Game mechanic for a battle between 2 monsters

Question

I'm building a flash game where you have a collection of creatures. It's basically a petting game at the moment, I'd like to know what kind of mechanics I could use to battle them efficiently. I'd like to avoid to have a mechanic inspired of pokemon because I see many games being too influenced by that. I'm trying to find the best ratio simplicity:efficiency mechanic for 1 to 1 battle. Anything that could enhance my inspiration would help greatly, thanks !

Answer 1

I'll give it the old college try. Combat generally breaks down into two types:

• Ranged
• Melee

Both of those have two basic options. (See: Which Combat Mechanic to use? forum post.)

You can either have an attack and block mechanic where you used, say an attack/defense stat combination and generated random numbers in a range, like rolling 1D6 per point in the relevant stat for both sides and then comparing, where every defense roll higher than an attack roll cancels an attack roll.

Otherwise you can have a simple target number attack, where you only "roll" for the attacker and then compare against a target number, such as the other creature's defense. Any number higher than the target is a hit.

You could also add in shield or weapon numbers into those two methods.

The above methods can be further modified by a Parry Mechanic, or Special abilities.

You could even invent your own Custom Die Combat Mechanic.

As you can see the links above are from various systems and forums, inspiration is all around you.