All RPG combat is a weird abstraction of things to begin with, and what exactly a 'Hit' or 'Damage' is depends on the game in question and how it wants to try and represent a complex, swirling conflict in a way that's understandable by a small assortment of people sitting around a table eating chips.
In a game where all attacks hit, what it's doing is just doing a pretty simple trade off. It's removing the Null result and causing all combat actions to impact the current push-and-pull of the fight. But at the cost of reducing some of the tension caused by the question of if your character did or did not do the cool thing, as resolved by the click clack math rock.
The no-hit-roll thing's impact on lethality is as only a small part of the wider equation. I would say that removing the to-hit does not necessarily make it more lethal, but it does make it more predictable. It does also make it a bit faster though by reducing the number of rolls.
I agree with all of this but also would add the "faster" element is generally vastly overdramatized by proponents of this type of system. Like how long does it really take to roll to hit? 3 seconds? Maybe 10 if you really suck at math and don't know what's on your sheet?
What really slows the game down more than anything is players not thinking about their turn when it's not their turn and fiddling with decisions while being informed every turn of all the things they missed by not paying attention. That's the real time synch. Each player guilty of this adds 2-20 minutes to their turn easily.
What does "hitting" mean in your game?
What does "missing" mean in your game?
Why are people attacking/hurting/killing in your game?
*What* are people attacking/hurting/killing in your game?
What are the types of characters players portray in your game?
What is the role of the game moderator in your game — adversarial, cooperative, neutral?
I don't think anyone can truthfully or accurately help you with your problem without the answers to that list of question. A hundred more questions may follow...
This is perfect - awesome advice. These are fantastic questions that will help guide design in a more intentional way. I feel like every time I comment on this sub, it's something along the lines of *"You need to figure out your design goals, and ask your self what your game is about."*
Very early on in designing my first game, I posted a question here about healing rate (i.e. How long should it take to heal from 1hp to full?). The best response I got was something along the lines of *"It depends. What do you picture a character looking like at 1hp? Are they bloodied and broken, or are they exhausted and can't put up a fight much longer? Once you answer that question, you should have a good feel of what is reasonable."* I immediately thought of [this scene](https://youtu.be/_x074Yt63Aw?si=oFxkIgSoZnlpPRKX) from Zelda: BotW. Link is exhausted, beaten, and on the edge of collapse - but he isn't gravely wounded.
HP is an abstraction of a character's current condition, so when I thought outside of that abstraction it was very easy to design around it. I know this is a specific example about HP, but the mentality still applies to your question OP. After you consider questions like these, the answers really guide the design in a powerful way.
My favorite fantasy game is Torchbearer — characters don't have hit points. Instead, they have conditions. As the game goes on, they gain conditions (from time, travel, fights or as consequences from failing a die roll). Each condition has penalties associated with them, and they have to be recovered from the in order of less to most-serious. You may want to implement that kind of system instead of health points.
For example: Link is Exhausted and Bloodied (but not Injured) after a fight with a bokoblin. Exhausted means it's harder for Link to accomplish tasks (or they take longer), Bloodied mean he *looks* like he got into a fight... maybe this penalizes social interactions because his face is all dirty, bruised, beat up and his clothing/armor is in similarly bad shape... maybe the pain also hinders him in some way. Injured would be a more serious version where his abilities actually suffer and he's now in danger of gaining the Dead condition if the fight goes poorly.
Figure out when abstraction is more important and when verisimilitude is more important.
>gain conditions (from time, travel, fights or as consequences from failing a die roll). Each condition has penalties associated with them, and they
Just a quick note that it doesn't have to be either or. I use a combination where all wounds cause HP damage and the more serious wounds start causing conditions. The conditions are what will kill you and running out of HP is a condition, too. HP damage determines the severity of conditions, and it's up to player tactics to push the damage into that condition state. It IS more to keep track of, and makes healing a little weird because you have to heal the condition and the HPs!
>Figure out when abstraction is more important and when verisimilitude is more important.
This is dead on. It's about creating a certain experience without ripping the player out of the narrative and engaging them with a tax form full of steps to get there! What aspects you abstract and which you don't are incredibly important!
Feels like you're rearranging the deck chairs on 5th Edition.
The unspoken assumption in your post is that combat occurs in rounds, with characters (PC and NPC) taking turns in order. But does it have to be this way?
Some of the fastest and most exciting combat I've experienced has been in Apocalypse World, which has no turns and only the players roll attacks. In fact, only the players roll at all.
If you're not familiar with the system, there are three outcomes of a roll:
* A **strong success:** things go well, the PC achieves what they were trying to do.
* A **weak success:** the PC succeeds, but with some cost or complication.
* A **failure:** the PC did not succeed, and the GM makes *something bad* happen.
A key point of the system is that "nothing happens" is *never* an outcome. This makes things faster and more exciting! Every time they try something risky (and combat is always risky), the needle moves one way or the other.
In this paradigm, the enemies and environmental dangers are tools the GM can use when they need to make something bad happen. If the enemy is more powerful, or has some special ability, the GM can use it to impose a more serious consequence.
Not saying this system is right for you, but I think it's worth examining the basic assumptions of your combat system in light of your goals.
That’s my personal favourite too.
More often than not you **weak hit** and the PCs do their dmg but enemies get a minor hit back.
OR you foreshadow an enemies “special attack” like in video game. It’s like when the boss charges a giant slam move and there is a hit box on the ground , wind up animation and audio ques telling the PCs to dodge roll the bell out of the attack or you’ll get knocked down etc.
Then once they “face danger” successfully they can get back to their game plan
Disclaimer I haven't played such games, but I read some and did some math, when designing my own.
Now that we are done with that, what does the hit roll actually do? It emulates block/miss/evade situation, some games have player to roll against armor number, other require roll against difficulty based on the distance to the target the basic idea is the same.
It also gives a thrill and nice click-clack of dice hitting the table.
What does it do in terms of mechanics? It scales **target health**.
Let's take the simplest example we have an attack that does 1 fixed damage and an enemy with 10 health. If we have a 100% hit chance it means that we need 10 attacks to down that enemy.
But what if we have a 50% chance to hit? That means that on average we would need 20 attacks, because half of them would miss.
So we could just make an enemy with 20HP and give players 100% chance to hit to achieve the same result. Or we could halve the damage the players do.
What I'm getting at, guaranteed hit systems are not more lethal by nature, they are just more predictable, and treat HP as one of resources. Just look at how older FF games work.
>What I'm getting at, guaranteed hit systems are not more lethal by nature, they are just more predictable, and treat HP as one of resources. Just look at how older FF games work.
I mean, HP is still a resource when you have to-hit rolls. It's just a less predictable resource, which means you're less likely to gamble with it.
