Feedback on new combat system

[Kinaed]

Just a note - not every blow connects - combat is just heavily weighed towards blows connecting. Misses are dependent on your dex vs your opponent's, so you will find particular characters hit you a lot whilst others might succeed less. The highest possible hit rate is 90% from "unskilled" hits, but the average, most likely is around 50%. Unskilled hits are lesser damage, but can add up.

The trick to the system is judging where you sit in overall offense vs your opponent's overall defense (this is not a skill, but resting "potential" values). When your offense is higher than their defense, you will succeed in a full strike. Otherwise, you're just whittling them down. As you take actions, your offense and defense will fluctuate, as will theirs.

Also, Jei was wrong. It does matter which defence skills you know. The combat system is a bit like rock-paper-scissors. Some defenses are less effectual against some weapons and vice versa. With relation to this, if your opponent attacks you with, for example a sword and dodge, you might consider switching weapons and which defense skill you're using to accomodate that. Which weapons, defenses, etc, counter one another is a purposeful secret we've kept - but yes, the help files were supposed to have hints. I'd better go add two more!

[Dice]

Even a 50% hit rate for untrained skills is pretty huge against well-trained defenses, regardless of dex.

To pick an example at random, fightmetric.com tracks the hit percentage of fighters in big MMA fights. Taking two people who should be expected to be operating at relatively similar levels, we get 51% connecting and 37% connecting - and these are guys who are good enough to be fighting each other in a cage on PPV.

Now, I'm not saying that I think everything has to be just like IRL. I think I understand what you're going for, and I do like the general idea; I just think that it's too extreme right now both by criteria of realism and fun and could really use a lower hit rate. You would still be whittling your opponent down by non-damaging hits by using up mv for defending.

I think I was unclear about my proposed idea, sorry: I meant that your overall rank in combat (Familiar, Unfamiliar, etc) could be used to modify your effective defensive skill. I.e., if you are a PC who loads all of your XP into defenses, your defenses will be penalized by your lack of combat breadth. This would also somewhat penalize people who max out one weapon and one or two defenses and try to call it a day (though I do understand those people would already be hurt by the differing applicability of the different defenses.)

(Let me know if you get tired of replying to me and I'll shut up!)

[Clockwork]

After some extensive testing, I think that base newcom is pretty solid. My biggest point of contention is "glancing hits" - a category that seems a bit too large. Some glancing hits do absolutely no damage (or next to none), while others appear to do a fairly significant amount. Any chance that we can get more adjectives there? i.e. near-miss for an attack that lands but does no damage, glancing blow, (normal) hit, decent strike, heavy hit, and massive strike.

[Kinaed]

That's probably a downside of using weapon dice to determine damage. :( An up side to it, however, is that the quality of your weapon is important, and it's well worth seeking good equipment for battle.

Higher quality weapons are more consistent in their damage rate - eg, more like 11-15% chance of hitting the average roll instead of spreading out over the bell curve. Thing is, if you're lucky (and not your character's luck, that's not factored in), then you can score a heavily damaging hit with a glancing blow - but a glancing blow automatically halves the damage you would have received.

I'm not really certain what can or should be done about that - other than perhaps breaking down the feedback into more categories based on the damage output rather than type of blow... is that what you're suggesting?

Thank you for the extensive testing!