Some questions about Melee/Wizard

[hcobb]

You can buy the full ITL online which indeed includes fighting talents.

http://www.warehouse23.com/products/SJG30-3455

For example:

Goblin Wizard
ST 6, DX 11, IQ 15
1-h staff(1d-1), brand(1d-2)
Alertness, Goblinish, Humanish, Literacy, Two Weapons.
Pathfinder, Staff, Staff II, Staff III, Staff IV

Basic combat option is a double weapon parry that stops four hits and causes the attacker to roll 4 dice to hit. This is combined with an occult staff strike as the third handed attack.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by bluekitsune13

One thing I've been wondering is how to represent a fighter that should be hard to hit. Since you only roll against your own score to hit, the opponent's dexterity isn't really taken into account. I would think that a very Nimble elf Swordsman could have an effect on the opponents chance to hit. The only way I see of doing this in game, is by allowing the elf to disengage when his turn comes before the slower fighter. He could keep jumping away, and the opposing fighter would never be able to hit the elf. I don't know what a better solution could be. All of the actual mechanics for making yourself harder to hit mean that you don't actually get to attack.

In ITL there are a few talents that give a very talented figure some small penalties for opponents to hit you - weapon and shield expertise and mastery, and the martial arts talents.

Some long-time experienced TFT players have developed various house rules for the situation. Typically they tend to involve sacrificing not your entire action, but some of your offensive adjDX, in exchange for reducing the adjDX of attacks against you. Tuning the numbers and details to taste is always a question though.

Originally Posted by bluekitsune13

Another thing I was thinking about is armor piercing. It looks like the only way to actually damage an armored foe is to Simply do more damage. I think it would be easy enough to create a weapon that has armor-piercing properties. The idea is that it wouldn't do a crazy amount of damage to an unarmored foe, and would be most effective at attacking someone with armor. Say it was a weapon that only did one die of damage, but had armor-piercing 2 on it. It could do at most 6 damage to an unarmored so, and 5 damage to an opponent wearing chainmail.

Yeah, this can be done, though it's usually more complexity than most TFT players want to get into.

If you really want both that sort of detail, and more detailed rules for defending yourself and other details, GURPS has that in spades, but may be more than you want to get into, especially at first.

[larsdangly]

There are a number of approaches people have taken in house rules to model high DX fighters who are hard to hit, but you have to be very careful not to introduce a house rule that messes with the basic game balance. It is easy to add something that turns DX into the 'god stat', and then a high DX fighter is the only valid character type.

In RAW, you have several options: Weapon expertise, Fencing, shield expertise, toughness, weapon mastery, fencing mastery, two-weapons and the various unarmed combat talents all provide talent-based means of reducing the effectiveness of melee attacks directed at you.

There are lots of ways to sacrifice your own attack entirely in order to make yourself harder to hit (Defend, and the talents above). There are not as many ways to make yourself harder to hit while also being able to attack others on the same turn. The basic dilemma you will encounter in adding an additional rule is how to penalize someone who deflects or avoids an attack so that their own offensive capabilities are similarly reduced.

I used to play with a house rule that enabled a parry as an action for deflecting a specific attack. You did it in place of your own attack, and if you succeeded you got extra armor points for that attack only. This was combined with another house rule that let you do multiple attacks and/or parries per turn, where each extra action adds another die to your rolls. E.g., if you want to parry and then attack (2 total), roll 4d for each. If you want to do two attacks and one parry (3 total), roll 5d for each. There were other restrictions and specifications, but that was the core of the idea. It worked well because doing more was balanced against increased chances of failure.

Lately, I've been sticking to RAW and not having any regrets. Basically, high DX combatants already benefit in a variety of ways: better place in action order; better chance of success; access to advanced talents, etc. They just don't have a complete 'lock' on fighting ability, as their greater fragility makes high ST fighters an equally valid approach.

