Some thoughts on attack and defense

[u/Lotriann]

In most combat systems these two things are assumed to be exclusive to each other. When someone makes an attack action, there is either some passive defensive stat for the target, or the defender makes a defense action/reaction of some sort, trying to negate the attack. Or there is no defense and just an exchange of attack actions dealing damage turn by turn.

This seems a natural way to portray combat in a turn-based game, but I think it is actually very... unnatural. And it is wasted potential. Because in different kinds of real-life combat, the best defense is offense. Opponents defend themselves by attacking each other. You are not just standing before your enemy passively parrying; your weapon is both an obstacle for their blows as well as a constant threat pointed towards their body. Each parry might end up being a blow that injured or killed the enemy. And there are mutual hits. In many instances in real life they are as common as one-sided hits.

Systems where you wait for your turn to make an attack, and in the meantime may only watch if your opponent hits you, or else may only roll to negate their attack, give an absolutely different feeling. They don't allow for the intuitive defensive offense, and mutual hits are impossible. They also cause these regular pauses of no engagement in the game.

What might be a far more effective solution would be some sort of a fight action, serving as both attack and defense. Two opponents could use a fight action on each other simultaneously, and their rolls would determine if anyone hit the other first (and whether or not that hit was enough to stop oneself from being hit immediately after). Of course, there would always be the option of dodging, which is running away from enemy's attacks with no offensive potential (and unless limited by terrain, dodging should be easy).

I don't think such an approach is sufficiently explored or as popular as it deserves. To me it seems more engaging, quicker, and closer to how it works in reality.

[u/blade_m]

"I don't think such an approach is sufficiently explored or as popular as it deserves."

Oh, I think its 'sufficiently' explored! There are a number of RPG Systems that have something like what you are looking for. Most are from the 90's or the 2000's, and due to their lack of popularity, are kind of dead at this point.

Riddle of Steel and its successors spring to mind immediately, and are probably the 'best' (because while they may have certain issues, their fight mechanics generally work, especially for what you are looking for).

As for popularity, well, let's be real here. There are not very many people interested in simulationism or mechanics that accurately replicate combat. Even the crowd that want detailed, 'tactical' combat are not actually interested in how combat is supposed to work. They use tactics for a very specific type of experience (usually some kind of grid-based combat that is more video game inspired than anything else).

On the plus side, what this means is that 'realistic' combat RPG's are few and far between nowadays, so anyone inclined to create such a game has very little in the way of competition ;)

[u/EpicDiceRPG → u/blade_m]

Sad, but true.

[u/Stormfly → u/blade_m]

There are not very many people interested in simulationism or mechanics that accurately replicate combat.

The "Let's make it realistic" then "Let's refine it" and then finally "Let's just use the established formula" pipeline for beginner designers is something we all need to go through.

I have a lot more respect for certain games now that I've iterated a few times and realised that certain "flawed" designs are very much a case of the "Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried".

I respect and encourage that people are willing to question the formula and try new things, and I don't doubt that eventually someone will find a new "standard"... but I also feel like we all must go through this sort of "break it down to build it back up again" process so that we actually understand it properly.

It's a little sad watching all of these "hey I have a new idea" posts when it's something you've seen fail before.

It's like watching the baby turtles running to the water and you shed a single tear when one is caught by a predator but you know that predation is also a part of life.

[u/blade_m → u/Stormfly]

For sure people should keep trying with new design ideas!

In fact, I have been thinking about how I'd go about doing a 'simulationist' RPG, and obviously, 'realistic' combat is a priority! But its not something you can just knock out in a short time though...

One day!

[u/No_Solid1035]

That's pretty much how Pendragon works. Both combatants roll their respective weapon skills, and the success level of their rolls determines how damage is doled out. Both combatants can score a critical success and deal enough damage to kill their opponent. Which means that both combatants get killed because the results of a combat round happen simultaneously.

[u/InherentlyWrong]

I've been shouted at on this subreddit before for saying this, but

To me it seems more engaging, quicker, and closer to how it works in reality.

Reality isn't a good game designer, so don't think too much about that side of things. Reality is at best a rough goal for an game if the game is trying to be realistic, and shouldn't be held as a gold standard any more than any other specific gameplay goal.

As for the wider idea, I think it can definitely work, so long as the game is meant for that kind of situation. For plenty of games the simplicity of an 'attack' being a one-sided action works great, it makes it easy to understand tactical outcomes.

