Advantages of Great Strength

[schoon]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

Horsemanship - I am not a horseman and am drawing my example from fiction so will listen if that example is getting shouted down. I will note that there is NO shortage of the "strong rider dominates horse" trope in fiction. Starting with Conan, of course. But this is not a real thing even at stupidly high ST?

My sister in-law is a horse trainer, and she would argue that strength has no place in Horsemanship if you ever want the horse to do what you want a second time, and mostly not even the first.

[Jim Kane]

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

I'm accustomed to having players roll their own attacks and damages. I think having the GM roll everything is quite unusual.

Where did you read that statement?

JK

Originally Posted by Skarg

Ok, thanks for elaborating, Jim. It just seems like an odd thing to be so common since it's generally not a great idea to use an off-ST weapon. Also It seems to me a lot of my PCs ended up having fine or magic or whatever weapons. (But also it's probably even harder for me to relate since I've been playing GURPS for decades (where everyone does different damage and has multiple attack methods etc.))

You're welcome, and you are correct it is odd, but it's just another example of when tweaking around with the rules. In that case, just like when going to the local diner afterwards, it starts with one player making a substitution or alteration to "bacon and eggs", and soon everyone wants something altered and even "off menu".

So it was with the same effect I spoke of with the TFT Jedi situation - it began with one person wanting to do it, then two, then three, etc; soon we that's all we had.

Your point about the various and granular GURPS weapon damage is a good example. When got Man-to-Man in the summer of '86 and tried it, you could immediately feel the difference in the flow between the two systems. Also, you are correct, much of the granularity of GURPS reminded me of all those weapon alterations we played around with in TFT. We never transitioned into GURPS from TFT for other reasons though.

JK

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by Jim Kane

Where did you read that statement?

To clarify: you're implying that you have players roll their own damage, but nonetheless often need to ask them what it is? Or else I just don't understand.

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by Kirk

If players can game something they will, and if they quickly discover that a ST 16 fighter armed with a rapier does more damage than with a great sword, they'll do it

That's Porthos.

There are limits to what a weapon can do, regardless of someone's strength. Conan inflicting blows with a wet noodle may not be substantially worse than my 80 year old mother.

This applies a lot less well to weapons than to noodles. Especially if the weapon's strength has been engineered to reflect the user's.

I would prefer that the rules themselves reward properly matched ones.

The whole proper match thing is a TFT fiction, not reflected in reality, so I don't think it's worth getting attached to it.

you've escaped an orc hold and everyone is armed with a scimitar, regardless of strength.

Just like the orcs were. :-)

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Kirk

If players can game something they will, and if they quickly discover that a ST 16 fighter armed with a rapier does more damage than with a great sword, they'll do it and the game experience will suffer.

That wouldn't be the case though unless you had added ST increase damage by more than 1 per level, and no one even suggested increasing it by 1 per level. Suggestions were 1 per 2 levels (same as the already-published reduction when lacking ST) or 1 per 3 levels.

At +1 damage per 2 levels, a rapier at ST 16 would do 1d+3 (or with die conversion, 2d-1 or at most 2d). A broadsword at ST 16 would do 2d+2.

At +1 damage per 3 levels, a rapier at ST 16 would do 1d+2. A broadsword at ST 16 would do 2d+1.

In either case, you'd still do more damage with a weapon of your ST.

[Jim Kane]

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

To clarify: you're implying that you have players roll their own damage, but nonetheless often need to ask them what it is? Or else I just don't understand.

Yes, the players roll their own weapon damage, so I have no clue as to why you wrote:

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

I'm accustomed to having players roll their own attacks and damages. I think having the GM roll everything is quite unusual.

In order to help you clear your confusion, I would need you to cite which statement you read which to you implied that I was indicating that the GM rolls the players weapon damage?

Without such a quote indicating the point of your confusion, I really can't help you figure out why you came to that conclusion David.

JK

[JLV]

Originally Posted by schoon

My sister in-law is a horse trainer, and she would argue that strength has no place in Horsemanship if you ever want the horse to do what you want a second time, and mostly not even the first.