[bluekitsune13]

One last thing I can think of. If I'm reading it correctly, DX is fluid. That means that changing conditions in a round can actually increase or decrease your DX. Say for example a fighter wants to declare a sweeping blow on his turn. I believe that normally gives him -4 DX to hit. If he has a starting DX of 12, does that mean he will act on DX8 if that is the case, what if during the course of a turn he decides that he would rather just Attack One fighter without the penalty. Would he have to wait until DX8 to act, because he already declared he was making the sweeping blow?

What about a fighter that has a DX of 8, and declares an attack against an adjacent fighter. Say the targeted fighter gets knocked down before he gets to attack. You get + 4 DX for attacking a knocked down fighter, so would that mean he would effectively act on DX 12 that round if he were to attack the downed fighter?

Also, what do you have to declare at the start of the round? Do you have to specify a specific Target of your attack? Say if you were engaged with two enemies, and one of them got knocked down. Could you change your attack to the knockdown enemy to take your turn faster? Also, could you not declare a sweeping blow, but then decide when your turn comes at DX 12? Would you then have to wait til DX 8?

One last thing. Fighter is attacking with two weapons. Depending on what talents they have, I believe it gives them a DX penalty to attack with the second one. So I believe it is regular DX for the first attack, and - 4 DX for the second attack. Attacking with different DX does that mean the first attack will strike at DX 12 and the second at DX 8? Or are they both rolled at DX 12?

[hcobb]

See Melee rules page 11: "Attacks come off in order of adjDX counting everything BUT missile and thrown weapon range; a distant target makes you less accurate but no slower."

The only "two weapon" attack in the Melee rules is "THE LEFT-HAND DAGGER" on page 13.

[larsdangly]

You are correct that DX is fluid (or, rather, adjDX is fluid), and I'm pretty sure the current edition specifies that your action order is always based on your adjDX at that moment.

Another important principle is that you don't have to commit to an action until the moment you perform it. Of course your range of possible actions may be limited by what you did during the movement turn, or by effects on you of other people's actions that went before you. But you are free to choose from among your permitted actions right up to the moment when you execute them.

A third core rule that is unstated but I think implicitly clear is that you can't effectively force another figure to violate rule 2, above. That is, you don't get to wait to listen to what another figure does at their point in the action order and then go back in time and effectively respond to their 'upcoming' choice. A subtle complication of this principle is the case of Defend and Dodge, where you can elect to do those things in response to an attack that comes your way before your normal action. But if you think about it this special case does not violate this third rule.

Putting these 3 ideas together, I think it is clear that your situational modifiers can shuffle you up and down in the action order, but they can't shuffle you 'up' to before the modifier started to apply. That is, if A, B and C have DX 8, 10 and 11, and if C knocks B to the ground at the DX 11 'count', then A can strike at B just afterwards, rolling against an adjDX score of 12 but not going back in time and acting prior to C. I.e., effectively A will fit into a place in the action order between 11 and 10.

[bluekitsune13]

Makes sense. But then do modifiers that affect DX delay my turn? Say I normally act on dx12. I did not move, so the full range of actions is available to me. I elect to do a sweeping blow which gives me -4 DX. Does that mean I make my attack now at dx12, but I am rolling my attack at DX8? Or do I now need to delay my turn and act at DX8?

Similarly, to the question I asked above, if you make two attacks at different DX, do they happen during your same turn?

[larsdangly]

I believe the intent of the current edition rules is that you act at the point in the DX order corresponding to your adjDX for that action, so 8 in the case you describe. My only discomfort in giving this answer is that I feel like I saw a passage somewhere that stated an exception to that rule.

[bluekitsune13]

I believe the above poster mentioned the one exception, which is subtracting your DX for long-range attacks. If you were taking a 4 DX penalty to make a sweeping blow, or an aimee attack, it would make sense that you act a little bit later because you are analyzing the opponent or winding up for the blow. That is how I interpreted anyway.

[Axly Suregrip]

ITL pg 126 it states about Sweeping "Roll separately for each target figure,
at the time of the lowest adjDX applicable to any of them."

So your intuition is correct.