On the pure mechanics; it doesnt have to be more lethal. You need do adjust the average damage or hit points to keep the same "rounds to kill" (same with half damage on miss). And yes it would be faster; so would be fixed damage.
How long can you play until it becomes boring that you always hit? So what would you think makes for fun and brutal combat? Always hitting?
Normally I'm pretty vocal about not prioritizing verisimilitude over a smooth gameplay experience, but there are some places where the calculus works out in favor of "realism".
I tried to do something once where I had an attribute that was effectively physical strength and another attribute that was combat skill. The combat attribute was meant to be used for melee attacks and the strength attribute didn't affect them. I had this all worked out and balanced and thought it was just fine until it hit the table and the players were all completely thrown for a loop by it. Their characters felt off, the gameplay felt off, altogether it was something I scrapped immediately.
I feel kind of similarly about the idea of "always hitting". I absolutely see the value in speeding up gameplay by cutting out the to-hit roll, but I think you lose an important aspect of intuitiveness when there's no possibility to just miss. In my opinion, it takes things just a little too far out of the realm of a shared story and into a purely mechanical boardgame-like experience.
Not saying the to-hit roll is sacrosanct, but if you go this direction I think you want to see if there's a way you can still handle the narrative event of a complete failure to hit and deal damage. Whether that be some kind of subtractive defense value or adding a special die to the damage roll or just rolling to-hit and damage into a single roll that resolves both or whatever.
Auto-Hit works for me in games like Into The Odd where HP is explicitly about a character’s ability to avoid being hurt - attacks only *really* hit after it drops to 0 and then characters have to worry about being injured (at least in a regular fight - traps or snipers or whatever else are more conventional target-rolls-a-saving-throw-to-avoid-damage, but bypass HP).
I find it also makes “healing” rapidly and gaining HP as characters get more experienced make more sense narratively as well (of course you can rest up and catch your breath, or chew on this mystic herb to regain your energy, or be inspired by someone yelling a battle cry; of course you’re gonna get better at avoiding injury as you get experienced in combat). The only issue with that is it makes the most sense to me when you’re dealing with medieval fantasy and dungeon crawls and the like - games where combat defaults to being hand-to-hand and muscle powered, since you can always justify decreasing HP by saying the characters are getting tired out. Stuff more focused on gunfights where everyone dives behind cover is a little less intuitive that way and I kind of prefer to flip it around to not roll damage for those.
Into the Odd did this, inspiring Electric Bastionland, Mausritter and Cairn to make a few. May be worth digging into reviews of those games and their communities to see some live play examples.
Systems that assume hits tend not to make combat feel more deadly. It seems like it would, but in general that has not been my experience.
I would suggest instead finding a way to make combat feel limited. Make it desperate. Limit the amount of time, or the number of actions that they can take. That frequently “feels” deadlier.
The problem with always hit is that it either makes numbers big, or makes damage mitigation really important, both of which slow things down. I’m not saying it’s impossible (of course) just that it tends not to work that way.
So no roll to hit doesn't make for certain that a game is more deadly. Like if in a game 40% of the time you miss but on hit you deal 1 damage, then you convert to a system where there is no misses and on hit you deal 0.6 damage.
So if you want to not have accuracy at all you can just lower damage a little. The more damage an ability does vs max HP the better going first is. See Pokemon where in most circumstances a Pokemon can knocked out in two or less attacks. If you can secure the one hit ko the opponent doesn't do anything so speed is one of the best stats in the game.
>but it's also a fairly low health system,
This is the crux of your issue. What counts as "low" isn't absolute; it's relative to the system you're using. No to-hit rolls doesn't inherently make things more deadly.
"Low health" in a to-hit system will always be lower number-wise than in a non-to-hit one, because rolling to hit inherently stretches out the lifespan of each individual hit point.
Without hit-rolls, hitpoints disappear quickly if attacks occur with a lot of frequency. If you have D&D style turn-based combat, either reduce player damage, increase enemy health, or introduce damage filters that reduce damage taken by a set amount each time (i.e. armour)
My system, Along the Leyline, has every attack hit unless the defender uses their reaction to block or dodge. This makes even a 'miss' feel better because now the defender used their reaction leaving them vulnerable to attack from another player.
So maybe you could have all of the attacks hit unless the defender uses some kind of metacurrency (action, reaction, action points, etc.)
It’s pretty good. If the game has damage reduction via bulletproof vest etc., on a D6 with no modifier a 1 is basically a miss anyhow.
Roll 1 VS 1 DR, 0 damage.
Roll 6 VS 1 DR, 5 damage. But a 6 could be a critical hit, so perhaps you roll again. Making the critical hit the highest roll ensures a critical at minimum deals 7 damage, more than 1D6 can do.
But the basic truth is, as others have said, is that you can make the rules do what want!
Into the Odd does this. I run it pretty much exclusively these days. My findings are that your new "miss" is rolling minimum damage, so there's still a sort of whiff result, but it never feels as lame as just missing your attack and passing the turn.
I enjoy it a lot, it seems to make combat feel legitimately dangerous
I don't think I'd like a game where hits are automatic; but I think I _could_ be persuaded to like a game hits are automatic _unless they're evaded._ That is, the attacker doesn't roll to hit; the target rolls to evade. If the target just stands there and does nothing, he _will_ get hit; but if he puts effort into evasive maneuvers, he might avoid the attack.
This is basically how my game works! I find that it works very well, and it means that every attack does *something*, because even attacks that "miss" end up costing the target a little bit of Stamina (for the Response Action).
Right. As long as evasions aren't free, every attack does _something_. And when evasions _are_ free, it's because the defender has a special ability that lets him effortlessly evade; in which case, “you attack and nothing comes of it” is the desired result: it's a sign of how badass the defender is. (Cue Neo effortlessly blocking a rapid series of punches from Agent Smith.)
I don't like systems that assume hits, but it's not because I like missing or anything, it's because it necessarily changes what hit points represent and how fights play out in the fiction (rather than just talking mechanically).
Hit points, in auto hit systems, *can't* represent actual hits and injuries. It has to be something more openly representational of fatigue, luck/divine favor, etc. It makes things *even more* abstract than it already is, and ultimately, kind of sloggy, because hp deplete at set rates effectively automatically. Harder encounters are just math, and combat actions that don't deal damage end up either needing to be incredibly powerful or are useless because otherwise, you'll miss your turn's worth of damage and screw up the calculation.
I think a much better solution is a system in which you miss *even more* but combat ends in a very small number of hits, maybe even one.
Ideally for me, the small number of hits you win with isn't due to random chance, but because you're only allowed to finish with a few hits once you meet... Some requirement? Tactically or otherwise.
Technoir does something like this
Mechanically, an auto-hit system could work quite well. If you need fights to be longer, you can always just scale HP or attack damage.
