Each mechanics rewards or penalizes certain aspects of the game so THAT’S what you want! Mechanics that help your game feel RIGHT in the story you want to tell!Health, Damage and Healing have a huge effect on the Story of your combat system: Do wounded characters take penalties as they get damaged, or are they tip top and then suddenly unconscious? How many hits with an average weapon and strength/skill does it take to drop a PC? How difficult or slow is healing? Changing these values has HUGE effects on your game feel and on character design, especially Healing speed and frequency.Armor, Weapons and CRUNCH are important, but less so than the previous. As long as it is a hack n slash world, maybe it’ll kinda work.If you are building a combat system LOOK at what is out there and play a bunch of them. Combat would be too scary for the Hack n Slash feel that D&D aims for and this break in ambiance would make the game unrecognizable.Most systems don’t understand this, so they take D&D combat mechanics and just plug it into another world. It’s a much higher value but so Many Things reduce it and healing it is very limited.Do you see the ambiance differences between these systems? If you plugged CoC combat into D&D you wouldn’t have D&D anymore. Also combat isn’t the only “damage” metric, investigators have Sanity. While taking damage doesn’t slow you down, you simply probably can’t take many hits so the tension is ‘can I afford to risk combat at all?’ and healing is SLOW so the wounds you do take are much more likely to persist into the adventure. You don’t have many hit points and weapons do a terrifying amount of damage compared to that small number of hit points.
This is the ambiance of the system… the tension is in party composition and tactics with few real negative effects from fighting and generally enough HP to likely survive your appropriate challenge.Now look at something like Call of Cthulu. Hit Points have no negative effects until you run out of them, a la Conan the Barbarian, you can have a thousand cuts and bruises and still swing your sword as hard as someone who just woke up and joined combat. Combat is built to be enjoyed, it’s a BIG part of the mechanics.
Put another way any mechanic you could use in your battle system is like a genre of writing and putting a “Action Movie” combat system into your “Creeping Horror” RPG is a terrible idea (unless that’s what you are aiming for, like Aliens!) You NEED your combat system to keep the feeling of the game you want to run.Look at D&D’s combat system.
Your battle system is not a “battle system”, it is a critical piece of storytelling written in math and “Kapow!” special effects.
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