Quote:
Originally Posted by bocephus
Another, possibly simpler, option is to limit Crits to a max of 6 or less. If you follow the "exceed your skill by 10" rule a 40 skill would be a crit on most swings.
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I'm fairly confident that's already the default.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bocephus
No matter how good your skill anything higher than a 6 is just a hit. This makes a 40 sword skill much much less useful. The math just doesn't pay back the points. Once you get to skill 20, to absorb a reasonable number of penalties, more is something you will grow into figuring out the sweet spot of whats legitimately enough to do the job.
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This is situational, but Deceptive Attack can be scaled up to any skill (it's -2 to hit per -1 to defend, with the only requirement being that you not drop below skill 10) - Broadsword-40 can strike at the Torso and impose a -12 to all active defenses while still being a roll against 16 (it also means your own Parry is against a 23 - 24 with Combat Reflexes - which requires similarly-incredible skill to get past... or using unparryable attacks). And, of course, you can trade in some (or all) of that defense penalty to do things like stab Eye Slits (-10 to hit, so "only" enough left to impose a -7 to defenses), do Rapid Strikes (-6 to hit - +3 to defense - per additional attack, unless you have Weapon Master or similar, in which case it's only -3 to hit - +1.5 to defense - per additional attack), etc. Combat skills don't really have the same diminishing returns as a lot of other skills - there's only so much of a penalty you can take for haste, not having the right tools, etc when using most skills, but with combat skills you can always use more rapid strikes and deceptive attack (eventually you hit the point where you don't need more hits to reliably drop any threat you can reach - and harm - and every attack requires the foe to roll a Critical Success to actually defend, but that can take a while).