Working on possibly inventing a system for the game should we decide to use dice. The basic gist is as follows:
You would take Strength or Speed (plus any special training mods like Strength or Speed) (I'm leaning toward Speed as the "to hit" attribute since Strength is what factors into damage) and then take a number of d4s equal to your Martial Arts rating... roll the dice and take the highest die result. ie if you have Martial Arts x3 and roll a 1, 2 and 4, you would take the 4 and add it to your modified Strength or Speed rating. For this example let's use Ranma with his Speed of 6 and Speed x2. He rolled a 4 so he would add it to 8 for a total of 12 to hit. Ryoga tries to Dodge with his Speed of 5 and Speed x1. He rolls a 1, 1 and 3, so he takes the 3 and adds it to 6 for 9. Ranma hit Ryoga with a 12 to Ryoga's 9. Since he got 2 over the 1 needed to hit him, Ranma gets to add a +2 modifier to his damage roll. Ranma's Strength is 5 plus Strength x1 for 6... he then rolls 3d4 again (because of his Martial Arts x3) and gets a 3 as his highest result. He adds that 3 to his base 6 plus 2 for the extra damage modifier and gets a total of 11. Ryoga has a Durability of 6 plus Toughness x2. That's a total of 8, so 8 points of Ranma's attack are absorbed with a total of 3 points going to Ryoga's hit points, which are (Durability+Toughness)x3. Ryoga has 24 hit points before he's bonked so now he has 21 left.
Note: I realize that a d4 is a very low variable, but that's done intentionally. I personally feel that 1-20 or even 1-10 is too high a variable for an RPG. Take any D20 game for example... until very high levels are reached, what you roll on the die is -far- more important than your actual stats. I feel that ability and skill are less variable than most RPG systems take into account. A guy who's a better swordsman than another guy by a good margin is going to defeat that guy 9 times out of 10. If you're skilled at a trade, odds are you're not going to fail at performing your job... yet (as an example), your average Rogue in 3.5 D&D had around 8 to 10 (assuming a fairly high attribute) in a disarm trap skill... and the average trap DC even at level one was around 24-26. That meant you needed to roll a 16 or higher everytime to disarm a basic trap. That's a 75%
chance of failure to do what your class was designed to do. In my opinion, skill and ability should be far more important than the element of chance. If you're good at hitting someone and the person you're hitting is extremely bad at dodging, barring some inconceivable fluke, they're going to get hit. Likewise, Bobby Flay is probably not going to ruin the food he's preparing (Oh no! I rolled a 1!). I think a D4 gives a decent variable range to account for things like luck and such, but also accounts for the fact that if an opponent's skill/ability is 4 points or more higher, they're just plain beyond your ability. Sometimes it's like that. There's always someone bigger and badder, so they say.
