Hello everyone!

With the coming holiday season, I was able to schedule a few more playtest sessions than usual so I went back to reworking on my most interesting half-baked projects of this past year.

I'm currently working on Samurai Beat: it's a Japanese-styled street modern game about a turf war between local gangs vying for control of the city. The game is overall pretty traditional and relatively lightweight mechanically, i.e. it's GM-led, the attributes are Street/Spirit/Steel/Strength, and you roll two dice under your attribute for checks (one success is a weak hit, two a full hit, zero is a failure), and there's a turn-based combat system with one action/one movement per turn.

The part I like the most about the system is how damage works, inspired by Into the Odd. Characters have Posture points instead of Hit points, and when they attack they don't roll to hit and roll directly the damage: if the target has enough posture points to absorb the attack, they describe how they dodge the attack, then they decrease the posture by the damage dealt; if the target doesn't have enough posture points to absorb the attack, they die and the attacker describes how they do it. There are many upsides, but notably it makes it trivially easy to differentiate between cool NPCs and 0 posture mooks, and over-the-top dodges or mortal slashes fit the intended themes of the game.

The issue is that there's currently no incentive for players to pick a Tanto/Knife d6 over a Katana/Longsword d10, and one player legitimately brought it up during playtest. On other games, I'd maybe tweak the accuracy or critical odds, but it's tougher to do the same without a to-hit roll. I'm aware that there are potential solutions in-universe for it (swords are bigger and you can't just go around with one without drawing attention), but I'd love to hear suggestions on how you dealt with similar issues!

Thank you for reading!

TL;DR Players ask why they would pick a d6 weapon when the d10 option exists.