Programing Progress

Been two weeks and I haven't gotten as much done as I wanted for Combat Test. Though that seems the standard when left to my own devices I get no little projects done, when I have deadlines for serious things I manage to find the time.

At the moment I have it one on one system. I have a basic set up for being able to change that in the future but at the moment testing to make things work out alright are top priority, I can add the wrinkle of three or more combatants later and pull out hair debugging it. The system was inspired quite a bit by Weapons of the Gods which I talked on in a post a while ago. Weapons of the Gods had a mechanic called the river where you could store good dice rolls and use them later or even used the ones saved to vastly improve your current dice roll. While that is interesting I'm taking a different take on it. The player chooses an action, the pool is rolled, then they move the individual dice to a "speed" pool, an "action" pool, and a "defense" pool. At the moment you can choose to put no dice in any of the pools, with the exception of defense as that at the moment takes any left over dice, but this may change in the future. From there it's success counting to see if the attack is successful against the opponent or not.

That's the basics of the system. Right now two things are being debated on adding and have had the groundwork put in for them. The first being varied defenses. Each character can change their defense set up on their turn and it'll take place when their initiative comes up. The basic is just a dodge, nothing special if your defense pool beats the active action pool for an attack you get to ignore the damage. After that is block, which lowers some of your success for your block pool, though even if the opponents attack succeeds you get a degree of damage deduction. The last defense option is parry, where if you are successful you get a counter attack. I am not quite sure on the mechanics of it as this could easily be an overpowered maneuver which may be part of the hold up on it.

The second system I've been working on and finally did enough testing to be happy with is a d20 standard. Accurate and Power attacks. You sacrifice some successes, thus missing more, to deal more damage. Or  you sacrifice damage to hit more often. A bit of tweaking got it to numbers that I was pleased with and not making the normal attack worthless, though actual testing could be worthwhile.

Beyond those improvements I'm going to have to think a bit harder about things to put in. Could do some special skill or magic system but I would rather wait on that. Those just seem to be a cheap solution that isn't adding to the system right now, not saying it couldn't be added in.

Outside of the Combat Tester front I did some looking to see if I could get python to read single characters for some fancy output possibilities. I found some samples and a bit of playing with them and it works easily enough. Though it though sadly it makes it OS specific which irks me as python is a very cross system interrupter.