Very rough draft 0.5 Transformers TTRPG combat
This is mostly just me working through a rough idea of what I think combat would look like in this imagined transformers TTRPG. I've roughed out three PCs, a Car, a Plane and a Tank, and they're under attack by four Decepticon Seekers, effectively henchmen.
I threw together some tokens and a quick hex map. The hex map is using hextml, a site intended for large scale maps rather than battlemaps. The rough idea is the 'hill' icons are terrain that can function for cover, but does not impede movement, and the 'Mountain' icons are taller terrain that impedes movement. It's meant to be roughly evocative of the kind of rough rocky desert a lot of the early cartoon took place in.
The hex tokens for the characters didn't come out great, but that's on me for going with something more complex than needed. Top left is a muscle car, bottom is a tank, top right is a jet. The four on the right are Decepticon Seekers.
Okay, let's give this a whirl.
The fight starts with the PCs gathered together discussing something, when they hear the telltale noise of Decepticon jets. And they roll initiative.
To roll initiative, the PCs make an Agility check. The Car, Tank and Jet in order roll Agility at 60, 30 and 40. They get 57, 77 and 23 respectively, which means the Car gets Success with 7 degrees of success, the Tank gets a failure with 7 degrees of failure, and the jet gets a success with 3 degrees of success.
This translates into a turn order where the Car goes first, then the Jet, then the Seekers, then the Tank.
Effectively, if you succeed you go before the NPCs, in the order of degrees of success. If you fail you go after the NPCs, in reverse order of the degrees of failure.
The Carbot goes first. He has three actions. His alt mode isn't super useful in combat at the moment, so staying as a robot is his best option. With movement four he can get to the space next to the jet easily and use that as cover, and a few jets will be in range of his pistol blaster there. It isn't much, but it's a chance to get the first shot. So his first action is 'Move', his second action will be to 'Attack' the nearest jet with his blasters, and his final action will be the Take Cover action.
I'm running this combat with the assumption of a 50 Combat stat for everyone, the second option in the previous post on the topic. So the Carbot opens fire and needs a 50 or less to hit. He gets a 95, which concretely misses. His final action is to Take Cover, which should protect him from the seekers counterattack.
Next is The Jetbot. He can fire from the ground, but he's in a relatively good place to take the fight to the Decepticons in the air. So he'll use his first action to Transform into a Jet. In Robot Form he has the Walker movement mode, which means he can turn freely at the start of his turn or during movement. He has Instant Takeoff, so doesn't require a runway either. So he turns one hex left, uses an action to Transform, and another action to Move.
He cannot split movement and firing, (maybe that can be a special ability they can purchase?) so he needs to end his movement somewhere he'll be safeish from the Seekers, while still opening fire with his Gatling laser. As a Flyer with the Hover feature he needs to move at least half his speed to remain airborn, and with a speed of 8 that means he must move at least 4.
He easily finds a flight path he likes, and takes aim at one of the seekers. Needing to roll under 50, he gets 25, which is success with 5 degrees. His Laser has a damage of 6, which added to 5 degrees of success becomes 11 damage. Seekers in Plane mode have a Shaken of 8 and Down of 12, so he just failed to down one of them, but they only have two actions next turn.
So at the end of the first phase, this is the rough layout.
Now the Seekers get to go.
Their jets have speed 8 and mobility 2, so they can turn one hex facing after moving two hexes. One of them, the one closest to the bottom of the map, could circle around to attack the jet in the air, but none of the others could. And this game does indirectly encourage grouping fire due to the Shaken rules. And the Carbot cannot get shake if attacked from a position cover helps, so it looks like their best odds is to group up and fire on the tank bot who hasn't reacted yet. Not ideal since he's the toughest of the lot, but they don't have many other great choices.
Unfortunately for the PCs, their Rayguns have the Linked feature, meaning that unlikely normal weapons that can only be used to attack once a turn, theirs can attack twice. One of them is shaken so only has two actions rather than three.
After a bit of thought, the Shaken one will transform into robot form (one action), land and turn (walkers can turn freely instead of needing to use movement) then fire on the jet.
The other three will fly close to the minimum speed necessary to stay afloat and unload two shots each into the tank.
First the shaken bot. It transforms, lands, turns and shoots at the Jetbot. With a roll of 26, that's a success with 6 degrees, plus the weapon's 6 damage that's 12 damage total. The Jetbot in plane form has 9 shaken and 14 down, so he's just shaken. And with his turn done the Seeker is not longer shaken too.
Now the incoming 6 attacks on the Tank. We'll roll those by jet, because they may want to change targets if he goes down quicker.
In Robot Mode the Tank has thresholds of 12 Shaken and 19 Down. But if he gets Shaken twice he goes down anyway. So the first jet opens fire, and gets 49 and 50, which is two successes, one with 9 degrees of success and one with zero degrees of success. That's a 15 damage hit and a 6 damage hit. The Tank shrugs off 6 damage, but is Shaken by the 15 damage.
