Saturday Morning Adventure Dev Diaries #11: Attack and Damage Rolls

Today's dev diary is all about the specific bonuses you'll get to attack and damage rolls in SMA. Probably not that interesting to general audiences, but powergamers take note.

I need to settle on how attack bonuses and weapon proficiencies work. I see two main options right now based on what has been set out already

• Treat them like any other skills that can be gained - characters will be able to apply skill bonuses from a relevant skill to whatever attacks they make. Maybe they have a "Brawling" skill, and when it comes to combat the GM might rule this applies to unarmed attacks, attacks with improvised weapons, and some special actions like grappling and shoving.
• Treat them as a requirement - weapons are given set categories which you can gain proficiency with like in D&D. If you have proficiency in a certain type of attack, you get some sort of set bonus to it. Or alternatively, not having a proficiency in an attack type gives a penalty.

I want to go with the first option, the second is more of a reserve. I think it would work well with the free-form ability system - rather than having to fit an ability into a set category, you can just draw on a skill. However, I do see some potentially dire issues as it currently stands.

Skillful Attacking

Let's assume for a second we go with this system. Attack rolls are treated like any other skill rolls, adding two attributes and the highest relevant skill bonus. Of course, I could always restrict attack rolls to adding only a single attribute rather than two, but let's just go with this for now.

When it comes to skills and skill points, my current plan is to have a skill cap of 4 or 4+INT (whichever is larger), which is the maximum a character can have in any particular skill. Characters would also gain 6+INT skill points per level or something like that.

Under this system of skillful attacking, there is the potential for very high attack bonuses from very early levels. Lets go through a quick example of a minmaxed character focusing on attack. Our example hero will be Sandra the Samurai. Sandra is very highly trained in the art of swordplay, and treats her body like a temple. She has a +4 to Strength, Agility, and Intelligence, and has a +8 to her Swordplay skill. This would give her a fucking massive +16 to attacks.

Personally, I'm not particularly bothered by having such a huge bonus to attack rolls in itself, especially considering it can't exactly be improved very much over Sandra's career. Even if she puts every possible attribute bonus towards it, and invests any feats she can into improving it, the highest she could get is to maybe +22. Coming from 5th Edition these numbers probably seem extremely high, but if the game is balanced around that I don't think I'm particularly bothered. 5th Edition uses a "bounded accuracy" design, in which attack bonuses really don't change much over the course of a game. So what are the drawbacks of this huge attack bonus?

Well Sandra has +4 to Strength, Agility, and Intelligence, so the rest of her stats probably aren't doing so hot. On average, the rest of her attributes are -2.4. She'll probably have low hit points, and while her Guard is pretty good her Resolve will be fairly low, and her Toughness will be rock-bottom. If she's targeted with anything that doesn't go against Guard, she's probably gonna get hit and it will hurt. And her defence scores will largely stay that way for the rest of the game. Additionally, she's fairly limited in her other skills right now, with at best a +2 to another skill. She's probably isn't that useful outside of combat. But this downside goes away pretty quickly since she gets another 10 skill points at level 2.

I'm fairly torn on this idea as it currently stands. I could see it working quite nicely as long as the downsides for minmaxing are pretty harsh, and I really don't mind if its possible to reach these huge attack bonuses in the late stages of a campaign. The main thing I want to do is reduce the possibility for having a huge attack bonus at level 1, but I think this might be possible by tweaking the skill system somewhat. Maybe I'll go the Pathfinder route and impose a skill bonus cap equal to a character's level, or some combination of that and the current system. I can also see issues with attack bonuses getting fairly high relative to defence scores, since I'm not exactly planning on allowing skills to boost your defences directly. Also, this issue is not nearly as strong if you aren't using point-buy - your chance of getting more than one +4 attribute when rolling randomly is about 5.6%. Maybe I should revise the proposed point-buy system to avoid characters minmaxing quite so sharply. Turns out it's a little more complicated than every increase to an attribute having the same value, who would've guessed.

