there is no real need for you to go to all that work, check out maptool

http://rptools.net/

Unless I am mistaken, that doesn't include a lot of what I am trying to do, such as the combat and character setup.

You can find scripts to handle just about every aspect of most roleplay systems.

It still does not look like what I am after =P Made a quick battle screen mockup to just solidify some things in my head.

That's cool, I really like maptool, and projecting it on the wall is exactly how I use it.  I have two maps going one for them (projected) and one for me so I can hide things from them.

Mockup looks good.

There is EVERY reason she should go through all that effort. I personally love this idea. I'd use it all the time.

I was just saying there are already tools available to do exactly what is suggested by this mod of elemental.

A lot of people have problems with D&D because armor exists to allow you endure damage, not elude it.  In D&D, THAC0 means "To Hit Armor Class 0", a collection of mistakes that means a catapult can hit a castle wall with the same facility as an individual sparrow, so long as they are both Armor Class 0.  There are a variety modifications that attempt to make sense of this essentially flawed premise, but they all essentially fail because armor protects you from damage and other things protect you from being hit.  

That being said, there are a lot of fun things about the D&D mythos, providing you can extract them from the fundamentally flawed conflict resolution premise.  And the notion that you learn French by killing Orcs.  And the concept of leveling in general.  (If somebody here has learned French from killing Orcs or suddenly became 5% more likely to withstand cyanide after being granted a certificate, I will cheerfully withdraw this statement.) 

There are a lot more interesting, fun, extensible, realistic and playable combat resolution systems than D&D.  If Elemental allows you to mod the game to the point where you can put both feet in buckets when that is your joy, more power to it.  Personally, I'd prefer a combat resolution system that doesn't displace machine gun fire because my plate armor dissuades the bullets from crossing my sillouette when I stand up. 

If you want a deeply fetishistic combat system that is more realistic, I'd suggest FGU's "Aftermath".  "Aftermath" does allow for quite effective swordplay and machine gun suppressive fire.  For a card based game, Paul Kidd's "Lace and Steel" (Various Publishers) has much to recommend it for playability and fun.

You are about one edition behind, my friend. Attacking walls and attacking creatures are now distinct. Non-living objects have "Hardness" which is essentially is damage reduction. So it might be easy to hit, but hard to damage, as you say. THAC0 is no longer used, either, which I agree THAC0 was a bad thing. Actually, a lot of what you have said really no longer applies to DnD

But, this aside, I'm comfortable with the dissuading armor. I think that DnD is the best combat system for what it is trying to do. If I had to pick the "best" combat system, it would be Unknown Armies, but I would never run Unknown Armies with a high-powered game like DnD, and I'd never use DnD to run my low-powered games. The fact is that both Unknown Armies and DnD have extremely genre-specific combat systems, which makes them fun.

DnD doesn't need damage reduction from armor because it doesn't have machine gun bullets that can punch right through it. It can actually simulate this by having a "touch attack" which ignores armor, but I suspect you know 2nd edition and aren't aware of the rule changes. But guns are simply are not in the universe. Just as in Unknown Armies melee weapons are run extremely simplisticly simply because the differences between a sword and a halberd are just sort of irrelevant in a world of magic and guns. Leveling makes sense in DnD because it's a heroic game where heroes suddenly get more skill and power rather fast, where when you hit someone, it is dramatic as a opposed to meek, which is why there's no damage reduction. There's no damage reduction so that players don't have to bother rolling damage for insignificant hits, when glance blows and such are simulated by the AC system. Learning French from killing Orcs, while odd, can be explained by the player by his character studying French in his downtime.

That being said, I love different rulesets and I'll definitely check out "Aftermath" and "Lace and Steel".

THAC0 is pretty old nowadays Things have moved beyond that...

Two editions behind. 4th edition is two years old already

As somebody who first saw D&D as an expansion of minatures combat rules put together by a Swiss Pike formation enthusiast, my view of avertive armor is somewhat jaded, I admit. THAC0 stunk as a way of arbitrating individual combat in 1976, and it stinks today despite the modifications and changes it's added.  It fails to describe fencing, archery, SCA combat, real mideval combat, and anything resembling firearms.  The importance of machine guns is that they produce a field of fire where any exposed target will be struck as a function of the amount and duration of exposure.  The difference between facing a Maxim in Flanders in 1916 and facing English Longbowmen in Agincourt in 1415 is largely a question of training and logistics, not ballistic probability.  A clothyard shaft in a cloud of clothyard shafts will punch through quite as well as a Maxim bullet for all concerned downrange. D&D combat takes that probability case as an exception rather than the rule.