The second Jet opens fire and gets 77 and 12, one hit with 2 degrees of success, for 8 damage, not enough.
The final Jet opens fire and gets 99 and 3, one success with 3 degrees turns into 9 damage. So after all that the Tank is Shaken once.
After the Seeker's actions, the field looks more like this:
Finally, the Tankbot gets to go. If he has more actions he may try to be more cautious, but two actions is enough to do all that matters.
As his first action he Transforms into a Tank.
As his second action he tries to shoot a Seeker out of the sky. He picks the one most south, since the other two might be something the Carbot can attack. He takes aim and rolls a 17, which is a success with 7 degrees. Plus the 7 damage his Turret does is 14 damage. The Seekers are Shaken at 8 and Down at 12, so he easily shoots one of them out of the air.
With that his turn is over and he loses the Shaken condition, showing his teammates how it's done.
Turn 2: Battle, uh, continues
I was tempted to have initiative rerolled every round, but it seems a bit much. So we'll stick with the current.
The Carbot goes first, and the Seekers (despite being in the air) are close enough he can get up and open fire.
It'll be a little risky, since he's trying to take advantage of his twin blaster pistols being a Linked weapon to use two actions, which in turn means he won't have an action to take cover. But sometimes you've just got to go crazy.
So he heads south, stopping between two pieces of cover, and opens fire on the current active South most Seeker. First shot rolls a 4, which is success with 4 degrees. His blasters aren't super heavy so they only have 5 damage, added to the degrees is 9 damage total. Seekers are Shaken at 8 or more, so the jet is shaken.
He could split his fire to reduce the threat of the Decepticon's counterattack, but they need to start taking Seekers down. So he uses his second attack on the same seeker. He rolls again and gets a 26, which is 11 damage. Enough to make the Seeker Shaken again. Shaken when already shaken is Down, and Henchmen enemies are out automatically if they go down. So a second Seeker drops.
Now The Jetbot's turn. He's Shaken and facing off against a single Seeker off to the side, although that Seeker is on the ground. That's a double edged sword, it means if he takes off at speed the grounded Seeker can use their walker movement to turn in any direction to follow, meaning he'd be easy pickings.
So he takes a risky move. He transforms into robot mode as well, lands and opens fire. If he could move it'd probably be a good idea to do that and fist fight instead of shooting, but he only has two actions available, and one of them is to transform.
So he lands and fires on the Seeker, getting 13. That's a success with 3 degrees, for 9 damage with his laser. That's enough to leave the Seeker Shaken. That'll give him some leeway, but it's not enough to take down the Seeker. At least he isn't Shaken anymore.
With this new lay of the land, it's the Seeker's action.
First off the landed Seeker could try to transform and do something fancy, but being shaken he only has two actions, so he'd be easy pickings the same way the Jet was. So he decides to go in swinging. His first action is movement to get into melee and his second action is to Brawl.
Brawling is very dangerous, I deliberately made it innately more damaging than most ranged weapons, because Robots punching each other up is pretty common across the entire Transformers franchise.
So he gets in close and attacks with 43, a success with 3 degrees. Plus the Seeker's brawl damage of 9, that's 12 damage total. Thankfully the Jetbot's Downed threshold is 14, so he's still standing but shaken.
Speaking melee, the only remaining Seeker to act is in the hex adjacent to the car bot. He could shoot, but like I said brawling is very dangerous. So he uses his three actions to transform back into a robot, brawl the Carbot, and then he'll still have a third action to shoot someone if he wants.
Note: Shooting in melee? Do I want this? Not want this? Maybe make preventing people in adjacent hexes shooting a skill they can get?
So the Seeker lands and tries to Brawl the Carbot, only to get an 86, a failure. Oh dear. At least he can try to shoot.
Ooh no, he did shoot, and got a 28. Added to the damage of their ray of 6 that's 14. The Carbot thresholds of 7 Shaken, 11 Down, and 15 Out. He was nearly out in that hit, but is currently Down.
And now it's the Tank's turn. An immediate option is the Tank just shoots the Seeker in the back.
But remember how I said Brawling is really dangerous?
The Tank's first action is to Transform back into a Robot.
His second action is to walk up behind the Seeker, who is probably gloating over the still conscious but injured form of the Carbot.
And his final action is to use Brawl against the Seeker. He only rolls a 13, which is just 3 degrees of success.
Except his Brawl does 12 damage. So that's 15 damage, which is enough to put the Seeker Down and Out immediately. I like to think the Tank picked up the smaller Seeker by the leg and just Hulk-Lokied him, slamming him into the ground until he stopped moving.
So with that, this is the current state of the combat.
