>>5883946Thank you for these very detailed thoughts, I appreciate your very comprehensive tactical dice combat design summary, yay!
I like reading about dice systems, I have a huge spreadsheet of notes and summaries of obscure dice rules like
>>5883772 but mostly for reference hehe, and when I play NwN
>>5880357I always have the console up lol I monitor every d20 roll but these days I feel this is best left to computers and crpgs, dnd combat kills all narrative suspense for me. I think computer games are different you can enjoy pure mechanical dice arithmetic because it rewards you with accompanying visual spectacle, the sorcery particle effects sounds animations etc that combine for minmaxing or optimisation.
But with ttrpgs it is not so much the imaginary special effects, you can certainly go down that route with elaborate descriptions Critical Role dm voices lol and lore but it is more the dramatic tension of the situation (strangely enough, in a lot of videogames combat is not really even that tense or lethal, it is the grind battle or loot drop excuse etc, which is why I think I am especially attracted to the punishing death Tarkov type videogames).
I am a believer in fictional positioning, ie the words you use to describe and establish a situation to create the dramatic suspense matter more than the dice, whether you have the humped curve 2d6 greatsword or flat uniform distribution 1d12 great axe etc. You are a warrior, you want to kill someone with a sword? You do it, roll under 65 etc, they die horribly that is it. Maybe you fling some sand in their eyes first or perform some ornate duellist flourish
>>5880992 and it is even easier or more favourable. Or maybe there is not even any roll at all (the OSR thing, always stab everyone as they sleep). The drama comes afterwards, when you are haunted by their bloodied face every time you sit down at a banquet, and realise the pact you made with witches to murder and usurp the King will drive you mad... (roll under 15 to fix this, lol) I am not too obsessed with creating the simulationist intricacy of hand-to-hand combat or tactics (there are many many systems that cover this already) I am trying to create procedural generation systems for drama and suspense. But random means less coherent or meaningful... I want to create some random table to generate dramatic catharsis hehe,
>>5882673 and not just more rulesets arithmetic for crpg combat