u/Aggressive_Charity84 — reddlx

I’m working on a rules-light game called Escape from Space Jail, and I need a way to define difficulty to hit a player in combat, AKA defense.

The basic system works like this:

Players have 6 stats — Fierce, Quick, Smooth, Solid, Savvy, Deep — that range from 1 to 5
To take actions, players roll a number of 6-sided dice equal to their stat; 1-3 is a miss and 4-6 is a hit; dice explode on a 6
Difficulty = number of hits needed to succeed, and standard difficulty is 2
Difficulty can scale, and there are other modifiers players might get for a +1 dice to their roll
The basic melee/brawl stat is Fierce; thrown weapons roll Quick; guns roll Smooth
In combat, players roll to hit enemies; the GM rolls for the enemies to hit the players

In combat, I want harder opponents to have a higher difficulty/defense. I also want player stats to have a meaningful effect on how hard they are to hit.

But what’s the best option for determining a player’s defense score?

Their Quick skill. This is super straightforward, but might make the Quick stat overpowered (it's also used for acrobatics, backstabbing, etc.).
Average of Quick + Smooth, rounded up. A little awkward, but allows players more flexibility in build.
Dynamically Chosen During Combat. Base is 2, but players can choose to add 1-3 dice after rolling initiative. Those dice are subtracted from any additional actions the user takes. So they can commit 2 dice to defense, but end up with -2 to their Fierce roll. This is complicated but injects a sense of gambling that I like.
A 7th stat. Feels like 1 stat too many.
Something else I haven't thought of.