"reason behind separate attack and damage rolls" Topic

Most games, both miniatures and rpg, seem to have separate rolls for both attack and damage. I'm curios as to why this is. Why not just make the damage a fixed value based on the attacker's weapon/strength/etc, which could then modified by the attack roll (higher margin of success = more damage). Is there a reason to have the two separate rolls for attack and damage?

You can make a difference between being good at hitting and striking hard.

That's one of the differences between a rapier and an axe, or a .22 and a hollow point .45. (The latter is about as easy to hit with, though.)
And different types of armour. The rapier or .22 won't help much against power armour.

A matter of granularity and what the game focuses on.

Differences in how hard the model strikes can be represented by different starting values. Daggers do 1 damage, battle axes do 3 damage, or sum such. Hitting with a larger margin of success increases the base damage to show how much health the target loses. I don't think I've ever seen a game use such a system and I'm curious as to why.

'cause they only had D6s, and there wasn't enough granularity to permit them to be combined into one roll.

Additionally, it also depends upon where you get hit. Could be a flesh wound, or a shot/thrust to the heart/brain.

But wouldn't damage based on where you get hit have more to do with accuracy, in other words: the attack roll? Flesh wound = marginal hit, chest wound = large margin of success. Why would you determine that once with the attack roll and then determine the exact same thing again with the damage roll?

There are lots of methods for modelling attack/defence type stuff.

Separate hit/damage rolls are one of them, however many games don't use this and instead use some sort of arithmetic attack system (attack – defence modified by some dice score), buckets of dice, CRTs of varying complexity, or hideous multi-step combat resolution of which a relatively simple example is that found in AHGCs 'Tobruk'.

I first came across separate to hit and damage rolls in Charles Grants 'Battle', a very, very long time ago. He said he did it deliberately to slow down tank battles, as real tank battles 'went on for longish periods of time'. Lionel Tarrs even older tank combat rules used attack-defence type mechanisms.

In the world of fantasy gaming I blame D&D (or Chainmail).

For ex with modern anti tank you can show how hard it is to hit something , compared to putting it out.
For ex tanks will find it easy to destroy APC but if the thing is well hidden hull down, the hard thing will be to hit, then it might just survive as well as a tank, sort of.

If medieval skirmish, one can hit an armoured knight but wounding him is another thing. The same one taken out of bed with the other's wife might fight just as well but any strike from the ax will bring him down.

Because they are not the same thing.

For RPG I use a fixed value for damage and a target to-hit roll. 2d6 is added to a combat skill value vs a defence value plus situational modifiers. If the target to-hit value is exceeded that amount is added to the fixed damage value. The better the hit… the more damage inflicted. No need for another roll and you don't end up with a situation where a character is "scratched to death" with…. "you take 1 hit" or otherwise incidental damage effects.

Just as you suggest.

Mathematically both methods (a single roll and two rolls) can be made equivalent. It sometimes takes quite a bit of work to figure out how to do this with a single die roll, and I think there is great intuitive appeal to two die rolls -- but not three like in many GW designs.

For instance when firing at a tank, hitting the enemy tank and damaging the enemy tank I think split quite nicely. If anyone tells you that at 1000-2000 meters they are aiming for a specific part of the tank, I think they are pulling your leg. Tankers aim for center of mass. Given a hit, different combinations of target armor, hit location, and penetration value of the firing gun effect the probability that the round penetrates, bounces off, or whatever.

The same is true of personal combat. Very few soldiers in the middle of a general melee aim for a specific body part. You aim for center of mass to get the greatest chance of a hit. As Henrix suggested, many calibers of small arms will have similar chances to hit at close range, but those different calibers of bullets have significantly different stopping power. While I have been fortunately not to be hit by any bullet thus far, if I had to choose, I would take a .22 or .38 over a .45 or .5 any day. :)

Buck Surdu

Combining the two into a single roll either makes the rule very unwieldy or is more prone to causing strange results. A tank sitting still able to be destroyed for example while one that is moving can not be. (that example is from the game Rapid Fire).

There are advantages in game play of having two rolls as both players can be involved at all stages of the game. The attacker rolling to hit, the defender rolling for effect keeps both players busy and immersed in the game play, as opposed to the active player simply doing all the fun stuff while his opponent looks on.

Silent Death 3 dice system.

Roll the three dice to hit: one of these represents the skill of the operator (which changes with different gunners), the other two are based on the type of weapon (which change with different weapons).

Add them all up to see if you get a score high enough to hit. Then leave them on the table and read them again: high, medium or low results to see what the damage is.

So a more skilled gunner, even with a poor or average weapon can still hit and – maybe – find that chink in the armour through his experience and ability. A poor shot with a big weapon (especially a multi-barreled weapon that gets pluses, one for each extra barrel) can still hit through sheer weight of fire and, as doubles and trebles help with determining damage scores, can still kick the cack out of things.

One (albeit 3 dice) dice roll to be read in two ways: no requirement to roll again. And no stupid saving throws.

