Roll 1D per Dexterity + bonus melee + accuracy
DV difficulty number parry DV when unarmed is halved against armed opponents
Injury roll 1D per Strength + damage (weapon + attack bonus successes)
Existing Excellencies would have to be revised since Attributes and Abilities are more separated.
Or you could switch everything around and use the Ability as their base dice pool so if they had no points in an Ability they would be unable to make a roll. Attributes would power Ability rolls so they would need high Attributes to have a hope of the roll succeeding more like a traditional skill roll (see Warhammer Quest.)
Some weapons could ass pre soak successes to the damage roll.
What if you balanced skill and power by requiring them to make a certain number of successes at a certain difficulty (number) rating.
Dice poll for injury roll- net successes on attack roll (including basic success) that way a glancing blow wouldn't be fatal.
What if you roll one trait in dice (possibly with a bonus against a difficulty) and add another trait to the number of successes.
With 1D per trait with a bonus of another trait you would have to have high ratings in both of them to succeed. Put weapon strength and armour soak into pure numbers, this will eliminate rolling outrageous numbers of dice.
vs DV need high dice roll and lots of successes to land a good blow.
I personally prefer rolling number of dice equal to an ability and adding an attribute so if someone has no knowledge or skill they can't succeed. Although this wouldn't work on more intuitive abilities.
I also like my earlier idea of basing the damage dice pool on strength and adding weapon damage to each dice result. However basing the number of injury dice on the number of attack successes is far more realistic since it determines the severity of the blow by how well it was struck. I also like adding one trait to the dice results with the number of dice based on another trait so a character will have to have high levels in both of them in order to be competent. The only problem I have is that strength and damage will have to be combined and added to each dice which seems a bit impersonal and doesn't put enough emphasis on strength. Exalted has a very streamlined system for dice rolls where you basically just add more dice. That reduces complecations but causes problems with weapons that have very high damage like a Heavy Implosion Bow which has damage of 50 or 60. The two separate elements of damage are severity and probability on injury. How well the blow was placed is the first component of severity which is why the damage pool is based on it. If you attack someone with a Grand Grimscythe and only score a glancing blow it will hardly do a thing. The character's strength and the damage of the weapon determine probability of injury but the size of the weapon is a secondary feature of severity as well. Attack someone with a small knife and the amount of physical injury you can do will always be limited. You could hit them in the neck or something but the actual severity of the injury is limited by weapon size as well as attack placement.
