Eltern said:
Hey! Sorry, I've been moving and packing the last few days, so I haven't had a chance to check the boards.
Ah! All is forgiven then!
I've moved many times and know what it's like....
Well, it looks like that the system does, in fact, take longer than standard d20. The additional factors that are needed for resolving an attack really pile on the minutes. I wonder if at high levels the speeds would reverse, as a few lucky rolls could still give a 20th level fighter three wounds to the head. You don't need to burn through a bunch of hit points.
Perhaps... Although, I'm not sure how positively your average player would react to their high level characters having a greater chance of being struck down by a small number of lucky blows.
Now that my campaign is starting back up, I'll try this out, and let you guys know how I tweak it to increase speed. Do you have any suggestions in particular, SpiralBound?
One way I can think of that may cut down on the time would be if your defence rating didn't include a defence roll. If it were more like AC in that it was a constant number, then you'd cut down on at least that amount of rolling and addition.
Really though, I suspect that the biggest time-consumers are the subtractions and those two charts. Subtracting the attack from the defence and then looking up the effects on one or sometimes two charts is a whole set of actions that simply don't have equivalents in the standard combat system. It's roughly equivalent in terms of added time and complexity to if every attack in standard d20 were a grapple or a turn undead check. If you simply remove all that though you risk removing most of what makes your system different in the first place...
As for the issue of differing weapon damage: While I'm not a martial artist, I have a few friends that are big into killing people. They do fencing, several different Asian fighting styles, historical European fighting styles, etc. And as they relate it to me, it is very, very easy to kill someone, let alone hurt them. It takes something on the order of one pound of pressure to break the skin, and if that's aimed at the right place a little bit of force can be deadly.
As I understand it, the driving force behind the differentiation of weapons in history was the development of armor. But at the basic level of hurting a plain old unarmored human, every weapon is basically equally effective. A dagger may be smaller than a greatsword, but it will still kill you with one or two well placed thrusts.
There are, of course, upper and lower thresholds. A noodle is not an effective weapon. At that point, you might as well be fighting unarmed. A rocket launcher is more effective than a pistol (depending on what range your target is at). However, within the standard scope of D&D weaponry, everything is about equal with each other. The great unequalizer is armor.
Now, that may all be bullhockey. As I said, I'm no expert. This is just how I've come to understand it.
You may very well be right from a realistic standpoint. I guess it depends on where your players prefer their gaming to lie along the "realism vs. cinematics" spectrum. That being said, even in a system that is heavily weighted towards the realism end I can still see a case to be made in favour of some weapons being more deadly than others.
In standard D&D there are several "concepts" that make up the entire attacker's action-damage combat mechanic. There's the concept of the innate ability of the character. This is usually the stats that the character has (str & dex mostly). Then there is the concept of the character's learned ability to use the weapon, which in D20 is mostly handled via feats. There is the concept of the weapon's innate ability to deal damage represented by differing die combinations per weapon. Lastly, there is the concept of "luck" or "random variation" delivered via the 1d20 attack roll. D20 applies varying levels of abstraction to each of these stages.
The character's innate ability is a flat spectrum of static bonuses applied to both the attack roll and sometimes the damage roll. The character's skill level is simply a collection of on-off switches - you either have or don't have the particular feat. The weapon's innate damage-dealing ability is part of the weapon and is a semi-randomized die roll. I say semi-randomized due to the fact that different weapons have deliberately different die roll values. And the luck factor is a purely random variation thrown on top of it all.
The presence, degree of abstraction, even method of representing each of these concepts doesn't necessarily have to match D20 though. They don't even all have to be present, nor are they the only concepts that could be included. For example, you could create a mechanic that represents the concept that, while all weapons have the potential to kill you, not all weapons have equal levels of ease with which a wielder can achieve the minimum success level required to perform this act of killing.
You can theoretically kill someone with a spoon or even a plastic drinking straw, however it is decidedly harder to kill someone in a combat situation using those "weapons" than it is using a 6 inch dagger, which itself requires more effort to effectively deal a death blow with than using a 40" sword, all of which are harder to use in combat than a pipe bomb or an Uzi!
My point is that while being stabbed in the heart with a chopstick renders you just as dead as being stabbed in the heart with a rapier, I'm willing to bet that performing that combat action is significantly easier using the rapier!!!
I suspect that (in part) this aspect of the innate difference in weapons was what prompted RPG designers to assign different damage levels to different weapons. It wasn't that a death blow from a greataxe made you any more deceased than a death blow from a letter opener, but that having access to a 4 foot handle and 2.5 feet of shapened axe blade gave the wielder more likelyhood to perform said death blow than the 6-8 inch length of metal in the letteropener... In the right hands, perhaps a foam sword
is as deadly as a katana?
