With the power of a German beer, I finally have an answer to a problem I've been having for like 4 days now. I'm writing my own tabletop RPG engine and I finally came up with the perfect system for calculating damage.
My goals are to reduce the amount of math and dice, while providing a realistic approach that can scale up or down to accommodate any kind of game. You want to be an Edo-era samurai? Done. You want to pilot a giant robot? Done. You want to be an Edo-era samurai who gets
flung into the future and has to learn how to pilot a giant robot? Done.
It was surprisingly difficult to have the damage follow those rules, since a lot of concepts don't scale up and down very well without having rules rewritten for every scenario. I think I understand how physicists feel trying to piece together a theory that simultaneously models both the "very large" and the "very small".