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My on-line game had a great session this evening. Having tracked down and killed a Great Orc that had stolen a dwarven map from a Northman who was bringing it to the King Under the Mountain, they decided to go and find out what lay at the point marked on the map. It seemed to refer to a watch tower built long ago on the Withered Heath. After an arduous march they arrived at the ruined watch tower and with a cautious approach found only a crebain lurking on the stonework. Shooting that they searched the building. The thorough search found a couple of nests that were not made by goblins but trolls and a hidden underground larder/storeroom.

The Elf took station on the roof and finally spotted the tower's inhabitant, or one of them, approaching. Loosing an arrow he missed the brute who rushed into the tower. Firing through the roof opening worked until the troll hid in the corner where the dwarf had chosen to hide in the underfloor larder. The Beorning and the Woodman abseiled down the tower and approached the front entrance only for the Woodman to stumble and alert the troll to their presence. A battle royal then took place between the troll, three close combat fighters and the elf loosing arrows from the roof.

The Woodman went down fairly quickly to the troll's Crush attack and then the Dwarf was Crushed and Bitten into unconsciousness. The Beorning drew back into a defensive stance and chopped away at the beast. Finally he remembered the Woodman boasting of his long=hafted axe and the keen edge that the dwarves had given it. Grabbing the axe (luckily he'd chosen (axes) as his weapon choice) he struck the beast and brought it crashing to the floor, dead as it's 18 for the protection roll failed to meet the axe's 20 injury rating.

A really tough fight showing the importance of getting a wound on a creature with a high attribute level as quickly as possible. The three dice of favoured armour with a three dice favoured crush and AL 8 really dished out the hurt. My die rolls were so good that a request was made to check the macro code for an unfair advantage . Several times I got one or two tengwars to supplement the base eight damage of the crush. Knockback was used more often than I've ever seen it used before. The company got the snow troll to minus 76 damage before it took a wound which was a long time even when they were doing ten or fifteen damage per attack.

Omg the dwarves didn't give the woodman's axe a keen edge; they forged a new one for him.

Hermes I think you rolled at least 1 tengwar on about 6 of his 9 attack rolls. Dishing out 16 damage per round is just horrible. I should have stayed in the larder!

Besides my errors in reporting the exact nature of Elfcrushers axe and the exact number of tengwars I actually rolled the rest of the report is accurate (or mostly).

Anyway to follow up on the point about getting a Wound on creatures possessing Great Size and needing a Wound to go down even when reduced to zero Endurance. We hadn't been exactly following the rules concerning the best way of downing a beast with Great Size.

Now I haven't found anything that says otherwise on the forums but It looks to me as if an Archer or Spearman in Rearward can spend a round aiming (Prepare Shot) and get a Piercing Blow providing he hits the target (TN18 in the case of the Snow Troll). That's roughly a 40% chance of inflicting a Piercing Wound with a 3D attack.

The less than good news is that the Troll has more than a 90% chance of shrugging that off with his 3D(+8) Favoured armour. At about a 2% chance of Wounding the Troll perhaps Cut and Run is the best tactic for a Company to use. A Great Bow improves the odds slightly, very slightly but running is still the best option.

(as an aside I calculate the odds of the Keen Long-hafted axe dropping the Snow Troll at about 39% to hit him, 16% of getting an Edge and then about 86% chance of his armour protecting him or roughly a 5% chance of dropping said Troll so well done Njal who truly earned the epithet 'the Bold'.)

You know, I've looked at that favored 3d armor test and it really never quite registered what it actually meant until you start having to actually roll against it. Now it makes sense why you would put the +2 Injury quality on an axe (before, I always thought 18-20 was more than enough, but no longer!)

And you know, this is the kind of play experience that puts all the theorycrafting into the "theory-only" corner. Statistics and models have shown that axes are sub-par due to the Edge, but let me tell you, yesterday, we were scrambling to find a solution to the Snow Troll problem, and that Keen Long-Axe was looking pretty tasty under the circumstances.

Rocmistro wrote:You know, I've looked at that favored 3d armor test and it really never quite registered what it actually meant until you start having to actually roll against it. Now it makes sense why you would put the +2 Injury quality on an axe (before, I always thought 18-20 was more than enough, but no longer!)

And you know, this is the kind of play experience that puts all the theorycrafting into the "theory-only" corner. Statistics and models have shown that axes are sub-par due to the Edge, but let me tell you, yesterday, we were scrambling to find a solution to the Snow Troll problem, and that Keen Long-Axe was looking pretty tasty under the circumstances.

What we really needed was a Keen, Fell, Splitting Axe...

