Picked up the game, both books, on strength of reviews and nominations.

To demonstrate combat, I pulled "Dur Garon" and "Tiberius Damarisk" from the OBAM "Rouges' Gallery", and they battled toe-to-Stahlnish-toe.

Problem 1) Dur Garon has a "mass weapon - battleaxe" which I couldn't find stats for anywhere. Yes, I'm a newbie, so please point out if I missed something obvious.

Problem 2) Dur Garon has no armor.

In fact, the amount of "rogue" definition seems to vary a bit, which makes them tough to show as "sample characters". Wouldn't mind knowing the "insight" points each is worth also...

Anyhow, Dur Garon went down easily in the first battle with a sword to the chest. After we played with character creation a bit, we imported Dur and Tiberius into the "combat simulator" and things were much different.

We did the first pair of maneuvers as declared, and Tiberius rolled many less successes so that Dur got out of it with only a pain of 9. He then ducked and dodged until he finally declared only 4 of his 5 dice to defend. In the second half of the exchange, when Tiberius had no dice, Dur Garon siezed the initiative --- and drove the battle home with powerful blows.

Taught us all a bit about TROS combat, I'm not shy to say.

there are sample characters on the web page that use the character generator available on said web page that may prove more usefull for said examples.

also try the combat gen yada yada.

And then thank brian leybourne who put it all together and lets us use them without charging.

Gidday Thomcat, welcome to the forum.

For Battleaxe, use either "Hand Axe" 2-handed or "Halberd" stats. The upcoming TFOB will have an extended weapons list, but in the meantime we just use whichever works. A battleaxe is basically a Halberd. As for armor, just because I didn't list any, doesn't mean he might not wear some. He is an armorsmith, after all.

Insight? Well, Dur Garon isn't exactly a beginner character (10 proficiency in his chosen weapon) but he's not far off it. As for Tiberius, err, you would has to ask Lance (Wolfen) who wrote him up for the book. Looking at him, he looks to be a starting character with "A" in attributes, and has used his Stahl bonus proficiency to get the 8.

When we said "Rogue's Gallery", by the way, we weren't suggesting that the characters are all Rogues ala D&D, but rather that it was just a list of "the usual suspects", if you know what I mean. I wrote most of them, and a few were submissions. For the ones I wrote, none of them have listed armor, weapons (except proficiency) or equipment, so you need to add whatever you think would be reasonable for the situation you want to use them in (in play, for example, Dur Garon used to wear a toughened leather jack and leggings. Treat this as AV3 everywhere except the head, neck, hands and feet).

Brian.

Tiberius is a beginning character. There are a few things which cannot be found in the book, but which will hopefully be found in TFoB. those things are his metal bracers, and his arming glove. Also, the leather sleeves were the difference in price between a leather jack with and without sleeves.

Notice that Tiberius generally fares badly in duels. The character is highly proficient, but the shortsword is not generally a good weapon to duel with against, say, a greatsword. The character is a bounty hunter, with a tendency to drive and/or catch his bounties in narrow confined places, where the arming glove and the short sword can be put to good use.

If you wish to play him in duels, just for the hell of it, your best bet is to play him very conservative, but have him take calculated risks. Primary goal is to get in close, and stay there. One method for this is the (risky) simultaneous block and strike (generally only used against thrusts, due to the focus of the arming glove) when the opponent is attacking. Put most of your dice into defense, but enough into attack to be relatively sure of a hit. Once he's struck with his sword, he'll have a marked advantage against longer ranged weapons, so long as he can stay in close.

Also, his priorities were as follows:

A: Proficiencies (14, +1 point for being a Stahlner)
B: Attributes (43, +1 TO, -1 Soc, High Att: AG)
C: Skills (Hunter/Ranger and Bounty Hunter)
D: Social Class (Low Freeman, 15 gold)
E: Gifts and Flaws (minor Accuracy, major Sleep Disorder)
F: Race (Human)