Customizing my Macdonalds Iniative Order: Making a Crunchy Combat System Taste Good.

In advance I would like to apologize for that title. This blog is about my proposed combat system I have made for my OSE home game, and the reasoning behind it. It is unfortunately not about ordering at McDonalds.

Over the last few months I have been running a OSE game with my long time party of players who I have played with for nearly a decade now. We all enjoy rules tinkering and making little systems for ourselves or attaching new systems in place of ones we don't like. Customizing the details has become a popular end of session discussion before breaking up for the evening.

One of the current main focuses for our homebrew has been the combat rules. We generally all like quick snappy combat, but combat that boils down to rolling dice at each other until one side retreats has never been particularly fun. OSR games do center more around the actions leading up to the first initiative than the combat procedure itself. We wanted to add more interesting options while keeping the game fun, and without adding too many multi mechanical rube goldberg machines to combat that didn't 'feel' like combat. The following is generally what we got

To start, at the beginning of my campaign I tried out prismatic wastelands McDonald's Initiative to try and speed up combat. It was a huge success with players for the most part, feeling fast and snappy. However, at the time Shadow of the Erdtree had recently released for Elden Ring and I was starting a new play through. The balancing of the combat system in that game inspired a lot of thoughts about the how I could take the McDonald's initiative system and expand it into something that could create that same satisfying feeling of combat. I introduced things like parries, charging, shields and many other small mechanics, and now looking back on it I would like to recombine all those little rules and changes into one spot. Let begin.

I am going to assume that you have read Prismatic Wastelands blog, so if you haven't; do that now. The principle is that at the start of a combat round players choose their actions first and foremost, before rolling any kind of initiative. They then roll a initiative dice to determine what order their actions play out, starting at 1 and counting up until the all actions have been made, in which then it moves to the next round. This is mostly to speed up the pace of combat (which in my experience has worked amazingly!). This mechanic is the corner stone of my combat system and integrating everything into it. I refer the initiative dice as speed dice from here on out.

Rolling to hit

I dislike d20s and modifiers against armor class for determining hits. It feels like a statistical abstraction of trying to make weapon contact with someones amour or body, rather than actually attempting to sneak in a blow past your opponents openings in their own attacks. I am tossing them out. Now hitting your opponent is determined by if you rolled an initiative lower than theirs. If I use my dagger and roll a 2 for my initiative, and the creature rolled a 5 for their claws, I hit them, but they don't hit me. This does throw off the balance of weapons, making fast 1d4 or 1d6 weapons king instead of heavier weapons, even thought they deal less damage. However I know how to fix this

Two-Handed Weapons must roll above their opponents weapon initiative instead of below. These weapons do not rely on sneaking into gaps in your opponents defenses, and instead just try to be too big and heavy to miss. If a weapon is wielded two-handed, regardless of if it has the two handed property, it will get this effect, allowing for medium weapons to get an edge on small weapons. Attacks rolled under their two-handed dice will still hit them.

Armour Class

This also requires changes to the rules for armor and shields. Usually, armor and shields play the same role of adding to armor class. I am think we can split them into two, so shields relate to the chance to hit with speed dice and armor relates to damage thresholds and damage taken.

 

When equipping a shield in your off hand, you may guard with it. The standard shield has a 1d6 block speed. To be hit, an attack against you must occur before both your block and attack roll. 

 

Armor provides a threshold for damage, with each level adding 2 armor. For example, a set of light leather armor would negate any one and two damage attacks, but you would take full damage from attacks greater than three.

This allows for a  nice set of counters against each other that I think can get built on as a I tweak and revise the system. Two-Handed weapons get countered by being too open to light fast attacks, Light fast attacks stop being as effective against the two dice rolled for shielded creatures and are weak to heavier weapons, and shielded creatures get countered by the Two handed weapons requiring to be above rather than below their dice. Each has its weakness and opening I can fine tune.

Class Bonuses 

Most retro clones have the fighters main ability be that they have high health and a better chance to hit. This current system would remove the advantage of a additional chance to hit, but I think this problem opens up a more interesting solution.

 At each level where a class would receive a improvement to their THAC0, they now get a bonus to their control. One point per increase to THACO. Control can augment attacks in slight ways, but only depending on the maximum allows for their weapon. Heavy weapons may allow for higher damage, while light weapons may allow for more attacks.

•  Each point of control can add a dice of damage to the attack. 
• A point of control may be spent to decrease the size of your weapons speed dice for your attack, or increase it for two handed weapons, up to a d20 and down to a d4. 
• A point of control may also be spent to conduct additional attacks, rolling another speed dice. or rolling another block dice and taking the highest.

This would increase the damage dealt by mid to late level PC significantly, especially fighters, but I am honestly fine with that. Should this set of rules prove too lethal, I may just make the armour damage cut off apply to each dice of damage rolled instead of the total value.

Adding some fun ideas

When I originally started using the speed dice system in my game while still rolling to hit, I introduced a new mechanic called Parry. This was a mechanic where a dice was rolled based on your shield parry dice (for example, the buckler had a 1d4), and if it rolled before the turn of an attack, your attack would automatically hit with some extra damage thrown in. If you missed however, the enemy would get to do the same to you with their attack. My players recognized this for what it was, which was gambling, and gambling is very very fun. I would like to have this mechanic return some how, and here is my general idea.

 

Certain shields will have a parry keyword with a dice attached that will range from 1d6 to 1d10. If a creature attempts to parry, then they roll their parry dice and their weapon dice. If an attack that attacks them is between their parry dice and weapon dice, it is parried. They may perform a double damage critical hit. If an attack occurs outside the parry window, then the attack does double damage back to them.

 

Control may be spent to roll additional parry dice, using the lowest first. Each parry may only block one attack.

 

In addition, we can make a similar mechanic for charging and bracing. Creatures may charge another, getting free control for their attack, however weapons that can be braced typically can do more damage and have faster speed dice to do so, making bracing weapons useful to keep around for the opening rounds of a combat. 

I could think of adding many small gambles and maneuvers to allow for additional control to be added like charging, their is some potential here I may build on with time. I will also not pretend that these are 'balanced'. Until I get more play experience, there will likely be a 'most meta' tactic or weapon. However considering the same thing was true in war, I am okay with this so long as it is fun and their are some options without adding too much cognitive load. I am fairly happy that I only have two cases of adding numbers together so far with damage totals across multiple dice, and the amount of control should not be too cumbersome.

I am cooking something up for ranged attacks since they will need something separate.

 To make tracking creatures easier, I usually just roll all their weapons speed dice at the beginning without out specific tracking, taking the left most to right most as needed. Making more monsters just do 1d6 damage makes this much easier, so I would recommend it.

Once I formalize this system fully and get more play test time, ill release a full write up of the rules for anyone to use. If you try this in your own game, please let me know how they went!