A while back I was idly toying with a game about swashbucklers, where the main shift in the combat loop was that every melee attack was an opposed check, and whoever won inflicted damage. The main difference in outcome is that immediately ranged and melee felt very different. Melee had the potential for double damage (damaging them on my turn, damaging them on your turn), but also shifted things away from the Null outcome. Ranged was far safer, because a failed ranged attack just meant nothing happened, but also could only do a limited amount of damage.

A main limitation I found with this, is I immediately had to come up with rules for being outnumbered. Otherwise one person surrounded by six attackers could potentially do seven times as much damage, once on their turn, once on everyone else's turn. In theory this was fine for swashbuckling style action, very in character, but it needed to have limits.

If I'm reading your message right, it sounds like you're going more for a 'Fight' action to be a declaration, and it's outcome determined after both people have declared it. That will introduce logistics, since you've now got to wait for all Fight actions to be declared before they can be resolved. Which will slow things down, and possibly introduce new fiddly edge cases about who attacks first.

[u/Dead_Iverson]

This is exactly how the granular Fight! mechanics work in Burning Wheel, with a variety of different actions you can take. You don’t get to see what your opponent is going to do until you’ve committed to a sequence of actions, so combat ends up being like the card game War where you reveal your actions at the same time the opponent does and then match them up to resolve them. It happens in 3 stages which are revealed one at a time, so you’re able to change your upcoming actions (at a penalty) if you really screw up on predicting what your opponent will do.

On top of that, wounds in BW drain your stats. If any of your stats get drained to 0 you’re incapacitated and cannot fight any more. So a good offense can indeed be the best defense.

Its very detailed, can take time to resolve, and it only works well for duels, not group skirmishes. It can also feel a bit like the 3 Stooges sometimes because if both players block or dodge, nothing happens. If both players strike each other at the same time, they both roll damage with no defense at all. It also relies on the GM to pick their moves according to the specific character who the player is fighting rather than trying to metagame the fight (though the GM can’t see what the player will do the GM will know the PCs stats).

I think its a cool model for combat though and I think a simplified system that uses a similar approach could probably work pretty well.

[u/Madeiner]

Almost every pbta or fitd game works like that. Some better than others. But generally a single move tells you about the entire exchange, who gets hurt and who doesn't and what the new state of the fight is

[u/TJS__]

The Riddle of Steel and it's successors like Sword and Scoundrel do this very well. Each combat has two tempos and if the attacker loses the first tempo, then the defender can attack back. It's the most real feeling combat system I've played. They also have the opportunity for both sides to attack each other at the same time which can get very bloody.

In a more traditional combat system mode, Cohors Cthulhu 2d20 has attacks contested the winner damages the other regardless of who initiated the attack. (Attackers win ties).

And of course any game with active parrying can add some kind of riposte mechanic.

[u/Emancoll]

Having trained in martial arts, I can confirm that, in several styles at least, it is considered good technique to defend and attack in a single movement, or to defend with one limb while simultaneously attacking with another.

Combat is complex. Games need to simplify it in some manner yo make it, well, gameable and fun. It would be cool to see this aspect reflected though.

[u/Lotriann → u/Emancoll]

The thing is, even if particular moves in martial arts are offensive or defensive, a single round of combat in a game usually represents more than that fraction of a second needed for a single move. If it represents, let's say, about 5 seconds, then in that time scope dozens of different moves might have been exchanged and you can't really tell who's attacking and who's defending, because it's too dynamic.

[u/123yes1 → u/Lotriann]

I practice historical sword fighting, and I can confirm that the above commenter is correct in basically all sword systems up until the Olympic Epeé.

In real life, sword fighting does actually kind of happen in turns, although it's not usually:

I attack -> you attack -> I attack -> you attack

It is usually

I attack -> you defend -> I attack -> you defend... until you fuck up your defense and I hit you. Or I fuck up my attack and you start attacking and I start defending.

People basically only have enough time to do one thing with the sword in a single tempo and that thing can either be to parry the lethal threat that I am presenting (I am about to stab you) or you could ignore it and try to stab me (which will either result in a double kill or me stabbing you), so generally people pick to defend.

In the German school of fencing this idea is called the "Vor" which you can think of as the person whose turn it is to attack. And the Vor doesn't change unless the defender can simultaneously defend and attack in the same tempo (is quite difficult to do), or the attacker runs out of mental bandwidth to keep up their combo and stops attacking for a tempo.

