Combat System

Err... I don't know what you mean... I never said that. That isn't in my post, and I especially didn't edit it out before you could post a quote of me saying it because I realized it was a terrible idea.

Actually, Lord's Mail has 350 defense, 60 or 70 over daedric for one quarter weight.

I was talking about it's base defence. Daedric has a base of 80, and lord's mail has 100 base, with a max of 333 (according to UESP wiki of course, I have no idea otherwise). Of course, the enemy in question probably had rather high heavy armor skill, so it would be much higher.

So you're right, it would be even MORE important to go for his soft squishy bits with called shots.

I'd say that, unless the player specifically wants to roll random location (whatever target presents itself), or a called shot, we should just assume torso. That way, this system is in place when we want to use it, and otherwise not in the way.

Good idea. Brevity is the soul of wit and any good game.

How do we handle attacks AGAINST the player then? Do we always just roll for random location when an enemy is attacking you, except perhaps in the cases of "boss" enemies that would go for your weak points? We can't have an enemy always attacking the player's cuirass.

Rainbay wrote:Good idea. Brevity is the soul of wit and any good game.

How do we handle attacks AGAINST the player then? Do we always just roll for random location when an enemy is attacking you, except perhaps in the cases of "boss" enemies that would go for your weak points? We can't have an enemy always attacking the player's cuirass.

Well, an opponent with the requisite skill would probably go for the least armored area, an animal like a guar or nix-hound would go for something random, small creatures like scribs and foragers would go for legs, and were-cliffracers would be all arms and head, all the time.

I like the idea of random hits. Deadlands used random hits to great effect. Get shot in the guts, and you might be alright. Take a bullet to the gizzard or noggin, and you're gonna be hurting bad. But hit location was randomly determined (although certain factors would allow you to raise or lower your roll so as to hit a better location). I think called shots should have enough things going against them that they're not the order of the day, but enough benefits that they can be useful if you're feeling lucky (or cocky, against a weak opponent).

PS I don't like all this were-cliffracer talk. There's a storm outside and branches are hitting my window and it sounds like OH GOD THOSE AREN'T BRANCHES SKREEE SKREEE SKREEE 9847GDJKFXZHR7Gjgoiyfi124&#!@gurgle

Close, but you made some logical mistakes on how a Were-cliffracers aims. They are the spawn of the greatest evil, and as such their rolls are randomly decided between hitting your soul and your family.

Which is tough, because a soul is -30 to hit.

Obviously I meant they'd murder you and trap you in a black soulgem first.

Back to the question at hand:

I feel like the modular armor thing is true to the CRPG, but too unwieldy to use as a major mechanic. Why not have 1 main value for your armor and have modular come in to play only as the result of a crit (possibly doing away with called shots?)*

*This is entirely personal prejudice, stemming from a game I GM'd where one of my players built his entire character based on called shot abuse.

So average together all the armor you or your enemy is wearing? Meh... I was sort of fond of the modular armor system, especially if we work with armor durability and giving different armor styles different amounts of stats for the rolls to hit against and the rolls to lower damage (however that would be achieved). Setting defence would make it easier to calculate when fighting a large group of foes though, even though you still need to assign them armors to be wearing for when their corpses are looted.

I don't really see how called shots would be abused in the system as it currently is, since it adds no bonus unless and enemy is glaringly unarmored somehow on some part of their body. It is actually WORSE in most circumstances, since it will always lower your chance of hitting the enemy.

Care to share your DMing horror story with us so we can better understand?

I think this belongs in this thread, and should answer Rainbay's question:

I think the key in keeping this both as playable and close to the
source as possible is to make it so that, in any given situation, the
character's skill is the single largest factor in the roll. So your
amor skill would make more of a difference that what armor you were
wearing.

Maybe to accomplish this, we make armor work like
lockpicks - some armors are apprentice tier, some journey man, etc -
and tier grants the same bonus to defense. Different armors within a
tier might have different properties, or be modified by different
skills, but this lets us keep skill as the main driver in any roll.

And the comment was about me being leery of called shots in general, not in this system. I ran a Hackmaster campaign where one of my players, completely within the rules and the limits I'd put on him, arranged his skills, talents and proficiencies to where he had a better change of hitting called shots that normal attack rolls.

