I am currently working on a fantasy-based game in which players must fight and kill monsters. I came up with a simple combat mechanic and would like some feedback on it. It works like this:
When a player encounters a monster, a monster card is flipped over from the deck. The card has a picture of the monster and a number at the bottom. If the player's attack + modifiers is higher then the number, the monster is slain, but if it is not, the monster is not slain and the player takes a damage.
What do you think?
I use a similar system in my narrative game. To simplify combat, players roll to see if they remove damage from a monster. If successful, they do some damage, if not succesful, they take damage. It's a nice and elegant system for combat since it only involves one die roll that could result in either taking damage.
Have you thought about giving monsters more damage taking capability so that it would take longer to defeat them? It seems that if they were all slain after one good roll, the game would be over pretty quickly.