Night-Haunted Hogwarts: Combat

For an overview of the project, see here

 

Combat

Check for Surprise

Before an encounter begins (and if the fictional circumstances have not already accounted for it) check for Surprise. Each monster has an X-in-6 chance in its description.

If you are surprised, the monsters get a free action. Because you cannot respond to these actions you must make Luck rolls to avoid them.

If you surprise the monsters, you get a free action. You must still roll, but the monsters cannot respond this turn.

Combat Structure

1. Referee hints at NPC actions

2. Players declare actions

3. Resolve actions

 

Resolving Actions in Combat

Actions taken against an opponent use that opponent’s relevant stat for the Difficulty. 

 

The procedure is essentially the same whether the player is initiating an action or reaction to an NPC. In either case, the loser of the exchange suffers damage (or whatever other effect their opponent was trying to impose). You can use any Skill in combat as long as you can justify your actions within the fiction. Some actions might not work - for example, trying to block a giant's club with your shield - and will automatically fail. Most of the time, however, your choice of Skill will simply suggest the kind of effect that you can achieve.

 

Damage, Injury & Death

Whenever you take damage you must make a Strength test using your newly reduced score. 

If you succeed, all’s well. If you fail, you have taken an Injury. Roll for location and severity. While Injured, any rolls that your Injury might reasonably apply to become Deadly.

If you are Injured twice in the same location you begin Dying.

 

Location – roll d6

1: Left Leg

2: Right Leg

3: Left Arm

4: Right Arm

5: Torso

6: Head

Severity – roll d6

1: Grievous – you are now Dying.

2-5: Severe – your injury clears at the end of your next Town phase.

6: Minor – your injury clears after your next Rest.

Dying

Each turn, roll 1d6. On a 1, you die. If you exert yourself in a given round (fighting, moving quickly, casting a spell, etc) you die on a 1-2 instead.

If you survive an injury that left you Dying you gain a Scar (this can be an actual scar, a limp, a missing eye or digit, etc). The player describes the Scar.

Scars

Mechanically, Scars work like Flaws, in that you can invoke them in a relevant situation to increase a roll’s level of Danger and gain Inspiration. Additionally, the GM can invoke a Scar in situations where it would be relevant (for example, trying to tie a knot with a missing hand). This makes a roll Deadly but does not grant Inspiration.

Healing

A successful Herbology or Potions roll reduces an Injury’s severity by one stage:

Dying → Severe → Minor

Minor Injuries cannot be cured by magic – you must Rest to fully recover.

 

Safe & Deadly Combat Rolls

If no other ruling for a mixed result on a combat roll seems more relevant, consider one of the following:

• The attack succeeds, but deals -2 damage (min. 0)

• The attack succeeds, but the attacker takes damage in return.

Design Notes: this is my first experiment with a looser "problem solving" combat system. The flexibility of "everybody is a wizard" suggested an open-ended approach to combat where most skills can be used in a fight as long as you can justify it within the fiction. As we'll see later in the Skills section, straightforward combat options exist in Fighting (for mundane weapons) and Curses (offensive spells), but the system supports using Charms to levitate your opponent's club, Transfiguration to animate a statue to intercept a blow, Divination to predict an enemy's spell and counter it in the nick of time, etc.

Injuries are the counterweight to Strength healing quickly. You can shake off being battered and bruised with a few moments to catch your breath, but once someone is seriously hurt you'll need to think carefully about when and how to get out of the castle and back to town.

The "two strikes and you're out" method was adopted from The One Ring RPG 2nd edition (as was the chance for a light wound or a serious one that skips straight to Dying). TOR doesn't use hit locations however. Normally I wouldn't either, but in this case it's meant to serve as an impartial spark table for describing the somewhat freeform injuries and scars that characters can accumulate, as well as a kind of hidden HP. In this rule set each hit is basically a saving throw vs death, with your chance of success dropping off rapidly with each point of damage (for example at 6 Strength you have a 72% chance of avoiding injury, but a single point of damage drops that to 58%). Strictly speaking the need to score an injury on the same place twice should make characters much more survivable in a concrete sense, but as each injury causes penalties on associated rolls (and the Danger mechanic here means that if you take a penalty on a roll only a qualified success is possible) mounting injuries should still feel very stressful.

The injury durations are non-diegetic here because of the assumed style of play: an open table where the characters venture out from town to a nearby dungeon and then return at the end of the session, with an in-game gap of at least a week between expeditions. In that context the durations "short term," "end of the session" and "dead" seemed sufficient - I didn't want a player who had missed several weeks worth of sessions to show back up wondering whether or not their character was healed up yet. Everything that doesn't kill you going away within a week would be a bit much for more grounded settings, but in Harry Potter land magical healing is apparently no big deal - its assumed that the healers in Hogsmeade give you whatever treatments you need to regrow all the bones in your arm or what have you. If this were a sandbox game that assumed a lot of traveling around then I would swap those durations for diegetic days or weeks.

Of course I couldn't write a Harry Potter themed dungeon-crawler without some way for the characters to pick up cool Scars. Inspired by this mechanic at Goblin Punch, Scars are trying to do a couple of things. First, genre emulation. Apart from the lightning scar, people seem to get cut up a decent amount in serious fights in Harry Potter - losing a finger or an ear, disfiguring facial scars, whatever the hell happened to Mad Eye Moody, etc. We're also told that scars can prove surprisingly useful, which is partly the reason that Scars can be used to gain Inspiration. Second, Scars are meant to provide a long-term consequence to almost dying, much like the "death and dismemberment" tables of some other games, and to create a mechanical and fictional incentive for some characters to simply retire rather than push on until they die in the dungeon. However, not everyone is comfortable with their character getting chopped up (and I didn't want to write a big table of effects), which is why the player describes the Scar. It can be as debilitating or disfiguring as you're comfortable with. Minor injuries will get in your way less, but you'll have a harder time justifying using them to gain Inspiration, so mechanically there's no "right" answer. I don't want anyone to feel punished or pushed here.