What is in your opinion the best or funnest system for melee combat?

Damn it, stop calling out the trolls... it's super awkward.

How about FFG Star Wars or Legends of the Wulin?

I third this request

Now I'm curious too.

I'm not like super dubious or anything, I have actually looked at the rules a bit myself and they look good and all, I just want to see what the play is actually like in practice.

Legends of the Wulin. It's built for high action Wuxia combat, and it has the best combat system in any game I've ever played.

Even without getting into the unique twists and tricks your Internal and External combat styles give you, the core combat system is still nuanced and interesting with bare bones characters, giving you plenty of options and interesting decisions to make every single around.

It's a much more cinematic and narrative focused combat system than most, focusing on the broad strokes of the fight rather than going into nitty gritty blow by blow detail, but the blend of fluff and mechanics makes every single fight a story event in and of itself, a clash of wills and ideals as much as blades.

The only downside is that the book is so badly edited the system is a fucking nightmare to actually learn.

That really depends. What do you value in combat?

>What is in your opinion the best or funnest system for melee combat?

the Riddle of Steel.

Combat is far less abstracted than normal, you choose what to attack with, where on your opponent, and how. The opponent decides how exactly they will defend and then the success threshold determines how effective the attack was. Armor is meaningful there are no hitpoint systems, and every wound has an exact effect on a person, bleeds over time. People don't die when their hit points disappear, they die when they get run through with a spear or their head chopped off.

Real Life

RoS and LotW are often cited as the two best combat systems in roleplaying games, RoS for more realistic stuff, LotW for more over the top stuff.

4e is also sometimes mentioned as the best gamey combat system, after the math fixes.

Dungeon World is pretty fast and fun.

>4e is also sometimes mentioned as the best gamey combat system, after the math fixes.

Strike! is a streamlined 4e clone; runs faster and with less fiddly numbers (in exchange, it has less granularity, and only 1 book). I'd recommend it if you want 4e style combats without having to fix the maths.

Neither are really focused exclusively on _melee_ combat, however (more like squad-sized skirmish combat I guess?), so for OP probably Riddle of Steel.

I've looked at Strike, and it honestly seems lacking in depth to me. The attempts to streamline got rid of a lot of the stuff I liked in 4e. I can see why some people would like it, it's a significantly pared down alternative, but I like a bit of crunch in my combat system.

Also, isn't RoS meant to have been replaced by Song of Swords, or one of a number of other successor systems?

Something rules-light with a decent helping of improvisation. It'll go quicker, give better results, and be more cinematic and immersive than a heavier system. Something like Barbarians of Lemuria works well.

>I've looked at Strike, and it honestly seems lacking in depth to me. The attempts to streamline got rid of a lot of the stuff I liked in 4e. I can see why some people would like it, it's a significantly pared down alternative, but I like a bit of crunch in my combat system.

I get what you are saying, but I can't offhandedly think of any glaring omission from 4e (assuming you don't miss scaling bonuses to attack and defense that are supposed to even out anyway). Some extra options for the roles and the classes would be nice tho (teleporting necromancer to better match feylock, for example)

>Also, isn't RoS meant to have been replaced by Song of Swords, or one of a number of other successor systems?

Right, I just mentally group all those under RoS.

>funnest
nigga...

Did you just claim people saying RQ6 combat is great are trolls and then post FFG Star Wars as the best combat system?

What the fuck is wrong with you?

RoS is extremely overrated. Yes, the system is realistic. Yes, it does without HP. But is that something outstanding or completely novel? No.

Combat is slow and counterintuitive as there are tons of parameters to take into account. And while it doesn't have HP, it has a huge table with wound levels and their adverse effects. Open D6, Mini Six, and Kult do wound levels much simpler.

Stop shilling Strike!

Why does Veeky Forums keep shilling Strike!?

>Complain about shilling
>Point out a post criticizing it

>But is that something outstanding or completely novel?
>Combat is slow and counterintuitive
Maybe you should try playing it before complaining? You sound like rules-lite cultist desu senpai.

RuneQuest operates on a pool of Action Points (AP). Most players have 2-3 action points without magical aide, and a few luck points they can use to skew the dangerous game in their favor.

