hollowworld.uk

Hello Hollowerworlders!

I think with the return to a more freeform combat system, it opens up a lot of opportunity to be more creative and have more fun without restrictions in combat roleplay with your fellow Hollowerworlders. With that in mind, I want to propose an optional combat system that's lightweight, focuses on freeform decision making, and makes solving disputes in combat roleplay fluid and interesting. Here's how it will work,

All players take turns in combat, the order of which is decided by either consensus among those fighting, or by a dice roll at the start of combat. All participants roll a 1d20, highest goes first, second highest goes second, and so on.

All players have 5 HP, or Wounds, or however you want to think about it. You can take 5 instances of damage before the fight is over. Players should determine what the stakes of the fight should be before proceeding. Are we fighting to the death? Are we having a friendly spar? Those 5 wounds will mean whatever you want them to mean; perhaps your sword breaks, or you pass out from exhaustion, or your friendly spar ends and you both only have some cuts and scrapes.

When a player's turn comes around, they'll have the option to make two actions:

Movement: A player can move up to 5 blocks on a turn without expending their action, and 10 blocks with expending their action

Action: This is the core of a turn. Actions are statements that players make:

"My character swings their sword"

An action does not include "My character swings a sword, and then chops your head off"

When you do an action, you roll a 1d20, then the target rolls a 1d20. A winning roll is considered a "success", a losing roll is considered a "failure", the receiving party then writes a Reaction to your action, based on the information gathered in the dice roll. If you're rolling to hit, and you succeed, the defender takes 1 damage. 

When deciding the outcome of a situation, its important to keep in mind the lore of the world and the setting. If a Journeyman Evicist and an Apprentice Evicist both throw fireballs at one another, and the Apprentice's roll comes out on top, you may consider writing more creative solutions to how a fight went. Perhaps the Apprentice aimed the weaker fireball in just such a way as to hit the Journeyman's blind spot, or they rolled out of the way, or a well timed collapse of a nearby pillar gave the Apprentice an upper hand in dodging the attack.

Be creative, but keep it within the lore; just because a Master's spells are better than an Apprentice's, doesn't mean that they win every interaction in every situation. 

Modifications to these rules, or alternative approaches should be discussed amongst one another before starting a combat. You might want to fight to 10 wounds, or 20 or 1 or 3. If you're a DM you might want to have an alternate win condition, maybe the players can win if they can break the armor of an opponent or if they can push all the buttons in each corner of the room before the monster gets them.

Critical Successes and Failures by default have no influence on the system, a 20 beating a 1 is the same as a 13 beating a 12; however as the player you're more than welcome to use the difference in rolls to influence how you write a success or failure. If you roll a critical success against someone else's critical failure, perhaps you can turn it into an opportunity for your character to grow and change in some way to better themselves, or unlock some new angle to their powers that they didn't know before. Perhaps the forces of nature came together to cause your epic spell to be a critical failure, or something went terribly wrong unexpectantly in the process of casting it.

Feel free to read this over and leave me criticism in the comments if you think that it should be different in some ways, my goal here was to make an optional system people could use to move along the flow of a combat rp a bit more and still enjoy the freedoms we have in freeform roleplay.