Rehabilitating the To-Hit Roll
A running theme on this blog is that I don’t want to roll dice twice to do one thing. However, I refuse to sacrifice the sweet mechanical crunch you can more easily get with two or three rolls! This forces me to do little dice math puzzles that make my neurons buzz and blink like a cell phone going off.
The ur-example is the multiple rolls for an attack. There is getting rid of D&D’s to-hit roll, which was introduced by B/X Blackrazor, popularized by Into the Odd, debatably perfected (it’s working well for me so far) by me, and “re-discovered” by Matt Colville, but there is also the multi-roll nonsense of gunfights in Boothill, which I also solved. But I’m not done setting straight the world of all its major problems.
What if instead of getting rid of the to-hit roll, we get rid of the damage roll? My colleague, Marcia of Traverse Fantasy, proposes in a recent post that we give weapons a set but variable damage. This means that if swords deal 1d8 damage, you roll 1d8 when you first obtain the sword, and the result is how much damage it always deals. This is incredibly tempting. It also opens up opportunities to add weapon degradation (perhaps when the weapon is attacked by a rust monster or similar misfortune) and to spend downtime to repair or improve a weapon if you have tools and training, which would be represented by rerolling its damage die and taking the higher result. Looting bodies would also be given an extra boost, since every goblin’s sword may be an especially sharp blade. No longer do you just toss them all on the pile since you already have a sword–we are looking for those special 8 damage swords!
However, we must add back the to-hit roll. I talked so much shit on the to-hit roll! But here I am. Because you’re no longer rolling damage each time you attack, adding a to-hit roll is the only way to have some variation for attacks and not just have auto-hit and auto-damage every time you swing your blade (but honestly, there is nothing innately wrong with that–I just enjoy rolling dice and living by their results). For reintroducing the to-hit roll, I would just use the blackjack method (discussed more here), testing either Strength or Dexterity to determine whether an attack hits. The attacker would need to roll below their score, but above the enemies’ armor for a full success. Partial credit if they just roll under their score. One thing I like with this over the just-roll-damage method is that it reintegrates the ability scores into attacks. Now, a strong fighter will be more deadly with a sword than a weak fighter with the same sword.
Because blackjack resolution allows variable success, you can allow weapons to do a gradient of damage based on that roll as well. So you could have the weapon do damage minus the defender’s armor on a partial success (representing the attack connecting but being blunted by the armor), no damage on a failure (representing an actual miss), do max damage (i.e., the maximum damage possible for the platonic ideal of a weapon of that type, rather than that specific weapon) on a critical hit, and will trigger an enemy’s counter attack on a critical miss.
While this is an interesting thought experiment and potentially perfect for some games (especially games that emphasize looting enemies or repairing and improving weapons), I ultimately am not going to adopt it for Prismatic Wasteland. I am just too enamored with what I am currently using, largely because it allows for weapons to have a push and pull of advantages. Under this system, a “8” sword will always be better than any dagger (although some daggers will be better than some swords). But in my system of Whacks and Whiffs, the dagger can be a useful tool for stabbing a defensive enemy in the weak point of their armor. Additionally, I’m not keen to bring back the null result happening so often. But I never get tired of thinking how a new system of combat would work (peep another post on Traverse Fantasy for the Kubular attack method). I do, however, have to restrain myself from the urge to design another whole new game around it. Maybe one of you will do that instead.
Update: My colleague, V.V. of the OneZero blog, has taken this concept and started to develop a whole-ass fantasy heartbreaker from it.
