Armour house rule

[Corvo]

Chapeau, Michebugio.

It's a rare indeed to have such a discussion on internet and maintaining such civilized tones.

I feel I have to add to your list of houserules the first one proposed by Rocmistro, here, 2nd post from the top.
It wasn't discussed since we lacked data (by playtesting or by simulator), but it's worth another look. Basically it's a tweaking of mine, but toned down (both in damage reduction and in tn malus). Since the most common objection to my houserule is armour becoming too effective, maybe Rocmistro reached the sweetspot?

[Corvo]

Since I don't want to let any solution unexplored, I tried to discover if the old proposal by Yepesnopes can work [Spoiler: maybe Yepesnopes has hit the nail in the head]
His proposal was fairly simple, yet got sense. Here it is:

I am not in favour of the reduction damage house rules.
(...) In any case, I understand people want to make armours more relevant during combat. Why not just then reduce ALL weapons (PC and NPC) pierce value by 1?

Cheers,
Yepes

Since I cannot add “keen” to the monster's weapons, I pitted the same Hero 18 times against an Orc. First against an Orc wielding an Axe (Edge “Eye”), with armour 0, 1d, 2d etc, for a total of 6 times.
Then I made the same against an Orc wielding a Sword (Edge 10), and against an Orc wielding a Spear (Edge 9).
The rational is that we can see the different effect of armour against different edges.

The result?
Against Edge “Eye” and Edge 10, the best way to win is going naked. Every die of armour lowers your chance to win.
Against Edge 9 the armour got some beneficial effect: Armour 2d yelds the best result, 1d or 3d is less effective, 0d or 4d is even worst, let alone 5d. Apparently 2d is the sweetspot against the orcish spear, that got Injury 12. I imagine that against an edge of, say, 14 or 16, 3d armour is better.

What does that say to us?
Once you reach Edge 9 armour got some sense. Going naked is still a fair option, but some armour is better.
Probably armour is very good against Edge 8 (that doesn't exist unless you take keen on a Spear).
Against Edge 10 armour is detrimental to character survival.
Against Edge 12 armour is a way to hamstring Heroes.
I think that the prevalence of Edge 12 weapons among the monsters is something that makes armour an hindrance.
If all the Edge were raised by 1 point, maybe we will solve the armour conundrum: Armour would become essential against Edge 8, average against Edge 9, an hindrance against Edge 10 (ie axes and trollish clubs).
Pretty balanced, isn't it?

More common wounding is a way to make armour more useful (Michebugio reached the same conclusion in another thread about the King's Sword): that raise the lethality of the game, but I think that this is a way to save the combat system without changing to much rules.

What do you think?
Elfcrusher, can you adapt the simulator to check this idea?

[Rich H]

... Been reading this thread with interest so a quick question: are you actually sure that Elfcrusher's simulation is free of critical bugs which may be affecting the results and therefore the conclusions that you're drawing from them?

Also, how does Elfcrusher's simulation work when a character in heavy armour is wearied? With my experience of the game and the RAW they move into forward stance so that they still have a good chance of hitting their opponent. Does the simulation factor in those kind of nuances, because if it doesn't then I think it's results will be erroneous and therefore can't really be fully relied upon?

The Dwarf PC in my game does this and he's never been Wounded or beaten in battle. He is Wearied a lot but with "Stiff Neck" this doesn't really impact on his Common Skills and as he recovers his Endurance pretty much before each battle he has never been reduced to zero endurance and when Wearied assumes forward stance so he successfully hits his opponents regularly and they largely have less endurance than he does so they are defeated before he is.

I'm wary of the conclusions that the contributors of this thread are forming - there's only a small handful of you commenting here, which doesn't invalidate the commentary but it does mean that the ground swell of opinion that the combat system needs fixing isn't really evident, and I'd be surprised if the game's designers would have built such a system with such glaring issues. Saying that I do think the system needs a little tweaking and I like the idea of reducing the encumbrance slightly of heavier armour and some of the ideas around the knockback rules that have been cited. I think larger alterations would make me personally think about just using another system, but that's my own personal opinion.