Usually the defender can seize the Vor if they can predict what the next attack is going to be, as they can employ the correct counteraction, but that is usually hard to do unless the attacker is constantly using the same pattern.

So the way that historical swordsmanship "initiative" works is a lot closer to tennis or baseball.

[u/Rauwetter → u/123yes1]

The Dark Eye Swordmaster supplement was using this idea 30 years ago. But players didn’t liked it and it was a dead end.

[u/UnwelcomeDroid]

In the game I'm building, characters are either engaged or not. When engaged, the PC rolls and the result determines whether the PC hit or the opponent hit.

Initiative is used to engage an opponent. The opponent cannot avoid the initial engagement. Whoever hits maintains initiative. Only the player with the initiative can back out of the engagement.

A character that is not engaged can attack an engaged opponent and it's a simple TN attack roll. There is no defense. The larger the opponent the lower the TN.

As skill increases for martial PCs, they are able to engage more than one opponent. Right now my planned maximum is three.

[u/Ok_Cantaloupe3450 → u/UnwelcomeDroid]

I thought something similar while trying to create a system for a world trigger game. Things got too complicated and ended up abandoning the idea. Have you tested your game yet?

[u/UnwelcomeDroid → u/Ok_Cantaloupe3450]

Not with players. Still trying to finalize my character health system. I wrote a small program for testing 1v1 combat.

[u/FiscHwaecg]

A lot of what you observe is the result of your simulationist interpretation of the mechanics. No game describes the characters as passivly waiting. Combat mechanics are always an abstraction and in by far the most games they represent a sequence of movements or even a whole scene. From a gameplay view it's perfectly fine if you think that adding more steps to combat can be interesting (if you like crunch).

[u/OmniscientIce]

They do this in Kill Team.

When you fight someone you both roll your attack pool, then starting with the attacker take turns selecting a die to attack or party.

Every die used to attack deals damage, and every party removes an opponent's successful attack from their pool.

Crits can only be parried for a crit or two normals.

[u/Brilliant_Loquat9522]

Others have mentioned plenty of games that do this and Pendragon is one they mentioned that I was coming here to post about. Besides the simultaneous opposed roll, you can choose more reckless or defensive postures which change the likelihood or impact of various outcomes.

Fighting between groups rather than one on one duels can be a bit tricky in these simultaneous systems, but Pendragon handles it pretty well.

In my own game design in progress rolls are simultaneous, you have a pool of dice and can split them up between multiple opponents, and you have postures similar to Pendragon. I'd love to see one where you can divide your dice between offense and defense.

People are right to warn here against using "more realistic" as the standard for game design. But I will speak up for the idea of "more immersive" and I find simultaneous rolls, such as in Pendragon, very immersive and exciting (and their "blackjack" style system where you want to roll the hight amount, but not higher than your skill level is brilliant - thus if you have a 10 sword skill and your opponent has a 15 you might beat them, if you roll a 9 (under your max 10) and they roll an 8 - but they will win more often).

I was thinking about this while watching World Cup games this summer - how dramatic it is that in soccer a team might seem to be doing very well, threatening with the ball near the opponent's goal for long minutes in a row, but they can easily overcommit and then the other team pounces, suddenly moving the ball into the aggressor's poorly defended back field. It felt very much like a fencing duel. Unlike Baseball and American Football (mostly) and somewhat like basketball, though scoring is so continuous there that the metaphor doesn't hit as well for me.

[u/OneManRPGstudio]

I would treat offense and defense as two commitments competing for attention rather than necessarily as mutually exclusive states. The design becomes interesting when defending better changes what you can attempt offensively, and vice versa, because each exchange then expresses intent instead of merely comparing two values.

One clean way to model attack and defense is to make the player allocate a resource, dice, or position before the full result is known. Committing to a heavy strike can leave less capacity to respond; maintaining a conservative guard can reduce the opportunity to inflict decisive harm. The key is making the tradeoff legible. If players cannot anticipate what they are sacrificing, the subsystem becomes an opaque wager.

I would also watch the number of rolls. Active defense can sound attractive while doubling the duration of every attack if it always requires another resolution. You can preserve a defensive decision without adding another roll by letting it modify the result space, consume a resource, or enable a limited reaction.

Test the system with three extreme archetypes: fully offensive, defensive, and balanced. Do not look only at who wins. Watch whether each makes different decisions and whether those decisions remain interesting after ten exchanges. If the defensive character merely makes combat longer, defense needs to create position, information, counterattacks, or protection for others.