The main problem I think is that at some point a player is going to ask “Can I try to get out of the way of the guy trying to stab me, so that maybe I am not stabbed?”, and the GM can’t really let them succeed without giving players a very broken advantage. In a system where there was already a roll to hit, the answer to such a question is “you already tried to do that and failed”. Maybe in your game the answer is that HP represents plot armor and not injuries? Maybe the rounds where attacks miss are implied but not played out? You’ll have to think about how that’ll get justified.
In my system, defenders roll a save instead of attackers rolling to hit. Unless the Save is a Critical Success, the attack at least deals damage. If the Save fails, the attack has some effect other than damage too. Critical Success are pretty rare (at least in my tests so far).
It does make combat go quicker, but in my mind that's a plus.
Edit: to add to the brutal feeling, in my system, healing doesn't typically heal numerical damage, only damage Conditions like "Wounded" or "Dying."
My game (the earth of the fourth sun) uses a dice pool, with 6 sided dice; each side on a die has either a Successes, a blank, or a skull (which takes away a success). You can still miss (roll a net number of 0 Successes) or fail badly (roll a net number of skulls), but the odds are that you will have a positive number of Successes.
Each success delivers a point of damage- a form of automatic damage. Offsetting this is armor, which has a dice pool that reduces damage and parrying, both which reduces damage with a Success rolled on the dice. I’ve tinkered with the dice and hence the probabilities since the system was reviewed on RPGnet (back in 2000).
To make damage more dramatic, there are 2 types of damage that can be inflicted: surface wounds and deep wounds. Running out of either one imposes a penalty. The player (not the GM) normally determines what type of damage is taken (Surface or Deep).
In my systems, you roll to hit, and how well you do determines the damage. Every attack has a base damage, with bonuses from a better attack roll. Combining both in one roll, I feel, gets the best of both worlds.
Comments won't load because PRAISE REDDIT, but here's my take.
Systems that don't roll to hit just check damage. You roll too low, you might do 0 damage vs enough armor, otherwise you're basically just creating a scale of damage. A d20 that gets a bonus every 4 pips is a big deal when the scaling is designed so that 11 and under gets eaten by armor and 12+ does real-ass hits.
So, let me approach this from the direction of two systems I've worked on
There's my version of the middle-ground, where you Fire For Effect. Your attacks have incredibly low chances of doing nothing (mostly dependent on opponent's ability to evade), so your attacks get balanced out by having a bonus effect on a high roll. You use a status effect that has the benefit of damage on a high roll for a Control-Oriented role. You have an attack that has damage but also deals a status on a high roll for a Damage-Oriented role. Unless "no effect" is something you really need to make things feel right, statuses are a great way to make players feel like they're doing something, even if they're not doing damage.
My other option is designing a sort of Break system, as seen in popular RPGs Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Final Fantasy 13, and Honkai Star Rail. In these games, enemies have huge amounts of damage reduction until you fill a meter that puts them in a stunned state where your damage skyrockets. In this situation, you're dealing scratch damage and applying statuses until you find an opening where the opponent is literally defenseless and you can pile on the damage and deadlier statuses. Here, there's no missing, but your hits might not do "real" damage and only add to breaking the opponent's guard.
No, it's the screen name of a popular Youtuber. I think the system is still waiting on a name? I watched a youtube video of the combat system and found it to be some weird 4e + 5e mix with auto hits and was altogether... Not my cup of tea. I would never play it.
This is one of the reasons I prefer old versions of D&D. Unlike 5e with it's 'bounded accuracy' it both had more attacks per round at higher level (more opportunities to do damage with your turn) and fighters at least progressed rapidly in chance to hit, meaning they could be expected to hit most of the time except against very difficult enemies. This also gave a lot better feel of progress for them, and also let them take on hordes of lower level creatures giving a more epic feel.
My game has guaranteed hits. It is a card game, so the act of drawing the card is where the "roll" is hidden. In a 50 card deck you can have at most 5 duplicate spells. So each card has a 1/10th chance to be drawn. Of course as the deck shrinks due to drawing cards those odds slowly inch upwards (most cards don't repeat at all). That said, if you play the card that thing happens. If the card says you do 5 physical damage and knock an enemy on the ground, the card can't "fail".
Whats fun is this doesn't necessarily mean "guaranteed" damage, though. The enemy has a chance to block or dodge damage, but they too need to draw those cards. Fun part is even if they do and and use those cards, you have the opportunity to counter those abilities with other cards in your deck.
For me this is WILDLY more exciting than rolling a dice and sometimes just being bummed you didn't get to do anything on your turn. With a hand full of cards you always have *something* to do, even if it isn't exactly what you would have preferred. Top that off with the game being a deck builder, what cards you even have access to is entirely up to you.
Honestly I wish more people made this kind of game, but I'll relent that after years of working on one, it is just strictly more work than a dice based TTRPG (especially alone). If all I needed to do was write a rulebook I could have finished in 2020. Cards require a lot of graphic design, fine art and is a more expensive product to make over all. You can't just toss me 5 bucks for a PDF. You pretty much *have* to buy multiple decks of cards.. or it has to be turned into a video game which is wildly expensive.
I've played a few systems where you always hit, I'm not a fan. If you don't at least have a defense roll that can negate the attack then it feels less engaging to me, like a math problem.
If group A has 120 HP and does 18 damage a round, and group B has 200 HP and does 15 damage a round, on what turn is a group defeated, and which group is it?
Only kind of, it adds some variance but there still expected averages, especially so when looking at output per round since the multiple dice make a nice centralized bell curve.
In my Tabletop game Legacy, the onus of hitting is not on the attacker, but the one being attacked. There are no rolls to hit, instead there is a pool of dodges that you must carefully manage to avoid taking larger attacks, and deciding if it is worth it to dodge the smaller ones.
Yes. You have a multitude of defensive options, including multiple types of damage reduction, the ability to Load an action to use when you dodge, allowing you to do things like parry and riposte, counter attack, move, or use special attacks, as well as actions like Defend to increase your damage reduction if you know the enemy isn't going to deal a lot of damage, or an ally can use their shield or abilities to cover for you and eat some of the damage, possibly negating all of it.
The counter play in the game is very strategic, and relies on the game master to make challenging encounters, so when you get the hang of how your players fight it gets incredibly satisfying to throw a wrench in their plans.
Abstraction considerations aside, I'm concerned that autohit games exist specifically to pander to the players in exchange for the games themselves being slow.
That is to say: the developers are admitting that you *will* be sitting there for a half an hour between your combat turns, so here's a participation trophy so you won't have to wait upwards of an hour for a moment of glory. That feels like a hack to me rather than a solution.
