Rejiggering Muscle-Powered Weapon Damage

[gilbertocarlos]

Originally Posted by phayman53

I was thinking about a different way of increasing the effectiveness of armor. I think with the edged weapons doing blunt armor rule armor acts relatively realistically; fine mail, for example, stands up fairly realistically to an average swordsman's average AOA (ST 11, 2d-1, averages 6 dmg, so 2cr dmg gets past DR, this seems realistic enough to me, only cutting through on an 10-12 dice result, or 1/6 of the time). The problem comes with spears and average AOAs. I think impaling weapons should have a similar rule for armor as cutting weapons, only maybe something like they need to defeat more than 1.5 DR to do their full impaling dmg, otherwise it is cr. I have seen video demos of people trying to stab through mail with what would be an AOA (holding a sword by the hit with one hand and the blade with the other and stabbing, the mail was over boiled leather on a pig carcas), the result was the blade penetrated a little, so would have cut and hurt, but no "impaling". The result of this new rule would be that a ST 11 warrior AOA one handed with a spear against fine mail for the same 2d6-1, again averaging 6 dmg, but the DR threashold for impailing is 1.5*4=6, on average the attack will only do 2cr dmg, but will not penetrate the mail and impail the wearer. A two handed thrust, however, will on average, but this is okay woth me given that a spear is designed as a penetrating weapon.

There are a few reasons that I like this change. First, it is a way of increasing the effectiveness of DR without having to change firearm dmg as it is piecing. Second, this means that impaling weapons also realistically do some damage to an armored person before they impale him (like Frodo in Moria :-) ). Third, it seems to still retain the impailing weapon advantage vs armor over cutting weapons without making it unrealistic (got to do 10 dmg with a lance now to pierce jousting mail instead of just 7, but 7 to 9 still hurts). Fourth, the ST progression stays the same, so no weird useless ST values for damage and no change in point value for ST. Finally, the weapon damage vs HP stays the same, which I like. A ST 11 spearman stabbing me in the torso with no armor is going to probably end the fight even if no vitals are hit.

Thoughts?

That wouldn't change almost anything, would make impaling even worse against armor(it already is), now NOBODY would thrust with a sword.

Also, it doesn't address the high ST damage problem.

Finally, it doesn't address the DON'T RESURRECT THREADS FOR NOTHING problem.