I haven't yet fully finished writing the rules for combat, in part because I'm rusty with rules writing and I'm having a hard time making myself clearly articulate.
However, I've now got a system that I think works pretty well.
There's a lot of overlap with Hammercalled, though it won't quite be Hammercalled with a d20. Combat in this is actually going to be more reliant on gear, with weapons having distinct range categories.
The key inheritance is how combat turns work, though I'm actually simplifying them somewhat.
When a character attacks, they make a Magnitude Roll, which means they roll a d20 and if they succeed on the test they add the result of the die to their weapon's damage. Traits can increase the Magnitude here, but that's going to be rare.
One distinct element is that characters can declare an Intent each turn. There are four options for Intents:
During a fight, characters might "take actions" in the sense that they can still do other things if the current engagement conditions allow it. For instance, during a long-range firefight it's possible for the medic to patch up their buddy without declaring an intent.
Basically, out-of-combat rules can function uninterrupted during combat if you've got a situation that permits it, and it doesn't interfere with a character's combat role unless the GM decides it does.
This decision is for two major reasons.
It enables a lot of fun dramatic effects, like raiders attacking while the party is deep in the jungle, with the PCs taking actions between the assaults to clear a path.
It also meshes with the abstract nature of combat. I hate the way many games do combat with a few exceptions because they do not represent infantry combat realistically. D&D's grid-based movement with a strict action economy is both reprehensibly slow at the table and as realistic as things falling up.
When you've got people with rifles and sci-fi weaponry running around, these rules make little sense. People are going to go down quickly, and combat's going to be people taking cover and trying to find an opening. It also doesn't mesh well with martial arts, since most of that in actual life is people trying to find gaps for incapacitating blows rather than constantly smashing against each other with battle axes drawn and battering their weapons against armor.
All events resolve simultaneously after players declare their intent. It's supposed to be narrated like a scene in a movie, with the GM choosing the order in which things happen (though the mechanical effects are the same regardless).
This doesn't mean that there's never an advantage in terms of one side getting to act before the other which can happen in the event of a surprise round.
There are two types of surprise round, and the distinction is whether enemies act at all or whether they act after players. This latter just means that any enemies incapacitated or killed don't fight back, while the former is a free pass.
I might simplify this down to just the former option for simplicity's sake.
One way that the GM works is that they're just distributing the bad guys' efforts in combat. There is no dice rolling involved, so when the PCs are targeted by enemies they make a Reverse Margin Roll to see if they can reduce the damage to zero.
This is necessary so that the GM doesn't have to roll and we can handle everything as one-roll resolution, and I clearly communicate that this is an abstraction during the combat chapter.
Damage (for both PCs and their enemies) is a representation of how competent an attacker is and the qualities of their weapons simultaneously. Just as PCs get more average damage as they become more competent because of the blackjack mechanic (since a 13 that would give a decent chunk of damage is a failure for characters with a Threshold of 12), even a poorly armed adversary with great skills is a major threat.
I'm well-aware of the fact that this will probably be controversial, but I think this system actually is more interactive than the one in Hammercalled, where characters rolled to dodge hits but had no way to negate their damage if they landed. Here, the assumption is that characters take hits more often than not during combat and they just deal with them based on their competence (though they "dodge" if they fully negate the damage).
The exception to the "you always get hit" rule is PvP. This is somewhat deliberate to make it less immediately lethal and force players to roll to hit each other, but it also is a necessity because you can't calculate a Damage value from players' characters. I guess you could take their highest relevant Attribute and add the weapon damage (house rule?), which would approximate it, though it would still likely be lower than most non-player threats' damage.
I figured out a solution to the 1-digit result problem I talked about last night. Because characters reduce incoming damage based on their rolls, there's a chance that there is no tens-place to calculate damage from.
When this happens, the character becomes Grazed, meaning that they gain a special condition. The only effect of the Grazed condition is that the next time they would become Grazed they lose 1 Health.
We do not track the Grazed condition outside of combat, so it doesn't require any treatment and goes away on its own at the end of hostilities.
Obviously this will depend on hammering out some stuff, and the GM can subtly tweak enemy damage down to give players an easier time.
The GM actually has near-infinite control here, because they can choose to have characters act or not act as they want.
Each encounter is pretty dangerous, though. Taking a 23 Damage hit halves a normal character's Health, but that's not necessarily too terrible.
One counter-point here is that a character who loses all their Health enters Critical Health, instead of dying. Assuming they survive combat, this is a simple state to recover from.
With the Grazed mechanic, I expect that a lot of characters will actually suffer minor damage in quick fights. Armor's effects apply with or without a successful roll, so a character with decent armor should expect to take 1 damage or Grazed status from moderately capable threats more often than they'd take a lot of damage.
I'll wrap up here because my bedtime is becoming a suggestion, but tomorrow I want to go over range, combat conditions, and maybe start kitting out some gear. I haven't touched that part of the game yet.
My goal is to make combat scenes fit in a very short data block so that adventures can still have a lot of nuances and details (like fights in close quarters with special rules for that) and GMs can share their work with others, but still have a programmatic or procedural element that gives a
