Alternate Combat Systems

I came up with a general concept of an alternate combat system for D&D the other night. It's not thought out very well, and it's just a rough idea at this point. I doubt I'll ever use it, but I thought I'd share it none the less. One major drawback to this system though is it makes some monsters "untouchable" if you have a very low attack. I don't actually view this as a problem though, as it's actually more realistic. Sometimes there's just a creature/adversary that you look at and go "well damn, I'm running".

Note I just thought of this the other night. If someone else has already come up with this, or if it's a common thing, sorry. I'm unaware of it. If it is found elsewhere, I wouldn't mind being pointed in the direction.

First thing, this idea uses the ascending armor class system presented in d20/3E. The way it works is you attack like normal in that system, and whatever you beat your target's armor class by (margin of success), is how much damage you deal. Weapons could be represented by static bonuses, or you could roll 1d20+weapon dice as well.

There you have it, pretty simple and straight forward. It boils combat down to one die roll, which is kind of nice.

I thought of an alternative for this system as well, which I'll share now. It's the same thing, but you take the ascending armor class, and subtract 10. You now have a "Defense" score that can be as low as 0.  You keep the base attack bonus and you can just call it "Attack", and it can also start at 0. Instead of rolling 1d20, you just roll the weapon's damage dice, adding the "attack" bonus, and however much it beats the "defense" score, is how much damage is scored.

This means two things: attack skill and weapons damage are far more important, and initiative is way more important. Lets look at two (kind of three) examples.

Assume two untrained, and unarmored individuals (no attribute bonuses), with daggers (1d4). Their attack and defense scores are both "0". These means whatever they roll for damage is how much they deal. This is actually pretty realistic from experience, as defense is usually the harder skill to learn. You give someone a weapon, and they can tear people up, whether out of shear fear from target, or just aggression. If you do use attributes, those initial bonuses (to armor class, or attack/damage) become extremely important to low level characters.

A second example would be a full armored knight (say AC 16), against a untrained peasant with a spear (1d6). Even if the peasant rolls a 6, he's not doing anything to that knight. The knight on the other hand will probably cut down the peasant extremely easily. There is something you could do to remedy such situations, and that's exploding damage. Anytime maximum damage is rolled on a damage die, you roll again and total, and you can do this infinitely if you wish. This is cool, because statistically critical hits would be more frequent (1/6 or 1/12 even, instead of 1/20).

So there's some fun ideas to toy with, if you're interested. Personally I'm heavily considering toying with the second concept for making a stand alone game, that could use D&D monsters with little conversion.