Manoeuver Declarations during Combat

[Caz]

I'm glad you brought this up. While it does take more strength to injure with a cut than a thrust (and therefore a longsword than a rapier), this is currently worked into the DR of TROS weapons. The second issue is the idea of "causing damage through armor." TROS allows this sort of thing to happen with very strong characters, but I dare say that that's unrealistic! I think that injuring a man in armor with a longsword cut would be horrifically difficult. The sword would break before the armor would--or at least that's what the research is showing. This is one area that I chose to go with playability and more modern conceptions of things instead of what was really going on. In all honesty, it's largely because at the time I didn't know any better. I am glad, however, that much beyond a lvl 1 wound is uncommon in TROS AFAIK, which sounds about right to me. It's the anti-armor weapons that I'd worry about--picks, axes, polearms.

Jake

   Good point, I use the alternate rule, which isn't really such a big difference enough to call it that, that whatever damage that surpasses the AV, is blunt, regardless of the weapon.  Simple and realistic.  You can still try to beat someone down with your sword if they're wearing armour, but it represents the impacts and what they do, not a weapon cleaving the armour.  It's GMs call whether it makes sense for a thrust to pierce or bypass the armour, or if a gorem with a bill cleaves it with a rage cut, or excalibur goes at it hehe.

[Lance D. Allen]

While I think TRoS is going to work beautifully in our environment, is it the sort of environment that a TRoS player wants?

Question REALLY is.. Is it the sort of environment that your TRoS players would want?

[Brian Leybourne]

To make this relevant to what I'm talking about, how does TRoS model the CP12 knight being overrun by six CP4 mallots? Does it do so with the same feeling of authenticity as it handles the duel?

I think so yes.  The knight is in a bit of trouble.  Base rule is he'd wind up splitting his pool of 12 against 6 opponents which if he tried to take them all on at once would be 4 dice to 2.  Pretty likely to get killed.

Instead he'd be advised to use Terrain Rules to maneuver.  This works by sacrificing dice out his CP for a roll that gives him the privelege of only fighting some of his attackers.  Not having the book handy I can't remember what the difficulty would be, but the knight would give up say 4 dice to face two opponents.  The other 4 opponents are considered to have been maneuvered out of position to attack that round.  This leaves the knight with 8 CP which makes it 4dice to 4 dice.  Still pretty risky.

Just a minor pedantic nitpick. No more than three opponents can attack someone at once. The default is two. A good terrain roll can reduce that to 1 (moving around so only one of them can face you each round), no terrain roll or a failure means you face 2, and a botched terrain roll means you face three 3.

The exception to this is if the opponents have spears (more than three can thrust) or they're animals (see OBAM).

The knight is still in some trouble, though. :-)

Brian.

[Ingenious]

I see everyone's point of view on this and finally understand it.
However, I would take note with Brian... that he's meaning melee combat, or so I hope. There can be many many more opponents on top of that with ranged combat, and all of them might only have MP's of around 6 or 7 or less. The knight is screwed in this situation, unless he has help.. but hopefully a knight isnt going to go single-handed into a peasant revolt without some bodyguards.

-Ingenious

[Lance D. Allen]

In general I think if you've got 3 or more people shooting arrows at you that you're scrood anyhow. But that's just my opinion..

[Bastoche]

Hello,

I watched that discussion attentively with a high interest. I'm a new member, so let me introduce myself shortly. I'm a Ph. D. physics student. I played RPGs since a good 10-12 years now. I heard of TRoS not long ago on another board and I look foward to play it. I took some ken-jutsu lesson at my university for about 2 years now and I'm currently reading german and Italian longsword books now (no longsword school around here :-( ). Principally Meyer's book as I think it's well written and understandable.

Back more or less on topic: german longsword basic positions and strikes are more than highly similar to katori shinto ryu sabre positions and strikes from what I gather... And from a historical point of view, I once read somewhere (wow credible information ;-) ) that pretty much all of the "civilized" world's swordfighting styles (and wrestling styles presumably) originates from the greeks. In other words, the greeks at pretty much nailed it down. The rest is just some sort of "dialiects" influenced by culture. And armor I guess...

Back on topic: About strength and long sword. Since the sword's movement is basically circular, the energy delevered by a cut depends on the angular momentum of the blade. Considering the relatively low weight of swords, I would guess you don't need to be that strong to make an as hard a strike as necessary/possible. I don't really have the feeling that a much stronger person will strike so much more efficiently. On the other hand, on some defenses, strength becomes much more important. That being said, I never wielded a real weapon so take it as you will.

[Ian Charvill]

w/r/t strength and wielding longswords

Olympic weightlifters have the best ten metre sprint of any olympic athelete, including the sprinters.

My experience of using broadswords and longswords is that the stronger guys were faster than the weaker guys absolutely.  They also had the option to power through your parries.  And greater strength lent them greater endurance so they could just play with you for a bit then smear you when you started to fatigue.