DAQ Combat System

Combat System

Combat is divided into four phases: Tactical Assessment, Plan of Attack, Rolls, Assault.

Phase 1: Tactical Assessment

The QM, from here on referred to in the first person, gives a description of the area that the players are about to engage in.  This includes the layout of the room, where enemies are located, what enemies there are, and other points of interest, such as civilians, technology, and other things that don’t strictly fall into the scenery or hostiles categories.

Player may upgrade their senses with gene mods or implants, or enhance their neural processing power with further implants to give them a more complete tactical picture.  For instance, an eye implant with thermal vision may detect a guard crouching behind a reception counter that un-augmented vision would miss.  Processing power allows more of the room to be surveyed before we move on to the next phase.


Phase 2: Plan of Attack

At this point, the players will decide and vote on a plan of attack for the room.  The plan of attack is a sequence of actions that the MC will take.  Each action is rolled on with a 3d10, and are given varying difficulties.  For example, moving to cover is almost always a low difficulty check, as in DC 3 or something like that, while shooting a man from 100 meters with your handgun would have a much higher DC, perhaps around 26.

At first, players will not be disclosed the DC checks that they will have to beat in order to successfully complete their plan of attack.  This is meant to more closely simulate the on-the-fly judgement a soldier must make.  However, at some point in the quest players will get the chance to acquire “Athena”, a combat AI adjutant that will give you estimations on how difficult each DC check will be.  For example, let’s say the players wish to shoot their rifle at a guard crouching behind poor cover ten meters away.  The DC check is 12.  Athena would give a tactical assessment of “Difficulty rating: 10-16”.  As the players upgrade their processing power or improve Athena’s coding the DC estimations will become more accurate.  Be warned!  Especially in the early stages, it is possible for Athena’s Tactical Assessment to be completely off target.

Eventually, players will decide on a plan of attack, and we move onto the next phase


Phase 3: Rolls

Players roll 3d10 to determine success of their actions.  Rolls are applied to their respective actions, IE, if the first action is “move to cover” the first roll is applied to it, and so on.  Failing a roll can range from a missed shot to you becoming pinned or even hit while moving to cover.  I guarantee that no single crit fail can kill you.  However, a series of failures may.


Phase 4: Assault

I finally write the result of your plan of attack and rolls.  If needed, we go back to phase 1 and continue looping through the four phases until all hostiles are elimsinated or otherwise compromised.



Special Rules:

Bullet Time:  At the start of the quest, players get an “adrenaline point” that they may spend to reroll a failed roll in their plan of attack.   I decide when players get a new adrenaline point.  Most likely it’ll work on a cool down based on the number of story posts I make.  Gene mods can lower this cool down, and certain drugs can be used to achieve the same effect, although they carry a high risk of dependency.

Action Chain:  This may be the main feature of the DAQ combat system, so please read this and have an understanding of it.  An Action Chain is essentially DAQ's version of a combo.  It is a sequence of actions, usually attacks, that are chained together.  So an example would be sneaking up on and then taking out three guards with a melee weapon.  That is an Action Chain of three attacks, one for each guard.  Every time you pass a roll in an Action Chain, the amount you beat the DC check by will be divided by half and added to any one failed roll later in the Chain.

Here is a sample action chain of players ambushing three Security Guards from behind with a melee weapon:

Attack Guard 1:  DC:10   Rolled:20

Attack Guard 2:  DC:15   Rolled:15

Attack Guard 3:  DC:17   Rolled:13+5

In this sequence the players rolled a 13 for their final attack.  That would normally fail the DC 17 check, but there is a +5 bonus from the 20 the players rolled on the first DC check.  The purpose of the Action Chain is to start off with easy rolls and then chain up to major combo attacks and increasingly unlikely attacks.  This isn't realistic in any way, but I think it offers good potential for balls to the walls awesomeness.