sanity check on my attack/defense combat pool system

[Zaranthan]

In Battletech, long range attacks have two powerful counters:

- They're much heavier, you can load anywhere from three to eight short range weapons in the same tonnage.

- Trying to be a mongol horse archer is suicide. Turning costs movement, moving backwards costs double, and using jump jets gives a significant penalty to your attacks.

Just lay similar penalties on fireball vs burning hands and you've got a wizard that wants to be in charging range.

[OgreBattle]

If my opponent is a much better attacker, even if I put all of my dice into defense, I'll still be hit - therefore I might as well go full attack.

If my opponent is much weaker than me, I should drop them as quickly as possible - therefore I might as well go full attack.

This might be reduced if there are 'degrees of hit' - ie, in D&D you roll an attack; if you hit you roll damage. If you're using something where you roll an attack and roll 4 hits you do 4x as much damage as you do 1 hit, then being able to negate some number of hits might make sense... Also, you could have limitations on number of hits...

Staging damage adds another calculation step but if everything else stays the same then it ends up en with 'ideal attack/defense ratio for this dice pool'

I've been thinking in terms of party vs party or party vs 1 giant monster, so the incentive to not always go full attack is that they can survive, then on their turn they have an ally with full combat pool attack you and you've got little or no dice to defend with.

But if there must be a hard counter to someone throwing full attack then I have two different methods in mind:




Method 1- Faster initiative attack causes target to lose attack dice

Initiative Dice: a 3rd form of die to go with attack and defense dice. If you roll 1 initiative die and your opponent doesn't your attack resolves first. If both throw initiative then whoever got a hit goes first, if both got a hit then it's simultaneous resolution.

Interrupt rule: If you're hit by a higher initiative attack then you lose attack dice equal to the amount of hits you took.

So if it's a duel where both have a pool of 4 and hit on a 3+...
A throws full 4 attack
B throws 3 attack + 1 initiative, striking first
B lands 2 hits so A loses 2 attack dice and only rolls 1 attack die if they survived




Method 2- Full Defense > Full Attack> Feint > Full Defense
Have full defense be the counter to full attacks, and feints (throwing just 1 die) be the counter to turtling, and full attacks or split att/def the counter to a feint like...

Full Defense: When throwing only Defense dice in an exchange, you regain dice to your combat pool equal to the amount of attack dice hits opponent rolled

So if A throws 1 defense die but B throws 4 defense dice, A has 3 dice left over for the 2nd exchange while B has 0, If A had thrown 4 attack dice instead, then any attack dice hits refill B's combat pool for the 2nd exchange, thus B is likely to defend and have dice left over to counter.