Monday, December 31, 2018

Baseline D&D Combat Simulator

For my final post of 2018, I am posting a link to a DnD combat simulator.

DnD Combat Simulator

While having two combatant whack at each other until one of them is dead is not very realistic in terms what goes on in a campaign. It is a useful baseline to have while designing a combat system.

The source code for this can be downloaded from.

DnD Combat Simulator Source Code

I developed a similar utility to use with a Majestic Wilderlands RPG based on Fudge and confirmed the feedback I got from my players that a +1 advantage seems to tilt the odds by a lot. No matter how I tweaked the combat procedure the steepness of the bell curve of 4DF dominates how bonuses work.

Ironically it wasn't until two years later I found d6-d6 fixes the issue as the bell curve is now the same as rolling 2d6.

With this utility one get a rough idea of how the changes over various DnD editions effected combat by plugging the various numbers as they existed in ODnD, ODnD+Greyhawk, ADnD and so on.

Hope this proves useful for your campaigns and I wish everybody a Happy New Year!



1 comment:

Frank said...

Yea, these kinds of things are cool. I think I wrote one for D&D back in the 80s. My friend who designed the Cold Iron game a bunch of us played and ran back in college wrote one for his game. It was really helpful to understand the impact of various modifiers and magic buffs.