While hardly qualified as a "horseman", much less a horse trainer, I have been on horseback a few times in my life, and I'm here to tell you -- getting into a strength contest with a horse is not my idea of a wise decision. Even an small, elderly horse has a heck of a lot more ST than most people do! Plus, do you really want to honk off your only means of transportation by doing something like that?

So yes, I'd say your Sister-in-Law has that exactly right! ;-)

[afschell]

Originally Posted by RobW

ST17 DX13 IQ10, using a two-handed sword in each hand. Give him Sword Expertise and Two-Weapons. Expertise gives him +1 damage so he would get an initial 3d+0 attack at DX13 and a second one at DX9. This is definitely scary!

Weapon Expertise? I like the concept but cannot find it anywhere.

[zot]

Originally Posted by afschell

Weapon Expertise? I like the concept but cannot find it anywhere.

Here is my Index of Threads Containing New Rules. Weapon Expertise is under Advanced Combat Rules.

[David Bofinger]

The TFT paradigm is ST determines weapon and weapon determines damage. There are some big downsides to this. For instance, if the player imagines their character uses a particular weapon, say a rapier, then either the character must have low ST or will be very inefficient in combat. This ruins a lot of suspension of disbelief and poisons character concepts.

Suppose instead weapons were described in terms of advantages and disadvantages and a player could choose the one he liked for his character, regardless of ST. The damage a weapon did would depend on the ST of its wielder as well as the weapon. This would carry some cost in complexity, but since it's only relevant when a character is being generated that's not a big deal: the important thing is to keep play simple.

I wrote up a toy version of such a system with 5 weapons. A real system would probably have twenty or so. There are no two-handed weapons or shields in it. But the system I present should allow you to adequately equip any character who has had their left arm ripped off.

• Axe: The generic weapon, good for hurting people in melee.
• Spear: Less damage than the axe, but can jab and does double damage in a charge.
• Spatha: A hack and cut sword, hurts people in melee and also provides a limited ability to parry, i.e. to stop hits from melee attacks through the front hexsides. If anyone has a better name than spatha I'll listen: broadsword is historically inaccurate and I think falchion might be just as obscure. Spatha is pretty much the ancestor of weapons like this.
• Gladius: A short stabby sword. Also parries. Its damage is a bit unpredictable (was there an artery in its path?) and it's short enough it can be used to a limited extent in hand-to-hand, this is represented by giving it a lower damage and saying it does normal damage in HTH and double damage in melee. This doesn't entirely work because the damage often doesn't change across ST, I may change this somehow.
• Rapier: Another parrying sword, long enough to jab (by lunging) or attack in melee. The good news is it does more damage than you'd expect, the bad news is you roll 4/DX to hit ... so it's good for high DX low ST characters.

I wrote a spreadsheet and spun out a rough implementation of these ideas:

        ST        6   7   8   9   10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20
Axe     Attack   1-2 1-1 1+0 1+1 1+2 2-1 2+0 2+1 4-5 4-4 4-3 3+1 3+2 3+3 4+0
Spatha  Attack   1-2 1-1 1+0 1+1 1+2 1+2 2-1 3-4 2+0 3-3 3-2 3-1 2+3 4-3 4-2
Spatha  Parry                         1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1 
Gladius Attack   1-3 1-3 1-2 1-1 1-1 1-1 1-1 1-1 1+0 1+0 2-3 1+1 1+1 2-2 1+2
Gladius Parry                     1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1 
Spear   Attack   1-3 1-2 1-1 1-1 1+0 2-3 1+1 2-2 1+2 2-1 1+3 2+0 3-3 2+1 3-2
Rapier  Attack   1-1 1-1 1+0 1+0 1+0 2-3 1+1 2-2 1+2 3-4 2+0 3-3 3-2 2+2 3-1
Rapier  Parry                 1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1   1

I'd like to hear feedback before I take it further.

There's lots of tuneable parameters I could adjust. For instance, it's a bit more generous toward low-ST characters than standard TFT.

A huge table of weapons, suitable for an expensive supplement, might be quite long: dagger, long knife, gladius, spatha, bastard sword, two-handed sword, hand axe, spear, godendag, flail, spear, rapier, main-gauche, club, greatsword, greataxe, longspear, halberd, buckler, heater, roundshield, tower shield, javelin, throwing axe, throwing knife, bow, crossbow, arbalest would all make sense, at least.