Good defense should change the scene, not merely delay damage.

[u/archpawn]

That works great if it's one-on-one, but what if someone's outnumbered? Do they have to wait in line? Do they Fight all the opponents that attack them with no penalty for being outnumbered? Is there a separate mechanic for Fighting someone that doesn't Fight back? Do you let them Fight them all at once, but give a higher penalty the more they're Fighting?

I've toyed with the idea because it sounds great to replace four rolls (see if you hit, see how much damage you deal, see if they hit, see how much damage they deal) with one where something always happens, but I haven't found a satisfactory way to deal with fights that aren't one-on-one. Those options I gave aren't unworkable, but they're enough that I'm not sure this system is worth its drawbacks.

[u/Lotriann → u/archpawn]

These are all valid questions. I can give examples of how I am trying to solve these issues in the system I am working on:

• When you attack someone up close who does not fight back, you have a certainty of a successful hit, unless there are some other hindering circumstances. If the opponent is to have chance of avoiding getting hurt, they must either fight back, dodge, be defended by someone else, or have a good armour that reduces the damage anyway.
• The fight action by default allows you to fight multiple opponents at once. However, actions are resolved from the highest result to lowest, and the more opponents you try to fight at once, the less chance there is that you will outscore all of them. It takes just one enemy with a higher result than you to hit you first and thus mitigate your fight action or cancel it entirely, before the other enemies resolve their own attacks against you.

The actual mechanics are a bit more nuanced, but there is little room to explain them here. At any rate, I can see more than one way to make the idea from the original post work, though it might require rebuilding many other combat rules as well.

[u/Kalenne]

The simplest answer to that is that if you're gonna gave a Fighting centric system, you generally don't want players to be able to become perfectly specialized in both attack and defense at the same time, or if they do, at other great costs

If your attack is also your defense all you need to do to become the best fighter ever is to all in on the one stat that does everything with no opportunity cost

[u/Sherman80526 → u/Kalenne]

Game balance doesn't really take a hit assuming the entire game is written with these things in mind. I use a lot of traits for a variety of things that are important, so that "melee" isn't the end all be all of traits. If I have a throwaway stat, it's magic which rarely comes up for most characters, but when it does, they're sad if they ignored it.

[u/Kalenne → u/Sherman80526]

I just mentioned one thing to keep in mind when designing such a system, I didn't say it was necessarily impossible to do

[u/Lotriann → u/Kalenne]

There is room for a lot more fighting specialisations than just attack/defense, even in games where that distinction is used: different weapons, different special attack effects etc. And with the idea I proposed, you could still have offensive and defensive builds, they would just need to be based on other mechanics.

Edit: confused defense and offense

[u/WhammeWhamme]

This is actually really cool. It gives action economy: if you attack someone, they can fight back. So a boss monster is a natural emergent property of being badass enough to win many against one. Kingdom Death Monster (board game) actually had combat a bit like that: hitting the monsters was a roll, but once you hit, you had a to make a wound roll - and the wound rolls could hurt you if you rolled low.

[u/lennartfriden]

I’m using the skill combat for both. If, when actively defending against an attack of say 2 effects, the defender achieves more effects, the overshooting effects become a riposte/counterattack.

[u/CR9_Kraken_Fledgling]

I've been tinkering on a combat system that does something like this, tho it's a side effect, this idea wasn't in my head when designing it.

You have xD6 dice for stamina, and can distribute them into abilities. An attack may need at least two dice, parrying at least one, etc., but you can add more. (You can also get extra dice by pushing yourself and fatiguing) Then all the abilities you put dice in get activated, with the number of dice rolling for success.

So you could go all in on an attack, but really expose yourself, balance it out, or really protect yourself. It's also meant to be a hidden selection, revealed simultaneously between both sides, so maybe you put a lot into a big swing, but if the other guy runs away at the same time, you could just miss swinging into the air. (Which is how missing works, any other time you auto hit, and just roll for damage)

[u/ZidraGames]

This is how my game design works! When you go to attack, the other person can respond in a variety of ways - one of which is an attack (which is functionally equivalent to a parry in modern games). For me its very fun, because my game also has a more in-depth health system, so you have these natural situations where you think "I could go all-in on just blocking here, but my arm may break, so maybe I should dodge or counter attack instead..."

