method that supports my current gaming habits.

[Neurosis]

There's a question almost every damage system needs to answer and that's "how quickly does it resolve 10 people getting hit by an explosion."

For everything but D&D style "A fireball does 10d6 damage" the answer is not fucking very. In Shadowrun in particular it's an out and out nightmare.

[Wiseman]

There's a question almost every damage system needs to answer and that's "how quickly does it resolve 10 people getting hit by an explosion."

For everything but D&D style "A fireball does 10d6 damage" the answer is not fucking very. In Shadowrun in particular it's an out and out nightmare.

Which makes me wonder, are you supposed to roll once and apply the damage to all victims, or are you supposed to roll 10d6 individually for each creature?

I want to lean towards the former, it being quicker, but in DDO and Eye of the Beholder it uses the latter.

[Dogbert]

From among 1 and 2, I prefer #2. Less of a hassle.

The last three, however, depend on the genre. #3 works if you want padded sumo, but it will be an abomination for any genre that requires either an impending sense of danger or discouraging frontal approaches (like #4 and #5).

[TiaC]

What would you classify White Wolf's system as?

[Hicks]

Crap.

[spongeknight]

What would you classify White Wolf's system as?

White Wolf's oWoD damage system is basically "let's make this as difficult and convoluted as possible so people stop trying to use our rules." It's also pretty significantly different between splats in the same edition, let alone in different editions that were supposedly playable together. I happen to have Exalted Second Edition with me (I bought it as a teenager, don't judge) and here's the resolution system-

1) Attack roll
2) Defense roll
3) calculate "raw damage"
4) subtract soak from raw damage
5) check against hardness
6) roll damage

And that's ignoring the many, many optional steps that you can throw in there like activating charms, rerolls, or counter attacks. Neddless to say a single attack takes a while to resolve, and of course every character can have 3~4 attacks per round at chargen almost automatically. Also you have changing bonuses and penalties to both your attack and defense depending on charms, the onslaught penalty, and if you're using a magical or normal flurry for your extra attacks.

Yes, once again White Wolf shows us how not to design a system. But nWoD uses option #5, which is much faster but even worse as a system. As has been proven a bus full of children with toy guns can kill a bruiser werewolf with ease in one round, though that's more a failure of the retarded stacking penalties than anything else.

[TiaC]

What would you classify White Wolf's system as?

White Wolf's oWoD damage system is basically "let's make this as difficult and convoluted as possible so people stop trying to use our rules." It's also pretty significantly different between splats in the same edition, let alone in different editions that were supposedly playable together. I happen to have Exalted Second Edition with me (I bought it as a teenager, don't judge) and here's the resolution system-

1) Attack roll
2) Defense roll
3) calculate "raw damage"
4) subtract soak from raw damage
5) check against hardness
6) roll damage

And that's ignoring the many, many optional steps that you can throw in there like activating charms, rerolls, or counter attacks. Neddless to say a single attack takes a while to resolve, and of course every character can have 3~4 attacks per round at chargen almost automatically. Also you have changing bonuses and penalties to both your attack and defense depending on charms, the onslaught penalty, and if you're using a magical or normal flurry for your extra attacks.

Yes, once again White Wolf shows us how not to design a system. But nWoD uses option #5, which is much faster but even worse as a system. As has been proven a bus full of children with toy guns can kill a bruiser werewolf with ease in one round, though that's more a failure of the retarded stacking penalties than anything else.

The fact that I also had Exalted 2e in front of me and I still had to ask shows just how bad it is.

M&M uses #3 effectively, as the low lethality fits superheroes quite well.

#3 does have the downside of making PbP much slower.

[Neurosis]

There's a question almost every damage system needs to answer and that's "how quickly does it resolve 10 people getting hit by an explosion."

For everything but D&D style "A fireball does 10d6 damage" the answer is not fucking very. In Shadowrun in particular it's an out and out nightmare.

Which makes me wonder, are you supposed to roll once and apply the damage to all victims, or are you supposed to roll 10d6 individually for each creature?

I want to lean towards the former, it being quicker, but in DDO and Eye of the Beholder it uses the latter.

In baseline D&D (whatever edition), I'm 90% sure you roll once and everybody gets the same damage.

[CCarter]

#1 and #3 are fairly different in that a "Toughness Save" is a check, rather than just an amount of damage. Its much easier to have damage go 'off the RNG' and either bounce or auto-splat targets.
The upside is that there are sometimes instances where you want a check that's damage based, which doesn't give reasonable results if damage is a scaleless value as in #1 - look at 3E Defensive Roll (the rogue ability) for instance.

[kzt]

There is also the casualty card method. It's not a TTRPG system so much, but still interesting. Basically you have a deck of cards with random injuries of varying types, ranging from essentially scratches to dead right there, the ones in between require medical attention or you get worse. You get one randomly when injured by anything in combat, though the way it usually works is that you get given one by the umpire at the start of the event and are not supposed to look at it until you get injured.