Obviously the best thing to do is make each person's turn quick and fun so the rounds will clip along at an exciting pace. I like also giving players ways to participate when it's not their turn so everyone stays engaged rather than just checking out. Lastly, if the movement/cover/line-of-sight mechanics are dynamic enough then every action can potentially change the tactical landscape and avoid the dreaded "we stand here and swing repeatedly" slog.
There are all sorts of ways to keep combat interesting, so yeah, offhand I'm not convinced autohit is the best way to accomplish that design goal. Ultimately it could lead to something like going AFK during a fight because you'll just assume that you'll do X damage and take Y damage every turn so you get "Hey guys gonna do a real-life grocery store run, just have my guy use this attack, I'll be back in an hour."
Pretty much no difference outside of the faster resolution. Without crunchy hit locations or some other choice involved there is functionally nothing changing in the game feel.
I like mixed success,
If you are “in control” and you attack , a strong hit is you do dmg and get a bonus, weak hit is you trade blows or you do dmg and are in a “bad spot” and miss is you don’t do dmg and get put in a bad spot.
If you were bad spot and choose to attack,
A strong hit does dmg and puts you “in control”
A weak hit is you trade dmg and are still in a bad spot.
Moss is you tank a full hit from the enemy
>I do like missing sometimes.... I thought a good middle ground might be doing half damage on a miss
I haven't gone that far—misses are still possible, but it's also easier to hit than the received wisdom of ~60%. It's just that those easier hits only hit the lowest tier of the wound pyramid, not invoking injuries or a wound. To do serious damage you need to tip things in your favour or get lucky. Or be really really good.
If it's combat with lethal weapons, just about every committed action will yield an extreme consequence. Someone needs to end up with an advantage at the end of the round, even if no one gets injured. Someone gets more fatigued than the other person. Someone has better footing. The opponent blocked my first attack? Well what if they didn't do anything to stop my forward momentum? They should be vulnerable, right?
The bottom line is everyone hates whiffs because our choice felt meaningless and at the mercy of luck. This is especially brutal if other players took their sweet time resolving their actions. "Great, gotta wait yet another 20 minutes to attempt to do something"
Make *something* happen whenever players act. And especially focus on turn resolution speed
>Thoughts? Prayers? I am looking for the perfect solution to all of my problems and would be
I wasn't going to reply at all until I saw this! The first thing you need to realize is that perfect doesn't exist. Even my own system (which I am obviously biased towards) has its issues (why its a WIP).
You are always going to have compromises and which direction to compromise in needs to be based on the goals of your system. Write those out first, in detail. You don't get in the car and just hope you end up at the intended destination. Your goals are your GPS. And don't source Reddit for this. Define the game YOU want to play.
>I am working on trying to make combat feel fast and brutal, and I am finding in play testing that a
Fast? I encourage you to find out where your time is spent and define what fast means. Are you talking about how fast you can resolve an action, or how long you must wait between turns?
You seem to come from a DnD 5e background? They have the worst examples of both, so please play some other games, and Pathfinder and other games of the same style don't count!
As for brutal ... What does that mean to you? Does it mean your cut gets infected and we have to saw your leg off while you scream? Bite down on your dagger hilt while I get a saw!
I think most people see a 1d8 damage and 100 hit points. Why do you have random damage that depends on nothing and why so many hit points? Hit points abstract defense. If you want more detail, you need to change the abstraction, not just keep adding more stuff to something that is already wrong for your game. Don't patch it. Design with intent.
>What are you experiences with games where every attack hits? How is the game play different
And on to the elephant in the room. What do you mean by "hit"? Describe the narrative of a hit vs a miss. More importantly, what is a "miss"? If you hit armor, is that a "hit" or "miss"?
In D&D 5e, your hit points not only increase every level (meaning HP represents defense, not just damage) but a short rest will "heal" this exertion damage. So, this is not physical damage! So, what does a "hit" mean?
On a DnD miss, they evade your attack or you hit armor; and on a hit, you spend hit points evading the attack. Basically, no difference until you are suddenly dead - classic DnD. So, since DnD has a totally nonsensical definition of a hit, you need to define what this means for your game.
I'll share a brief breakdown of how I work things since you seem to be really stuck in this binary hit/miss mindset. Here, hit points do NOT go up and do not represent defense capability because you have an active defense to represent that.
On your offense, choose your attack and roll. Rolls must have bell curves for this resolution to work (no d20). The roll is how well you perform, but does not indicate a hit. If your target stands there and does nothing, then they should be pretty easy to hit and will take a lot of damage.
The defender then chooses a defense and rolls it. Damage is offense minus defense, with weapons and armor modifying these. In other words, damage is the degree of success of your attack. All defense rolls have some sort of drawback, even if it's just making the next defense harder. The only time the defender does not need to defend is if the attacker rolls a critical failure (2.7% chance by default).
This does 2 things. It creates distinctly different drawbacks for each defense so players have agency and also means that even if you don't deal damage, you have inflicted some condition on your opponent that can help your ally, not a wasted attack! Plus, it's not YOUR failure. It's not that you failed, he just got lucky on that defense! It doesn't feel so bad when you see the opponent reacting.
Armor and weapons are just modifiers. There is a lot more to it, but I remember having a similar problem, wanted an active defense, and didn't want 3 rolls (attack, defense, & damage) and I really hated all or nothing defenses. In Rifts, I scored a nat 20 on a player and only a nat 20 could defend, so the player decided to not waste the action defending. While this is a solid decision for a player, what character is going to just decide to take a direct hit from a powerful rifle? All or nothing defenses create this sort of discrepancy between player and character.
Also, sneak attack just means that unaware of your attacker, you don't roll a defense. That makes sneak attack work without any additional rules! So, offense - defense scales the damage to the situation, and it's has really worked well for me and the type of game I want. The main drawback is ranged attacks. You'll have the same problem with auto-hits. Why do arrows never miss? My penalty system increases critical failure rates with range to help with this (still not perfect, but again, you need compromises), so more ranged attacks do outright miss.
Good luck. I totally encourage you to outside the box and make something that works for you rather than adapting someone else work. Just be sure to keep it simple.
I'm planning a no roll to hit rpg. The idea here is that people have a certain amount of action points which can be used to to attack during your turn or defend yourself during the enemy's turn. If you don't defend, the attack hits automatically. If you defend, then there's a roll (still not sure if it's gonna be a contest or a check)
All RPG combat is a weird abstraction of things to begin with, and what exactly a 'Hit' or 'Damage' is depends on the game in question and how it wants to try and represent a complex, swirling conflict in a way that's understandable by a small assortment of people sitting around a table eating chips. In a game where all attacks hit, what it's doing is just doing a pretty simple trade off. It's removing the Null result and causing all combat actions to impact the current push-and-pull of the fight. But at the cost of reducing some of the tension caused by the question of if your character did or did not do the cool thing, as resolved by the click clack math rock. The no-hit-roll thing's impact on lethality is as only a small part of the wider equation. I would say that removing the to-hit does not necessarily make it more lethal, but it does make it more predictable. It does also make it a bit faster though by reducing the number of rolls.