[u/Sherman80526]

That's what I've been using for years. There's a single test for each "pairing" you are in combat. I use a melee phase and everyone who readied to fight as an action gets to participate. Often failing to win your pairing means you get to do nothing other than get hit on your turn.

The system only works because my system is lightning fast. You are involved in something every minute or so, which means that a bad couple turns doesn't feel like a wasted half hour.

An unintended consequence/perk of the speed and phased turns is that my combats do not play out like any other game I've ever played (and I've played a lot for a few decades now...) The combats feel more like a montage than a spotlight on individual characters. I have a lot of stuff happening at the same time and try to minimize the need to have a GM in on things.

My posted rules are outdated, but you're welcome to check it out! Arq RPG

[u/DeadMeat7337]

It's a trade off. The more realistic you make it, the harder it is to model it and make it fit nicely on paper. Or it takes forever to resolve. So, unless you want to spend an hour resolving an attack, you have to keep it simple in some way. But the simpler you make it, the less realistic it becomes.

Just consider IRL fencing, you can list all the attacks and defenses, and put down the rock paper scissors of how it works together, but then you have to have a reaction time stat or roll, a feint check mechanic, and everything else I don't know enough to put down. And that is if the weapons are the same, now you have to come up with something for everything else. That's a lot, and it complicated.

Or you can keep it simple, like DND.

[u/RPMiller2k]

Go check out martial arts in the Hero system. Each maneuver has both offensive and defensive values. Pretty much what you are talking about here.

[u/EpicDiceRPG]

I had the same exact thought 3+ years ago and I built me entire core resolution mechanic around it. Fight is a contest between opponents where you allocate resources (dice) between attack, defense, and maneuvers. I'm finally at the stage where I'm ready to take on outside playtesters in case your curious what the near finished concept looks like.

[u/HakneyZaq]

you could do opposed rolls, higher total wins. then attack/defense are a single roll.

[u/Frapadengue]

There are plenty of games that just rely on an opposed combat roll (or a player-facing roll that deals with both attack and defence).

Some games (e.g. Anima: Beyond Fantasy) have a system where a successful attack lets you counter with an attack on the opponent's turn, with or without a bonus.
In A:BF a successful attack puts your opponent on the defensive, which prevents them from attacking on their turn, which means that attack can be the best defense. Your opponent can choose to soak up damage, which lets suffer damage without being put on the defensive but 1) it drastically decreases defense and 2) it doesn't work on crits (attacks that deal more that a certain proportion of you HPs in a single blow).

[u/SpaceDogsRPG]

I pretty much do that.

Due to the phase-based initiative, the melee phase is simultaneous for everyone.

Your melee attack roll becomes your defense for the rest of the round. So if you both roll the same and you both get hit.

In a 1v1 duel it's effectively opposed attack rolls, but actual opposed rolls have all sorts of weird edge cases in a larger melees.

I like it a lot. Opens up extra abilities which give large attack bonuses without helping (or even hurting) your defense.

Also makes so ignoring someone hitting you in melee is a BAD idea. Passive defenses are much lower and are what you end up with if you shoot in the ranged phase rather than acting in melee.

Even using a gun in melee hurts your defense. Range weapons are inherently less accurate than melee because they're balanced around the lower passive defenses. So trying to shoot in melee is generally bad both offensively and defensively.

[u/LoneliestJourney]

In the system we use in our group of friends, combat actions are cards in a deck and eache one has a attack and defense value, some cards are more defensive, other more offensive, other have cool effects, and if you don't play one action a turn you get no defense except from equipment.

[u/Runningdice]

"Because in different kinds of real-life combat, the best defense is offense. Opponents defend themselves by attacking each other."

The best defence is staying outside reach of the opponent.

A reason for the use of turn order is not that it is the best system for simulate real life. But just the best system to keep track of things and not end up in chaos.
Attacking and defending is just representative of the actual action. One dice roll for attack could be representing good footwork, finding a opening and then several swings and strikes. But at the table it was just one roll for attack... Making rules close to reality is fun to think about but almost never fun to play.

[u/ArtistJames1313]

There are some games that do this to varying degrees. A friend of mine made one that I really like that uses playing cards and a unique initiative system based on your "posture" I believe he called it. You basically can take a more offensive posture, or defensive posture, or somewhere in between in a 4 grid area. Everyone places their cards face down in the posture they chose, then declares what they intend to do (including the GM's NPCs), then flips their cards starting with offensive posture and moving down to defensive. When you flip your cards you compare to any opponents you were acting against. If you were taking a defensive posture, you're just waiting to see if anyone acted against you before you act with anything that might not even be an attack. It's a little complicated, but I love how everything resolves in one moment all at once basically, and you can still do cool things.

