Oooh... We're touching on a subject which is near and dear to my heart.

For my money, if you want a fairly realistic approach to the way ancient/medieval/early modern weapons and armor interact, the optimum way is to address three factors for weapons:

--Ability to circumvent armor: i.e., the ability to strike at gaps or weak points in armor.
--Concussive force: i.e., blunt force trauma,
--Penetrative capability: slashing and piercing.

The ability to circumvent armor by striking at weak points is critical, because it is the entire purpose of many weapons, such as the rondel dagger and most types of late medieval sword. Some historians assert that it is also the purpose of massed bow fire. As far as concussion and penetration goes, the balancing there is fairly obvious: A piercing sword like a rapier has good penetration, but almost no concussion, a cutting sword a bit more concussion and less penetration, an axe a fairly even mix of the two, and a mace pure concussion.

Armor would then optimally reflect the same three factors, with a rating for thoroughness of coverage, and concussion and penetration resistance stats. Mail for example, would have good penetration resistance, but minimal concussion resistance. Textile armor would have little of either, but perhaps better against concussion than penetration, and renaissance style full plate good levels for all.

This is the only system I can think of which represents the choices of weapon vs. armor as they were in history. E.g., if you expect opponents to be in head-to-toe mail, as you might if you were fighting 12th or 13th century knights, you really want a lance (which should have an extremely high penetration rate when couched from horseback) mace or hammer, but if those aren't an option, a battleaxe is a good second choice, which is exactly the trend in battlefield weapons during that time.

The additional wrinkle you could add in is a bonus to combat checks (attack if you're using D&D rules, but optimally both attack and defense), to represent the combination of reach and wieldiness. That further ups the realism of the decision making, since while an axe might be a more damaging weapon, a sword is much more nimble.

The point of doing all this for a game IMO, is to give your players a more interesting choice to make when choosing their loadout, and to allow you as DM to mix up the dynamic by changing the weapons and armor in play. Being forced by social circumstance to carry "civilian" weapons such as swords and knives makes much more difference when a sword and an axe no longer have the exact same utility.

Admittedly, the level of complexity this requires is possibly too much to be practical. I haven't tried to implement it in my own games, but where I can, I do aim for half-measures that move towards the same effect.

The D&D combat system was designed to be simple and abstract. Tacking detail on it generally leads to unsatisfactory results. The basic D&D combat chassis of rolling to hit, and rolling simple damage vs a pile of mounting hit points starts to have issues the more you try to jazz it up.

I have my own issues with it, the primary one being variable weapon damage. It is a system that creates winner and loser weapons simple due to the assigned damages. My current project that I am working on for a planned OSE campaign is removing all weapon damage completely and starting over. All of these medieval weapons are very deadly and can inflict brutal wounds. You will almost never see a classic D&D hoplite fighter using spear & shield when using var weapon damage because choosing a d6 over a d8 weapon is sub-optimal. I am moving away from specific damage from particular weapons. I have all weapons classed as small, medium, large, and great. The actual damage inflicted depends on the expertise of the wielder. Martial classes have the best damage, semi-martial classes have medium damage, and non-martial classes have the lowest damage.

I am also doing away with multiple attack rolls. Instead, base weapon damages go up with level gain. The more martially focused the class, the quicker weapon damage rises. I am also giving martial and semi-martial classes a base AC boost with armor adding on to that. Still tweaking the numbers on the scaling damage amounts but they are significant. A barely trained militiaman might only do 1d3 damage fighting with a dagger but a grizzled 7th level fighter will be doing 1d10 with that same dagger.

Quote from: Venka on April 22, 2024, 04:09:53 PM

Quote from: Exploderwizard on April 22, 2024, 03:31:47 PMLucky you! I was playing an AD&D monk that got hit with it and the system shock that came with it killed him.

AD&D Monks are immune to haste and slow starting at 5th level. This is more nerf than buff normally, as monks get a huge number of powerful unarmed attacks (this is their main job).  So either you were below 5th level or the DM forgot that you were not subject to it in the first place- either way, a tragedy!

Level 4. We were a varied level party some of us coming to the campaign later. The thief was level 7 and almost died. Everyone else was fine.

