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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cavalorn" data-source="post: 1677971" data-attributes="member: 15377">That sounds a lot like what I did with OGL Ancients, which also had Bronze Age armour, group tactics (e.g. phalanxes), a 'realistic' wound system that includes cautery (possibly the most popular section in the entire book), extensively researched historical weapons, and so on...Regarding defensive die rolls, one thing I learned from my experience with OGL Ancients was: while it's true that some people do like to play a more active role in their defence, that's generally true of lower levels or one-on-one combats.  When you move on to higher levels and have multiple attacks in a round, or you're facing off multiple opponents, then the allure of getting to roll an extra die (even simultaneously) can pall.  Now, OGL Ancients was based on the premise that most of the longer fights would be one-on-one in the old heroic style, so for that kind of epic scene by scene cut and thrust, the defensive die roll works.  However, contrast that with something like Ian Sturrock's exquisite Conan combat system, where it's more likely that you're going to be facing off five cutthroats in a Zamoran alley.  To maintain the pace of the encounter, you need to know very quickly whether they've hit you or not.  Conan doesn't have a defence roll, it has static values for parry defence and dodge defence, which can vary depending on the circumstances.  In practice, this works like a dream.I think it's significant that over on the Conan forums, there's quite a consensus in favour of dropping the only contested combat roll in Conan (the Grapple check) in favour of a roll against a static Grapple value, just for swiftness's sake.Just my 2 denarii. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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