Spear vs Knights... am I missing something?

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Kromm

"ST is optional" is somewhat true in mortal vs. mortal conflicts where nobody can have extraordinary abilities or gear. As soon as people can have arbitrary DR all over their body thanks to tech or magic, which can quite easily protect even the eyes (e.g., invisible or transparent plastic visors), and/or innate gifts, ST matters to punch through the DR. If the enemy is weird enough – say, with one or more of Damage Reduction, Homogeneous, Supernatural Durability, and Unkillable – even DR ceases to matter, and you just need damage output. In fantasy, so many things just don't care about your high-skill eye poke that you absolutely need ST if you're planning to use weapons rather than magic.

Of course, this burdens the GM with the duty of remembering all that stuff. Or just reading that the dragon has, on top of DR 20, Nictitating Membrane 20 that makes the eye poke kind of pointless. A lot of GMs run everything like a human with human vulnerabilities, in which case skill is indeed decisive.

I'm thinking about how Mr. Spear and Mr. Knight would fare in the PbP Dungeon Fantasy game I play in...


Of the four players, two of them would take down Mr. Knight marginally slower, One would take down Mr. Knight easily but be in trouble again spear, and one would take down Mr. Spear easily but need to take time with Mr. Knight. I'm also thinking of monsters Mr. Spear would struggle with compared to Mr. Knight. Knight does better against the massed bandit archers, the exploding bugs, and the line of undead... which are what I'm remembering as the "hard" encounters. Though part of that is one player has a high-skill high rate of fire DF archer, who takes care of most things the spear guy would take out.