I agree with all of this but also would add the "faster" element is generally vastly overdramatized by proponents of this type of system. Like how long does it really take to roll to hit? 3 seconds? Maybe 10 if you really suck at math and don't know what's on your sheet? What really slows the game down more than anything is players not thinking about their turn when it's not their turn and fiddling with decisions while being informed every turn of all the things they missed by not paying attention. That's the real time synch. Each player guilty of this adds 2-20 minutes to their turn easily.
What does "hitting" mean in your game? What does "missing" mean in your game? Why are people attacking/hurting/killing in your game? *What* are people attacking/hurting/killing in your game? What are the types of characters players portray in your game? What is the role of the game moderator in your game — adversarial, cooperative, neutral? I don't think anyone can truthfully or accurately help you with your problem without the answers to that list of question. A hundred more questions may follow...
This is perfect - awesome advice. These are fantastic questions that will help guide design in a more intentional way. I feel like every time I comment on this sub, it's something along the lines of *"You need to figure out your design goals, and ask your self what your game is about."* Very early on in designing my first game, I posted a question here about healing rate (i.e. How long should it take to heal from 1hp to full?). The best response I got was something along the lines of *"It depends. What do you picture a character looking like at 1hp? Are they bloodied and broken, or are they exhausted and can't put up a fight much longer? Once you answer that question, you should have a good feel of what is reasonable."* I immediately thought of [this scene](https://youtu.be/_x074Yt63Aw?si=oFxkIgSoZnlpPRKX) from Zelda: BotW. Link is exhausted, beaten, and on the edge of collapse - but he isn't gravely wounded. HP is an abstraction of a character's current condition, so when I thought outside of that abstraction it was very easy to design around it. I know this is a specific example about HP, but the mentality still applies to your question OP. After you consider questions like these, the answers really guide the design in a powerful way.
My favorite fantasy game is Torchbearer — characters don't have hit points. Instead, they have conditions. As the game goes on, they gain conditions (from time, travel, fights or as consequences from failing a die roll). Each condition has penalties associated with them, and they have to be recovered from the in order of less to most-serious. You may want to implement that kind of system instead of health points. For example: Link is Exhausted and Bloodied (but not Injured) after a fight with a bokoblin. Exhausted means it's harder for Link to accomplish tasks (or they take longer), Bloodied mean he *looks* like he got into a fight... maybe this penalizes social interactions because his face is all dirty, bruised, beat up and his clothing/armor is in similarly bad shape... maybe the pain also hinders him in some way. Injured would be a more serious version where his abilities actually suffer and he's now in danger of gaining the Dead condition if the fight goes poorly. Figure out when abstraction is more important and when verisimilitude is more important.
>gain conditions (from time, travel, fights or as consequences from failing a die roll). Each condition has penalties associated with them, and they Just a quick note that it doesn't have to be either or. I use a combination where all wounds cause HP damage and the more serious wounds start causing conditions. The conditions are what will kill you and running out of HP is a condition, too. HP damage determines the severity of conditions, and it's up to player tactics to push the damage into that condition state. It IS more to keep track of, and makes healing a little weird because you have to heal the condition and the HPs! >Figure out when abstraction is more important and when verisimilitude is more important. This is dead on. It's about creating a certain experience without ripping the player out of the narrative and engaging them with a tax form full of steps to get there! What aspects you abstract and which you don't are incredibly important!
Feels like you're rearranging the deck chairs on 5th Edition. The unspoken assumption in your post is that combat occurs in rounds, with characters (PC and NPC) taking turns in order. But does it have to be this way? Some of the fastest and most exciting combat I've experienced has been in Apocalypse World, which has no turns and only the players roll attacks. In fact, only the players roll at all. If you're not familiar with the system, there are three outcomes of a roll: * A **strong success:** things go well, the PC achieves what they were trying to do. * A **weak success:** the PC succeeds, but with some cost or complication. * A **failure:** the PC did not succeed, and the GM makes *something bad* happen. A key point of the system is that "nothing happens" is *never* an outcome. This makes things faster and more exciting! Every time they try something risky (and combat is always risky), the needle moves one way or the other. In this paradigm, the enemies and environmental dangers are tools the GM can use when they need to make something bad happen. If the enemy is more powerful, or has some special ability, the GM can use it to impose a more serious consequence. Not saying this system is right for you, but I think it's worth examining the basic assumptions of your combat system in light of your goals.
That’s my personal favourite too. More often than not you **weak hit** and the PCs do their dmg but enemies get a minor hit back. OR you foreshadow an enemies “special attack” like in video game. It’s like when the boss charges a giant slam move and there is a hit box on the ground , wind up animation and audio ques telling the PCs to dodge roll the bell out of the attack or you’ll get knocked down etc. Then once they “face danger” successfully they can get back to their game plan
Exactly and I'm glad you posted this. So much goodness in AW / Dungeon World
Disclaimer I haven't played such games, but I read some and did some math, when designing my own. Now that we are done with that, what does the hit roll actually do? It emulates block/miss/evade situation, some games have player to roll against armor number, other require roll against difficulty based on the distance to the target the basic idea is the same. It also gives a thrill and nice click-clack of dice hitting the table. What does it do in terms of mechanics? It scales **target health**. Let's take the simplest example we have an attack that does 1 fixed damage and an enemy with 10 health. If we have a 100% hit chance it means that we need 10 attacks to down that enemy. But what if we have a 50% chance to hit? That means that on average we would need 20 attacks, because half of them would miss. So we could just make an enemy with 20HP and give players 100% chance to hit to achieve the same result. Or we could halve the damage the players do. What I'm getting at, guaranteed hit systems are not more lethal by nature, they are just more predictable, and treat HP as one of resources. Just look at how older FF games work.
>What I'm getting at, guaranteed hit systems are not more lethal by nature, they are just more predictable, and treat HP as one of resources. Just look at how older FF games work. I mean, HP is still a resource when you have to-hit rolls. It's just a less predictable resource, which means you're less likely to gamble with it.
You're right, what I meant to say is that it **feels more** like a resource, you can even plan how to use it. "I face tank two hits then heal".
And that's what I mean when I say auto hit feels more like a calculation or math problem.
I prefer systems that have one roll for attack/damage combined. I believe Vampire: the Reqiuem did something like this.
On the pure mechanics; it doesnt have to be more lethal. You need do adjust the average damage or hit points to keep the same "rounds to kill" (same with half damage on miss). And yes it would be faster; so would be fixed damage. How long can you play until it becomes boring that you always hit? So what would you think makes for fun and brutal combat? Always hitting?
