DC Adventures - Combat Rules

Im sorry, it's just that the combat is less intuitive than the usual hit point thing. Basically, I am finding hard to measure how close to defeated someone is.

Im okay with combats taking just few turns when it's 2 characters of similar PL.

As I'll be the GM I think this is the biggest challenge I have - getting these mechanics straight, so that I can have balanced NPC antagonists.

If it's at Nigeria then it may be terrorists.

If it's in a more developed part of the world maybe its some kind of false flag incident to start a war (like some people say 9/11 was).

Do insurance scams work on oil rigs?

You need ideas? I don't get mechanics much yet, but ideas I got a plenty. Here you go

>eco terrorism
>oil rig is actually a decoy, they're actually investigating something super creepy/valuable/dangerous underwater
>oil rig accidentally digged into a shitton of kryptonite/valuable mcguffin of your world, and Villains want a piece of it
>thing is actually a lab, once heroes arrive both villains and most crew went zombie
>one guy in there is actually a future despot, villains are time travellers who went there kill the guy before it comes to pass, morale decision for heroes
>they have some awesome porn going down there

Wait, that means everyone has... "4 HP".
As in, each time you take a degree of failure, you go down one "level" in the conditions scale.

So I would be KO'd if I took 2 hits, being:
>1 degree then 3 degree
>2 degree then another 2 degree
>three degree then an extra 1 degree

...Is that how it works?

Basically.

And you're welcome for the link.

>eco terrorism

can someone explain to me how ecological terrorism actually works?

damaging the environment doesn't seem like the best way to go about terrorism when you can just blow up people and/or things filled with people. especially if you are trying to do it in a developed part of the world.

I'm saving the porn and time travel ideas for future use in less serious games.

>Do insurance scams work on oil rigs?

only when a republican is in office, otherwise the EPA would make it not worth it.

Kinda. But you can take a ton of 1 and 2 degree hits before hitting the 2 3's or a 4 degree needed to go down.

Every -1 to your toughness just drops your toughness by 1. But as long as you get lucky, you can keep going. I've gone from Toughness 12 to Toughness -2 in a partially brutal battle I managed to keep avoiding rolling bad enough to be KOed in.

Holy shit, I assume that this battle took forever?

Also - so I can be hit by One Degree damage hits infinitely, and never die from it?

Eco terrorism is not necessarily about damaging the environment. It's actually damaging someone who the "terrorists" see as the perpretator of such damage. Greenpeace, to a pussy-ier extent, does that.

So if an oil rig is killing lots of fish schools as a side effect from its activities, for example, a group of eco terrorists could threaten put the place down. For mother nature and all.

If p0rn wont make them hero it down somewhere, nothing will.

If possible, I'd like to read a turn by turn narration of combat in which one of the oponents is defeated.

Dont even need to care about the numbers of the rolls. Something like that would do

>"Turn 1"
Hero hits Villain; Villain fails Resistence by 12, three degrees. He's staggered, -1 Toughness.

And so on.

Also - in game terms, how can one tell which character is "winning" in a 1v1? The ammount of -Toughness isn't right, as one might have negative toughness and still hit for 4 degrees.

Superman vs Black Adam, because that's simple enough, two burly brawlers and they're both in the DC Adventures Hero's Handbook, no going out looking for them.

This is also a comparatively simple fight, I'm not going to go and do any weird shenanigans, this is just punch, punch, punch, punch until someone is KOd.
Superman rolls Init +2 (14), BA rolls Init +6 (12), Superman first
Both have DC34 damage attacks
Speed is irrelevant in this fight, both have flight speed 15
Superman rolls attack 17 (6+11), which is a miss (BA Parry +11 = 21)
BA rolls attack 15 (2+13), misses (S Parry +10 = 20)
S rolls attack 23 (11+12), hits, BA rolls Tough 36 (18+18), no damage
BA attacks 19, miss (20)
S attacks 23, hit, 29 Tough (34-29), fail by 1 degree, 1 bruise = Tough 17
BA attacks 20, hit, 33, no damage
S attacks 16, miss
BA attacks 19, miss
S attacks 25, BA rolls 30, fail by 1 degree, Tough now 16
BA attacks 32, S rolls 20, fail by 3 degrees, staggered (dazed - only 1 standard action, hindered - half movement)
S attacks 29, BA rolls 28, fail by 2 degrees, dazed
BA attacks 31, S rolls 30, fail by 1 degree, Tough 17 (S recovers dazed)
S attacks 21, BA rolls 34, nothing (BA recovers dazed)
BA attacks 31, S rolls 36, nothing
S attacks 23, BA rolls 34, nothing
BA attacks 24, S rolls 24, fail by 2 degrees, dazed
S rolls 15, miss
BA rolls 26, S rolls 18, fail by 4 degrees, incapacitated

This was a relatively long fight mostly because of the whiffing and also because they're targeting each other's strongest defenses - just two men hitting each other as hard as they can.

You can...if you can manage. But eventually, you'll be worn down.

Save DC is 15+Damage.

You can only make it so long before you drop from sheer negatives.

atomicthinktank.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=37545&p=849589#p849589
Here you go.

Oh my god, this is utterly hilarious. How stupidly boring and long would that fight be?! And super complicated bookkeeping with modifiers... this is the worst combat system I have ever seen.