It is a beautiful and elegant system that I have used (or 'pinched'…) for numerous games and I just wish I'd thought of it first!

John "no dog in this fight" Treadaway

You don't say so, but this is more common in skirmish/RPG games. When fighting with units like battalions, a single die roll is very, very common. Many horse & musket era games have you add up your total fire power and roll the dice. You get the number of hits from a chart. Done.

Designing a combat system involves lots of decisions. Mr. Treadway thinks saving throws are stupid. So designs around them. Some gamers like rolling a die in defense as they feel they are more involved = more fun.

Percentages come into play here. Many gamers loathe dice beynd the D6 and you can't get much granularity with them unless yo uuse lots of them. Me, I hate buckets of dice as they inevitably end up all ver the table.

The good news is almost any mechanic can be reworked. I have a redesigned the Flames of War combat system to eliminate rolling dozens of dice. I use 2D6 read as base 6 to get results from 11 to 66. It is used for both hits and saves. For any roll of 5 dice or more you use the chart. It is much, much faster than dice overall. I can read the chart much faster than you can find/count 24 dice, roll them, and sort out the 5s and 6s.

One other note. Your method would assume that variables that help the chance to hit also help the chance for more damage. In many instances designers may decide that's not the case.

Last note: over time, all weapons will produce "average" damage. So why not get rid of the whole variable damage thing entirely?

> Last note: over time, all weapons will produce "average" damage. So why not get rid of the whole variable damage thing entirely?

Some games do that, the Panzer series for example (though it has a to-hit followed by hit-location system), the problem for me is I find such systems too deterministic.

A good one DR for hit and damage resolution was in the Pacesetter RPGS. It was a percentage based system and damage dealt was determined by how low you rolled – if you needed 10% or less to hit then 1 or 2 was best damaged, 3 or 4 next best, and hitting with a roll of 9 or 10 would be a hit with the least damage.

Hitting with a larger margin of success increases the base damage to show how much health the target loses. I don't think I've ever seen a game use such a system and I'm curious as to why.

Lots of them do. Quick Intermediate Level Skirmish (my game @ WGV) does.

Combining the two into a single roll either makes the rule very unwieldy or is more prone to causing strange results.

The QILS rules are neither unwieldy (though they require non-standard effort before the game) and there is no way to create an "impervious" character (though you can create an "ineffective" one).

The simple one-die figure (kinda the Joe Average baseline) in the system could kill a massive, multi-die, special rule using behemoth. The odds would be massively against it (requiring a long series of low probability misses on one side and hits on the other), but they would be non-zero.

Which leads to another thing, which is for any monstrous behemoth in the game, a large enough horde of Joe Averages can take it down. Sometimes a very large horde, with a lot of time on its hands.

Mathematically both methods (a single roll and two rolls) can be made equivalent.

Yes, but mathematically, any finite performance space process can be "black boxed" into a set of inputs mapped to a set of outputs, connected with a probability function (Markov map).

It sometimes takes quite a bit of work to figure out how to do this with a single die roll

It's pretty straightforward with two dice. What could take work is making a judgement call on what size die you need to make the closest mapping. Worst case, you could need a 36-sided die to recreate rolling two separate d6. But the percentages might be close enough to approximate it with one d8 or d10 (or maybe d6 or d4, but unlikely).

I think this is part of the attraction of d20 systems – you get a reasonable size die that you can read at arms length and +/-5% granularity in your approximation to what you want in one die (vice d%% systems). Kind of a middle of the road system as the (above quoted) surdu2005 is discussing.

Last note: over time, all weapons will produce "average" damage. So why not get rid of the whole variable damage thing entirely?

Because the type of real life actions that wargame engagements generally try to recreate do not happen over the long haul. Generally, you want players to make decisions on immediate (or near-immediate) actions by the troops on the board and to have to react to conditions that are not entirely deterministic such that the varaibility tests their strategic, operational and tactical prowess at the same time.

Extending surdu2005's assertion (possibly beyond what he thinks is reasonable), if you have deterministic damage, and finite board space, you might as well run the probabilities analytically and resolve it down to one die roll for the whole game.

Most games, both miniatures and rpg, seem to have separate rolls for both attack and damage. I'm curios as to why this is. Why not just make the damage a fixed value based on the attacker's weapon/strength/etc, which could then modified by the attack roll (higher margin of success = more damage). Is there a reason to have the two separate rolls for attack and damage?

What does a "higher margin of success" represent? Hitting closer to the center of mass? If I'm firing at a human target, hitting closer to the center of mass can decrease my chances of a head shot (given random radial distribution).

I can take an arrow in the thigh and it'll hurt like heck, but I'll live. 10mm to one side and it severs the femoral artery--I'm a goner. Is superior box skill shifting the aim point by just a few millimeters?

Does a given margin of success always translate into the same amount of additional damage, regardless of the weapon? I'd suspect that this would not be the case. In the case of a .22, you can always hit someone in the eye, shatter the orbital, and kill them.