Turn 3: Battle concludes, I assume
I knew I wanted a test to try and recover from Down, but I hadn't fully nailed that down. So let's adlib, since it's the Carbots turn and he's down.
You roll a Brawn test. And your degree of success determines how 'Back' you are. A 0-3 DoS means you're back with 1 action, a 4-7 DoS means you're back with 2, and a 8-9 means you're back with 3 actions.
But the Carbot's Brawn is only 40, so this is a challenge. Let's see if he's back: 27! Back with 2 actions!
And I want to try some other rules too, so let's see how they work here. The Enemy seeker is on the ground. The Carbot could open fire with both pistols, that may work.
Or, they can Ram. Let's do that.
The Carbot can start their turn facing any direction because of the Walker movement type. They spend an Action to Transform, and another Action on the Ram attack. Ram is a special attack that lets you move up to your Speed, and then your Speed from all movement that turn is added to your Size to determine your damage.
The Car mode has a Roll speed of 7, and a size of 3. So that's a damage 10 attack if it hits. Let's give it a whirl.
Ah. An 85 to hit, so it's a miss. Ahh well, can't win them all.
Next up is the Jetbot. He's Shaken, but adjacent to the Seeker so that doesn't matter much. Time to Brawl. But he rolls a 72, so another miss. Might as well try to shoot point blank to see if that hits, and he rolls a 10, a success with 0 degrees of success, becoming just 6 damage, below the Seeker's Shaken threshold of 8. So he didn't do anything there, but he's not shaken anymore which is a plus.
My gut feeling from GMing is the Seeker would transform and flee, which would be a bit of a fail state for the PCs, since they could report back their position to Decepticon command. And they could flee easily. Seeker's can immediate launch on transform, meaning he can turn the direction he wants to go as a robot at the start of his turn, transform and use his remaining two actions to move. Seekers are fast, speed 8, so he could easily get off the map in that one action. The Jet could pursue, but that'd be a different kind of action scene.
And that's not what I'm here to test. So let's try to fight our way out. The Carbot is size 3 so doesn't seem as tough, obviously the Seeker would attack him. Of course the Seeker doesn't know the Car has a little more armour in car mode, but we'll see how this goes.
First a Brawl. A roll of 63 misses. Then he has two attacks with his ray because it's a linked, weapon, rolling 37 and 43. Two hits, one with success of 7 the other of 3. At 6 damage that's 13 and 9.
I've jumped the gun here. The first attack did 13 damage, that's enough to Down the Carbot again, even in Car Mode. But what does an attack on a Downed enemy do? I didn't think about it much, since I think in that situation the Seeker should have used their second attack on the Jetbot.
Note: What happens when you attack a Downed bot?
For the sake of this we'll say the first attack hit and downed the Carbot (again), and the second attack was at the Jetbot. 9 Damage is enough to leave him Shaken.
This Seeker is holding his own, for sure. But now it's the Tankbot's turn, and he's been cleaning house. He's not close enough that his 4 Walker movement can get him into melee to Brawl, but... oh no, a terrible idea has come to me.
See, not just Cars can Ram. Any vehicle can.
So his first action is to Transform into a tank.
His second action is to take the Ram action, which gives him movement equal to a move action. For his Tank form that's 6. He moves over (rolling over a defeated Seeker on the way) and Rams into the Seeker.
That's another attack roll of 43 (exactly the same as the Seeker's last attack roll, weirdly). A success with 3 degrees plus the Tank's speed of 6, plus its size of 5, for 14 damage. The Seeker is concretely down, and out, and the fight is over.
The Autobots were outnumbered by Henchmen level foes, and were able to emerge Victorious. The Carbot went Down twice, which would lower his Resilience from 3 to 1 until repaired, likely making them a bit more gunshy, but they still walked out of it in better shape than the Decepticons did.
I think this has legs. I need to nail down some things, and this absolutely I think suffered by there being no 'special skills' or abilities in play, but I can imagine this being fun to play.
Although it does make me think there may need to be concessions for a Theatre of the Mind version of combat from time to time.
It gave me some immediate ideas for possible combat skills. Maybe the Ram action normally doesn't give movement, unless you have a special skill for that (Road Warrior?)
Also, I really really like that it evoked the old cartoons propensity for melee fights, just through Melee being super dangerous. Guns were a big deal, but eventually people started throwing punches.
And a throwaway idea in the rules turned out to be major. I liked the idea that Walker movement mode makes you super quick to turn, since you can just, y'know, turn. But it turned into a big thing where vehicles otherwise slow to turn could easily change direction from robot mode. I love the mental image of a Jet transforming into a robot at low altitude, landing, and taking off in completely the opposite direction.
Something it did bring into sharp relief: I need to find a better solution to a 50 or less being a hit in combat. I'm not sure what it is, I don't really want people to feel like they have to give up fun character stuff to optimise for combat, but I need a solution.
