OK. This is really beginning to bug me now.

If you take 2 warriors, identically skilled, but give one a sword and leather, the other say halberd and plate, the one in armour gets an effective 6 point skill advantage over the other.

This takes no account of the greater mobility of the lighter armoured fighter, the fact that if he closes, the halberd is near useless and various other factors.

If you make that an iron halberd and iron armour, you're looking at an 18 point advantage.

I'm very tempted to at least go back to edges for armour - whilst the new system may be simpler and cleaner it's just not sitting right with me.

You can give situation modifiers for weapons all the time any way you want, for instance a guy with a polearm and one with a dagger fighting in a tiny room.

Another solution is treating armor as an ability, that gives you the chance to come back into a contest when brought to zero AP.

Mandrake, are you expecting the players to be able to judge the tactical pros and cons of various weapon and armor combinations realistically around the table, as they play?  Because if you are, you're inviting all kinds of arguments.  The old "Daggers can strike three times to a greatsword's one" canard is just one of many discussions that will go around the table endlessly in this kind of situation... I'm just not interested.

How about this:  Given any particular weapon vs. weapon situation, assume that there is a tactical advantage to be gained, if either wants to claim it.  Have a conflict over it between them, and whoever wins gets that advantage according to Brand's alternate rule.

Yeah, in play I simply get rid of all stock equipment bonuses, and give bonuses or penalties based on situation. Mostly I don't bother, in fact...but if it seems appropriate, then this is how I handle it.

Edges have the problem that they don't come into play in Simple Contests (which implies an assumption that every fight will be an extended contest).

Mike

Mandrake wrote:
If you take 2 warriors, identically skilled, but give one a sword and leather, the other say halberd and plate, the one in armour gets an effective 6 point skill advantage over the other.

This takes no account of the greater mobility of the lighter armoured fighter, the fact that if he closes, the halberd is near useless and various other factors.

If you make that an iron halberd and iron armour, you're looking at an 18 point advantage.

I'm very tempted to at least go back to edges for armour - whilst the new system may be simpler and cleaner it's just not sitting right with me.

nichughes wrote:
Not that I agree about polearms being useless close up. If you are ever hit by the blunt end of a polearm you are as likely as not to find yourself on your backside at the perfect chopping distance from your opponent. A properly wielded polearm moves fast and both ends hurt, albeit one end more than the other.

I'm not sure that edges would help - they rather assume that losing action points is the same as losing hit points. And as we all know, it isn't. And of course they only work on extended contests.

I'm more likely to put the equipment bonuses in on a "per round" basis, same as any other augment - if the lead skill is "hit him very hard" then armour will help defend. If the lead skill is "wear him out", then it'll be a negative bonus. And so on.

It also depends on what your setting and focus is:

For a wuxia hero with swordfighting 15M4, armor is nothing more than a costume.

In a setting focussing on other aspects than fighting, weapons and amor give you the usual bonus.

In a sci-fi setting with powerarmour, where the equiment is a major part of the flavour, its an ability or even a keyword/follower-like keyword.

Use of polearms in close quarters depends on the close quarters. I'd agree that you can use the blunt end, (or as many ax bladed polearms have suplementary stabbing points, the pointy end) but that would assume you have room to use a spear for instance. In very confined quarters, you wouldn't neccessarily. But as stated in earlier reply, you can argue all kinds of situational modifiers that would just slow things down.

Giving situational modifiers rather than a standard always applicable bonus would work (assuming cooperative players), it's not so much about the loss of edges as the way they were removed, I especially don't like armour giving a skill bonus.

I guess I'll have to give this some more thought before I run again, come up with something it isn't too simulationist

Jane wrote:
I'm more likely to put the equipment bonuses in on a "per round" basis, same as any other augment - if the lead skill is "hit him very hard" then armour will help defend. If the lead skill is "wear him out", then it'll be a negative bonus. And so on.

As best I can tell, the skill bonuses now are a more or less direct conversion of the old edges.

As mentioned elsewhere, I run a "RQ style" game which is combat heavy. I think I'd be happiest keeping edges and applying situational modifiers or directly applying equipment bonuses against each then applying the net result as a bonus/penalty combined with situational modifiers.

Basically, I can't get my head round armour providing a skill bonus. In many circumstances, it will be a hinderance not a help.

Getting our group out of the "automatically apply these augments/bonuses" mindset is going to be fun though :)

One effective way to represent armour is to let players take it as a free ability - lets say, either Leather 14, or Chain 17, or Plate 5m. The augments from these abilities map against the mods you get from the normal armour rules, but you can also make them the principal ability if the contest is all about getting cut down or not, for example.

The advantage of doing it this way is you can also treat the ability as a flaw in the right circumstances. So you might decide that if Sir Galahad is running across the drawbridge he gets a -3 negative augment from his platemail, or if he falls off and starts swimming through the moat he is opposed directly by the Platemail 5m itself, perhaps with other mods or negative augments from the moat as well.

Having said that, I also don't bother with that level of detail for armour and weapons anymore. These days I tend to just fade it out, representing it via narration or circumstance mods (if appropriate) unless someone actually decides to buy a particular item as an ability.

Mark

What Mark said. Better yet, let's say somebody tries to destroy the armor itself. Then it's really a good idea to have a rating for the armor. Basically this gets rid of one extra system, and consolidates everything into one.

You don't like the idea of swords being abilities? Not even exceptional ones? Stormbringer is not Elric's sidekick (or even an NPC controling him half the time)?

