You know this moment. Round three. The fighter steps up, swings at the necromancer, rolls a 3. Miss, turn over, pass the dice. Twenty minutes of table time, and the story of the fight so far is: nothing happened, four times.
That’s actually the attack roll doing its job. It was built to answer this question: “did you connect?” And it answers it by deleting entire turns from the game. Your players didn’t come to the table to be told nothing happened.
A handful of designers looked at this and asked a better question: what if every attack just hit?
The Games That Pulled the Trigger
Into the Odd made this famous. No attack roll at all. You swing, you roll your damage die, armor soaks a point or two, the rest comes off their hit points. Fights that drag an hour in other systems end in minutes here.
Cairn carried the same engine into dark folklore forests. Mausritter handed it to mice with swords — and yes, even the game about mice figured out that whiffing three turns in a row kills a table’s momentum.
When every hit lands, standing in the open trading blows is a decision you make with your character’s life. Players start treating combat like a threat instead of a math mini-game.
The result in all three is that combat gets fast, and it gets dangerous.
Draw Steel’s Tiered Approach
Draw Steel also killed the attack roll, but in a different way. You don’t roll damage directly. You make a power roll, and the number tells you which tier of result you get. Roll low and you get a weaker effect. Roll high and you get a stronger effect. Something always happens — the dice just decide how hard.
It fits Draw Steel’s goals. The game wants cinematic, competent heroes, and tiered results smooth out the swing so those heroes never look foolish and never get killed by one bad moment.
That smoothing is exactly why it didn’t work for Left for the Vultures. Tier systems compress outcomes toward the middle: you’re rarely embarrassed, and you’re rarely destroyed. In a heroic fantasy game, that’s a feature. In a game about men crawling back out of the ground for revenge, it’s a major deflating force.
Why We Let the Dice Be the Damage
I looked hard at a tiered approach early in design. It played fine but it felt too safe. So in Left for the Vultures, your dice are your damage. You swing, it lands, and whatever you roll comes off them in meat.
Then we made the dice explode. If you roll the maximum on a damage die, you get to roll it again. If you keep maxing, you keep rolling. Any hit can spiral into something horrific.
A rusted knife in the hands of a starving Revenant can open a man from hip to throat if the dice are on their side.
That’s the tone we wanted. Combat in LftV is fast because nobody whiffs, and it’s terrifying because the ceiling on any single hit is gone. You don’t plan on surviving three more rounds. You hope to survive this one.
What It Does in Play
Rounds resolve in seconds. Fights end in two or three rounds instead of eight. Players stay locked in on every turn, because every turn changes the combat state.
And the fear comes back. When you can’t hide behind a miss chance, the smartest move is often not to fight at all. Or to fight dirty: strike from ambush, poison the well, burn the building down with them inside it.
Which is exactly how a Revenant should think.
The attack roll asks whether you hit. We think the better question is what it costs when you do. Every drawn blade becomes a promise.
In Left for the Vultures, promises get kept.
