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My Hobbit player just got his fresh new King’s Blade after the last Fellowship Phase and, to my big disappointment, he all of a sudden became the deadliest warrior in the group, hewing elite orcs like butter and subtracting a great deal of fun from our last game session.

So I tried to evaluate this weapon balance in comparison to other cultural rewards, and as I put a lot of statistical calculations on it, my considerations went further, about weapon balance in general. I’ll go back later to the King’s Blade discussion, but first of all I just wanted to share some considerations about weapon effects in game.

I started considering, just to keep things simple (for now), 3 types of weapon that are (probably) supposed to be directly comparable in terms of efficiency, because they have equal Damage and Encumbrance scores (look at the axe, the sword and the spear, for example; all Enc 2 and Damage 5). Maybe they are not supposed to, but let’s just assume it.

1) Those with G Edge and 18 Injury TN (usually Axes)
2) Those with 10 Edge and 16 Injury TN (usually Swords)
3) Those with 9 Edge and 14 Injury TN (usually Spears)

For each of them I evaluated the probability to score a Piercing Strike against 1D armor, 2D, 3D and 4D. This probability is the probability to roll the right score on the Feat dice (Edge score or more) multiplied by the probability that the resisting monster has to fail his Protection roll. The final score is the actual probability to deal a Piercing Strike, assuming the attack is a hit.


The results are the following:

G Edge, 18 TN (Axes): 7.64% vs 1D; 6.96% vs 2D; 5.10% vs 3D; 2.90% vs 4D
10 Edge, 16 TN (Swords): 15.05% vs 1D; 12.11% vs 2D; 7.64% vs 3D; 3.60% vs 4D
9 Edge, 14 TN (Spears): 17.71% vs 1D; 14.53% vs 2D; 7.63% vs 3D; 2.86% vs 4D


Hoping that the maths are correct (feedback would be appreciated), this would just mean that Edge is the driving factor, and in terms of efficiency, Spears are just plain superior to Swords which are plain superior to Axes, in all cases (much more so against lightly armored foes). I would have expected something different, i.e. spears progressively losing effectiveness and axes becoming the right choice against heavily armored opponent, but this is not the case. Type 1 weapons (G Edge, 18 TN) are simply never advantageous, in any circumstances.

Moreover, this is not exactly what happened in Middle Age warfare (well, it’s actually the contrary! keep reading): slashing weapons (axes and swords) were capable of dealing grievous wounds to unarmored opponents, but as a matter of fact they were very limited against hauberks or plate; on the other hand, spears and piercing weapons (but also swords, when properly thrust and not swung) performed much better against heavy armor. Check Wikipedia or more specialized sites for further considerations on the matter, but more or less all references agree on this.

While we can consider the middle way (10 Edge, 16 TN) a good way to represent Swords, it’s just like Spears and Axes have been inverted in terms of effects!


And now let’s go back to King’s Blade. I compared it with two other Cultural Rewards, the Bitter Spear and the Splitting Axe. All of these weapons have similar effects on combat so they can be directly compared in terms of probability to deal a Piercing Strike. The simulations have been made considering that the King’s Blade is wielded by a character with 3 dots of weapon skill (the results are varied proportionally to the skill level).

These are the results:

King’s Blade: 36.67% vs 1D; 30.08% vs 2D; 15.80% vs 3D; 6.84% vs 4D
Bitter Spear: 20.52% vs 1D; 17.34% vs 2D; 10.45% vs 3D; 5.67% vs 4D
Splitting Axe: 7.64% vs 1D; 7.64% vs 2D; 6.96% vs 3D; 5.10% vs 4D

Well, no wonder the Hobbit (the Hobbit! not the Beorning warrior, or the Elf archer!) is slaughtering my orcs. And just imagine a Hobbit with a higher weapon skill...


Am I missing something? If not, is it ok to have such disparity in terms of raw efficiency between weapons? Do you nerf King’s Blade in your campaign, and how do you do that? Thanks in advance for any contribution!

Michebugio wrote: G Edge, 18 TN (Axes): 7.64% vs 1D; 6.96% vs 2D; 5.10% vs 3D; 2.90% vs 4D
10 Edge, 16 TN (Swords): 15.05% vs 1D; 12.11% vs 2D; 7.64% vs 3D; 3.60% vs 4D
9 Edge, 14 TN (Spears): 17.71% vs 1D; 14.53% vs 2D; 7.63% vs 3D; 2.86% vs 4D

This is most interesting...and a bit disturbing.

Michebugio wrote: King’s Blade: 36.67% vs 1D; 30.08% vs 2D; 15.80% vs 3D; 6.84% vs 4D
Bitter Spear: 20.52% vs 1D; 17.34% vs 2D; 10.45% vs 3D; 5.67% vs 4D
Splitting Axe: 7.64% vs 1D; 7.64% vs 2D; 6.96% vs 3D; 5.10% vs 4D

Yes the kings blade reward is a bit broken compare to other rewards. Some people has suggested some house rules for it:

King’s Blade (short sword)
At times, country Hobbits find ancient swords inside fallen mounds, amid tilled fields or washed ashore along a watercourse. Unable to discover their precise origin, they call them simply ‘King’s blades.’

If you inflict a piercing blow on an attack using a King’s blade, the target rolls one protection die less (to a minimum of zero) on his Protection Test.

another option is

If you inflict a piercing blow on an attack using a King’s blade, the target rolls the Feat dice twice on his Protection Test and picks up the lowest result.

Thank you very much Yepesnopes for your answer: given it's the only one, I suppose this topic doesn't meet the interest of other users maybe too much maths involved?

