Fantasy Hearbreaker - Rethinking Initiative & Armor

I began role playing using 1d6 per side for Initiative. I liked the way this worked and adopted it to Harnmaster and RuneQuest and OpenQuest in turn. Then I read Black Hack and loved the way that system handled Initiative. It was an INT test. If you passed you went before the enemy, if you failed you went after. This worked nicely with my Damage per attribute idea, if you take a concussion your initiative roll will suffer.

But what about two attacks a round? Black Hack doesn't have that and I wanted it. That will be one of the advantages of increasing your INT high enough, you think faster and can gain that second attack. I finally decided if you have two attacks you don't roll initiative, you attack before the enemy and again after the enemy.

Wizards are all going to have high INT, I didn't want them firing off two spells a round though. I had the choice of making spells different or having each spell take two attacks to cast, thus ensuring they'd go off at the end of the round. Slow thinking Wizards might take two rounds to cast a spell, sucks to be them.  I liked the way the Initiative system played out.

And enemies? What if they attacked two times? They got to attack twice on their turn. Back to back attacks is brutal, but it was better than stretching the round out further.

OpenQuest uses Armor Points. That is you swing to hit. If you hit you hit the armor and may or may not actually cause injury. You have to roll damage and subtract that armor value to determine how much damage goes through to the fleshy bits and how much bounces off harmlessly. These feels more realistic but has the negative in that it steals the victory in away I don't particularly like. I Hit! no you didn't, it just impacted on the surface, it didn't go in. From glory to fail in seconds.

D&D uses AC. Armor Class is binary, either you damaged the fleshy bits beneath the armor or you did not. The system doesn't care about hits hit the armor and bounce off. A swing and a miss just means banging the weapon harmlessly against the armor, not that the you actually whiffed. This means you miss more often but when you do you are doing damage. It's more satisfying.

Black Hack uses some nonsense with the usage die that I knew right away I wasn't going to use. Also Black Hack does this thing where the bad guys are assumed to hit and the players have to dodge, which has the players making all the rolls (yeah) and the stolen thunder is all the enemies problem (yeah). This removes the chance the GM can cheat the attack rolls which is also nice, but it treats the creatures and the players mechanically different and I didn't like that.

So I discarded the idea. I like the simple Black Hack initiative but otherwise combat will be like D&D. You attack and the enemies defenses are all stylized to speed things up. No stolen glory. If you hit you hit, if you whiff you whiff. That and fumble rolls because I love fumble rolls.

Enemies on the other hand don't roll. The player rolls to dodge with the enemies level added to the roll. If they succeed the attack missed. If they fail the enemy rolls damage and the damage still has to overwhelm the players armor points giving the players one last desperate chance to avoid or at least minimize incoming damage.

I like treating players and NPCs the same but I think this dynamic makes it more exciting. Will have to play test to be sure of course.