Monday, July 27, 2026

Combat Chaos Rolls

I recently ran the first playtest of my unfinished ruleset (tentatively titled - Imperial Subjects of the Divine Emperor) and got tons of insightful thoughts from my playtesters.  For this playtest I mostly wanted to get an idea how people responded to the character creation process and the general ideas presented by the world and ruleset used (currently a panic engine system heavily inspired by Cloud Empress).  

One thing that was not playtested but we spoke about briefly was the idea of a chaos roll at the end of each combat round.   

Combat is split into 3 phases per round (fast actions, enemy actions, slow actions) and at the end of the round a D10 is rolled on the Chaos Table (Working title).  Random combatants are selected by rolling D100 for each combatant and taking the highest roll.

  1. Everyone gains 1 stress. 
  2. Everyone takes 1 damage from exhaustion.
  3. A random combatant slips and falls, taking 1D5 damage.
  4. If there are bystanders they join a random side of the fight, if not the environment changes in a meaningful way. (It begins to rain, a fire spreads, a pot of water spills onto the floor, a wall crumbles)
  5. A random combatant is wounded immediately the next time they are struck.  They retain their current damage total.
  6. All attacks deal an extra 2 damage in the next round.
  7. All attacks must roll to hit in the next round, with misses causing the attack to hit an ally or the weapon to break.
  8. Everyone who has been damaged makes a Guts Check, fleeing on failure.
  9. Everyone makes a panic check.
  10. Everyone who is struck in the next round takes a Wound.  Their damage resets to 0. 

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