I hate the fucker so much.

hmm... if we want to make this primarily skill-based, the armor tiers could work. You can wear armor above your tier, obviously (this is not Oblivion ) but you can only gain certain benefits if your skill level matches or exceeds the armor level. Then we can have material determine DR, weight, and similar.

Saint Jiub wrote:hmm... if we want to make this primarily skill-based, the armor tiers could work. You can wear armor above your tier, obviously (this is not Oblivion ) but you can only gain certain benefits if your skill level matches or exceeds the armor level. Then we can have material determine DR, weight, and similar.

That could work, although I'd prefer to just take your multiplier system and reverse it, so that the armor was the multiplier and the skill was the base. So iron might be = .75(heavy armor), steel = (heavy armor), daedric = 2.5(heavy armor) or some such.

I think that just might work, GLIPP.

That's a good idea, but we'll want to prevent the armor multipliers from getting too high, or we'll have whole combats of a bunch of guys swinging away like a blind kids' tee-ball league.

Saint Jiub wrote:That's a good idea, but we'll want to prevent the armor multipliers from getting too high, or we'll have whole combats of a bunch of guys swinging away like a blind kids' tee-ball league.

Truth. Still, it is doable.

Yes, especially since we were just working on putting a cap on how high things can get. No point in doing so if the multiplier kicks in. That's why I go for addition and subtraction when I can. I don't really like the idea of making them have a multiplier less than 1 either. The issue with make crummy armor actually hurt your skill is that armor shouldn't really hurt your ability to use your armor ability. Afterall, wearing armor should only increase your chances, not decrease.

And even if we do go with hampering multipliers, we'd probably have to start low. Afterall, at 100 heavy if daedric is 2.5, you'd have a massive 250 in the equation. And that's just daedric, not artifact level armor.

I don't really think the armor tier thing should effect damage reduction. A level 1 mook wearing the cuirass of the savior's hide shouldn't be any more likely to have his torso pierced by an arrow than a master of light armor. Although he might be poorer at dodging in it.

I'm against armor tiering and further complication at this level. We have the skill that goes 1-100, we can use it as a percentage for effective utilization of armor. Tier names ought to remain just that - names for tier where skill purchase becomes more expensive.

Do we really want to force our players to calculate what 73% of armor 35 is? That's why we're toying with different systems - because we don't want to have too many calculations, especially calculations that leave a ton of hanging decimals.

Saint Jiub wrote:Do we really want to force our players to calculate what 73% of armor 35 is? That's why we're toying with different systems - because we don't want to have too many calculations, especially calculations that leave a ton of hanging decimals.

Being confessedly unable to do anything over basic addition without a calculator and a sheet of paper I'd be the first to agree that finding percentages for each piece of your armor each time your skill improves is a bad form, but I also want to stay as close to the original system as possible. Part of that was that every point of your skill counts (even if it doesn't in practice). Also, if we split skill benefits into tiers, then a skill of 21 and 40 will be the same, and then suddenly at 41 it gets noticeably better. Abstraction for the sake of streamlining is nice, but I think we're sacrificing too much with this. We might just as well adopt WoD system and have four dots in place of 100 point skills.

Or make a compromise and build tables that show defense and DR of each armor depending on skill. It will look intimidating, but will be quick and save us from having to dance on tiny rubber buttons after every session.

The way I was envisioning it was that your skills weren't tiered, but the "physical" armor your character wore was. So Chitin, Iron, Chain and what not are all the same tier, they all have the same defensive value. Netch leather, steel and whatever the second step medium armor is have the same defensive value, and so on. The tier value gets either added in or multipled, depending on how we decide we want to scale it, with your skill in the relevant armor, so your opponents attack roll looks something like weapon

(skill+weapon)-(skill+armor tier)

and so on.

LessRudeScrib wrote:The way I was envisioning it was that your skills weren't tiered, but the "physical" armor your character wore was. So Chitin, Iron, Chain and what not are all the same tier, they all have the same defensive value. Netch leather, steel and whatever the second step medium armor is have the same defensive value, and so on. The tier value gets either added in or multipled, depending on how we decide we want to scale it, with your skill in the relevant armor, so your opponents attack roll looks something like weapon

(skill+weapon)-(skill+armor tier)

and so on.

I like this. It keeps system synchronicity, and the last thing we need is a table for skill and armor values, let alone percentage calculation. This is fairly true to the game, and also true to the systems we have worked out so far.