Anyway, I'm not wanting to come across as a party-pooper so I'll try and add a little to the discussion beyond my above critique...

One of the discussions/observations my group had in the early days of playing the game was that the Wounded condition doesn't really have any detrimental affects beyond impacting Endurance recovery (and eventual death). Perhaps if being Wounded carried some kind of penalty it would make the desire to avoid being Wounded greater and therefore heavier armour would be more attractive as the Wounded condition would be worse than the Wearied condition?

[Glorelendil]

Can't guarantee an absence of bugs, of course, but the source code is available if anybody wants to poke through it: https://github.com/davidprea/freezing-shame.


Alternately, you can run fights one at a time and look at the output, inspecting manually for bugs. (It's how I find most of the bugs.)

That said, I'm not sure a lot of bugs, or the absence of smart strategies (like changing stance) matter. We're not trying to predict actual outcomes versus specific monsters, but looking at how variables affect those outcomes.

For example, until a patch or two ago monsters were not adding their attribute bonus to favoured rolls. (And they're still not adding it to favoured protection rolls.) Will that affect outcomes? Sure. But it doesn't really matter if what we're trying to deduce is whether King's Blade or Small Folk is a more effective virtue against different types of opponents...as long as the variables being tested are working correctly.

So, yes, switching stance at key points will increase the win rate, and it would be interesting to model how effective that strategy is. But if Armor X is 'better' than Armor Y, adding that functionality won't suddenly make Y better than X.

I could be wrong; if so I'm very interested in understanding what I'm missing.

(When I get a chance I'll add 'decrease edge by 1 for everybody' rule. Who do I name it after who doesn't already have a rule?)

[Sprigg]

@ Rich, In my campaign, wounded characters recover no endurance after fights, and untreated wounds stop natural endurance recovery entirely. This has made them a real danger to my lightly armored characters.

On topic, I'm thinking I'll have to test the 'roll for kbockvack' rules, as I quite like them at first glance!

[Rich H]

So, yes, switching stance at key points will increase the win rate, and it would be interesting to model how effective that strategy is. But if Armor X is 'better' than Armor Y, adding that functionality won't suddenly make Y better than X.

I could be wrong; if so I'm very interested in understanding what I'm missing.

I understand what you're saying but by not adding such granularity you're removing an option for Wearied characters that significantly affects their chances of hitting their opponent and as heavier armoured characters become Wearied sooner you're artificially skewing results against such armour which makes comparisons with lighter or no armour inaccurate and unfair. Therefore the conclusions/results underpinning the driver for some/all these changes is flawed.

[Rich H]

@ Rich, In my campaign, wounded characters recover no endurance after fights, and untreated wounds stop natural endurance recovery entirely. This has made them a real danger to my lightly armored characters.

When we discussed the Wounded condition we also discussed Wearied feeling that the Wearied mechanic (of ignoring results of 1, 2, and 3 on the success die) could be applied to the Wounded condition and a new mechanic for Wearied could be developed with the opinion that it needed to be similar/comparable to the Miserable condition. So, the suggestion was that Wearied should mechanically do something when an Eye is rolled in the same way that being Miserable results in a Bout of Madness when an Eye is rolled... We never developed the idea further though as this discussion occurred very early on in our gaming group, before we even started playing, and we weren't too keen on making such a seemingly drastic alteration.

[Sprigg]

@ Rich, In my campaign, wounded characters recover no endurance after fights, and untreated wounds stop natural endurance recovery entirely. This has made them a real danger to my lightly armored characters.

When we discussed the Wounded condition we also discussed Wearied feeling that the Wearied mechanic (of ignoring results of 1, 2, and 3 on the success die) could be applied to the Wounded condition and a new mechanic for Wearied could be developed with the opinion that it needed to be similar/comparable to the Miserable condition. So, the suggestion was that Wearied should mechanically do something when an Eye is rolled in the same way that being Miserable results in a Bout of Madness when an Eye is rolled... We never developed the idea further though as this discussion occurred very early on in our gaming group, before we even started playing, and we weren't too keen on making such a seemingly drastic alteration.

