First things first, hello you there my dear reader! Hope you're having a good day.

You'll have to excuse me, but I'm not an english-native speaker so please ignore my inevitable spelling mistakes. Also, I'm writing here because I hope to find people more inclined to mechanics than the narrative behind it!

Introduction

I've been working on a ttrpg system able to handle cool "anime-like" 1v1 battles for the last few weeks, this being my New Year Resolution. The lockdown my country is going in and out is also helping me to have enough free time on my hands to do so.

The gist of it is that the game is designed to be a Creature Collecting TTRPG (à la Pokemon), designed to emulate the battles of the anime and not the ones of the games. That said, I hope for the battle resolution mechanic to be intricate, but not unwieldy and prone to be mechanically upscaled by adding different actions and conditions to be integrated in the base system.

Base Stats and Turn System

Each creature has 3 stats; speedy, mighty and healthy, pretty self-explanatory. Attached to each of those stats there are three point bars, with the maximum being equal to the amount of points they have in that stat:

• HP Bar, attached to Healthy. It's a measure of the character vitality and the damage taken.
• MP Bar, attached to Mighty. It's a measure of the character energy and is a measure of fatigue.
• SP Bar, attached to Speedy. It's a measure of the character relative advantage in combat due to positioning and speed. (This let me to avoid using grid combat entirely and be very loose with the movement descriptions)

If any of those is depleted, the opponent get to use a "finisher" and end the battle.

During each turn, a player is on the offensive (and is said to have "the initiative" and Initiative goes back and forth between turns), while the other is on the defensive. The player on the offensive must pick an option from a list of "actions" while the other pick an option from a list of "reactions". Then they make an opposed roll to see the result of their combined actions and narrate together as the sequence goes down.

Actions and Reactions

The whole dice system is explained here, but it's not really relevant now. Basically, the two players chances of success are indipendent (both can succeed or fail indipendently); they don't roll against each other but against the opponent's stats.

Every roll may end up in being a failure or a success and in the case it succeed the degree of success is measured in hits scored (from 1 to 6), whose can be spent to get secondary effects according to the chosen move. This means that each action and reaction has a "main effect" and a list of "secondary effects" that the player may pick if they rolled well enough or if the opponent failed. This is my current configuration:

The Action List (the ones that could be picked by the player on the offensive) is:

1. Strike (Mighty Action), to hit the opponent. (Primary Effect: Many HP Damages; Secondary Effects: 1 MP/SP Damage)
2. Maneuver (Speedy Action), to get positional advantage. (Primary Effect: Many SP Damages; Secondary Effects: 1 MP/HP Damage)
3. Stall (Healthy Action), to wear down the opponent. (Primary Effect: Many MP Damage; Secondary Effects: 1 HP/SP Damage)

The Reaction List (the one that could be picked by the player on the defensive) is:

1. Block (Healthy Reaction)
2. Dodge (Speedy Reaction), to convert HP damage into SP damage (?) or resist HP damage?
3. Outwit (Speedy Reaction), to convert SP damage into MP damage (?) or resist SP damage?
4. Counterstrike (Mighty Reaction), to convert HP damage into MP damage (?)

Basically, I think that reactions may help giving reactions or absorb a specific kind of damage, but I'm at a loss with the possible primary and secondary effects of many of the reactions.

Questions

I want to keep the list of actions and reactions relatively small (being 10 my super upper limit and 6 being ideal), but I'm a little bit of a loss with the reactions here.

• Have you got any idea for gamifying those reactions and actions? Should I tie down secondary effects of the reactions to the action chosen by the other player?
• What kind of primary or secondary effects would you suggest to avoid having a non-choice for the reaction (with one obviously superior than the others), given that the player on the offensive pick their action first?
• I think that there could be something more unique as secondary effects for the actions.

Thank you very much!