Perhaps the most important aspect of a dungeon-crawling game is its combat. The way a game handles combat has a huge effect on how it feels. Is it adventurous? Lethal? Do the characters actively pursue or avoid fighting?
For Dynamic Delver, I want to borrow the idea of “icon dice” from HeroQuest. Each die will have different icons on each side. Some of them will be “hit icons” and some will be “defense icons”. The attacker and defender roll a number of dice equal to their attack and defense values, respectively. The attacker counts how many hit icons they rolled, and the defender counts their defense icons. Each defense icon cancels one of the attacker’s hits. Then, the defender takes damage for each hit icon left. This mechanic has a number of advantages:
- It’s relatively easy to understand and to estimate how combat will go, but random enough to prevent over-analysis.
- It allows for a lot of variability between classes. Different characters can have various types of dice with different icons, or even unique icons specific to their class.
- It’s easy to incorporate the effects from items or spells. The fireball spell can roll dice that have fire icons instead of hit icons, and the fire icons have different effects in certain situations.
- It’s possible to support icons that have effects other than just damage. The icons from the Call of Cthulhu LCG are a good example. Some of the icons let you terrify your opponent or investigate.
Dynamic Delver 