Thursday, February 7, 2013

Hacking a free form skill system: Combat skills

I knew it would happen when my Mog campaign was going to have a free-form pick your own skills skill system: folks were going to pick combat skills, and they sure did.

So the easy hack/kludge/house rule. Players get to roll extra dice on damage but only add the points that are rolled as a 1 or 2 per d6.  The skill system normally allows for a task modifier for ability scores but with combat skills this is ignored as characters already have ability modifiers factored into combat.

Folks with combat skills also get to reduce damage they suffer from others attacking with their combat style if they are parrying/dodging/fighting defensively for the round. The damage they can reduce is the same 1 or 2 per d6.

Haven't seen it in play yet but no crunching doesn't show it will be onerous.  currently skilled characters get to roll 2 dice for normal skill rolls when skilled in a field (legends get 6 dice) I might crank that down to one die when applying combat skills as folks already have rolls in the combat system. I'll be leaving that for play to shake out.

Ex: Blaine is skilled with broadsword. Normally he would attack with a 1d20 and do 1d8 +1 damage (thanks to STR) factoring in the extra skill Blaine get to roll 2 extra six sided dice and any roll of 1 or 2 is added to damage. That works out to rolling 1d8 +2 for damage on average to a maximum roll of 13, pretty sweet for low level but not overwhelming.
the mightiest fighter in the land with a STR of 21  (+6 damage in houserules) and a legendary broadsword fighter will be dishing out 1d8+9 pts of damage most of the time with a max of 26 points on rare occasion, not a game breaker for high level characters.


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