Designing Weapons (xD6h)

In the previous post (The xD6h System) I tried to give some insights into the thoughts and inner workings of the dice resolution system of Blight. This post will elaborate on those thoughts in relation to making weapons and abilities work in the d6 space of the Blight resolution system.

One of the things that make skirmish games fun and interesting, is that they let you make tactical decisions, and not only on an abstract level, but directly in the physical movement and interaction of miniatures on the table. Thus, a major purpose of a ruleset is to provide mechanics that afford this. One way Blight tries to do this is through a subtle rock/paper/scissor (shield/two-hand/dual) approach that provides tactical depth through weapon choices. However, the systems is not just stitched on, instead it is baked in directly.

The Weapons

The base weapon in Blight is the Hand Weapon. It has no modifiers, and simply deal the damage you roll on your damage die. Easy and straight forward. This is the baseline for all other weapons and gear. It is the most common item, so it is kept simple. The hand weapon is not part of the counter loop directly, but mentioned here to give and idea of the basics.

First in the counter loop is the Shield. An easy mechanic for a shield would be to simply provide a +1 defense bonus. Not very interesting though, and a bit arbitrary. Shields block things, but only some of the time, and only if you are skilled in using it. Why not make it do precisely that? In Blight shields block partial hits (when attacker and defender gets equal rolls). The nature of the xD6h system actually means that the shield gets better as a model gets more skilled, due to the fact that the amount of partial hits increase as dice pools increase.

Next up is the Two-Handed Weapon. I wanted these to be brutal, feel dangerous and unwieldy, and to negate the shield. The last point is simply added as a rule. For brutality, the Two-handed weapon is given a +2 damage bonus (Two-handed = 2 damage, easy to remember). To compensate for this strength, and to make it feel unwieldy, all models using Two-handed weapons has a -1 die penalty to their Melee stat (baked in to their profile, so you do not have to remember). Statistically the melee penalty actually makes the Two-handed weapon worse than the regular hand weapon, even with the +2 damage. However, the damage boost also provides a chance of a single hit kill that the hand weapon does not (health of most characters are 7-8). This adds an aditional level of choice too; Do you risk engaging these models without the numbers to take them out before they get to swing, or do you take the chance?

Next up is Dual Hand Weapons. The thematic feel I wanted for these was that a model will attack with one weapon, and then follow up with the other when the defender blocks the first. This too fits in well with partial hits. In Blight, Dual Hand Weapons dealing full damage on partial hits. Thus Dual weapons are especially handy against Two-Handed weapons, where you want to make sure you deal as much damage as possible, but useless against shields, as they blocks partials altogether.

As it hopefully shows, it is possible to weave a rock/paper/scissor mechanic into the game in a more subtle way than explicitly says that X has a +1 bonus vs Y. One possible problem though is that some players might not realize the mechanic. When baking things in, the most important thing is therefore to make sure the mechanics actually work intuitively and matches the players expectations. Hopefully most players will agree that if you want to deal with that guard with the shield, you should hit him hard with the great axe. If you want to deal with that brute with the great axe, the nimble duelist with the two swords is the right man for the job.

Abilities without modifiers

As shown above, weapons in Blight work by interacting with certain aspects of the dice mecanics, instead of modifying rolls. Abilities work the same way. Weapon Mastery allows you ro reroll 1's (representing a model that is so well trained that complete failure is rare). The Off-hand Parry skill allows Dual hand weapons to block partials in defense (like the shield). Shield Bash makes a defense roll of 6 count as an unarmed attack.