Limits on defend

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Letting defend only be effective against a weapon up to five times the weight of your own weapon would help balance ST up.

I like the concept. A few issues:

• Daggers were historically used for parrying all the time, and a dagger weighs so little in TFT it would be almost useless. Even a main-gauche would be pretty much irrelevant.
• What's the weight of e.g. a giant's club? Or a dragon's claw?

Rather than weight, would it be better to use some combination of ST and handedness? I realise daggers don't have an ST minimum so something would have to be fudged.

[RobW]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Letting defend only be effective against a weapon up to five times the weight of your own weapon would help balance ST up.

There's something about this idea I like, but I don't think of Defend as being all about parrying.

By not committing to an attack, the defender can keep better distance, and move to avoid contact.

The defend action requires a ready weapon, so there's definitely meant to be an element of parry and deflect. It's not all about ducking and weaving. But making Defend effectiveness purely ST-based takes this kind of ducking and avoiding out of the picture entirely.

[Nils_Lindeberg]

It is also a bit counter-intuitive because avoiding a great sword or a great maul is probably easier than avoiding giving a fencer a touché.

It is also harder to parry with a big weapon since it is slower.

So I am not sure why a giant with a club and an abysmally low DX should be able to make himself harder to hit, while a fencer could not?

I think that the size of the weapon have already been modeled into the equation with the damage value. And we don't go into details as to why a broad sword can bypass a full plate armor half of the time. When we know that it is almost impossible for a sword swing to severely hurt a plate wielder. Parry or no parry.

We are already making huge compromises with the current ruleset for the sake of playability, that have no basis in reality or simulation. Just to mention another example are shields that always lessen the effect of any attacking weapon. Not 100% protection or 0% protection that would be the more realistic approach. Because it is not like every spear trust goes straight through the shield and they straight through the armor and then do the damage.

So, considering this, I think that weight comparisons are too detailed, and would rather remove the limitations on Two-Weapon parries that only can parry 1H weapons and just call it all a shield bonus. I could even live with the fact that parry with a melee weapon protected against range attacks. Not because the arrows are plucked out of the air, but because the target is focusing on movement, a little like dodge, and that an archer is not as likely to hit the spot he is aiming for and hence the average damage goes down.