I haven't added lions into NineTenths yet, but I think it's just a matter of time. Lions are pretty cool, aren't they?
What I have been doing, for the last couple of weeks (I think) is testing out the combat rules to make sure that they look right. I had a flash of inspiration about damage and now different weapons do different damage. Initially, I had made them all the same on the theory that fighting is inherently dangerous, but mulling it over I decided that I wanted it to be more likely you'd be scarred by an axe (say) than a staff. Also that the chance of significant damage is higher with different weapons.
When someone takes damage, you draw a card. The value tells you where you've been hit, and the suit tells you how serious it is. The original damage matrix looks like this:
Spades | Hearts | Clubs | Diamonds |
Significant and scars | Significant, no scar | Minor and scars | Minor, no scar |
This is now the damage matrix for a sword. An axe, which is significantly more likely to scar and a little more likely to cause significant damage looks like this:
Spades | Hearts | Clubs | Diamonds |
Significant and scars | Significant and scars | Significant and scars | Minor and scars |
Significant damage reduces your strength, which makes you less effective in combat but also, when strength reaches zero you are incapacitated. The total of minor damage is kept and when it equals the total of current strength and skill, you are incapacitated. Minor damage is also recovered much more quickly than significant damage.
I wanted something which would be quite dangerous, to discourage combat being a first-solution to problems, but not wildly deadly so as to kill the characters constantly. As the physical characteristics belong to the host villagers that the spirits are inhabiting and they are trying to protect the village as a whole, it would look bad if the characters worked their way through the villagers in short order.
I know a little bit of Python, so I started with a bit of code that got one person to fight another with a range of weapons. I scaled it up so they would do that 10000 times and report on the statistics of who won what percentage of the time, how scarred they were and so on. I added in a couple of creatures and did the same thing and it worked OK.
But most fights aren't going to be 1v1, so I rewrote it to allow sides. Now two people can fight three hill goblins or five giant trapdoor spiders (and soon to be some lions!).
Hold on, what about missile fire? Some characters have bows and slings, so that needs to be included. But how do you do that?
None of the characters are Legolas and cannot fire into melee combat. So I ended up with a front and a rear on each side. Missiles fire at missiles and melee continues in the middle. If one rear defeats the other, then they can join in with the melee. If one side in the melee wins then they can attack the rear, with their own rear joining in.
I need to write some code to shuffle the people from the rear to the front - at present the two rears just stop once one is side is all incapacitated. Some characters might do that - if you have a bow and no other weapon, would you jump into a swords and axes combat with just your fists if you didn't have to?
Other things to do:
Morale - I probably want to include some morale-type rules
Armour - it exists, but I need to write to code to add it in
Room and encounter generators - why not? Then I might end up with a random dungeon generator. The other option would be to include a way to code maps so that I can write actual dungeons to explore
While I started this to test out the stats on weapons, I've ended up with something that might be a bit of fun in itself. As I'm coding in line with the paper rules I've written, it's a handy way to play test solo. Not as good as a group, mind, but it might be useful to thrash out some kinks in the rules before real people get subjected to it.
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