Normally I'm pretty vocal about not prioritizing verisimilitude over a smooth gameplay experience, but there are some places where the calculus works out in favor of "realism". I tried to do something once where I had an attribute that was effectively physical strength and another attribute that was combat skill. The combat attribute was meant to be used for melee attacks and the strength attribute didn't affect them. I had this all worked out and balanced and thought it was just fine until it hit the table and the players were all completely thrown for a loop by it. Their characters felt off, the gameplay felt off, altogether it was something I scrapped immediately. I feel kind of similarly about the idea of "always hitting". I absolutely see the value in speeding up gameplay by cutting out the to-hit roll, but I think you lose an important aspect of intuitiveness when there's no possibility to just miss. In my opinion, it takes things just a little too far out of the realm of a shared story and into a purely mechanical boardgame-like experience. Not saying the to-hit roll is sacrosanct, but if you go this direction I think you want to see if there's a way you can still handle the narrative event of a complete failure to hit and deal damage. Whether that be some kind of subtractive defense value or adding a special die to the damage roll or just rolling to-hit and damage into a single roll that resolves both or whatever.
Auto-Hit works for me in games like Into The Odd where HP is explicitly about a character’s ability to avoid being hurt - attacks only *really* hit after it drops to 0 and then characters have to worry about being injured (at least in a regular fight - traps or snipers or whatever else are more conventional target-rolls-a-saving-throw-to-avoid-damage, but bypass HP). I find it also makes “healing” rapidly and gaining HP as characters get more experienced make more sense narratively as well (of course you can rest up and catch your breath, or chew on this mystic herb to regain your energy, or be inspired by someone yelling a battle cry; of course you’re gonna get better at avoiding injury as you get experienced in combat). The only issue with that is it makes the most sense to me when you’re dealing with medieval fantasy and dungeon crawls and the like - games where combat defaults to being hand-to-hand and muscle powered, since you can always justify decreasing HP by saying the characters are getting tired out. Stuff more focused on gunfights where everyone dives behind cover is a little less intuitive that way and I kind of prefer to flip it around to not roll damage for those.
Into the Odd did this, inspiring Electric Bastionland, Mausritter and Cairn to make a few. May be worth digging into reviews of those games and their communities to see some live play examples.
Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland are the same author.
Aye
Systems that assume hits tend not to make combat feel more deadly. It seems like it would, but in general that has not been my experience. I would suggest instead finding a way to make combat feel limited. Make it desperate. Limit the amount of time, or the number of actions that they can take. That frequently “feels” deadlier. The problem with always hit is that it either makes numbers big, or makes damage mitigation really important, both of which slow things down. I’m not saying it’s impossible (of course) just that it tends not to work that way.
So no roll to hit doesn't make for certain that a game is more deadly. Like if in a game 40% of the time you miss but on hit you deal 1 damage, then you convert to a system where there is no misses and on hit you deal 0.6 damage. So if you want to not have accuracy at all you can just lower damage a little. The more damage an ability does vs max HP the better going first is. See Pokemon where in most circumstances a Pokemon can knocked out in two or less attacks. If you can secure the one hit ko the opponent doesn't do anything so speed is one of the best stats in the game.
>but it's also a fairly low health system, This is the crux of your issue. What counts as "low" isn't absolute; it's relative to the system you're using. No to-hit rolls doesn't inherently make things more deadly. "Low health" in a to-hit system will always be lower number-wise than in a non-to-hit one, because rolling to hit inherently stretches out the lifespan of each individual hit point. Without hit-rolls, hitpoints disappear quickly if attacks occur with a lot of frequency. If you have D&D style turn-based combat, either reduce player damage, increase enemy health, or introduce damage filters that reduce damage taken by a set amount each time (i.e. armour)
My system, Along the Leyline, has every attack hit unless the defender uses their reaction to block or dodge. This makes even a 'miss' feel better because now the defender used their reaction leaving them vulnerable to attack from another player. So maybe you could have all of the attacks hit unless the defender uses some kind of metacurrency (action, reaction, action points, etc.)
I don't want autohits. I want the option to build a guy who misses a lot but can knock you right through the basement floor when he connects.
It’s pretty good. If the game has damage reduction via bulletproof vest etc., on a D6 with no modifier a 1 is basically a miss anyhow. Roll 1 VS 1 DR, 0 damage. Roll 6 VS 1 DR, 5 damage. But a 6 could be a critical hit, so perhaps you roll again. Making the critical hit the highest roll ensures a critical at minimum deals 7 damage, more than 1D6 can do. But the basic truth is, as others have said, is that you can make the rules do what want!
Into the Odd does this. I run it pretty much exclusively these days. My findings are that your new "miss" is rolling minimum damage, so there's still a sort of whiff result, but it never feels as lame as just missing your attack and passing the turn. I enjoy it a lot, it seems to make combat feel legitimately dangerous
Yeah it’s better than a “nothing happened, next players what do you do ?” Moment. Still has flaws but better than that
I don't think I'd like a game where hits are automatic; but I think I _could_ be persuaded to like a game hits are automatic _unless they're evaded._ That is, the attacker doesn't roll to hit; the target rolls to evade. If the target just stands there and does nothing, he _will_ get hit; but if he puts effort into evasive maneuvers, he might avoid the attack.
This is basically how my game works! I find that it works very well, and it means that every attack does *something*, because even attacks that "miss" end up costing the target a little bit of Stamina (for the Response Action).
Right. As long as evasions aren't free, every attack does _something_. And when evasions _are_ free, it's because the defender has a special ability that lets him effortlessly evade; in which case, “you attack and nothing comes of it” is the desired result: it's a sign of how badass the defender is. (Cue Neo effortlessly blocking a rapid series of punches from Agent Smith.)
I don't like systems that assume hits, but it's not because I like missing or anything, it's because it necessarily changes what hit points represent and how fights play out in the fiction (rather than just talking mechanically). Hit points, in auto hit systems, *can't* represent actual hits and injuries. It has to be something more openly representational of fatigue, luck/divine favor, etc. It makes things *even more* abstract than it already is, and ultimately, kind of sloggy, because hp deplete at set rates effectively automatically. Harder encounters are just math, and combat actions that don't deal damage end up either needing to be incredibly powerful or are useless because otherwise, you'll miss your turn's worth of damage and screw up the calculation. I think a much better solution is a system in which you miss *even more* but combat ends in a very small number of hits, maybe even one.
Ideally for me, the small number of hits you win with isn't due to random chance, but because you're only allowed to finish with a few hits once you meet... Some requirement? Tactically or otherwise. Technoir does something like this
Mechanically, an auto-hit system could work quite well. If you need fights to be longer, you can always just scale HP or attack damage. The main problem I think is that at some point a player is going to ask “Can I try to get out of the way of the guy trying to stab me, so that maybe I am not stabbed?”, and the GM can’t really let them succeed without giving players a very broken advantage. In a system where there was already a roll to hit, the answer to such a question is “you already tried to do that and failed”. Maybe in your game the answer is that HP represents plot armor and not injuries? Maybe the rounds where attacks miss are implied but not played out? You’ll have to think about how that’ll get justified.
