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Fighting is all about fatigue control. My experience is boxing, and after almost a decade of practice (now I'm 29) I can fight well for 9 rounds (3 minutes each, 1 minute rest). I'm not that fit (for a pugilist): if I go all-out on the first round, then on round three I would spit my lungs to the mat. Luckily, my opponent gets tired like me, so it's just a matter of tactic.

But if on each round I had a different, fresh opponent going for the k.o. against me... well, that's a completely different story.

I think that a LOTR battle would be more like this: your character always gets new, fresh Orcs eager to kill him, and he has to be equally efficient against all of them. So it's all about skill and fatigue control, rather than sheer endurance training. And soon or late (and by "late" I mean quite soon ), they HAVE to get prolonged rest, otherwise they'll go down, end of story. Heck, I would reduce the Endurance of the characters by, let's say, 1 point every 5 combat rounds even if they don't get hit at all!

Fighting is hard indeed.

EDIT: my comments in another thread regarding armor and fatigue:

In terms of game balance, heavy armor becomes less useful as the game advances to higher challenges: the adversaries deal more and more damage, while their chance to score a Penetrating Strike remains almost (if not exactly) the same. So the characters get hammered to WEARY conditions faster and heavy armors only worsen this. The only way to counteract this is by raising characters' Endurance, but still, adversaries' damage outputs tend to grow faster than the character's ability to "toughen up".

But it also depends on the threat: if you're facing a horde of Orcs, you'll receive a lot of blows, and your chance to get WOUNDED gets higher. Hence, a heavy armor would be more advantageous. But if the Company is facing a single powerful Mountain Troll, I would recommend them to throw away their armors, since a single opponent won't score many Penetrating Strikes, while it will deal tons of Endurance damage. But would YOU, real-life people, throw away your armor when facing a 10 feet tall monster? I guess not!

Ruling armors has never been an easy task in rpgs...

Then again...

Legolas and Gimli have an orc killing contest. The final score is 41 to 42, in Gimli's favor, I think. (Legolas won in the movie, though.)

Even if Legolas and Gimli are maxed out characters with 6s in their weapon skills, how are they surviving to kill 40+ regular old orcs?

Armor in TOR is basically designed to give 1d6 Protection per 4 points of Encumbrance.
Trying to make it more viable I had 2 ideas for house ruling:

Option 1:
It gives 1d6 Protection per 3 Enc, so it would be Leather Shirt Enc. 3, Reinforced Leather Enc. 6, Mail Shirt Enc. 9 and so on...
This simply lightens armor, no need forother changes.

Option 2:
It somehow also absorbs Endurance inflicted by blows. 1 point per d6 seems way too powerful, considering a standard Orc deals 4 with his bent sword, an Hauberk (4d6) will always negate that.
This changes a lot and possibly gives a solid boost.

Thoughts?

Definitely disagree with armor reducing incoming endurance loss, as if it were 'absorbing damage'. Endurance loss is not damage. One could (and many will...) argue that you should lose more or less endurance when wearing armor, but it's still not damage.

Actual damage, "wounds", are already absorbed by armor quite well.

My only question is: is the fatigue cost of armor too high?

EDIT: And to expand on my earlier post, I guess the thing that bothers me about the armor trade off (getting tired faster, or risking wounds) is that it's not clear to me how you use that information tactically/strategically. In what situation(s) would you want high armor and fatigue vs. low armor and fatigue? Does it involve knowing the weapon stats of your opponents? That seems meta-gamey to me.

As stated earlier, armor is at its best when fighting lots of small things. It's at its worst when fighting one big thing.

If you're fighting 10 orcs, the LM has 10 chances to roll an eye and wound you. If you're fighting 1 troll, he doesn't have so many chanced to go eye fishing.

Michebugio wrote: Ruling armors has never been an easy task in rpgs...

Yes, it's a can of worms to say the least. Thankfully, plate is absent from TOR.

Valdur wrote:Thematically it makes no sense that the soldier wearing armor and carrying a shield goes down before the lightly armed woodman.

True. I'll use the dreaded phrase in the real world to point out that if you matched two individuals of equal skills and provided them the same weapons, the outcome would be anyone's guess. But give one mail and the other leather, the person wearing the mail has a significant advantage over the person wearing leather.

There is a crusade account (that I cannot find at the moment and I do not remember if it was a christian source or a muslim source describing the crusaders) of two or three knights defending a bridge a whole day. By the end of the day, they were bloodied and covered with so many arrows sticking out of their armour they looked like porcupines. However they all survived.

Maybe the problem is that weary is a more powerful status effect then wounded. In TOR, it's usually more dangerous to be tired then it is to have a hole in you.

Weary REALLY screws up your dice. Wounded is a minor inconvenience until it's time to start healing.

Angelalex242 wrote:Maybe the problem is that weary is a more powerful status effect then wounded. In TOR, it's usually more dangerous to be tired then it is to have a hole in you.

Weary REALLY screws up your dice. Wounded is a minor inconvenience until it's time to start healing.

Yeah. That could very well be the "problem" (if there is one) right there.

On the subject of armor reducing endurance loss: I am a huge fan of this. I think if you break armor down to what it does lowering the chances for wounds is one thing but lowering damage taken is exactly the same thing. I think leather shirt 1
Leather corslet 1
Chain shirt 2
Coat of mail 2
Chain hauberk 3
Chain and plate/heavy scale 3

Or just keep armor the same and somehow lower the fatigue because you can't even outfit a soldier in 14th-15th century armor without getting into the 20 range and that was the thematic time frame the weapons, armor, and combat were based on for LoTR.

Angelalex242 wrote:As stated earlier, armor is at its best when fighting lots of small things. It's at its worst when fighting one big thing.

If you're fighting 10 orcs, the LM has 10 chances to roll an eye and wound you. If you're fighting 1 troll, he doesn't have so many chanced to go eye fishing.

I decided to sim this out...

Beorning
Body: 7(10), Heart: 4(6), Wits: 3(4)
Giant Slaying Spear, Fell, Keen, Grievous
Weapon Skill 5, Favoured
Virtues: Fell-Handed, Resilience
Defensive Stance
10,000 iterations for each scenario (EDIT: It's 10,000 divided by number of opponents.)

vs. Cave Troll
with no armor: 24.6% win rate
with mail shirt and cap: 26.5% win rate
with mail hauberk and helm: 26.1% win rate

vs. 5 Wild Wolves
with no armor: 33.7% win rate
with mail shirt and cap: 55.6% win rate
with mail hauberk and helm: 44.9% win rate

I decided to try one more thing, and put the Hero in Forward stance against the wolves.
with no armor: 5.7% win rate
with mail shirt and cap: 24.3% win rate
with mail hauberk and helm: 7.7% win rate

Conclusions: there does seem to be more variance against "lots of small things", but in both cases the value of the armor, versus the cost of being weary, peaks and then declines as the armor gets heavier (although the difference in the first case is probably statistically insignificant).

Edit: Oh you did say "10 orcs" didn't you. One more run, this time against 10 Snaga Trackers, using one-handed Splitting Axe and a reinforced Shield: 0.5%, 2.0%, 0.9%. I'll have to get "Old Hatred" working for Dwarves and try it with one of them.