Kharille wrote:
If we allow them to split their ATTACK it would sure do more than convince unranked npcs to run away from his saliva spray.
The problem with splitting Attack is mainly with the broken Critical Hit rule, and with the fact that a small success is just as good as a big one when rolling in combat. Once you fix this, you can make multiple attacks (even against the same opponent!) legal without difficulty and everything hangs together in a realistic (game realistic, not necessarily real realistic) way. No need to kludge up any arbitrary penalties or modifiers that you'll then need to look up.
In my rules it works like this: Every 4 points of success in a hit roll gives you +1 on Armour Bypass, up to the maximum permissable on that weapon. If you've already hit the maximum, each 4 has the effect of reducing the enemy's AF by 1 point, to a minimum of 0. Damage is reckoned as a whatever your AB was after you got through the armour multipied by some number (1 for most weapons), so in this way the degree of success cascades into the AB roll which cascades into damage in a (to me) plausible way. Also, rolling exactly on your "to hit" is a 'glancing blow' and AB is halved.
Critical success hits let you reroll your Attack with +10 to your score; if this is higher than you had before, you keep it. Critical failure works in reverse. Optionally, very high success (I think I settled on 13 points eventually for this) can be used to do "vital" damage, potentially killing or incapacitating an enemy instantly, lopping off a limb or whatever; basically the player gets to describe exactly where they've hit for this and the GM interprets the result in their favour. A 15th Rank Knight vs a normal human should be able to do this on about half their Attacks.
The non-absolute way this all works tends to mitigate against
reductio ad absurdum situations like the one CD describes.
All these rules apply to all other skills and checks too, with obvious modifications to account for how they work (AB not being meaningful for Stealth or Magical Attack, etc)
Quote:
One of the reasons I love dragwars is that a skilled 15th rank knight can hold off a peasant in plate for a long time... it reflects the hand to hand skill of the Knight which is not properly reflected in some systems I'm familiar with.
The thing is, this isn't right. Not really. The Knight is getting wounded just as often as his opponent. With the kind of skill a 15th rank knight has that peasant should be a mewling heap in 6 seconds, not lasting the better part of 35 combat rounds (on average) while the Knight basically waits for him to land a lucky hit.
Cheers,
-Kyle