frodolives wrote: ↑Fri Feb 23, 2018 3:16 pm
Exactly. In a middle earth game, I'm personally not interested in combat realism. I'm interested in combat that feels like the scenes from the source material.
When I brought up realism, I wasn't bringing up historical accuracy. I just said that getting tired after a single heavy-armor-penetrating blow is realistic—that is, it's quite believable.
As you point out yourself, in the books we have examples of lightly armed and armored adventurers going on adventures, and we have examples of heavily armed and armored warriors going into battle. But we have no examples of heavily armed and armored adventurers going on adventures (except maybe Earendil in Bilbo's poem, but Tolkien never wrote the story of Earendil's adventures). So sticking to the source material falls down as soon as you ask the game to do that. What's the best fallback position? How about plausibility?
If you only give heavily armed and armored adventurers only a bit of token fatigue compared to lightly armed adventurers, then the signal you're sending is that the lightly armed and armored ones are being foolish and inefficient. Everyone ought to wear the heaviest armor and carry the biggest weapons they can get their hands on.
I agree that hauling a lot of gear should contribute to getting weary, but not after a single blow.
Why not after a single blow? Frodo is hit by a spear and made Weary after that single blow, even though the spear did not penetrate his mithril armor, and his armor was lighter than anything you'll get on the equipment lists.
If you don't want to become Weary by a single blow, don't wear so much armor. I don't see the textual evidence to support heavily armed and armored adventurers in Tolkien. Most of his characters try to
avoid fighting.