I will continue to argue that levelling is a deeply flawed description of skills improvement and damage tolerance that leads to some very bad downstream effects.  Anybody who has dealt with massively multiplayer games, delicious though that revenue stream might seem, knows the many unpleasant ways power gamers skew the experience for all.  Levelling rewards exploitive behavior that ruins economies and gameplay experience for many folks.  Since Elemental is turn-based the "rat fix" obsessive behaviors of many power gamers is not as heavily rewarded, but it still bears talking about.  

I will freely admit there are some exceptions to the ability to handle damage that are worth discussing.  Marcus Luttrell's book "Lone Survivor" describes real world experiences that were incredibly harrowing, where SEALs endured numerous gunshot wounds and kept fighting long beyond rational human expectations.  Nevertheless, the events surrounding June 28th, 2005 are also notable because though the four SEALs on the ground all kept fighting through numerous hits for hours, 16 other special operators (8 SEALs and 8 160th SOAR crew) all died in moments when an RPG shot down their helicopter. (Of course one obvious conclusion is that it is safer to surround yourself with Afghan rock than American Jet Fuel.)

Another important testimony to the endurance of humanity under fire worth discussing is David Bellavia book "House to House".  Former SFC Bellavia describes in painful detail the actions that got him nominated for the Medal of Honor (which he probably put the kibosh on).  The amount of damage the terrorist fighters in Fallujah endured through a combination of pharmacuetical assistances was incredible. Later, Bellavia describes the kind of endurance US Army Infantry showed in their continuing efforts to clear Fallujah, which is another point worth discussing.

Both of these books describe different ways endurance to damage can be built up unrelated to any kind of artificial assessment such as a level.

Real world combat stinks: real fencing is "five seconds and you are dead". Unless you don't mind redoing your character every 10 seconds, real combat is not fun at all. It's a good thing systems don't try to model real combat but just something that is fun to play.

Also, it could be argued than in a RPG describing is left up for the players, not the rules. A fail can be a dodge, armor deflection, parry,... A strike can come after several skilful feints or just a direct pure strenght blow. Some people use rules for "fencing maneuvers" (maybe the systems you noted, I don't know them), others use descriptions and the DM judges (like DnD 4e),...

It seems to me that you have a great deal of interest in the technical aspects of combat and warfare. I bow down to your knowledge on this subject, I know as far about real combat as I know from Close Combat II and III, which probably isn't all that much. But as someone who seems to a military buff, you'll never be satisfied with DnD, as you shouldn't. But DnD is definitely not a realistic system, hence the "dungeons" and the "dragons". I don't know jack about pike formations especially not a Swiss one, but as the DnD system has evolved it has become far more about mighty heroes and magic than a simulation of combat.

I've read the reasoning behind the AC system and it makes sense to me. Having one number determine whether you hit or not simplifies the experience and streamlines the game. You'll only be rolling damage for blows that matter. Even if you "miss", you're still hitting the other person, but the wounds are negligible or it glances off the armor or it gets parried. Also, I've heard hitpoints expressed as not only physical toughness but an ability to avoid blows, willpower, luck, and so forth, which also makes sense to me.

As for levelling, I don't have any experience playing mmorpgs, so I don't know how people abuse it. If you're talking about a point-based character creation system, then I've seen those abused too... where players just unload a ton of points into fighting and little else, punishing anyone who wants a roleplaying skill. When I ran my In Nomine game, players eventually ran out of places to spend their points, after they had all maxed out their various fighting skills. I feel at least in a level system there is always a place to advance and to look forward to. I've actually become somewhat disaffected by most non-leveling systems as I feel most of them aren't very well balanced.

The thing with leveling is that you need to realize what you do is not all your 'character does'.  Just like you don't "roleplay" attending to nature calls, you also don't roleplay 'learning french', or in a better example, your character gets 10% more for picking locks while he/she didn't open a single lock since last level.  Same thing, maybe the character just practices during camp hours. I never had a problem with that or with the concept of armor class.