AL Combat

The Combat System in Flight is beautifully complex.

Basic Combat

Players strike a mob triggering an attack roll based on "There is no Twelve" from YoF. Mobs then have a defense roll to counter it. Each attack removes one defense dice from the pool. Once a monster has no defense left, the players can start inflicting damage levels on it. Enough damage in a particular pool kills it.

Players also have different attack-types they can use situation-ally. Some are geared towards lowering a targets defense, others designed to his specific crits. In general characters will never need o deal with more than 3-4 enemies at a time, and only at the higher levels. CC effects also remove defense points.

Crowd Control

When dealing with multiple enemies, players will need to use various crowd control effects to survive. Knockdown, daze, knock-backs, etc. These will be granted through perks.

Magic

Magical attacks will be treated the same as weapon attacks, for all intents and purposes. There will be a number of sub-types in magic for which enemies can have resistance, but all Damage Levels will go in to the Magic-type.

Characters will have a mana pool that slowly regenerates. Every spell cost mana but some also regenerate it. Spells have cool-downs. Like weapon attacks, some spells are spcialized in reducing an enemy's defense value, others are damage-dealers, others are a combination. Players can only slot a set number of spells but can slot the same spell multiple times with independent cool-downs.

Damage Types

There are five types of damage in the game: Slashing, Blugeoning, Piercing, Magic, and Generic. Each type has a different number of levels associated with it. Killing a monster requires removing all of the damage levels in any one specfic type.

Monsters that are vulnerable to a particular type of damage will have fewer damage levels within that pool.

Removing damage levels also calls for a particular type of hit(of which there are currently 4). Certain very tough monsters may be impossible to kill by players at lower levels.

Crit Types are: none(0), half-crit(0.5), full-crit(1), and Over-Crit(1.5). A regular hit is any attack role that defeats a defense-role. A half-crit happens if the attack role is divisible by eight, a full crit must have at least 8 successes above the defense AND be divisible by 8, and an over-crit is at least 16 points over the defense roll.

Sample Pool:

• Slashing: 0, 0, 0, 0, .5
• Bludgeoning: 1, 0, 0
• Piercing: 0, 1.5, 0, 0, .5
• Magic
• Untyped: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0

To kill the monster in the above example with a sword, a character would need to land 4 regular hits and one half-crit. To kill it with a hammer, they'd need one full-crit, followed by two regular hits.

Damage Level Trees

The idea is that certain mobs(particularly tougher ones) could have branching damage trees. The idea is that by doing damage in a particular pool, you then make alternate pools smaller. So for exmaple by inflicting 3 levels of piercing damage, the slashing damage pool becomes much smaller and requires fewer crits.

Defense

Players have attack points, monsters have defense points. When a player attacks, the attack removes a certain amount of defense points. A monster cannot be damaged until all his defense points are gone. Monsters also regenerate defense points. Players can also learn special attacks that help remove defense points.

Immunities and Damage Reduction

Certain mobs may be entirely immune to a particular damage type. Others will have "damage reduction" abilities which heighten their crit-requirements if not bypassed. Still others have "hit immunities" that must be bypassed just to attack them.

Ideas for immunities: Alignment, metal, and Magical types. The simplest monsters have no immunity. The immunities can require specific combinations(AG a metal and alignment-bypass) there will also be bypasses that get past everything, but these would be very high-level.