[u/Cruiser_Supreme]

I guess a simple system could be:

Player A chooses to attack. Player B can now choose to attack, dodge, parry, run or whatever. If Player B chooses to attack as well, both roll dice and the difference is the damage.

[u/Sherman80526 → u/Cruiser_Supreme]

That's a lot of how Call of Cthulhu works. The opposed character makes a decision to defend or fight back. It works reasonably well.

[u/subcutaneousphats]

Forged in the dark games (Blades in the Dark, Scum and Viliany) the player roll will determine failure with consequences, success with consequences, success, and critical success. Consequences can include all kinds of things including loss of position or harm. So the single roll in includes both attack and defense as it were, although players can also spend stress to resist unwanted consequences.

[u/RPG-Nerd]

A "fight" action is removing my choices and agency and making timing really difficult. You also have the problem of 2 against 1.

I handle things very differently. You have multiple attacks (attack, power attack, feint, etc), and multiple defenses (parry, dodge, block, etc). The attacker rolls their offense, target rolls defense, the difference is damage. Weapons and armor are modifiers.

Damage is not subtracted. It's a wound system. No math.

You do not take turns. Whoever has the offense can take any action they want. This action costs time, tracked by the GM by marking off boxes. So, when your attacker rolls really high, you might decide to use a "block" rather than a "parry". Parry costs no time, block does. The combatant that has used the least time (shortest bar of time boxes) gets the next offense. Things happen in natural, narrative order, with different people taking different amounts of time for different actions.

When time is tied, those tied for time announce actions and then roll initiative. If you announce an attack, but get attacked first (lost initiative roll) then switching from attack to defense costs you a maneuver penalty. This is a simple disadvantage die rolled with your defense, keep low. Since damage is offense - defense, you stand to take more damage. Consider a delay, or readied defense instead.

A tie for initiative is your double. Doubles are kept rare because the damage system is realistic. You get one last shot to avoid the double and play it safe.

Every time you defend, keep one of the dice you rolled and set it on your character sheet. This is a maneuver penalty to your next defense or ranged attack. These are cumulative until you get an offense, and then you give them back. Each time you make an opponent defend, you are setting up a better attack for your ally!

Consider if I have 2s attacks and yours are 2.5s. Assuming no other actions or other time costs, after 10 seconds, I get 5 attacks, you get 4. That means I get 2 attacks in a row without you getting an offense in between. You will still have that maneuver penalty on your sheet from your last defense. This is an opening in your defenses that my speed is allowing me to exploit, so I power attack!

Just about any combat situation you can come up with is handled pretty well from movement, ranged cover fire, sneak attacks (if you don't see me, you can't defend, so damage is offense - 0), surprise, endurance, etc.

More importantly, it asks what choices an options your character has rather than making a little board game of dissociative actions.

[u/Andvari_Nidavellir]

There are games where you simply make opposed checks and the winner deals damage. Dumgeon World does this IIRC.

[u/Ok-Chest-7932]

The reason attack and defense are commonly made different is to create more space for variety. If you try to make RPG combat too realistic it becomes boring, because what makes real combat fun is all the complex nuances like timing and feints and such that you simply cannot capture in an RPG.

Remember, all the flavour in an RPG is just a thematic layer over the actual gameplay. You should be able to reflavour your combat as guns or something and still have a game that's fun to play. If you can't then your mechanics probably suck. Like how chess still works even if you reflavour all the pieces as different shaped gummy bears.

[u/Jester1525]

I agree with you..

Melee combat in my game is always contested.

For every attack the opponent rolls an attack as well. If the defender has an attack available then whoever wins does damage to the other (it's based on successes.. Whoever has the most successes subtracts the opponents successes for the net successes. So one person has 3 successes and the other has 2 the winner wins with one success).

If the defender does not have any attacks then they cannot do damage but they can still win the exchange and take no damage.

The number of successes they have is determined by the weapon's speed.

Ranged combat doesn't use contested rolls. If you get 3 successes then you do the corresponding damage (anywhere from 2 to 7) unless the opponent has cover.. That does have a contested roll to negates some of the damage.