I’ve thought a lot on how to correct the issues above, but any solution that implies changing the base weapon stats is neither simple to develop, nor effective in terms of results.
So as a first step I tried instead to evaluate from the same statistical perspective as above the performance of a house rule that I developed to make combat “deadlier” (and, somehow, to increase armor importance): the rule is that
in addition to the Piercing Strike chance of Edge, every Extraordinary Success (2 or more Tengwars) on an attack roll is a Piercing Strike (but instead of dealing Weapon Damage + 2xDamage score, it only deals Weapon Damage + 1xDamage score, like a Great Success). It’s like a soft version of King’s Blade ability.
This rule has the additional effect of increasing the Piercing Strike chance as the Weapon Skill of the attacker increases (which seems also logical, btw: an expert warrior knows better than a novice where to hit to incapacitate his enemy). The question is: does it increase the chance too much? Or does it increase the chance with too much disparity between different kinds of weapons?
The following are the statistical results of my evaluation.
The total, average chances to deal a Wound of ANY character with a Weapon Skill between 2 and 6, against ANY monster with any armor between 1D and 4D, using the “extraordinary success is a piercing strike” house rule are these:
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Axes (G Edge, 18 Injury TN):
14.27%
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Swords (10 Edge, 16 Injury TN):
15.26%
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Spears (9 Edge, 14 Injury TN):
15.12%
Well, I was lucky. It seems way more balanced, using the rule. It’s an increase of about 6% to the average chance to score a Wound for Swords and a 5% for Spears, but almost a 9% for Axes, which on average makes them now comparable to the other weapons (though still a tad inferior).
Looking more in depth, I split the above chances into separate chances for each armor category:
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Axes (G Edge, 18 Injury):
19.29% vs 1D,
17.58% vs 2D,
12.87% vs 3D,
7.33% vs 4D
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Swords (10 Edge, 16 Injury TN):
21.52% vs 1D,
20.51% vs 2D,
12.93% vs 3D,
6.10% vs 4D
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Spears (9 Edge, 14 Injury TN):
25.07% vs 1D,
20.57% vs 2D,
10.80% vs 3D,
4.05% vs 4D
As you can see, we have a nice rationale. Against lightly armored foes the Spears are the weapons to go with, while on the other side Axes are the best weapons to bypass heavy armor (by the way, as I wrote in my previous post, I see this as quite the contrary of real combat). In all cases Swords are a nice and well-rounded choice, performing well against all kinds of armor while never being the predominant choice.
I’ll playtest the house rule some more, but from these preliminary considerations it seems the right way to go. It may also be a step towards making heavy mail a viable choice, since our players would want to be more protected now: increased Wound chance and decreased Endurance damage (Extraordinary success has now the same damage of a Great success) mean becoming WEARY later, and increasing the chance to end combat scoring a Wound rather than dropping to zero Endurance. Which makes heavily armored characters a bit more favored.
Elfcrusher, it would be fantastic if you added this house rule to your simulator so we could also see how it performs!
