Hello, the entire roleplaying community. Apparently, Oskar made mention of this system of IC combat Everwatch'd started using in his podcast, and a few of Nebulous' members have expressed interest, or at least a desire for a clearly-written list of rules, so here you go.
I'm going to talk a little bit about the [/random] command first off; the full command is [/random x], where x is a number between 1 and 1000. When performed, the game will randomly generate a number between 0 and whatever you put in for x. Mind, 0 is always a valid possibility, so if you only want 20 possible results, subtract one so the values can run from 0 to 19. Leaving x blank will make the system roll from 0 to 100.
First off is The Action, followed by The Roll. Basically, a player declares what they want to do, and then uses [/random] to find out if they succeeded in their action or not. Rolling high is always better; this is the simplest way of using [/random] in combat. In events with someone coordinating all of the combat, you'll need to wait for them to let you know if your roll was high enough for success; for those coordinating, I'd recommend having an idea of where success and failure fall on the scale of 0 to 100. If it's just a duel, you'll either need to settle on where success and failure are divided (at 50, per se) or simply use [/random 1] to decide immediate success (1) or failure (0).
To spice things up, you could include degrees of success or failure. In combat, you're not always guaranteed to land a clean blow or else miss entirely; since the basic [/random] has 101 possible results, you can divide the possibilities up into different degrees of success or failure. As a sample, let's say a Menacing Swordsman takes a swing at a foe, and rolls [/random].
0-19: Critical Failure (The swing lodges the sword in the ground, or is parried completely)
20-39: Failure (The swing simply misses or the foe blocks)
40-59: Partial Success (The swing deals some damage, but bounces off armor or the foe backsteps)
60-89: Success (The swing deals a good amount of damage, and both are left capable of retaliating)
90-100: Critical Success (The swing deals a massive amount of damage, perhaps striking the foe's neck)
That's just a sample spread. I'd really recommend having more chances for success than failure; it's always more fun to succeed than fail, and keeps the combat from devolving into "he blocked. she parried. he dodged." Spells can be handled in a similar fashion, although Critical Failure could mean friendly-fire or a failure to cast the spell in the first place, and Critical Success could mean freezing the foe completely, or carrying him off a cliff with a burst of wind.
For duels, the spread would be much simpler. Let's use a [/random 2] as an example:
0: The attack fails completely.
1: The attack deals a glancing blow only.
2: The attack succeeds.
Adding more possibilities is always an option, mind; just set it up beforehand with your duelling partner and get the [/random] rules out of the way first.
As a final reminder, this isn't an excuse to make everything ruled by the whims of the Random Number Generator and Nymeia's threads; sometimes, a player just isn't going to miss (against a foe unable to evade or resist, or a coup de gras, a finishing attack on a knocked-down foe), and sometimes, a character's talents will make some things more or less likely. Talk to your coordinator about things like this, and work it out. It's not set in stone, after all.
