So when setting out to make sense of how the violence side of things was going to work, I came in with two main ideas:
So here’s the rabbit hole that sent me down and where I came out.
For the first, the thought was finding a way to make a combat roll that also included damage but also included the possibility of missing. This necessitated either a PbtA-inspired success/partial success/fail system or playing around a target number system. Dice pools were floated early on, but felt wrong for the game (though I like them for a different game that’s half-started).
Because I knew I wanted (and still want) the combat to be relatively quick, the PbtA ambiguity seems undesirable, so it’s down to what the dice MEAN. Instead of attack AND damage, a single roll of the dice is the “combat roll”, representing the entire turn (how long is a turn? Don’t worry about it yet) of being in combat.
So, there’s a target number acting as the target’s defense. Exceed it and you do the full damage you roll. Fail to exceed it, you do nothin’. Sure, it’s a little math, but it makes it so after the first or second round with any given enemy, you know what their defense is and you can take that little bit out of things and concentrate on finding interesting things to do while you’re doing mayhem.
Should there be critical hits? This was tabled until we figured out the actual dice and how that was going to work.
So to do that, we start looking at the actual rolls themselves, their shape and values and how we can play with them to create different effects.
For instance, in some games (D&D’s 5e, for instance), you have advantage/disadvantage, where you make a roll twice and pick the better or worse outcome. I wanted something like that but something that played with probability in a more obvious way. So, out of that, I looked at dice that don’t get used a lot.
And hey, there’s the d12. The noble d12. The oft-ignored d12.
I decided this oft-ignored die was going to be the base for things.
This had a few good knock-ons from the jump.
First, base-12/duodecimal was a relatively common counting system in a lot of places throughout time, surviving to the present day with our 24-hour day and 12-inch foot in spite of a lot of systems going into decimal/base-10/metric, so there’s this feeling both of familiarity and otherness to thinking in 12s that I think would translate well into a kind of nebulously-placed game like Chorus is intended to be (is it another world? is it a mythic past? is it our own post-post-post apocalyptic future?).
The next benefit was that it automatically created some fascinating opportunities for fucking with dice to change the possibility of hitting in combat.
For a good primer on the concept of dice math, check out the Matt Colville video on the subject.
It’s the same thing in, well, D&D where I prefer a greatsword to a greataxe. Now, a part of this is aesthetic (I like to imagine my fighter with a big ol’ fuck-off sword because he’s a big feller), but it’s also the dice. Greatsword is 2d6, greataxe is 1d12.
Doesn’t sound like there’s a ton of difference there, but let’s face it: there is.
This means that the average damage is substantively pretty samey with 1 point of difference between them.
But it also means the roll is going to be really swingy because the d12 can hit every point between 1 and 12 every round and that’s all you’re getting. What are the odds of any given number coming up? 1:12.
2d6s, however, are two separate dice rolling. Each one goes between 1 and 6. The odds of both sharing the same number is 1:6^2, or 1:36. And even if you get the worst possible roll, that’s still 2 instead of 1 with the d12.
That’s a built-in bonus on top of creating some more reliable damage output.
So I took that one step further and said what about 3d4 as well?
After all, 3d4 also equals 12 and if 2d6 is a big numerical advantage, what about adding even more dice?
So:
This does have the downside of flattening maximum damage, of course. But on the other hand, it has the upside of making it easier to figure out the math of any given encounter and what kinds of skill any given character type has with fighting. It also means that any bonuses or penalties to one’s combat skill, because in this game it’s the same roll as damage (probably gonna get a more evocative name eventually; bloodletting? violence? pain? It’s a work in progress), is going to be even more consequential.
If the baddie’s hit points are in multiples of 12, then if you have a +1 bonus to your combat rolls, you’re really tearing into things.
This creates opportunity to figure out some decent percentile chances for people to hit or miss. This one’s a bit more in the air at the moment (and likely to be affected by enemy type, which will be discussed later), but it means we can start looking into how often we think a roll should miss. It will have to be a target number everyone CAN roll (so the lowest can’t be 2), but which isn’t entirely unreasonable even for the person rolling the d12, swingy as it is.
So basic combat round goes:
We’ll get into actions in combat that aren’t about dealing damage and the action economy later as well, of course; this is just for dice.
And that’s it for this bit of “My head’s too tired to do more design, let’s explicate at length the hows/whys/wherefores of one aspect or another”.