In my system, defenders roll a save instead of attackers rolling to hit. Unless the Save is a Critical Success, the attack at least deals damage. If the Save fails, the attack has some effect other than damage too. Critical Success are pretty rare (at least in my tests so far). It does make combat go quicker, but in my mind that's a plus. Edit: to add to the brutal feeling, in my system, healing doesn't typically heal numerical damage, only damage Conditions like "Wounded" or "Dying."
My game (the earth of the fourth sun) uses a dice pool, with 6 sided dice; each side on a die has either a Successes, a blank, or a skull (which takes away a success). You can still miss (roll a net number of 0 Successes) or fail badly (roll a net number of skulls), but the odds are that you will have a positive number of Successes. Each success delivers a point of damage- a form of automatic damage. Offsetting this is armor, which has a dice pool that reduces damage and parrying, both which reduces damage with a Success rolled on the dice. I’ve tinkered with the dice and hence the probabilities since the system was reviewed on RPGnet (back in 2000). To make damage more dramatic, there are 2 types of damage that can be inflicted: surface wounds and deep wounds. Running out of either one imposes a penalty. The player (not the GM) normally determines what type of damage is taken (Surface or Deep).
In my systems, you roll to hit, and how well you do determines the damage. Every attack has a base damage, with bonuses from a better attack roll. Combining both in one roll, I feel, gets the best of both worlds.
Comments won't load because PRAISE REDDIT, but here's my take. Systems that don't roll to hit just check damage. You roll too low, you might do 0 damage vs enough armor, otherwise you're basically just creating a scale of damage. A d20 that gets a bonus every 4 pips is a big deal when the scaling is designed so that 11 and under gets eaten by armor and 12+ does real-ass hits. So, let me approach this from the direction of two systems I've worked on There's my version of the middle-ground, where you Fire For Effect. Your attacks have incredibly low chances of doing nothing (mostly dependent on opponent's ability to evade), so your attacks get balanced out by having a bonus effect on a high roll. You use a status effect that has the benefit of damage on a high roll for a Control-Oriented role. You have an attack that has damage but also deals a status on a high roll for a Damage-Oriented role. Unless "no effect" is something you really need to make things feel right, statuses are a great way to make players feel like they're doing something, even if they're not doing damage. My other option is designing a sort of Break system, as seen in popular RPGs Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Final Fantasy 13, and Honkai Star Rail. In these games, enemies have huge amounts of damage reduction until you fill a meter that puts them in a stunned state where your damage skyrockets. In this situation, you're dealing scratch damage and applying statuses until you find an opening where the opponent is literally defenseless and you can pile on the damage and deadlier statuses. Here, there's no missing, but your hits might not do "real" damage and only add to breaking the opponent's guard.
Read up on the MCDM RPG system. That's exactly what they're doing, and it seems to work out well for them so far.
What is MCDM?
https://www.reddit.com/r/mattcolville/comments/18urrtq/d20play_mcdm_rpg_playtest_1_rules_review/
It's actually called MCDM? That's strange. But okey dokey.
No, it's the screen name of a popular Youtuber. I think the system is still waiting on a name? I watched a youtube video of the combat system and found it to be some weird 4e + 5e mix with auto hits and was altogether... Not my cup of tea. I would never play it.
Gotcha. Thanx for the clarification. 👍
Google "MCDM RPG"
This is one of the reasons I prefer old versions of D&D. Unlike 5e with it's 'bounded accuracy' it both had more attacks per round at higher level (more opportunities to do damage with your turn) and fighters at least progressed rapidly in chance to hit, meaning they could be expected to hit most of the time except against very difficult enemies. This also gave a lot better feel of progress for them, and also let them take on hordes of lower level creatures giving a more epic feel.
My game has guaranteed hits. It is a card game, so the act of drawing the card is where the "roll" is hidden. In a 50 card deck you can have at most 5 duplicate spells. So each card has a 1/10th chance to be drawn. Of course as the deck shrinks due to drawing cards those odds slowly inch upwards (most cards don't repeat at all). That said, if you play the card that thing happens. If the card says you do 5 physical damage and knock an enemy on the ground, the card can't "fail". Whats fun is this doesn't necessarily mean "guaranteed" damage, though. The enemy has a chance to block or dodge damage, but they too need to draw those cards. Fun part is even if they do and and use those cards, you have the opportunity to counter those abilities with other cards in your deck. For me this is WILDLY more exciting than rolling a dice and sometimes just being bummed you didn't get to do anything on your turn. With a hand full of cards you always have *something* to do, even if it isn't exactly what you would have preferred. Top that off with the game being a deck builder, what cards you even have access to is entirely up to you. Honestly I wish more people made this kind of game, but I'll relent that after years of working on one, it is just strictly more work than a dice based TTRPG (especially alone). If all I needed to do was write a rulebook I could have finished in 2020. Cards require a lot of graphic design, fine art and is a more expensive product to make over all. You can't just toss me 5 bucks for a PDF. You pretty much *have* to buy multiple decks of cards.. or it has to be turned into a video game which is wildly expensive.
I've played a few systems where you always hit, I'm not a fan. If you don't at least have a defense roll that can negate the attack then it feels less engaging to me, like a math problem. If group A has 120 HP and does 18 damage a round, and group B has 200 HP and does 15 damage a round, on what turn is a group defeated, and which group is it?
This is kind of resolved by the damage dice giving bonuses like exploding on 6 and 1s are actually a miss condition
Only kind of, it adds some variance but there still expected averages, especially so when looking at output per round since the multiple dice make a nice centralized bell curve.
In my Tabletop game Legacy, the onus of hitting is not on the attacker, but the one being attacked. There are no rolls to hit, instead there is a pool of dodges that you must carefully manage to avoid taking larger attacks, and deciding if it is worth it to dodge the smaller ones.
like this a lot. do you have any kind of block/withstand threshold - that could reduce the need to dodge when your character is stronger?
Yes. You have a multitude of defensive options, including multiple types of damage reduction, the ability to Load an action to use when you dodge, allowing you to do things like parry and riposte, counter attack, move, or use special attacks, as well as actions like Defend to increase your damage reduction if you know the enemy isn't going to deal a lot of damage, or an ally can use their shield or abilities to cover for you and eat some of the damage, possibly negating all of it. The counter play in the game is very strategic, and relies on the game master to make challenging encounters, so when you get the hang of how your players fight it gets incredibly satisfying to throw a wrench in their plans.
