I've been messing about with dice mechanics in the d10 DAV system.
The game is normally set up to have a flat 6 difficulty for both to hit and damage, and both are opposed by dodge and soak rolls. I wanted to speed things up somewhat and eliminate the dodge and soak rolls.
I tried making the difficulty to hit be the target's Dexterity + Dodge + Shield (Every success on the attack roll translated to additional damage dice on a 1 to 1 basis.), and the difficulty to damage be the target's Stamina + Fortitude + body armor rating. Whatever got past that soak difficulty was damage that had to be healed later on.
However, I learned that for some unknown reason, offense was wildly blowing defense out of the water. Couldn't figure out why. Whoever went first hosed over the defender to the point where said defenders couldn't really make much of a comeback.
The way the game works, a 1 on a given d10 negates a success. A success is whatever number meets or exceeds the difficulty number, and the greater the number of successes, the more impressive your roll. A 10 on a d10 doesn't do anything special, other than always counting as a success.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to speeding up the game mechanics somewhat? And why did the offense so greatly overpower defense when I messed with the difficulty ratings.
I had similar problems with DAV.
For to hit:
Dex+Dodge+Shield+Armor
For damage:
If bashing, a vamp takes 1/2 damage, lethal does a /, and aggravated does an x
With fortitude, a vamp negates bashing up to what ever fort they have. so if a vamp has 3 fort and someone does 3 bashing, they take 0.
And for every 2 points of fortitude, they can negate 1 lethal, so in the example above they would take 1.
The other way you could go is raising the difficulty for damage and going with the normal system after that. sure they can hit easily, but to actually damage you would have to roll 8-9-10
I am AFB at the moment, but isn´t 6 the base difficulty when the other party doesn´t go out of their way to dodge or parry, at which point it can roll its own roll and "eat" successes?
I have played in a game where the defensive successes were subtracted from the attacker´s pool, and it more or less worked.
I love WoD, but hate the difficulty mechanic. We are trying one game of crossover OWoD-Exalted (yeah, we are crazy like that) with the basic dice mechanic of Exalted. For now is working fairly well, but we have had few combats until now.
The basic mechanic:
7-9 is always a success, 0's are two success. The number of success necessary for a given task is what defines the difficulty.
The combat defence is (DEX + Athletics + variables) /2
Similar for mental/social opposite powers, a static defence number valid for all situations.
The greatest problem I have is specific of the interaction of OWoD with Exalted 2 Ed. Ticks and extra actions of both systems. But for what you are doing that is not a problem.