Quote:
Originally Posted by Kuroshima
Energy reserve is capped to 20 in DF11, and FP is capped at +30% of the racial HT cap, so if casters face caps, why shouldn't melee fighters face the same issues?
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Mostly because casters can have power items of arbitrary size and use paut (and Recover Energy!) to regenerate, so in practice, well-equipped casters don't have a meaningful energy limit. And they can also learn spells to arbitrarily high levels, which often makes them free to maintain and even to cast. Whereas weapon skill bonuses are very hard to come by from equipment, meaning that they just about have to be innate.
Very roughly, how often you can cast a spell corresponds to how often you can attack successfully. The former depends mainly on high spell skill (for which there is
no limit in any
DF book), which reduces energy costs (allowing more castings) and casting times (allowing more-frequent castings). The latter depends on high weapon skill, which makes Rapid Strike workable and allows potent Deceptive Attacks that lower the number of attempts needed per foe. I really do think that open-ended melee weapon skill is completely justifiable at higher levels of play. The "natural level" in my former campaign was skill 25-30, past which things like Extra Attack started to look attractive.