Conquest of the Horde

Every now and then a roll system is proposed, detailing for bonuses and such in an attempt to create a balance of power by making some characters better suited to attack or defend than others. I tend to prefer trust fights in general, as it creates a better flow of RP if you know where you wish the story to go, but in times when it is necessary to roll, I find that a simple 5-7 HP, +50 crit system is better than any more complicated formula. I'm not a huge fan of roll bonuses. Though useful if you are the recipient, they are too open to interpretation. Prestiges tend to be the recipients of them but it leads to questions like:

1) Shouldn't DK's get roll bonuses since they are prestige-like?
2) Should forsaken get defense bonuses seeing as they are undead and can withstand greater punishment?
3) Should a hunter with an established pet have 2 attack rolls per turn, seeing as neither the hunter nor the pet is going to stop attacking for a turn?
4) If wearing heavy armor, you are realistically less likely to dodge, so shouldn't the roll be to decide if the heavy armor wearer loses half a point versus a full one?
5) Tauren are frickin huge! Shouldn't they -always- have an attack/defense bonus on sheer size alone?

There are probably other things to consider, but you get the idea. Once someone gets a bonus, then it is natural for everyone to look for the potential bonuses in their own character. This tends to create more OOC drama than anything for various reasons, such as unagreed upon bonuses to fear of character death. So unless a comprehensive and agreed upon table of bonuses is created based on every class/race/prestige combo, I think sticking to the base roll system is best.

Also I want to refer to something a player mentioned in another post:

BountyHunter Wrote:Know when to give up, fights don't need to be won when someone is K.O. If you feel your fighter can't take any more (Or in an Undead's case, get bored) then simply wave the white flag.

This was referring to trust fighting, but is perfectly applicable here too. If your powerful character loses a roll fight, instead of being a warrior laid out bloody and beaten by a farmer, it could be that the warrior stopped fighting out of respect to the farmer. Make the fight and its reasoning/results interesting!!! Roll fights tend to be too bland and black and white, coming down to the wins losses instead of the story. If you make it something that progresses the character, you won't care as much about the victory, because either way the character will be more interesting as a result of it. On both ends of a roll fight I've had:

1) Victory! My character kicked butt and found new respect from her peers for her fighting prowess!
2) Defeat! My character lost her leg, and had to get get a prosthetic which constantly causes her pain and led to her having to make permanent life readjustments.

The second I thought I would come to hate, but I kept it even after the restart. Her loss makes great conversation fodder when things are slow. So don't fear losing the roll, as it may turn out that it is better that you did.

Its funny, the game probably takes more stat info into consideration when calculating damage than we could shake a stick at. It makes pvp fighting more fair and balanced but not necessarily more entertaining .. hence we RP fight.

I used to enjoy watching those old kung fu fights on TV. They would go at it for hours, screaming, flipping, smashing stuff, finger pointing, chasing, climbing, leaping, posing, attacking the air furiously, making totally seriously dramatic facial expressions accompanied by awesome screeching noises, and of course vowing to get revenge as the loser would scurry away to inform his 80 year old master that his ass was kicked and that their sacred way of kung fu proved to be ineffective.

Stats are for mathematicians...

This is why in my roll system I take track of everything about stats. But my events are only against NPCs. I hate PVP-RP only because of the stupid fights and OOC drama it wants to cause. My /roll 50 system is based off GM common sense and playing out the situations.

I love trust fights, I really do. Still, when you end up doing it with someone who godmodes, it can really take the fun out of the event. It's a careful balance between being a badass and having weaknesses.

Of course, my roll fights always go the wrong way, too. My Death Knight has lost roll fights to unarmored knife-fighters (it was a spar, she was going easy on him!) and my scared, naive Shaman has utterly wiped the floor with an Orc warmaster (we trusted the end of the fight because I didn't want her to win against him, yet.)

I agree with Jonoth. Simpler -is- better.

I never Trust-fight, because it is hard to measure your character's power, especially without wanting to appear OP and such. So, I leave it to dice numbers to decide who wins. It's -much- simpler, and it is cold, hard truth, instead of speculation. No one can argue with the numbers. Ever.

I have always - always - decided the lives and limbs of my characters and those of others(with consent, of course) via dice rolls. It is only fair. Perhaps you may be a very strong character.
Perhaps you may even be a king. But remember Hastings(The battle, not the Forsaken <3) - A king got shot with an arrow to the eyesocket, in a -fluke- accident. Such things happen on real battlefields.

As a friend of mine that made CEO of a local company puts it: Luck is better than skill.

A peasant with a flint knife can kill an armored knight if he's lucky.

So, yeah. 5 or 6 HP with Crits at 50, on a /roll 100 system is all I need. No modifiers. No +/- to any stats. Just equal terms.
On a side note, I've always treated Hunter Pets and Warlock Demons as tertiary individuals. Basically, they have the exact same stats a normal player would, and get their own turns and Initiative. The master of the Pet rolls for them.

I totally agree with the simplicity for many factors. One of them is that, by eliminating modifiers, we save time by not arguing. When I do manage to get in game and RP, I don't always have lots of hours to kill. Do I really want to be bothered to keep up with crazy modifiers in a fight when my time is precious?

I also agree with Flammos on luck; fate is a crazy thing that defies certain logic sometimes-- or rather, employs logic that we don't think about. Going on the armored knight killed by the peasant example: armor does have gaps. The armor may be poorly forged. Who knows, really.

I love trust fighting, but with roll fight, I've alway been a "3 hp and 100 is a crit" or some straightforward rule like that kind of person. It's fun to gamble with fate.
That being said, I like rolling for other factors outside of fighting for that same reason.