Wulfbanes wrote:Delayed resolution sounds like it'd be a nightmare to bookkeep any conflict with multiple parties. Can you write out how you imagine a round to go for 3 actors, how about 8? Does it scale at all?
I feel like keeping the dice rolling with the declaring helps to keep things straight for the players, which works against the increased bookkeeping on MC's side. The exercise you propose is a good idea.
Simplifying assumption: characters only get 1 action per turn.
TEST SCENARIO #1: ALICE, BOB, CATHY
Alice: HP 5, Init 10, Attack 5. [Team 1]
Bob: HP 10, Init 5, Attack 3. [Team 1]
Cathy: HP 8, Init 7, Attack 4. [Team 2]
Declaration order is Bob, Cathy, Alice.
Bob's turn. Bob attacks Cathy. Bob rolls his attack dice against the appropriate difficulty to hit and makes his THAC0 threshold (or whatever). The MC records the 3 HP damage that will be coming Cathy's way at the end of the round.
Cathy's turn. Cathy suspects Alice will attack her next, so she elects to defend. Cathy rolls dice to gain a pool of damage absorption for this round. The MC records Cathy's result of 5 HP added to her soak pool.
Alice's turn. Alice attacks Cathy, knowing that Cathy already has 3 HP of damage coming her way that will leave her with only 2 defense on top of her natural 8 HP. Alice rolls to hit and succeeds, meaning 5 more damage is headed Alice's way. MC records Alice's attack damage.
MC consults the Order of Operations and first gives Cathy her 5 HP soak pool. Then he combines the power of all attacks made on Cathy, adding them for 8 HP. MC tells Cathy that her HP value is reduced from 8 to 5 HP. The round ends.
I don't think that was too bad.
Something to note: Because the effects of attacks can't be considered individually, it is
not possible for a defense action to decrease hit rate. A binary hit/miss value has to be determined on the actor's turn, because it's a mess to go back and cancel a packet of damage that's already been earmarked for a defending character and at the very least you would have to also record each attacker's die roll instead of just the damage value of their attack. Practically, defense actions can only absorb some of the numerical pain coming your way, not cause retroactive misses.
Individual attacks can still have status effects associated with them. Different defenses could counteract different status effects as well. I'm thinking about including "wound thresholds" as well, to make it possible to cripple enemy robots with powerful enough blows, but because damage is cumulative among all attacks, it would be difficult to differentiate a non-wounding death of a thousand cuts from an equally damaging sledgehammer blow. I definitely don't want people trying to allocate their soak pools preferentially to specific attacks to avoid wounding.
TEST SCENARIO #2: ALICE, BOB, CATHY, DENNIS, ELLY, FRANK, GILLY, HOWARD
Alice: HP 5, Init 10, Attack 5. [Team 1]
Bob: HP 10, Init 5, Attack 3. [Team 1]
Cathy: HP 8, Init 7, Attack 4. [Team 2]
Dennis: HP 4, Init 12, Attack 5 [Team 2]
Elly: HP 20, Init 1, Attack 3 [Team 1]
Frank: HP 12, Init 6, Attack 2 [Team 2]
Gilly: HP 6, Init 6, Attack 4 [Team 1]
Howard: HP 9, Init 9, Attack 1 [Team 2]
Declaration order: Elly, Bob, Frank/Gilly [tiebreaker], Cathy, Howard, Alice, Dennis
Elly's turn. She is the slowest and therefore has no ability to react to what anyone else participating in the combat does. She defends and rolls +8 to her soak pool. MC records the result.
Bob's turn. Bob also defends, getting +5 to his soak pool. MC records.
Frank's turn. Frank attacks Bob and hits, inflicting 2 HP damage. MC records.
Gilly's turn. Gilly attacks Frank and misses. MC doesn't bother.
Cathy's turn. Cathy attacks Gilly and deals 4 damage. MC records.
Howard's turn. Howard rolls to put a buff on Cathy and succeeds. MC records.
Alice's turn. Alice attacks Cathy and deals 5 damage. MC records.
Dennis' turn. Dennis attacks Gilly and deals 5 damage. MC records.
MC totals the damage. Bob gets 2HP knocked off his soak pool, but ends the round with no HP loss. Gilly takes 9 total damage and is killed. Cathy takes 5 damage and is left with 3 HP. Cathy is buffed by Howard's spell.
I'm here giving soak pools as a value of HP added to your total that vanish at the end of the round, but there's no reason a soak pool couldn't be expressed as a percentage and reduce incoming damage on that basis.
I dunno, I don't think it's that bad in terms of bookkeeping, though it is somewhat clunky if you take your notes in text form and then have to hunt through them... 8 entities on the field at once is pretty average size for a level appropriate encounter, though getting any bigger you'd need to prepare a table in your notebook in advance or otherwise take special measures to record the damages and status effects flying around in a round.