The Riddle of Steeel, a fantasy roleplaying game published by the apparently-defunct Driftwood Studios, has a highly interesting combat system. Unlike many other systems, all attacks are called shots (you’re not just trying to stab somebody, you’re trying to stab him in the face or arm or somewhere), there are no hit points to speak of, attacks are actively defended against (you have no static defensive values, but you can try to block, parry, etc.)

After perusing some examples of play and looking through the rulebook, it seems to me that this system suffers from looking more convoluted on paper than it is in actual play. The following is the basic flow of how a fight goes between two parties:

a. Check for Surprise & Hesitation

Check Reflex (TN see below), failure indicates that no action can be taken until next round – proceed to step 1. Succeed and defend as normal – proceed to step b.

• TN 5: Purposely standing with no stance, inviting attack
• TN 7: Aware of opponent, but victim of a cheap shot; or hesitation
• TN 10: Unsuspecting or inattentive
• TN 13: Blindsided!

b. Declare Stance

At start of bout, or after a pause, declare stance out loud.

• Aggressive Stance: +2 CP when attacking; -2 CP when defending
• Defensive Stance: +2 CP when defending; -2 CP when attacking
• Neutral Stance: offers flexibility and no modifiers

c. Initiative – Establish Aggressor and Defender

Take a red and white die into your hands. The GM calls “throw,” and each combatant drops one of the dice on the table.

• Red: indicates aggression
• White: indicates defense
• Red/Red: a tie-breaker is required
  • Both parties roll Reflex against their own ATN, apply Weapon Length penalties as normal.
  • In the case of a tie, compare actual Reflex scores. Thrusts provide a +1 Reflex modifier over swings and bashes.
  • If this is still a tie then the blows are simultaneous!
• White/White: The combatants circle each other, repeat the initiative process, return to start of step a.

1. Start of the Combat Round – Blood Loss Check

Successfully roll EN/BL or lose one point of HT.

• HT 1: all dice pools are halved
• HT 0: character unconscious and dying

2. Call out the Number of the Round – Fatigue

• -1 CP per 2xEN rounds of fighting. This number is further reduced by the total CP penalty for armor, shield, and encumbrance.

3. Dice Pool Refresh

• All dice pools fills or refreshes, remember to deduct spillover Shock, unless Pain is greater. Pain is deducted from all dice pools.

4. First Half of the Exchange of Blows

• Aggressor declares attack: state maneuver, CP spent, and target zone; 1-7 for swings, 8-14 for thrusts. Remember Stance (1st blow only) and Reach modifiers.
• Defender declares defense or attack: state maneuver, including CP.
• Weapon Reach: -1 CP per step to attack an opponent with longer reach, until the shorter weapon makes a damaging strike. When the longer weapon is in too close, the penalty applies to both defense and offense, until a damaging blow is scored.

5. Resolve Damage and/or Determine New Attitude

• (MOS + DR) – (Opponent’s TO + AV) = Wound Level
• If the attacker’s MOS >=0 he stays the aggressor, keeping initiative
• If the defender’s MOS 1+ he becomes the aggressor
• Shock is immediately subtracted from all dice pools, active first then reserve, any spillover applies in step 3.

6. Second Half of the Exchange of Blows

See step 4. The roles may have reversed since the first exchange

7. Resolve Damage and/or Determine New Attitude

See step 5.

8. Repeat Until a Winner is Determined

Repeat steps 1 through 7 until the combat is over – one way or another.

*whew*. Take a quick look at the target zones and damage tables (separate for slashing, bludgeoning, and piercing) and this all looks like a bit of a brain-full. But a duel between two characters in this system will frequently be resolved after only two or three rounds, with a total of maybe six throws of the dice. By the end of the first round or halfway through the second, it is often abundantly clear who has the upper hand, and one or two more exchanges seals the deal.

*summary lifted from erdtman.com/story-games/
**some excellent examples of folks muddling through a few matches can be found archived at suptg

I rather like the general idea of skill challenges; they encourage a DM to reward players for solving problems without resorting to combat. This encourages players to see each other’s characters outside their combat roles and fosters a more rich, varied, interesting, and thus entertaining play experience. The general idea is lovely, a welcome addition to Dungeons & Dragons.

