Late Night Thoughts on opposed combat rolls in whitehack
It’s 3am and I’m thinking about my favorite topic, opposed combat rolls.
I don’t particularly like the regular combat flow of Whitehack, or any DND game for that matter. I use it most of the time because of its simplicity, but to me it smooths over a lot of the more interesting bits about melee combat. Why does only the armor of an opponent matter if I’m trying to hit them with my pointy stick? Why does only my armor matter when they do the same? It’s also just not conducive to duels, which are just cool and deserve to be supported in my elf games.
So here are some ideas I’ve come up with for applying opposed rolls to Whitehack’s roll under system, stolen mostly from BRP games and with some other random ideas I’ve come across as well. Because this is an unorganized list and because I should really be getting to bed soon, I’m not going to bother with formatting, these are just some basic ideas.
- Opposed melee combat: In melee combat, opposed checks are done by the attacker making an opposed check against the defender’s AV OR Agility, defender’s choice. Armor is still applied to both checks, but counts as a hit.
- If one side passes, they roll their damage.
- If both sides pass, the highest passing roll succeeds and does their damage.
- If both sides fail, both sides miss.
- This also applies to combat maneuvers. I typically enjoy These combat maneuver rules. The attacker gets to declare a maneuver. I don’t know if defenders should also get this option, but it’s possible.
- Applying these maneuver rules to Whitehack, combat maneuvers should be successful if the attack roll hits armor and the maneuver doesn’t require hitting flesh. The defender can still choose to take the hit instead of taking the maneuver, and in this case that damage would still happen.
- Initiative is important here, and the defender gets a choice on whether or not they engage their attacker or not. If they choose to, it takes up their turn. If they want to use their turn for something else, they can choose not to make an opposed check. The attacker rolls a normal attack roll.
- A defender can choose between using their AV and Agility. If they choose AV, everything listed above works as written. If they choose agility, they don’t do any damage if they win the check. They simply spend the turn dodging. They can also use their movement on their turn as long as they succeed. They don’t trigger free attacks (Whitehack’s opportunity attack) from their attacker.
- I don’t quite know what I’d do for multiple attackers. If someone spends their entire turn defending, perhaps they should just get an opposed roll against any attacker. Perhaps they only get to do damage as a defender if they spend a free attack. This would give the Strong a pretty substantial buff, I think.
For ranged combat, I think I’d be fine with not dealing with opposed checks there. Perhaps you could allow contested agility attacks if you wanted cool anime moments or something like that.
My last thought for this post is stealing the idea of glancing blows from McDowall. I think it would be simpler in Whitehack. Probably half damage on misses, rounded down. Since Whitehack uses mostly d6s, you’d get somewhere between 1-3 potential damage on a glance. Modifiers would probably be added, though a creature would need a d6+2 attack before their glancing blows could reach 4 damage.
That’s all of my thoughts, it’s bed time. Hit me up if you have anything to contribute!