Now, does your hit roll give a wide enough spread that it's possible to shoot at someone at long range, with little chance of hitting, but still hit them somewhere fatal? That's going to take a huge spread. If modifiers give you a 1% chance to hit, and you roll damage separately, and there's a tiny chance of doing enough damage for the hit to be fatal, then you can simulate a golden BB instead of every low-probability shot being "Just a flesh wound!"

The biggest problem is "math at the table." People are absolutely terrible at figuring success margins because they involve subtraction. Then you need to multiply the success margin by whatever to represent the effectiveness of the weapon, and then you have to add in the base damage. Surprisingly slow process, in practice.

I can give you about anynumber of RPG systems that do not use a separate damage roll, if you want.
They tend not to be very combat focused, however.

As for systems where you calculate how good you rolled, modify it for weapon and whatnot – it is slower and clumsier.

Rolling another die is faster and requires less math in the heat of battle.

It always irked me after "really good hit rolls" that this did not somehow affect the ability to do damage.

My rules use d% and say you have a 30% chance to hit then you hit on a 1-30, 1 = probably a critical hit and 30 = almost certainly bounced off, 15 being an AVERAGE QUALITY hit.
An average hit and the shot achieves the book value armour penetration thickness possible at that range, a good hit adds a bonus to the penetration, a poor hit applies a penalty. At extreme ranges when, what with modifiers, you can only hit with a 1, damage if you hit at all is only going to be a very predictable average and at that range, not a lot.

So with a VERY good hit you can get a smaller AT gun penetrating the armour beyond normal book values, the 37mm PAK finds a vision block on the Char B, etc. Similarly, when you roll a 99 for the 88mm it's almost certainly only managed to remove a mudguard off the A9!

(only talking about AP here)

over time, all weapons will produce "average" damage. So why not get rid of the whole variable damage thing entirely?

Chess.

No thanks…

John T

This has been an interesting thread! I got some interesting ideas. Thanks, folks.

I get to roll to hit – you get to roll to save : we both feel "involved" in the combat. And so the game is more exciting.

> I get to roll to hit – you get to roll to save : we both feel "involved"

Second time I've seen this in the thread, rolling dice is not "being involved", needing to make a decision is being involved. Worst game experience I ever had was CWC, rolling boatloads of "saving throws" over and over while my tanks were being shot at. Best game experience is ASL where I have to decide to fire now or wait for the next unit, or do I set a fire lane or not – THAT is involvement.

"rolling dice is not "being involved""

Well, some players don't feel like that. I have actually had people say to me that throwing saving dice makes them 'fell less like a victim'.

In a 2D6 CRT type system, this is very simple to implement – just give one dice to each player. This of course slows the game to a crawl.

> Well, some players don't feel like that. I have actually had people say to me that throwing saving dice makes them 'fell less like a victim'.

People have the strangest ideas…

The biggest problem is "math at the table." People are absolutely terrible at figuring success margins because they involve subtraction.

Doing math in public is always a bad entry argument. Not that it can't (or shouldn't ever) be done, but in public, a minor mistake in math can make someone feel stupid (whether anyone else in the room percieves them as such or not) or (in a wargame) appear to be trying to cheat. Both of these potential perceptions lead people to take their time and want to be really sure about their sums before announcing them out loud.

The biggest problem is "math at the table."

Players shouldn't be calculating whether to engage one target or another. I imagine the greatest perceived threat would be targeted, not the one which is 10% more likely to be destroyed.

I believe modifiers are commonly applied at the "to hit" stage in smallish scenarios so the only thing you are gaining by dicing for damage is, well rolling some more dice and looking at another chart.

It also depends on the thing being modelled. in my Battle of Britain game I have one roll:
D6+weapon value-range mod+/- deflection.
There is also a chance of critical hits dependent on damage done
I don't often do this, but for fighters it made sense – they are firing high speed weapons where something may hit, but the number will go down with rage and deflection

rolling dice is not "being involved"

Yes it is – try playing when your opponent has wandered away…

"People have the strangest ideas…"

Well, I and all my gaming buddies all feel that rolling saves IS being involved. I think that believing the opposite is a really strange idea!

Well, I and all my gaming buddies all feel that rolling saves IS being involved.

I tend to agree. If you are making a defensive roll, you (probably) didn't make the most recent decision in the game, but you still made a decision that put your unit in the position to have to defend in response to your opponents' actions. I don't see rolling as an outcome of that decision to be funamentally different (or any more or less involved) than rolling immedately after you make a decision to attack an opponent.

Players shouldn't be calculating whether to engage one target or another. I imagine the greatest perceived threat would be targeted, not the one which is 10% more likely to be destroyed.

This is part of why I designed my game system to allow players to easily understand their units capabilities in general but difficult to precicely map them out against an opponent's capabilities mathematically. Especially on the fly.

Rolling dice doesn't add excitement ?

The guy who invented Craps must have been bitterly disappointed that his game never took off….