Okay, I need an alternative system for supers.

So basically, you either kill waves upon waves of pointless minions (that shouldn't even be in the game in the first place) in a single turn, then spend the next hour and a half rolling against a "boss" fight. Woah.

You do realize that it would mean rolling around THIRTY times to finish a fight, right?

This is really an awful combat system.

It isn't relatively long, it's hilariously prolonged. I cant imagine any comicbook with these two powerhouses (or any powerhouses for that matter) needing to exchange about 18 blows to get to a conclusion.

I'm sorry, I know Im posting a lot. But this was a ridiculous turn off for the system if there isn't a fix for it.

That's pretty much par for the course for two brick style characters running into each other and refusing to do anything but punch. It's a bit more dynamic usually, people being knocked through buildings, high speed flying punches, heat vision, magic lightning, and the usual end to the fight posted is Supes holds until Captain Marvel arrives, and they double team Adam, Adam tries to use his magic lightning to hurt Supes, and winds up taking a hit from it and switching back to human form, or Superman goes down because the plot needs him removed for now. An actual fight would use environment, other powers, teammates, taking advantage of flaws. Probably a better fight to look at in terms of a sample would be Batman or Robin vs. The Joker. They're still about equal in stats, with Batman/Robin being more accurate, but Joker more damaging, since he's going for kills. Don't feel like rolling it out, but Bats should win, and it would probably go to the Joker in a Joker vs. Robin fight, because Robin is about half as tough.

I've played the system a lot. It's perfectly fun.

You're freaking out over literally nothing.

This is why you can have crits on 16+, you'll need them

No, not really at all.

No, not at all. Can you actually read or understand basic mechanics?

>So if an oil rig is killing lots of fish schools as a side effect from its activities, for example, a group of eco terrorists could threaten put the place down. For mother nature and all.

That seems like a good way to have another deepwater horizon disaster.

Actually no, I still don't understand it.
By the Supes vs Black Adam example above (thanks user who posted it), it seemed to me that the previous blows are just means to reduce their toughness, because only the 4 degrees actually matter. Anything below that is just making it easier to hit the 4 degrees.

Which means that any hit with one, two or three degrees accomplishes almost nothing. And the 4th one finishes it. There's no such a thing as a "strong blow". You either bruise the guy, or falcon-punch finish him.

This, first and foremost, is a big downer for me.
Please tell me I understood it wrong.

That really is dependant on your ability to enjoy yourself rolling dice repeatedly over a long time.

Seriously, anything that takes 18 turns to go is garbage. I do understand that powers would shorten it, but if I understood, not by a lot.

Sure, no need to post the whole thing again.
But how many rounds, average, would that take?

My biggest beef with the system (the Supes vc BA example especially) is that rolling 18 times to finish a combat is awfully bad design.

The supes vs black adam example provided have the characters combined rolling exactly thirty dice until the fight end.

But I am trying to like this system, so for hotfixes, tell me how much would I break the system if every damage actually stacked (meaning everyone would have "4 hit points", what would make some last longer than others would be their toughness and defenses)

>Both have DC34 damage attacks
That was an arbritary example for this rundown, right? In their sheets, neither of them seem to actually have a DC 34 damage attack.

Yeah, you literally have no fucking clue about what you're talking about.

Maybe you should stop that?

Str 19. That's a DC34 attack. Learn the basic fucking rules.

Before you try to 'fix' anything, learn how the fucking system works.

19 STR + 15 base damage DC. Correct.

I am trying. I wish the book did a good job in putting them all together instead of spread among multiple chapters.

In all seriousness though, thanks. This is actually making me getting a minium grip of it.

Sure, you are correct.

So to make it as simple as possible:
"Any damage below 4 degrees of failure basically only contributes to actually reach the 4 degrees eventually"

Would that be a correct assumption?

"Any damage below your max HP only contributes to actually reach the 0 HP"

Keep in mind that user posted an example of simple mechanical combat. The system is actually fairly flexible with feats, team combat, power stunts, alternate effects on crit, improvised weapons (throw a building at someone--see how their toughness save likes that) and edit scene hero point uses. It's rare that two characters will just sit there punching each other for rounds on end without trying something different to break the stalemate.

That's kind of the point of the system: it incentivizes thinking your way around a threat that would be insurmountable otherwise. Think of all the times in comics where the hero is vastly outmatched but pulls out a win through pluck/luck/determination/innovation/improvisation. The hero point system along with the alternate effect features and clever use of feats and teamwork can even odds and give the players a chance for interesting role playing opportunities.

Yeah, past the initial shock, I'm getting to that conclusion as well.

I think that it may be similar to the old DnD 3.5 problem with feats. If you don't know them, it may prove to be a pitfall, but as you get familiar with the most used one, the system becomes more accessible and these sort of plays start making more sense than simply "punch-punch" fights.

user who posted the Supes vs Black Adam fight here. I deliberately chose that one because their attacks are simple damaging effects and deliberately chose to make it simple, just beating on each other. I could have picked any others (and may, if this topic is still around later or someone wants me to make an example, providing the characters involved are in the books). I was just on a weird schedule last night so I did something simple and quick because I wasn't sure how long I'd be around or how long the topic would be up.