HELP with Combat Mechanics

This is very doable.
EDIT: But would require a re-thinking of the combat system. I meant doable in the sense that there are plenty of interesting ways to use symbolic dice.

I've been experimenting with symbolic dice combat for quite a while now. And you can even build in some pretty sophisticated concepts that are all effectively "under-the-hood". In that, the math is all done beforehand and baked into the dice, so all the players need to do is compare symbols.

What I've found that works well is a symbolic language that is, essentially, "Do this offense, unless that defense." Where the offense and defense in question are represented as symbols.

This can be further broken down into having different dice for different classes of attack. (Melee, Range, Magic) (Guns, Beams, Missiles) (Attack, Bonus1, Bonus2) This way, you can include different buffs for offenses on the appropriate attack dice, and have the defensive symbols cross-over onto different dice.

So for example, say you are using a d6 for a Melee attack. As a baseline for a hit, you'd have some kind of universal symbol for a hit, like a star or pip, that appears 4/6 on that die.

So a normal unbuffed attack vs an unbuffed defense, is 4/6 chance to hit.

Then on the same faces of the hits, you have a smaller defensive symbol that can potentially cancel out the hit if the defender is showing the proper symbol.

So that face becomes, "Hit, unless the defender shows (armor symbol)"

You may then use this symbol more times on the die to represent more effectiveness, and or include it as a defense on multiple dice depicting greater versatility against multiple types of attack.

So multiple defensive symbols will chip away from that 4/6.

Conversely, you can add other offensive symbols that indicate a hit only if the attacker has the appropriate symbol. Thus increasing the 4/6 to 5/6 or more.

That face says, "Miss, unless the attacker shows (sword symbol)"

You can also combine the two concepts (and this is probably as complicated as you want to get) by further adding another defensive symbol paired with an optional offensive symbol.

Thus saying, "Miss, unless attacker has (sword symbol). But also miss if defender has (shield symbol)."

In this way, the dice are effectively disguised stat tables that the player never needs to worry about. You can build interesting relationships between offense and defense types far beyond simple +1, +2, etc. And they are even quicker to resolve.

Some defenses can work better vs certain offenses. You can build in diminishing returns for certain attack buffs. You can build rock-paper-scissors relationships (or not) with deliberate distribution of attacks and defenses.

There's lots of ways to implement this, so I'll just go over some broad concepts and lessons learned.

1) You need to spend time on clear symbols. Ones that can be quickly identified at any angle, and at varying sizes.

I highly recommend following a pattern for easily distinguishing offensive symbols from defensive symbols. For example, defensive symbols always appear as an outline, offensive symbols always appear as a solid shape.

2) No more than two unique symbols per die face. If you must break this rule, do it sparingly, and realize that this is going to really add to the learning curve for new players.

It should be noted that multiple pips representing multiple hits can probably be regarded as a single unit, if you go that route.

3) There's not much to be gained by using ever increasing die faces. Stick to d6 or d8 if some faces are going to have more than one symbol.

Here's what happens. Say you want your baseline chance of hit to be 50/50. On a d6, that's three spots for offensive buffs, and three spots with default hits. All of these spaces may also have defenses.

Ok, now say you decide you want to have room for more offensive options. So you move to d10. That gives you four more spaces, right? No.

You still want 50/50 as the baseline, so you now have five spaces instead of three. You've only gained two. Additionally, you've now watered down your existing buffs. Maybe one of them should remain strong, so you expand it to two faces, and now you only have one face left for your new buffs. To top it all off, d10 sides are much smaller and cramped, making your symbols harder to read, and increasing your production costs by using non-6 sided dice.

If you need further examples or explanation, just say so.

If you want to get away from counting pips on dice, you can go with a random tile draw face down. They each have a hit and a miss symbol of some sort (add complexity to taste rock paper scissors lizard spock style). The number drawn randomly is proportional to the relative strength of them and you flip them over one at a time. The first to score a hit with the other scoring a miss wins. No tiles is an automatic miss, meaning there need only be a hit on the other tile. This is simple, accounts for relative strength, can be simultaneous, and is a little more involved than a die roll.

Well, you could do it either way. If there are no defensive symbols, then everything has the same defensive abilities.
Also, you can use the system with defensive symbols on the attack dice to nullify hits. Or, you can have separate dice for offense and defense, using defensive rolls to nullify hits.

Personally, I found it more interesting to combine the two. Less materials, less rolling, and it allows defenses to be tailored to attack types, and even individual attack buffs.