Perhaps if an eye is rolled, the character is now unable to take strenuous action without assistance (jumping, climbing, fighting, carrying a heavy load, etc)?

[Corvo]

Edit: while I was writing Elfcrusher already answered! sorry

Hi RichH,

Thank you for chiming in. I'll try my best to answer some of your questions. Bear with me if I got something wrong, I'm writing from mobile, so keeping an eye on your text is difficult.

1- is Elfcrusher's simulator correct?
I cannot say for sure, and it's a doubt that troubled me. We know there is some snag with favored armour, but I cannot discern if there is some more general problem. Now that I'm thinking... The log for single combat is pretty detailed: maybe I can check it for errors. But not before 24h (real life)
2-it's possible there are such glaring errors? Well, these errors aren't glaring, and many great RPGs are full of mathematic errors (Fading Suns 1st Ed?).
What we are pretty sure is that Axes (and all Edge "Eye" weapons maybe) are "bugged". Michebugio and others demonstrated it by raw mathematic in previous threads.
3-why my players don't see any problem?
The game is skewed in favor of the heroes: Hope points can hide many mechanical problems. But painkillers cannot stitch a wound.
4-Why in many games my armoured heroes haven't failed? Really, how many total party kill have we got in our campaigns? Cause you need a TPK to really feel the problem. Elfcrusher's simulator is a remorseless killer, and I alone have tested almost a million fights (really). Our personal sample cannot compare.
5-what about stances?
The simulator let you choose a stance for the whole fight. That showed that Defensive stance is invariably the better one once you got skill 3, but that's another problem.
What about your dwarf switching stances? We can try to simulate by setting defensive stance and raising skill at 5 or 6: high enough to simulate your better chance to hit once you are in aggressive stance. Once we have done this we can compare if an higher armour is really useful or not.
I made some test in the past, and armour wasn't any better, but as soon as I can I'll do some other test... At least for the sword. Because we already know that against spear armour a fine, while stances doesn't influence armour efficency when you are facing an axe: 12 is an auto hit, whatever stance and parry you got. So we already know that against axes any stance-switching doesn't change the relative utility of armour compared to going naked (hope you can understand what I'm trying to explain).

Well, kid's calling and my time is running short, hope that I had answered some of your questions. See you later
(Please forgive probable errors, I got some hefty malus to my Lore rolls)

[Glorelendil]

So, yes, switching stance at key points will increase the win rate, and it would be interesting to model how effective that strategy is. But if Armor X is 'better' than Armor Y, adding that functionality won't suddenly make Y better than X.

I could be wrong; if so I'm very interested in understanding what I'm missing.

I understand what you're saying but by not adding such granularity you're removing an option for Wearied characters that significantly affects their chances of hitting their opponent and as heavier armoured characters become Wearied sooner you're artificially skewing results against such armour which makes comparisons with lighter or no armour inaccurate and unfair. Therefore the conclusions/results underpinning the driver for some/all these changes is flawed.

"Is" or "might be"? I can believe that optimal tactics vary depending on gear choice.

In this particular case the doubt creeping into my mind is: If a more aggressive stance increases survivability for some armor types, but not others, then wouldn't it be better to use it all the time, not just when weary? Maybe not: maybe you hit easily enough when not weary that it's better to have the defense than the offense, in which case the parry score of the opponent also becomes a factor. But you could test the theory by comparing heavy armor to light armor, in multiple stances, to see if the advantage varies.

EDIT: I believe Corvo is saying the same thing in his most recent post, above.

But I'll tell you what; I'll add it to the model. Tell me the logic you want heroes to follow and I'll code it. Maybe I'll add a new group of checkboxes for tactics.