So it's been about 3 weeks since I last posted. I made a lot of progress on the group system but now I've come to realize I will have to rewrite the whole combat and weapons system, and it's not going to be easy. The new system will handle the whole combat as one event instead of a series of hits. The stats of the attacker(s) and defender(s) (and their weapons) affect the probability of each possible outcome. For example when you are hunting with a group, the possible outcomes are:
- the group doesn't find an animal at all
- the group (or you) finds an animal but it gets away
- the animal hurts someone and gets away
- the animal hurts someone before getting killed
- the animal kills someone and gets away
- the animal kills someone before getting killed
- the animal hurts you and gets away
- the animal hurts you before getting killed
- the animal kills you and gets away
- the animal kills you before getting killed
- the animal tries to hurt someone but you prevent it. You may or may not get hurt in process
- somebody gets lost and people have to spend time searching; hunt may or may not be aborted
- somebody sprains their ankle and the hunt has to be aborted
Basically if it rolls that somebody gets hurt, it counts a damage pool and then how many people the damage is divided between and whether you are one of those. It's possible that the whole pool goes to one person. If it's a big pool then someone might die. Whenever you do something heroic, you gain respect points, and whenever you do something cowardly, you lose them. Once you have 1000 or more respect points, you can start trying to win leadership of the group.
So currently it's supposed to tally up the damage potential of the group based on which weapons they are using. The problem is, currently there are three types of damage, which have different scales. They will have to be merged in order for this to work. Finding the best values will most likely rely on trial and error, which means a lot of testing will be needed. Also at some point I would like to take into account that a skilled person with a bone knife is more dangerous than a child with a sword. When weapons are given to a group, it can be assumed that everybody uses a weapon that best suits their skills, but when PCs are fighting individually or with each other, it will need to eventually utilize skills. If I decide to add group skills, the group will gain experience as an entity instead of individuals. One idea would be to give weapons difficulty ratings bound to their weight, and if you don't have enough strength or skill, your damage potential will be greatly impaired.
Edit 2: I had this budding idea on how to take skills and weapons into account without making it too complicated. Skills and weapon stats would both be multipliers that made you count as more than one person, or as a fractional person depending on how good you were. So somebody with a crossbow could be worth two people. The good thing about this it's easy to tweak the numbers, so what ever I use for testing doesn't have to be final. Also I can give each weapon a difficulty rating, and if you don't have enough skill levels, you would get a less than 100% multiplier instead of what skilled users get, so this would give unskilled fighters a reason to stick to simple weapons such as knives and clubs.