By the way to round up my previous post, the following are the average, total odds to score a Wound against any monster that has a number of Protection dices between 1D and 4D, in ANY condition (they are actually just the average scores of those given in the previous post, which were split between armor types):

Axes (G Edge, 18 Injury TN): 5.65%
Swords (10 Edge, 16 Injury TN): 9.60%
Spears (9 Edge, 14 Injury TN): 10.68%

Looking at this table, the disparity between weapon categories is even clearer. From these considerations it’s also clear that Keen Reward is way more effective than Fell, in terms of wounding efficiency.

Please note that I am not going into detail about discussions regarding if this was intended or not. Also, I usually reject arguments like “well, there ARE weapons more effective than others, just deal with it” because on the basis of the same principle, then, there should be races and cultural backgrounds plain better than others, which is not in the spirit of most RPGs (and less so in TOR where - I believe - a remarkable effort was made to balance all the player choices). In general, there shouldn’t be better choices, just different choices.

I understand that most players won't care and will simply get the weapon they like the most, but as a LM I also think that I shouldn't let the player who makes the worst choice be penalized by that (and by the hells! if the worst choice is the AXE, are you telling me that all those DWARVES are deliberately choosing the least effective weapon on the market as their trademark?!?).

Many thanks and a lot of kudos for raising this issue and suggesting the analysis.

I guess that most of us have a feel for rolling a few D6 from all of the other games we've played previously.
It's that Feat dice with its G and Eye results that means the probability analysis gets to be more of a mind bender. So well done again for looking at this.



I'd like to work out the benefits of moving from 2d protection to 3d protection (leather to mail armour). Is the extra d6 to the protection roll worth it against any Injury rating?

Dunheved wrote:I'd like to work out the benefits of moving from 2d protection to 3d protection (leather to mail armour). Is the extra d6 to the protection roll worth it against any Injury rating?

Yes it is, check this post: viewtopic.php?p=12226#p12226

However, it is difficult to quantify how much being weary earlier will cost you in general.

Michebugio wrote:Thank you very much Yepesnopes for your answer: given it's the only one, I suppose this topic doesn't meet the interest of other users maybe too much maths involved?

It isn't that, it's just been discussed before on at least two occasions (that I can recall) so people that discussed it in those older threads probably aren't too fussed about doing so again. An earlier post outlined two house rules; these are from the earlier discussions. There may be others.

If you want to run some scenarios through my combat simulator, it's at:
http://lit-oasis-7482.herokuapp.com/

I don't have every option in there, but King's Blade is one of them.

Sorry for the horrendous UI and lack of instructions; my plan is (was?) to make it feature complete and then worry about making it pretty.

Rich H wrote:It isn't that, it's just been discussed before on at least two occasions (that I can recall) so people that discussed it in those older threads probably aren't too fussed about doing so again. An earlier post outlined two house rules; these are from the earlier discussions. There may be others.

Thanks Rich, could you please address me to these other threads? I haven't been able to find them yet

Dunheved wrote:Many thanks and a lot of kudos for raising this issue and suggesting the analysis.

I guess that most of us have a feel for rolling a few D6 from all of the other games we've played previously.
It's that Feat dice with its G and Eye results that means the probability analysis gets to be more of a mind bender. So well done again for looking at this.

Thank you very much for your appreciation. Simulation of any number of D6 is quite straightforward (albeit going higher than 5 or 6 dices may be tricky without some programming), but you can add the Feat Dice to the equation if you construct the probability curve of the Success Dices (the % of each possible result), then you set the TN you need to achieve, and finally evaluate the Success Dices' probability curve crossing it with the result of the Feat Dice (example: with two Success dices, the probability to achieve a TN of 14 is the sum of all the possible outcomes' chances of the two dices, each multiplied by chance of getting the right score on the Feat Dice to reach 14... more difficult to explain it than to do it).

Dunheved wrote:I'd like to work out the benefits of moving from 2d protection to 3d protection (leather to mail armour). Is the extra d6 to the protection roll worth it against any Injury rating?

I'll make a complete report of chances to avoid wounds for each type of armor, but as start, consider that Mail armour protects you against Injury TN 14 69.48% of the times, and against Injury TN 16 54.17% of the times. The Leather corselet chances were respectively 41.90% and 27.31%. All these calculations are valid when NOT WEARY and not considering Hope points expenditures.

Speaking of which, WEARY and Hope mess things up a lot in these statistical calculations, so for now I just avoided the matter.

Michebugio wrote:I'll make a complete report of chances to avoid wounds for each type of armor, but as start, consider that Mail armour protects you against Injury TN 14 69.48% of the times, and against Injury TN 16 54.17% of the times.

I'm curious about your methodology. I didn't try to compute the values analytically, but your results are very different from my simulations, so maybe I'm missing something.

EDIT: forget it, I made a mistake in my simulations, your numbers are right.

Elfcrusher wrote:If you want to run some scenarios through my combat simulator, it's at:
http://lit-oasis-7482.herokuapp.com/

I don't have every option in there, but King's Blade is one of them.

Sorry Elfcrusher, I didn't notice your post before!

So I ran three simulations with the same Woodman using an axe, a sword and a spear against an Orc Guard (armor 2D+4). Results seem to support my thesis: the axe Woodman has a victory rating of 60%, the sword Woodman has 68% and the spear Woodman has 72%. And 12% difference in rating just because of two different weapons is A LOT, in my opinion.
I then tried the same with a Beorning and the results are similar, but less evident (I guess it's due to higher damage output of the Beorning over the Woodman): 82% for the axe Beorning, 84% for the sword Beorning and 88% for the spear Beorning.

I'm getting convinced that this issue should really get some fixing.