The system works even if everything has effectively 1 HP.
However, there's going to be a wide range of randomness. I found I liked the results better with most units having 2 HP, as it cut down on crazy outcomes, and opened up more interesting tactical possibilities with extra supporting dice, and keyword abilities.

But this is going to be highly dependent on your game.

Certainly, there's lots of different ways to implement the basic idea. If you want to implement most hits wins, you can easily just add more dice. Or even have access to different types of bonus dice.

Here's a couple different ideas on implementation.
(I don't think there's a way to embed an image here.)

http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk140/Desprez10/Dice%20ExamplesRGB_zp...

One is a single roll with offense and defense symbols.
The other uses multiple die rolls, with no defense symbols.
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On the left side, there are three d6 representing melee, ranged, and magic attacks in a fantasy army themed game.

The large eight-pointed stars are universal hits, and the outlined symbols are defenses. The other solid symbols are attack upgrades.

One of the nice things here, is that the symbols are loosely thematic. The physical defenses that protect against physical attacks look like armor and shields, and the magic defenses look, well, a little more like magic things.

Notice how some defensive types are more effective against certain attacks. For example, the arrows (mobility) is very effective against melee (2/6), but does nothing to protect vs ranged and magic. Whereas the magic barrier (pie-hex thing) helps protect against all three, but somewhat less effective against melee as it only protects against a particular melee upgrade.

Again with the theme, one of the ranged upgrades is accuracy (crosshairs). You can imagine this as a headshot. But look! The helmet is one of the crossover defenses that protects against that upgrade.

Altogether, this naturally results in a bit of loose rook-paper-scissors effect. Cavalry (mobility) is good vs infantry, archers good vs cavalry, and infantry (shield) good vs archers.
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Next, on the right, is an example that uses multiple d8s for an airship battle game.

In this case, there are no defense symbols. Instead, the ships have armor points that must be punched through and reduced.
What's listed on the die are extra chances to hit, and different weapons roll different numbers of dice to score more hits.

The attacker tries to roll hits so that the result is more than the armor score, and the extra passes through. But otherwise, the armor is left intact. The star shapes reduce the actual armor value.

So the large black circles are a hit, and the other things are misses unless the weapons used shows that symbol.

There are three classes of weapon:
Large culverins, that get no bonus to hit, but roll large number of dice, and get the outlined star icon which increases the armor reduction chance from 1/8 to 2/8.

Rapid-fire gatling guns, that roll less dice, but get multiple attacks. And have the three-circle icon that indicate better accuracy increasing hit chance from 4/8 to 6/8. Less dice mean less chance of penetrating armor, and they get no bonus to reduce armor. However, multiple attacks mean more damage overall once armor gets low.

Torpedoes, that have good chance to do lots of damage, but have other tactical and practical limitations like speed and space. These get the rocket icon and the star icon, increasing their chance to hit to 7/8 and increasing chance to reduce armor. (It's not 6/8 because of range, see below.)

Lastly, there is a '4' on once die face. This is a miss unless the target is within 4 spaces. This automatically makes range a factor.
But notice that the gatling guns get an icon there as well, resulting in them never getting the range penalty.
Torpedoes (if they reach the target) explode within 1-2 spaces, so will always be within 4 spaces, effectively making them 7/8 change to score.

The big take-away here, is that you can get lots of great built-in detail from a single type of die, and most of that complexity is hidden away.
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Hopefully, these example have illustrated that there are lots of ways to make symbolic dice very powerful. And there are plenty of ways to expand on this, as well! (Yikes, I could probably write a thesis paper on this subject.)

I have only played two games that I remember that used tiles to resolve combat. I think there are more, but there is probably a lot of room for thinking up new mechanics there. Essentially of course a bag of tiles to draw from is just like a die with many faces (and larger faces with room for more details like more symbols!).

Great thread here! I posted a reply on bgg to this same question yesterday with my own ideas about a system with two dice using 1-2 symbols per side, but anything I said there is easily beaten by the great replies here, so I am not going to repeat that suggestion.

Regarding number of symbols per side though, I think you can get more than two readable symbols on a side without making them difficult to read. Thinking about some recent games I have played, you could look at Mice&Mystics or Quarriors or DiceMasters (probably lots of good photos on bgg of all three) to see how much information they manage to get into their combat dice, and I never think it was a problem to quickly read them. Picking easily recognizable symbols I guess is the key, but if you do a good job at that I think you can easily have 5-6 symbols even on a small die.

I would love to see how you use it. I currently do not have a game that needs a battle mechanic, so I am very interested to see what fun can be had by a random thought experiment (pun slightly intended) I had on a long drive.

Also, keep us posted on what you settle on for the game presented in the original post. I do love me some dice.

Ww