It's for a warfare combat resolution. I decided that there will be various unit types that will duel each other. The way the units are matched up is not important for what I am going to explain below. The result of the duel will make the players lose "Life Point" from their army track.
I was looking for various combinations of mechanics to determine which unit will win. The first idea that came to my mind is for a mechanic I used in a RPG like game. Armor was used differently than in traditional RPG. Instead of reducing the amount of damage, a successful armor roll reduced the damage by half. The second idea was to solve the problem of "which weapon is stronger than others?". In a warfare, archers for example will probably make as much damage as spear mens. So the type of weapons does not really influence the number of people that are going to die. Finally, since each battle would have many duels, I needed something that gets resolved fast. So for example, I did not want players to add and subtract values, I wanted something that could easily get resolved in a glance.
So I came up with a new approach that I find particularly interesting which I called: Avoiding death. By default, your unit dies, now you must try to avoid death. So the whole system would work with saves. For example, players would have armor saves, roll 1d6 <= to your unit's armor value, to avoid death. Armor level for different type of unit is much more easy to identify in a warfare. Even some unit names refers to the armor level (ex: light cavalry vs heavy cavalry).
It might be possible for the attacking unit to have multiple attacks. For example, you could have swash bucklers that can do a preemptive pistol attack and then fight with their swords, or have some cavalry have a charge attack and sword attack. In that case, the defender will have to save for both attacks. So the number of attacks the opposing unit has is equal to the number of dice you need to roll.
If I really need stronger attacks, I could make players rolls D8 and D10 (or D6+1 and D6+2), but I think this will be too much.
Armor rolls, would not be the only roll that can be done, here are the other type of rolls:
Avoid: Some special ability or spell effects, could make you avoid completely an attack (make you survive). This could be the case of spells like "Blur" or "invisibility". In that case, if you save against avoid, your unit survives no matter what are the other results. A minority of units will have the possibility to avoid attacks.
Resist: There will be special status effects like Paralyse, confuse, weakness, poison and death that could be avoided with a successful resist save. Again, not all units has special status effects.
Block: Some units will have tactical advantages (ex: mobile, flying, teleport ). If the unit fail his block save, the player lose an additional "life point" as a routed unit. Routed units count as killed unit for victory conditions, but it is possible to rally them back into battle.
In overall, when the units to duel are matched up, each player roll his dice and see if he survives. The only thing the player need to check on the opposing player's unit is the nb of attack the unit has and if it has special status or tactical abilities. But by default, the players could roll all the dice and ignore the results of some die if for example, there is no status ability, or roll additional dice if there attacker has multiple attacks. Of course, each type of roll will use dices of it's own color so that you can roll them all at once.
What do you think?
Does it makes sense that all types of attack have the same kill potential?
Yes it is, because I need to look at my opponent's card/sheet to read the information and make the calculation with my unit's stats. In the system above, all the rolls are done relative to the unit it self. The only exception if for the number of dice to roll or if certain rolls are active. But like I said, it can be resolved after the roll.
Sometimes you will ignore dices this way. For example, If I have a blur effect that makes my unit avoid all attacks if I roll 1 or less on 1D6, then all roll the dice, look for that die first, if the results is a 1, I ignore all other results.
Well 1 dragon and 1000 sword mens will probably have similar attack powers. The dragon will have 2 attacks where the 2nd is the breath. But for the tails/claw/bite attack strength, it is equivalent to 1000 soldiers. So the how big the creature is does not really matter because it is counter balanced in quantity which is generally not the case in a RPG where you can have a lot of 1 on 1 battles.