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PostPosted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 9:35 am 
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I was talking about this before. Bearing in mind how colourful the other professions are, maybe we should consider one way to empower the warriors. All nice that a Barbarian, after getting scratched can go into blood rage but unless he's wielding a heavy two hander it doesn't amount to more than +1 damage. I'd imagine that a flailing madman could do more damage, especially since he's 8th rank.

If we allow them to split their ATTACK it would sure do more than convince unranked npcs to run away from his saliva spray.

Now, I know, it can be unbalanced under certain circumstances, so how about 2 attacks for a -4 overall ATTACK and -1 damage? So if they want to do 3 attacks, it'll be like fighting blind -8 ATTACK, -2 damage and ATTACK split 3 ways after modifiers?

At least an 8th rank bloodraging barbarian can do more damage to some 1st rank types. Not sure about applying a modifier to armour bypass under these circumstances, but it would seem relevant, you're not hitting with so much precision.

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PostPosted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 10:30 am 
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Hum, personnaly I m not very convinced, it still sounds "hack and slash" and unbalanced.

Humbly, I admit you have a lot of ideas (you have already 61 posts...) maybe you coud focus on some rules close to your heart (field rules?), and work deeper on it, for being attractive and balanced? I expect the outcome would be awesome.

Probably official changes are going to be done, one day, for the barbarian.

One suggestion (for extra attack) I liked, happened on a 20 from the opponent :"size the opportunity".
The barbarian had to succeed in a dice roll, and would have an extra attack with malus at the end of the CR.
We can compare it with the "disarm technique" of the knight (and it works even if the opponent has no weapons).

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PostPosted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 11:31 am 
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There's a lot wrong with the DW combat system that won't be fixed by adding multiple attacks to the Barbarian profession. For example - how is it that an untrained peasant has the same chance of injuring a knight in plate armour with a dagger as a 15th rank knight?

Similarly, why is it that a peasant in plate armour with any weapon other than a sword (so Disarm Technique doesn't apply) is pretty dangerous to an unarmoured 15th rank knight with a dagger. Such contests are ludicrous, but that's how the rules are.

It is, however, easy-ish to fix. Firstly, get rid of the barbarian profession (was that sharp intake of breath I heard back there?) - something like the Thane is much more appropriate if you want to play a fighter from another land, and tweak the knight's skills of the mighty and combat options to ensure a breadth of combat manoeuvres are available to the knight even if he is stuck with a dagger against a plate-armoured opponent.

In reality, though, I wouldn't even roll for this encounter - the 15th rank knight would win against a peasant, regardless of the arms or armour involved.

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PostPosted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 11:40 am 
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Field rules? You mean terrain? I have something I created, an excel file but it involved every square being having one of three shades of colour. Still troublesome to keep track of, and from a GM's perspective tiresome trying to fill out every square. I do think terrain rules are important, but perhaps Dragwars the computer game would make it smoother.

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 Thane... it scares me that he has all these 'abilities'... I guess in book 4 they had to add skills of the almighty to balance them vs the assassin with all the abilities they have.

Still, I love computer games more than I love pen paper rpgs... wonder how this 'y' generation feel about pen/paper.....




Now, theres a thought. What if you apply a penalty to ATTACK, for every 4 you are willing to sacrifice you get +1 to armour bypass rolls?.... should be relatively simple to implement....

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PostPosted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 12:01 pm 
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That peasant is not going to hit that knight almost ever. Whereas the knight is going to hit every round unless he rolls incredibly badly. Knight will make one attack per round eventually he'll get a 1 and peasant is dead.

Of course a smart knight would just bodyslam the peasant and once he's prone just kick him in the head or drop a handy rock on his neck. :-)

But then the DW combat system he'll favourite of mine. :)

As for replacing Barbarian with Thane? Nup, Thane is a very specialised Profession and is not really suited for swapping abilities out without careful consideration.

Barbarian is much more easily modded.

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PostPosted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 12:13 pm 
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that is unless he's striking from behind, whilst the Knight is occupied with freeing himself from a TANGLEROOTS spell. I don't know, dragwars also had facing which again was weak in some of the systems I'm familiar with. I like the rules, how you have full defence against those in your vision.

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PostPosted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 12:37 pm 
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I would suggest that dumping the Barbarian - one of the four core professions that kick-started the system(!) - would be an over-reaction. There are issues with the DW system, but modifying the Barbarian does seem far more preferable than axing it...

...and the Players Book isn't even out yet.

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PostPosted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 1:16 pm 
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hermes421 wrote:
Similarly, why is it that a peasant in plate armour with any weapon other than a sword (so Disarm Technique doesn't apply) is pretty dangerous to an unarmoured 15th rank knight with a dagger. Such contests are ludicrous, but that's how the rules are.


I don't actually disagree with the main thrust of your argument, but I have to dispute the particulars of the example. Me being an insufferable nitpicker and all.

Lets give our human a battleaxe for maximum carnage. Pit him against an unarmoured, unshielded Knight with only a dagger and the knight still wins nearly 90% of the time. The reason is that although both fighters are relying on critical hits (the knight hits pretty much every round, but only penetrates on a roll of a 1, and the peasant only ever hits on a 1 but automatically gets through) the knight can outlast his enemy with his massive stockpile of health points. In this way HP can almost be interpreted as "miscellaneous skills" for a fighter, rather than (or in addition to) actual physical bulk or toughness. Even with the knight using only his fists (d3,2) he still wins about three quarters of the time.

An unarmoured 15th rank Knight versus a plated zombie, on the other hand... the zombie wins three quarters of those fights. THERE'S a matchup worthy of the Murphy's Rules page from the old Space Gamer magazine!

Cheers,

-Kyle


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 1:49 pm 
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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)

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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


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PostPosted: Sun Feb 01, 2015 10:49 am 
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Corner cases are corner cases - perhaps armour shouldn't have a second armour bypass roll, but instead add to defence, so that the peasant is harder to hit, but not impossible to injure except on a critical hit? I'm sure I've seen that in another system somewhere ... :)

I don't have any objection to splitting attack, but I think you should only be able to attack an opponent once in your action - just like you can split your defence against multiple attackers, but don't get to apply your defence multiple times against the one opponent. That would make it easier for a high rank warrior to quickly defeat several opponents in the time it would take them to go one-on-one against a comparatively skilled warrior, which feels right to me.

Cheers,

Gary Johnson

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