Rounds consist of cycles. Everyone takes one action in a cycle, spending 1 AP on their turn (they must spend 1 AP per turn). Actions include attacking or outmaneuvering multiple foes to prevent them from attacking you or refilling saves on magical effects. When no one has AP left the round is over. Outside their turn they can spend AP on reactions - dodge, parry, etc. which means they have to be careful to not spend all their AP and be left unable to act during a round.

The actions you can take are very open, and some actions require multiple turns to accomplish if they are complex - casting a spell takes a full round, reloading a weapon takes a few turns, a charge takes a number of turns depending on the distance traveled, etc. Meanwhile moving, melee attacks, etc all take 1 action so you can interrupt a complicated action. Adds a layer of tactics.

Then when you attack you determine if the defender or attack wins an advantage, and choose a combat effect. As an attacker you can trip or push or even impale someone with your weapon. As a defender you can force the attacker to waste a turn or throw sand in their eyes or even have them injure themselves during the attack. Obviously the bigger advantage you gain (like if you critical or they fumble) the stronger the effect.

It has some initially hard to grasp details, like your action doesn't end until the beginning of your next turn - so for example when you move to an opponent they can't attack first. But it is very open, engaging, and a streamlined version of what a lot of systems go for. Hell, the Mythras Imperative book is 34 pages and has all the basic rules of the game. Try it and if you like it get the full book, the additional detail really adds a lot without bogging things down.

Forgot the book.

I'll expand using what I know of Runequest, though I use MRQ;

One player attacks another; his spear skill is say 50, the player opposing him declares he will parry this attack with his parry skill of 47.

They roll at turn's end, attacker rolls 52, the situational modifier for difficulty of the task is 0, as we are in a well lit open space, both combatants are stationary and standing, so he needed only to roll under his skill to hit; his attack is a hit, but the defender has rolled an 18, suffessfully interposing his shield between him and the spearhead.

The attacker rolls for damage with his shortspear; his weapon die is 1d8, plus his damage bonus of say 1d2,we'll say his combined Size and Strength stats are 26.

He rolls to hit on a d20, and gets a 10, which on a human is the chest.

He rolls the damage, we'll say the total is an eight, but since the defender succeeded on the parry he gets to add the armour value of his Kite shield (we'll assume his chest is otherwise unarmoured).

Kite Shield has AV of 10, which acts to directly reduce the damage of the spear by that number; since the spear's damage value is eight this reduces it to nothing, however, had it hit the chest, the eight damage would have been a lethal wound for an average human.

RQ combat is quick and deadly.

Addendum; in an actual combat both parties would be making multiple attacks and parries each, all resolved at the end of the round.

Say, you could use one AP to block an incoming shot, one to strike the man in front of you with your shield, and another to stab at the man to your right.

In MRQ I believe action pools for offensive and defensive actions are separate, but you can only parry so many attacks per round, shields let you parry an extra attack per round which means they're pretty damn good.

Are there significant differences between original RuneQuest and Mongoose RuneQuest? Like, say I was interested in trying the game—is there any reason I should pick up MRQ over RQ6, or vice versa?

This. I've had much better experinces playing and gming more rules light improvisational games' combat with people who are creative and know something about combat/violence/action than in games' with lots of crunch. If I want tables and tactics I'll play a hex&chit game.

Dogs In The Vineyard gets my vote for the most enjoyable and tense with its bidding dice/skills for narrative control. The back and forth as the conflict becomes increasingly serious and violent the more players draw works really well.

Fuck... This system looks fun as hell and I doubt I'll ever find a group for it.

"It depends" is a perfectly cromulent answer to that question.

No it isn't.

The question is what you prefer the most as a combat system. It doesn't depend on anything, it's just a lame and typical pseudointellectual response.

What's the goal of the prompt here? It's to explore new systems. So suggest something. No doubt there is difference in the appeal of various combat systems, that's fine. We're here to list them all.

that sounds awful.

It's tricky, but games do recruit for it. It's been pretty quiet for a while, but #LotW on Sup/tg/ has had recruitment going once or twice.

neat... Finger's crossed.