Combat Stats - Fighting PCs almost always hit?

[James Harrison]

Please do post it, I would love to see it. My weapon table is by no means something I consider done and finished for my house rules, I am sure that I will be tweaking it as I have more games under my belt.

P.S: Regarding the Maul, two things occur to me:
1) Give the maul a slight malus tu initiative (-1 or -2) to represent its cumbersomness.
2) The attack bonus listed for weapons is equal to your weapon skill up to the maximum listed on the weapon chart. So a peasent with weapon skill 2 will get only a +2 from the maul, while a warrior with weapon skill 8 will get the full +6 bonus.

Ah! The limiting the accuracy bonus makes that a much more appealing weapon table to use. I think that would stop part combatants "buying up" power.

And Challenge accepted I will think through my alternate weapon ideas in a fuller seance and post them here - see what people think. I'm happy for them to be shot down if they do not fill the needs of the setting.

Not necessarily, indeed, it all depends on the GM and Players, but it is my belief that the lighter the system is, the more you will encourage the participants to take a narrativist approach rather than a simulationist one.

I think there is the rub - both are equally valid modes of roleplaying, but Shadows over Esteren is defiantly aiming to be a narrative game first. I'm super excited about meckatons (sp) - and love that there are no rules for them, just cool story.

Obviously you can have more detailed rules and have the game be narrative; but I expect in me (and guess in you Yepesnopes, coming from A.M.) it steams from liking simulationist Role Playing.... I'm a little uncomfortable about the unknown and pure narrativism is something I haven't tried!

In fact when thinking about weapon rules I am not sure how much I want to change things; I want to keep the feel of the setting and the danger of combat... but I do want to tweak the combat system (I cant help liking mechanics) to be slightly different somehow. So I will propose my system (probably next week) and you can see how well it would (or would not) work with the flavour of Esteren;

It does involve more maths - and i wouldn't publish it in a book, but my gaming group will all be fine doing the maths, so it wont be clunky or unclear for us (and should not detract from the narrative). the only thing I fear is it makes a heavy armoured guy more durable, and thus combat less deadly... Anyway this is all for another post

[Clovis]

We'll be looking forward to your next post then!

[StripelessTiger]

Might think about such stats

It's hard to argue with cold, hard math. I personally think the system is excellently balanced unless you TRY to break it. Any system, no matter what it is, can be abused.

But I think this topic forgets the spirit of Esteren, in that it is a roleplaying game focused on theme, atmosphere, NOT on combat. It is more about how you play the character's Ways, not about trying to tailor them to make a perfect fighter. You can give any idiot a sword and he can get lucky.

Playing the personality is way more important that making a strong combat character. In fact, I URGE EVERYONE to limit your fighter/knight/blade oriented characters to about 1 in 4 party members. When everyone hits drastically hard, it kinda takes the fun out of the other aspects of the game when you can just kill anything.

The wounds are supposed to be bad, and linger, and hurt. This enforces the idea of not choosing violence as a first option. In fact, it is possible to run a completely investigative game with no actual combat. The rules are tailored as such.

Obviously no one here has played Deadlands or you'd be used to the brutality of this type of combat system.

[warwolf1969]

Personally I like the combat system as is. It's quick, brutal and effective. The idea that any reasonable combat char can hit most times is good. Because it forces players to think of ways around combat, i.e. roleplaying. From the back ground it seems that this is not a world where warriors wander around aimlessly killing monsters. It has a definate Lovecraftian feel, where a single monster becomes a whole adventure in itself. Where the adventure builds up to the final confrontation with a deadly creature, or human enemy. In both cases the combat system works as it allows for the bad guy to be able to viciously kill NPC's etc. This is often the problem with games like D&D where it was hard to explain in the system how a murderer could so easily kill and so on. I agree with the comment about Deadlands combat system which can be seriously deadly, and leads itself to the same sort of adventure.

[Kadakithis]

To me, good combat needs to always favor the offensive, because missing the other person has little effect on the game, and rarely moves things forward. Only in simulationist games should defense, in my opinion be on par with offense since combat will be a more drawn out affair and the center of it will be who has a mixture of all stats to win which changes the focus of the game.

i do like defenses that mitigate success, so like defense is now, it matters on how much damage you do and if you are lucky, misses you. Which is very similar to real combat.

Weapons and their different ratings matter more to me as a narrative modifier. So, knives are good for small spaces where a maul would not, but don't tell me you are cutting down a door with your sword, because that is when the maul is much better. But giving different weapons stats is really trying to simulate different fighting styles, and is mostly conjecture.

Notice in D&D if the DM narrates the damage die, they often use it as for where and how they were hit, not that the sword was especially sharp that day. Everything in combat is location of the hit and deflecting those places with speed or armor or with your weapon. If someone with a knife can get in close to someone with a sword they have a better advantage since the sword user has little leverage and dodging is hard close up.

Even simulationist games have little way to calculate all these little shifts. Especially since stamina is something usually reserved for mages, and takes a whole quotient from combat, but the whole system then must be designed with the idea of matching and comparing different fighting styles, most of which don't exist in a largely homogeneous culture like Esteren. So in my games I really don't sweat it. The more important things to combat are being prepared, and situation and the story. Some enemies aren't beatable, and in combat, Natural or Urban Know how is as important as raw ability to fight.

If Shadows of Esteren was all about killing others, I imagine it more Hunger Games than Lord of the Rings. Sneaking to undermine the enemy, running away to a better position, avoiding dark sinister areas, using natural lore to survive, and quick skirmishes that are tough but rare and often fatal, it favors people with combat ability but favors quick wittedness more.

[BadDecisionDino]

I understand the intention to have a primarily narrative-focused game without getting bogged down in combat-simulationist rules, but having plate armor confer absolutely no drawbacks for wearing it just seems like a total no-brainer to me. The fact that there's nothing stopping a thief from sneaking around and doing pirouettes in full plate is ridiculous, and while I'm sure I could think of some homebrewed penalties to apply to the rolls, the whole point of a combat system is to take the onus off me to keep things relatively balanced. None of the reasons stated so far really give the impression that there was much thought put into this at all.

I'll probably just be working on some unholy chimera of Savage Worlds + Horror Companion to see if I can just rework that whole system to work with Ways instead of the typical Str/Vig/Agi/Sma/Spi. The system has a reputation for being "over the top" but no one can say its combat isn't brutal and deadly. Plus it'll give me a basis for ruling on the creation of Magientist artifacts beyond the 8 or so that are in the book.

[Pierstoval]

Or you could simply consider that anyone wearing a full plate armor endures a -5 penalty to all throws related to movement or agility, like the Feats domain for example…

[BadDecisionDino]

I mean if that had been a playtested rule I'd feel more comfortable just slapping those penalties on it, but oh well. Looking at it again, it does look like there are two stipulations in the RAW that say you can't use the majority of the Stealth domain in metallic armor, and you can't take advantage of the Ambush rules either, which are fairly compelling reasons to take them if you're specifically going for a sneaky type.