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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8045474" data-attributes="member: 87792">A substantive hit with a maul might not kill someone - but it will break limbs or ribs and out the target out of action. A hit by a cutting weapon into metal armour that actually takes effect (which it mostly does by avoiding the metal parts) is likely to at the very least mangle whatever it hits, cutting right to the bone and probably breaking that.And yes people can survive arms that are simultaneously broken and mangled (which is what a substantive hit does) - but they don't survive unweakened and they are pretty much out of the fight.Remember: in AD&D one in five first level fighters is capable of standing up to the best possible hit by an orc with an axe without substantive penalty.That depends how close the fight was and how much time the professional has had to recover.If you're one of the untiring robots of AD&D the only advantage the amateur has is that it will take fewer hits for the amateur to drop the tired professional. And the professional is going to take exactly as long to drop the amateur regardless of how much of a battering they have taken. And give them a full night of bed rest and they are going to be almost exactly as hard for the amateur as they were the second they left the ring against the other professional.If you're using a D&D that is actually on something approaching terms with the real world (i.e. 4e or 5e) rather than running on pure genre convention the way AD&D does then it matters whether the fighter has had time to take a short rest. If the amateur jumps into the ring immediately after the previous professional fighter goes down they've got a chance. The battered professional is tired and will have spent all their encounter and daily powers in 4e - and will have spent their action surge and second wind in 5eMeanwhile if the professional has had time to rest and recover they are going to have had time to spend hit dice/healing surges, and they are going to have recovered their second wind (both editions) and either their action surge or their encounter powers. They aren't at full capacity yet - but having been given time to recover most of their offense and at least some of their endurance is back even if they have a lot less in the tank long term. This is very bad for the amateur. And woe beide the amateur who gives the supposedly tired professional a full night to rest up. This to me feels about right.If on the other hand it's just been a few rounds of exhibition match the amateur is going to get mauled whatever.The thing you miss is that it's not the case that "the only way of modeling the advantage of the fresh amateur is that the worn expert takes fewer hits to knock out, but the pro is still more likely to land hits on the amateur than the other way around" We know it's not the case because the two most recent editions of D&D demonstrate that it's not the case. 4e and 5e alike use substantially better models than this that account for fatigue lowering offence as well as defence. They don't sacrifice almost all realism in the name of simplicity (and then mess that simplicity up with useless attack matrices or THAC0). But the simplicity of AD&D's combat mechanics becomes particularly ironic given the fiddly spellcasting rules, with a particular irony coming with just how fiddly the iconic Fireball spell is in AD&D, covering an area [sic] of 33,000 cubic feet. Utterly unrealistic almost untiring fighters with video-gamey health bars and mashing A to attack alongside video-gamey spell lists where you want a computer to calculate the effects of a fireball is a design decision. And it's one that says that the rules are mostly for spellcasting.To be fair this is the best way of squaring the real world with AD&D - but it doesn't do a good job guiding you to that.</blockquote>

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