Quote from: Cathode Ray on April 22, 2024, 04:27:23 PMFrom Bounding Into Comics:
Bounding Link

From The Blaze:
Blaze Link

I never played the game, but: Isn't absurdist sexy depictions of Lara the whole point of the game.

NOT ANY MORE!

Saw Abigail this past weekend and it was a lot of fun.  I did my best to hide trailers from my wife, and bought tickets to surprise her.  She had no idea what kind of movie she was seeing.

Naturally, when the "big reveal" happens, her reaction was priceless.

Worth the price of admission, Abigail was really well done.

My son is rolling strong again.  Did a 300x5 squat yesterday and is on track to have a shot at a 4 plate 1rm DL by the end of May.  I think his goal for squat is 350 1RM by end of May and it looks like he is on track to hit that too.  Not bad at all for a 13 year old (he is not small though, at 5'9" and 167lbs).

I think the outward degeneracy was an evolution that went with the social marxists.  They needed something to sell their rotted goods with so a reskinning was in order.  All of the commies who were in charge have always been trash humans though.  Most political figures have things about them they like to hide, but commies are the worst of the worst.

I keep getting recommended NPC trpg content so I might as well start sharing it with all of you!

QuoteThis is not to object to media products being transformed into propaganda. I'd agree that they're already always propaganda. Refusing to indoctrinate someone is indoctrinating them into neutrality, just as refusing to teach children religion is teaching them nullifidianism. The Wokists have that right: most everything reinforces one political narrative or other.

I would beg to differ on this one, and I think it's better to approach this from a Christian Apologetics angle than from politics or the history of gaming. I will try to circle back after I make my point.

There's one key difference between Atheism and Theism. If you push the Atheistic universe to it's conclusion, you must assume that logic, mathematics, and ethics are self-assembling.  If you push the Theistic universe to its logical conclusion, these could be self-assembling, but it is more consistent with the universe for them to be directly provided by God.

The problem is that since the 1930s and Godel's theorems of incompleteness, we have known that mathematics especially doesn't fit into neat self-assembling boxes. Without this, ethics and epistemology follow suit. This is why pseudoscientific ethics typically resort to non-answers like survival and reproduction and secular ethics fall apart under scrutiny. In this sense I think that it's more accurate to say that as our culture abandoned Christian ethical ideals, it lost the moral fiber to resist Marxism. Marxism also failed--it became Wokeness by switched away from economic arguments to racial and gender arguments--but because the Christian moral authority was exiled from public life and there were were no other moral authorities to call it out, Marxism evolved into Wokism.

And here we come to the rub; Christianity is getting targeted by the Woke because it retains the moral authority to call Wokism out. No one else really does.

So, no, I don't agree with the sentiment that teaching children nothing is actually teaching them nullifidianism. You either teach children functional worldviews or you don't. And if you didn't, chances are they will become Woke, not because they actually believe any of the ideas, but because the only thing which is real to them is the opinions of their peers.

Dark Souls would need a custom system to do it justice because the "Hollowing as a metaphor for the player quitting the game" metaphor is unique to Dark Souls. I actually can't think of a good way to embed this into a TTRPG, which makes me think the definitive version of Dark Souls will forever remain the video game, even if someone does manage to make a TTRPG out of it. It is a work of art which uses the video game medium as a choice.

None of that is true of Elder Scrolls.


Elder Scrolls has a mountain of lore, but to be honest...I think most of that lore is ho-hum at best. The best thing about the setting is that the Khajiit and Argonians are relatively novel races given the high fantasy backdrop. The magic system is merely OK, and the pantheon is a straight-up hot mess. I don't see anything in Elder Scrolls which has enough creative clarity to warrant a custom system. It might be better than "high fantasy as written by Chat-GPT" but it is certainly closer to that than literally any Final Fantasy game (including most of the spinoffs.) You can comfortably run Elder Scrolls with pretty much any generic system there is (and I think there's a fan-made Savage Worlds module for it.) However, if you tried to do that with Final Fantasy VIII, the system would crash.

Believe me; I tried. Way the heck back in my high school days I tried to make a Final Fantasy VIII conversion in GURPS and watched as the system broke down crying because GURPS doesn't have a clue how to handle junctioning.