In practice, skill challenges as presented in the rules are a mess. I’m not talking about the math of target difficulties. Whether you need to roll a 5 or a 15 to advance the challenge is immaterial. The problem is that poor rolling necessarily results in failure. The tactical combat system of Dungeons & Dragons when implemented as suggested in the rules assumes player victory. Take 600xp worth of bad-guys from the Monster Manual and throw them at five 2nd level adventurers and you will almost always see the adventurers succeed. Repeat this two more times without allowing the player characters to reset their daily abilities and healing surges, and things can get a little hairy but victory is still the most foreseeable outcome. Skill challenges as presented in the DMG and the errata introduce a significant chance of defeat without a mechanical means of building up player tension.

Some assumptions I work with when doing prep-work for a campaign:

1. The characters will be advancing through levels during the course of the story.
2. As characters advance in level, they become more competant.
3. Players generally prefer to have their characters succeed overall.
4. It is important that the characters be competant enough to have a reasonable chance at success.
5. Success that comes too easily is rarely satisfactory.
6. It is important that the characters not be so competant as to make success trivial.
7. When preparing for play, some preparation for the players bypassing or failing in regards to certain xp-yielding challenges should be taken to address points 4 and 6.

If I am to incorporate one or two skill challenges per game session, each worth the experience points rewarded for a level-appropriate tactical engagement, I face the very real possibility of the players failing several encounters. If I pepper in skill challenges every second fight or so, the player characters will advance a level after six fights. That tends to take two to three game sessions for my group. Fail one of those skill challenges and the rhythm gets broken up. Instead of doing the character advancement busywork at the beginning or end of a session, maybe the XP threshhold is broken mid-session. No, thank you, but I still want to use skill challenges.

Does this mean I should force the players to succeed their skill checks? Oh Lord, no. When players roll badly they know it. Just as they expect their characters to be awesome when they roll a 20, they expect their characters to suck when they roll 1. Rather than stonewall on a skill failure (or series of failures), I add complications and require that everbody gets in on it.

“Everybody grab a d20, somebody give me a Nature check, somebody else give me a Perception check, everybody else give me either an Endurance or Athletics check.” The players pick who’s responsible for which end of things. If most of them succeed, a consequence is avoided. Consequences could involve the passage of an undue amount of time: you found a good route through the swamp, but Mr. Shinypants Paladin got stuck in the muck about a half-mile in.

If enough failures amass over multiple passes through the group (let everybody have a chance to roll at least a second time; people love a chance at redemption), they fail the skill challenge and are faced with an additional combat encounter to make up the XP gap and slap them on the wrist a little. After Mr. Shinypants Paladin got stuck in the muck, Mr. Smartypants Wizard picked the wrong path, and Ms. Stabbity Rogue didn’t notice the Gnoll ambush before it was too late. Oops.

Depending on the nature of the challenge, it may be more or less easy to come up with a narrative justification for this. How does haggling with a merchant over the price of apples result in fisticuffs in heroic fantasy? Pretty easily, really, but in many of those cases there’s really no reason to pick up dice in the first place or give an experience point reward for a success.

So I was knocking around some of the suggestions from the 4th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide regarding the distribution of treasure. When following the advice of the DMG, a DM basically ends up distributing one less magic item than there are player characters every level, each of increasing level-value (level +1 … L+4). For four characters, the book recommends dropping the level+2 item, yielding an item output of L+1, L+3, and L+4 by the time the party advances.

As an issue of basic fairness, you wouldn’t want the person who got the level +4 item (ostensibly the coolest material reward that level) to also get the most super-neato-von-awesome stuff during the following level. It seems to me that a round-robin approach makes a lot of sense. But which direction to spin the wheel? Does the character that got the L+4 item this time get the L+3 item next time? Then the L+1? This would allow whoever missed out to get the L+4 next time. It also means that starting at 1st level, some guy is going to end up with multiple same-level items repeatedly during his career. Odd.

Here’s how the downward-stepping round-robin breaks down:

And so forth. An upward-stepping round-robin goes like this:

In both cases, naturally, the same number of items show up, of the same power levels, at the same rate. When descending, an individual’s gear clusters up into tight little clusters of general potency. When ascending there’s a lot more scatter.

Descending, I observe that if you look at each character’s best gear (at the tail end of level 6), Player A gets at 10th and 6th level item, Player B gets two 7th level items, Player C gets two 8th level items, and player D gets two 9th level items. All else being equal, I’d expect Player B to feel a little put-out at that point.

Ascended, Player A gets and 8th and a 7th level item, Player B gets a 9th and a 7th level item, Player C gets a 10th and 8th level item, and Player D gets a 9th and a 7th. Player A is right behind the pack and player C is a little ahead. I suspect this is the approach that would be most likely to yield a defensible appearance of fairness at the game table.