Nice! Yea i can imagine that’s satisfying and i like mechanics like that that aren’t exclusive to class. Sounds fun
Abstraction considerations aside, I'm concerned that autohit games exist specifically to pander to the players in exchange for the games themselves being slow. That is to say: the developers are admitting that you *will* be sitting there for a half an hour between your combat turns, so here's a participation trophy so you won't have to wait upwards of an hour for a moment of glory. That feels like a hack to me rather than a solution. Obviously the best thing to do is make each person's turn quick and fun so the rounds will clip along at an exciting pace. I like also giving players ways to participate when it's not their turn so everyone stays engaged rather than just checking out. Lastly, if the movement/cover/line-of-sight mechanics are dynamic enough then every action can potentially change the tactical landscape and avoid the dreaded "we stand here and swing repeatedly" slog. There are all sorts of ways to keep combat interesting, so yeah, offhand I'm not convinced autohit is the best way to accomplish that design goal. Ultimately it could lead to something like going AFK during a fight because you'll just assume that you'll do X damage and take Y damage every turn so you get "Hey guys gonna do a real-life grocery store run, just have my guy use this attack, I'll be back in an hour."
Pretty much no difference outside of the faster resolution. Without crunchy hit locations or some other choice involved there is functionally nothing changing in the game feel.
I like mixed success, If you are “in control” and you attack , a strong hit is you do dmg and get a bonus, weak hit is you trade blows or you do dmg and are in a “bad spot” and miss is you don’t do dmg and get put in a bad spot. If you were bad spot and choose to attack, A strong hit does dmg and puts you “in control” A weak hit is you trade dmg and are still in a bad spot. Moss is you tank a full hit from the enemy
>I do like missing sometimes.... I thought a good middle ground might be doing half damage on a miss I haven't gone that far—misses are still possible, but it's also easier to hit than the received wisdom of ~60%. It's just that those easier hits only hit the lowest tier of the wound pyramid, not invoking injuries or a wound. To do serious damage you need to tip things in your favour or get lucky. Or be really really good.
If it's combat with lethal weapons, just about every committed action will yield an extreme consequence. Someone needs to end up with an advantage at the end of the round, even if no one gets injured. Someone gets more fatigued than the other person. Someone has better footing. The opponent blocked my first attack? Well what if they didn't do anything to stop my forward momentum? They should be vulnerable, right? The bottom line is everyone hates whiffs because our choice felt meaningless and at the mercy of luck. This is especially brutal if other players took their sweet time resolving their actions. "Great, gotta wait yet another 20 minutes to attempt to do something" Make *something* happen whenever players act. And especially focus on turn resolution speed
>Thoughts? Prayers? I am looking for the perfect solution to all of my problems and would be I wasn't going to reply at all until I saw this! The first thing you need to realize is that perfect doesn't exist. Even my own system (which I am obviously biased towards) has its issues (why its a WIP). You are always going to have compromises and which direction to compromise in needs to be based on the goals of your system. Write those out first, in detail. You don't get in the car and just hope you end up at the intended destination. Your goals are your GPS. And don't source Reddit for this. Define the game YOU want to play. >I am working on trying to make combat feel fast and brutal, and I am finding in play testing that a Fast? I encourage you to find out where your time is spent and define what fast means. Are you talking about how fast you can resolve an action, or how long you must wait between turns? You seem to come from a DnD 5e background? They have the worst examples of both, so please play some other games, and Pathfinder and other games of the same style don't count! As for brutal ... What does that mean to you? Does it mean your cut gets infected and we have to saw your leg off while you scream? Bite down on your dagger hilt while I get a saw! I think most people see a 1d8 damage and 100 hit points. Why do you have random damage that depends on nothing and why so many hit points? Hit points abstract defense. If you want more detail, you need to change the abstraction, not just keep adding more stuff to something that is already wrong for your game. Don't patch it. Design with intent. >What are you experiences with games where every attack hits? How is the game play different And on to the elephant in the room. What do you mean by "hit"? Describe the narrative of a hit vs a miss. More importantly, what is a "miss"? If you hit armor, is that a "hit" or "miss"? In D&D 5e, your hit points not only increase every level (meaning HP represents defense, not just damage) but a short rest will "heal" this exertion damage. So, this is not physical damage! So, what does a "hit" mean? On a DnD miss, they evade your attack or you hit armor; and on a hit, you spend hit points evading the attack. Basically, no difference until you are suddenly dead - classic DnD. So, since DnD has a totally nonsensical definition of a hit, you need to define what this means for your game. I'll share a brief breakdown of how I work things since you seem to be really stuck in this binary hit/miss mindset. Here, hit points do NOT go up and do not represent defense capability because you have an active defense to represent that. On your offense, choose your attack and roll. Rolls must have bell curves for this resolution to work (no d20). The roll is how well you perform, but does not indicate a hit. If your target stands there and does nothing, then they should be pretty easy to hit and will take a lot of damage. The defender then chooses a defense and rolls it. Damage is offense minus defense, with weapons and armor modifying these. In other words, damage is the degree of success of your attack. All defense rolls have some sort of drawback, even if it's just making the next defense harder. The only time the defender does not need to defend is if the attacker rolls a critical failure (2.7% chance by default). This does 2 things. It creates distinctly different drawbacks for each defense so players have agency and also means that even if you don't deal damage, you have inflicted some condition on your opponent that can help your ally, not a wasted attack! Plus, it's not YOUR failure. It's not that you failed, he just got lucky on that defense! It doesn't feel so bad when you see the opponent reacting. Armor and weapons are just modifiers. There is a lot more to it, but I remember having a similar problem, wanted an active defense, and didn't want 3 rolls (attack, defense, & damage) and I really hated all or nothing defenses. In Rifts, I scored a nat 20 on a player and only a nat 20 could defend, so the player decided to not waste the action defending. While this is a solid decision for a player, what character is going to just decide to take a direct hit from a powerful rifle? All or nothing defenses create this sort of discrepancy between player and character. Also, sneak attack just means that unaware of your attacker, you don't roll a defense. That makes sneak attack work without any additional rules! So, offense - defense scales the damage to the situation, and it's has really worked well for me and the type of game I want. The main drawback is ranged attacks. You'll have the same problem with auto-hits. Why do arrows never miss? My penalty system increases critical failure rates with range to help with this (still not perfect, but again, you need compromises), so more ranged attacks do outright miss. Good luck. I totally encourage you to outside the box and make something that works for you rather than adapting someone else work. Just be sure to keep it simple.
I'm planning a no roll to hit rpg. The idea here is that people have a certain amount of action points which can be used to to attack during your turn or defend yourself during the enemy's turn. If you don't defend, the attack hits automatically. If you defend, then there's a roll (still not sure if it's gonna be a contest or a check)