But Dragon Pass Geography is OK?

Mike

Actually, I'm currently in the process of making some of the more powerful weapons the party has into effective sidekicks, albeit still with the edge/bonus.

So, using Jamie's characters spear as an example and removing the basic bonus/edge would leave something like this:

Jared Lar's Spear <base ability rating>
    Fight well with Jared Lar's Spear <15 - converted from a bonus to hit in HW>
    Project flame <5W - A flame thrower lke ability>
    Curse of Jared Lar <5W4>

Some of the abilities of the spear don't translate to well right off the bat, but that would be the basic gist of it. If I've understood what was discussed above, the Fight well ability would augment attacks with the spear, but the actual ability of the spear would be a situational augment.

Which abilities don't translate well? The above ones look great to me. Are there ones you left untranslated?

Mike

There was a "boost fire magic augments cast on spear by 50%" and possibly something else

So how about an Enhance Fire Magic ability? Yeah it doesn't mechanically translate perfectly. But, in fact, I'd argue that the result will work better in play.

Mike

The problem I would have with that is that much of the time it would be augmenting and augment.

I'm still not entirely sure how I would use the ability that replaces the old bonus/edge or indeed how to translate from bonuses/edges to an ability rating - would a dagger ^1 and a spear ^6 have the same rating, similar ratings or wildly different ratings?

Took me a second to figure it out, you mean "Augmenting an augment."

This is a commonly cited problem, and I used to worry about this too, until I figured out the better way to do it. Just make it a normal augment. Yeah, this may mean that the "helper" ability is providing more augment than the augment it's meant to help. But that's not really a problem. In fact, if you think about it, it's pretty cool. Instead of getting this minor effect, you may be getting a doubling of effect or more. So that +2 fire effect now looks like a much cooler +5 or something.

The effect is still limited in that you can only bring it in to augment in a contest when the other ability is in play as primary or augmenting.

As for replacing the edges...well, I'll reiterate what I do. I simply do not rate weapons at all. I only give situational bonuses. And when I do, they often blow the original bonuses out of the water. For instance, if you have some monster sword worth +5 per the HQ book, and I have a dagger worth +1, the net difference is a +4. Significant, sure, but not huge. I might rule that situationally, defending against an attack with a sword that size in a particular situation might be with a -10 penalty to your dagger skill - it's just not something that a dagger is good for or that you prepare for with dagger training (or, if you know different, then in your game you can modify differently). Same sort of thing as if you tried to defend against a sword with your "Fistfighting" ability.

The rationale is that, well, if you fight without a sword using your swordfighting ability, you're going to get a penalty, right? Perhaps a huge one, or even an automatic failure (check the charts regarding that near the section on automatic bonuses). So we're informed that we're supposed to be making this sort of assessment already. Isn't this like cooking without cookware? Normal equipment gives you the ability to perform a skill that uses said equipment at normal level. Just as normal ground lets you use your Run Fast ability without bonus or penalty (whereas wet ground might be a penalty). The only purpose for edges and bonuses is to check the relative potency of weapons.

But the problem with stock bonuses like this is that they don't consider the situation. Wet ground might be precisely what you need in a certain odd running contest. And a dagger is better for fighting somebody in a sewer than the sword. Sure you can stack these situational modifiers on top of the standard bonuses, but why bother? Why say, "OK, you get +5 for that big sword, but -10 for the sewer?" Where's that +5 coming from? It's a normal sword, it should get no bonus other than it's good for the situation at hand.

Why do people tote around big weapons? Well, because other people do so, too, and in most situations, the larger weapon is going to have an advantage over the smaller one. But, then not always, so this explains why people carry daggers as well...

Anyhow, so I don't rate weapons at all. Unless...unless, they're not, in fact, "normal." If the weapon is of high or low quality, then, by all means that should be listed. Just as you list if your strenght is higher or lower than the norm. And then the augment from that rating represents the weapons' quality working for you when it's appropriate to augment with that rating.

What't cool about this is that such ratings (which are a normal part of the game, not some special rule I'm making up), do not get washed out in the bonus. That is, let's say I take Flaming Sword 5W. That gives me a +3 augment, normally pretty cool. But if that's attached to a sword that gives a +5 bonus...well it's just not that special then.

Anyhow, that's how I play it.

Mike

Vaxalon wrote:

This is exactly the kind of discussion you want to avoid happening in play.

Mandrake wrote:
Use of polearms in close quarters depends on the close quarters. I'd agree that you can use the blunt end, (or as many ax bladed polearms have suplementary stabbing points, the pointy end) but that would assume you have room to use a spear for instance. In very confined quarters, you wouldn't neccessarily. But as stated in earlier reply, you can argue all kinds of situational modifiers that would just slow things down.

nichughes wrote:

Vaxalon wrote:

This is exactly the kind of discussion you want to avoid happening in play.

Yes and no. As OOC debate it is clearly going to hurt the game. As IC narration it can be a lot of fun and leaving players with some leeway to do this sort of thing is IMO a good idea. I find the trick is not to argue about it, if a player comes up with a funky move then go with the flow and deal with it. Its hard to a abuse the system because the situational modifiers are decided by the narrator.

Running a simple contest to decide situational modifiers for an extended costs seems wrong to me.

Biggest issue here I think is having players that will accept narrator's ruling without too much of a fight. That's going to be a challenge in our group :)

If you're having fights around the table, game rules won't help you.

Hi all,

Vaxalon wrote:
If you're having fights around the table, game rules won't help you.