Quote:
Originally Posted by lexington
I appreciate the desire to collapse the combat skills into fewer skills with clear distinctions but adding the modifiers seems to defeat the gains, you have more skills on the list than you started with. The results are sometimes unclear and it opens you up to Munchkinism like:
Master of Defense (Spear; Fencing, Restricted (Limited Weapons), Weak) DX/E
I feel like it would be more balanced to just define things in a clearer way than Basic Set, rigorously enforce familiarity penalties, and not worry about building your own skills.
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In general, I intend for characters who pick up a modified skill to have
all their skills similarly modified - it's meant to be more of a character choice than a skill choice, although the option remains to purchase unmodified or differently-modified skills. I do appreciate the feedback, however.
One bit of nitpicking - Limited Weapons isn't a legitimate option for Restricted, rather it's allowed (as per Rapier) to exchange the Limited Techniques requirement for Limited Weapons. You still need an actual restriction, although I think with what you're getting at Restricted (Staff-Grip Only, Limited Weapons instead of Limited Techniques) would work. I'll need to think on just how munchkin-like Master of Defense is. On one hand, a character with a high level of it is nearly untouchable when armed with a staff (or spear, whatever the limited weapon selection is). On the other hand, he needs to remain relatively unarmored and unencumbered, needs plenty of room to maneuver around, and has anemic damage (-1/die, in addition to -1 to thr). Take away his weapon, and any defaults he can work off of have similarly anemic damage. And taking away his weapon is fairly probable, thanks to all the glances (and head-on impacts) his weapon is going to be suffering from. Maybe if he used a metal staff...
EDIT: Your post reminded me of something I forgot to mention in the initial write-up - the bonus to Parry from using a Staff Grip functions just like a Parrying shield's DB - meaning that +2 results in an increased chance of the weapon being hit. I'll modify the original post shortly...
EDIT2: And... changed. You may notice I've also made a slight modification to this post - upon revisiting Staff Grip, I remembered that the -2 to sw only applied to polearms. Oops.