Quick Aside: Bounded Accuracy

Bounded accuracy is a design concept that has been used really nicely in D&D 5e. Essentially, it's the idea that attack bonuses (accuracy) kind of has a fixed range to it. For a Fighter in D&D 5e, their best attack bonus ranges from about +10 at 1st level to +15 at 20th level. There's another side of this design concept that doesn't typically get as much of a spotlight, and that is bounded defence. Similarly to bounded accuracy, bounded defence is the idea that the defence scores has a sort of fixed range to them as well. Both of these ideas really work in tandem. Bounded accuracy doesn't work if defence scores can get really high, and bounded defence doesn't work if attack bonuses can get really high.

This system is really nice. It reduces how much a player needs to think about building their character optimally, since even a character with a low attack bonus won't be super far behind one with a high attack bonus.

Bounded accuracy is a design feature that I do want to take into account to some extent in SMA, but I also think its not quite as important here than in D&D. This is simply because of the use of multiple defencive scores that can be targeted by most characters. If your attack bonus vs. Guard isn't particularly good, you should hopefully still be able to target an opponent in different ways.

Also, I'm not totally convinced that this "skilfull attacking" design really does break the conventions of bounded accuracy all that much. Most of the discussion around bounded accuracy is in reference to the removal of having many "floating modifiers" - small plusses or minuses to your attack roll, which were mostly replaced with the advantage/disadvantage system. The proposed system for SMA is more like shifting the goalposts than letting attack bonuses run totally wild. Also, there is still  a definite boundary - the skill cap. The biggest difference is that this boundary won't change much as a character levels.

An In-Between Option

After writing the bulk of this post, I went back to thinking about Dragon Quest 11, as I so often do. And thinking about the way weapons work in that game helped me think of a middle-ground option between totally basing attacks on the skill system and just having some set proficiencies. It would totally be possible to have some set categories of weapons in a certain setting, and just let players invest their skill points into them. For example, maybe for D&D you'd have categories of Blunt, Blades, Axes, Polearms, Crossbows, Bows and Whips. That probably doesn't cover everything but you get the picture. These having these weapon categories could also have some benefits elsewhere in the game. You could make certain properties standard for each category - like every Polearm would have the "reach" property by default, something like that. When making certain abilities, you could also make a requirement of using the ability that you're wielding a weapon of a certain category.

The main issue I can see with this approach is when it comes to special abilities. Dividing up magical attacks especially into different categories sounds troublesome.

Damage Rolls

As with most games I've read, damage rolls are just going to add attribute bonuses and nothing else. I'm not yet sure if they will add two stats like ability checks or only one. I kinda like the idea that regular weapons add both STR and SIZ, while finesse weapons add STR and AGI, but I'm not quite sure how I'd handle other types of damage like spells. Willpower is going to be the go-to magic stat for this sort of thing, and I'm not sure if adding another different attribute on top would be appropriate all of the time. Ah well, I'll figure out the specifics later.

For a while I've had an idea for an RPG system where the die that is rolled most of the time is fairly small, at least compared to the ability bonus. Something like replacing the usual D&D roll of d20 + ability modifier with a roll of d6 + ability score. This way, your ability would more strictly define what it is that your character is capable of. For example, a weak wizard may simply be unable to bust down a sturdy door through brute strength, even on the best possible roll. It's a very particular vibe that I think would really feel "unheroic", at least compared to d20 systems. Not particularly relevant, but the plan of using two attribute bonuses to damage rolls kinda reminded me of it.

In Closing

Lately I've been noticing my usual indecisiveness creeping into these dev diaries, so sorry about that. I'm kinda getting towards the design phase now where I'm thinking more about the nuts and bolts of the game than just what the vibe I'm going for is, which I think is making me a bit overly cautious. I'll try and stick to more firm decisions going forward - after all, it's not like I can't change anything later if it turns out badly.

Next dev diary is going to be about how hit points and damage work in SMA, plus dealing with character's dying. I hope to see you then!