I'm writing up stats for some skeletons for my next game session and I've run out of ideas so I thought that I would see what you all thought.

The basic plot I have cooked up is that in ages past the men and elves of mirkwood buried many of their dead in tombs and barrows in the mountains of Mirkwood. When the Necromancer took up residence in Dol Guldur he summoned up minor spirits of shadow to inhabit the tombs and barrows as skeletons. While it's true that the skeletons aren't terribly powerful their purpose was to cause inconvenience and spread despair.

Stat wise I'm looking at something around the power of an Orc-Chieftain. My problem is with how to model the skeleton's traditional resistance to piercing weapons. I have been thinking of reducing damage from piercing weapons, bows and spears, to 1 and halving damage from edged weapons.

Another thought was too eliminate their endurance score and have them "die" only when they suffer a wound. With an increase in Armor vs piercing weapons.

What about making them immune to actual Wounds, since they lack internal organs and are generally just composed of bone?
They could be destroyed only after a lot of battering (loss of Endurance), and if you really want to give them a kind of resistance against puncturing and cutting blows you could rule that against skeletons such weapons never get the tengwar rune bonus to damage (or they get it but reduced: you need 2 runes just to get a Great Success, and the Extraordinary one is impossible)...

The can't be wounded thing makes sense and looks good on paper but in actual play I have yet to have a PC take out an opponent with wounds. Every fight has been won with End loss.

So that would make Skeletons functionally the same as everything else. I want to make skellies special.

Skelatons can be disabled by direct impact on skull or column but are immune to common wounds.

Rule should be Wound on a G only. That reduce efficiency of Spears (and Swords) but not those of axes.

Really? I find this surprising. Do your players have poor weapon skills? Or are you as LM just really lucky with Protection rolls?

Sorry to go off topic, but this shocked me...

Not so much with the protection rolls. It has just worked out that every hit that causes a wound also does enough damage to reduce the critter's End to 0 at the same time. So the critter would have gone down anyway.

As skill levels increase and the toughness of the opponenets rises this may change. But for the weaker foes like basic Orcs and Wolves wounds have not played a part.

Why not try it the other way around then?
Require a Wound and ignore the Endurance?

Honestly that would fit better with the idea of an Undead I think. I mean, "Endurance"? Come on! It' DEAD!

But if you hit it bad enough, crushing a vertebrae or mauling a thigh-bone... that could stop them in their tracks.

Then again... Wounds are hard to "do"... maybe that will make them too powerful?

/wolf

I had that thought and the same reservation. I think I will give it a try but I'll start off by throwing just a few skellies at first.

They go into action tomorrow evening. I'll let you know how things work out.

My assumption behind the "no Wounds, just Endurance loss" idea is that skeletons must be hacked to pieces to be effectively destroyed.
I like imagining them crawling on the ground, their backbone shattered, trying to stab your feet with a rusty blade...

In this case, however, their Endurance must be high enough to make them a believable threat (according to the "threat level" you are looking for).

I'm curious to know how they fare in your game, anyway!

I tested out the Skellies in my last session. Several players couldn't make the game so I improvised a simple little excursion to the mountains of Mirkwood.

The party was sent to find the tomb of an ancient scholar who was known to have researched the spiders of Mirkwood in depth. Their mission was to find any lore on spiders and return with it.

In the tomb the three party members encountered three animated skeletons and battle was joined. I was using the "immune to end damage, destroyed by a wound" option. At first things looked grim when 2 of the 3 skellies dropped in the first round! The third skelly held up much better and put some damage on the woodman and damaged the Mirkwood Elf until he was weary.

The players didn't like not being able to damage the skelly and liked the option for reducing damage done based on weapon type instead. basically they preferred doing something, even just a point or two, vs doing nothing at all.

Next time I will try the reduced damage option and see how that goes.