(By the way, the reason I took Keen for a reward was because the theorycrafting said it was the best thing to do...)

A Keen or Fell Mattock or Great Axe is probably the way to go for dwarves.
A Keen Mattock with an Edge of 9 and an Injury rating of 18
A Fell Mattock with an Edge of 10 and an Injury rating of 20
A Keen Great Axe with an Edge of 10 and an Injury rating of 20
A Fell Great Axe with an Edge of G and an Injury rating of 22
Those are tough choices for a dwarven character.

That Long-hafted axe often used by Woodmen with an Edge of G and an Injury rating of 20 get's very nasty if it has been improved by adding either Fell or Keen and totally wicked if it get's both. It's versatility over the Great Axe is what makes it for me.

The Splitting axe Reward for Beornings with the Protection die reduction when getting a G rune on the Feat die makes for a nice race-specific alternative and this with the addition of either Fell or Keen on a Long-hafted axe and their ability to ignore the Weary condition in combat makes them really effective fighters.

To go back to what Rocmistro was saying about the theorycrafting, the discussion a month or so ago involved some claims that the spear is superior because it gets so many Piercing blows. What that argument leaves out is Injury rating. Spears work great against enemies with "normal" armor who die after one wound, or zero endurance. But when you're up against 3D + 8 armor, high Injury rating is king.

Put another way, the value of Edge rating doesn't vary by opponent: a Pierce is a Pierce regardless of who you are fighting. But the value of Injury varies greatly.

That said, with a base Edge of Gandalf, Keen doubles your chances of getting a pierce in the first place. So for axes Keen is the way to go. For other weapons I'd take Fell.

Just a question: did you remember to apply the WEARY condition to the Troll's Protection Tests when he was reduced to 0 End?

My group will be running with the new rules for the first time on Friday, and... I dunno. Is it wrong that we're crazy, stupid wary about the new Attribute bonus rules for NPCs? Anything with a Favored Weapon skill or armor skill just got massively more deadly without a corresponding increase in PC survivability.

There are now a number of trolls and orcs that can auto-hit people who dare to move into Forward or Open; my particular Fellowship has a lot of people with middling to low Wits scores and thus low Parry ratings. Well, okay; it isn't QUITE an auto-hit. But they'd need to roll a Gandalf AND a whole bunch of ones in order to miss. This rather disincentivizes ever leaving Defensive Stance, as many of us are willing to take risks, but "this thing is always gonna hit you" is less "a risk" and more "suicidal."

I mean, we're willing to give them a shot. Everything else in Revised got a standing ovation. Our Hobbit was all "Well, now I can take a King's Blade without feeling like a powergaming douchecanoe." We have no less than three Wanderers in the group, and a couple of them are really keen to replace their massively redundant Folk-lore Trait with things both more useful and more appropriate to their characters. I was planning, wearily, on needing to invest a ton of treasure into raising my Standing in multiple cultures, and Receive Title makes that way way WAY easier. Travel is now more interesting and to be taken much more seriously; we groaned at our Traveling Gear suddenly becoming twice as heavy, but accepted it was probably balanced.

So with all that, we're willing to give the one thing we don't like a serious shot before we condemn it. Everything else was awesome, and the devs know what they're doing, so we should give it a chance, right?

But... well, I play a Beorning who fights with a two-hander in Forward and Open a lot; I'm the go-to person for Intimidate Foe AND Inspire Comrades. And I'd rather not get splattered across the landscape for trying to undertake basic combat competencies. We have an axeman who is seriously considering asking the GM for a weapon skill refund and change so he can pick up a shield, as he too would like to not die.

The Barding who was always fighting with a giant shield and long sword in Defensive Stance is feeling pretty smug, tho. Or at least, he will until we start expecting him to spend a ton of Hope protecting us.

It seems entirely fair that NPCs can get Attribute bonuses the way PCs can. But we have to spend Hope to do so, we don't just get a never-ending awesome bonus on every single roll no matter what. It would be different if they had to spend Hate; you can run out of Hate. It would even be different if suddenly every NPC had two wounds, just like we do. But them suddenly becoming way more lethal just seems deadly and mean and kind of unfun.

I dunno. We could just be paranoid.

Hermes Serpent wrote: The Splitting axe Reward for Beornings with the Protection die reduction when getting a G rune on the Feat die makes for a nice race-specific alternative and this with the addition of either Fell or Keen on a Long-hafted axe and their ability to ignore the Weary condition in combat makes them really effective fighters.

My Beorning has been running with a Keen, Fell Great Spear. It's not as "you will never make your Protection test" as the Axes are, but you do Pierce a lot more.