A revelation hit me, and combat had to change.

Awful, demonic, arduous combat systems go like this:

• 2 players roll for initiative
• 1 rolls to attack, another to dodge (4 rolls so far)
• The other rolls to attack, and the first rolls to dodge (6 rolls so far!)
• Possible Damage rolls (up to 8 dice rolls in total).

Rolling to defend is an easy fix - just reduce the Target Number to attack by the enemy’s defence. But we still have so much waste:

• If neither character dies, the Initiative roll was pointless. Who-went-first made no change to the outcome of the game.
• Any roll which misses doesn’t tell us anything. If the first action was a botched attack then nothing has changed, so players will just attack again.
• The system shoudl only tell us about successful attacks.

With that in mind, and overhaul began. The crux is this: when you miss an attack, you receive damage. If the enemy attacks, you don’t ‘dodge’ - you deal damage.

This required a major overhaul of movement mechanics, the initiative system, knacks, manoeuvres, and reprogramming those stat-blocks. But the results are worth it; playtesting has shown the system works very fast indeed.

More updates are coming, as I’ll be playtesting more over the coming month.

And of course, it’s an open-source project, so if you have a game, do tell me how it went.