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Originally Posted by TheFred
No, no, no. Why would you compare ubercharging vs a special kind of armour?
People don't go "aha, my foe is about to charge me - I shall change to my special anti-charge armour!". They were one type of armour, and I can change weapons more easily than you change what you're wearing. It is pretty easy even for a fairly standard Fighter using only a few splatbooks to cover enough different types of attack (and covering many options is what Fighters are bad at!) that they will be able to deal big damage in a variety of different ways.
You need to compare all kinds of attack to any types of armour they may realistically come up again.
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Oh, but you see, that is an armour type it's likely to come up against, because that's the armour type the lancers themselves wear. Therefore it is both the armour type they'll be facing if they charge another heavy cavalry man, and it's the kind of armour that will protect them if they charge into a spear. It's also the only armour intentionally made impractically heavy for the purpose of defeating such attacks. I'm not suggesting to compare it to that very heavy armour for any reason other than the armour being designed to hold up to it. There's no other armour like that.
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And yeah, it's OK for some attack-vs-armour combos to be more effective than others, that makes good sense - but you've got to decide exactly how "swingy" you want it to be (quite swingy is possibly more realistic since one good hit can easily kill you in real life, but makes for poor gameplay) and make sure that the system works in all circumstances.
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I'm satisfied with the amount of damage getting through armour right now, I've tested it pretty extensively. The only variable now is crazy player builds, which haven't been tested as much. My main test thusfar has been NPCs and creatures against armour, as players likely care more that their armour is effective against the threats they face most regularly.
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The fact that a charger can only hit once (by the way, that's not a fact, there are oodles of ways of getting pounce or the like) doesn't really matter if that one hit can one-hit kill people. That is already a problem in regular D&D where I can deal more damage than you have health on a charge;
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At low levels, at least. Though armour having DR does make that less likely.
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make it so that I only need to deal 2 x HD and I'm laughing.
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Yes, I already said that specific number was changing quite some time ago. Moot point.
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See, this is that same problem again. Balancing everything against what poor damage-dealers can do is hardly smart and likely to wind you up with a similar or worse balance to Core (ever noticed that they seem to think even one or two points of DR or Fast Healing is like gold dust?).
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That's not what I'm doing. I said I used 14 as the average strength thereabouts for level 5, not that it was the way I was balancing the system.
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And yeah, NPCs might be weaker but that's just NPCs being weaker. You need to know what PCs are likely to be able to do to your foes, and what actually challenging foes can do back to them.
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And I do realize this, (though my NPCs can be downright nasty in combat if I may add, if you want I can show you a few), but my NPCs hold up fine to PC attacks and even if they didn't it's pretty easy to make it so they don't need to. Good encounter design covereth a multitude of sins.
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Pretty much every Fighter-type will have a 16 Str, at least by L4. They may have a +2 or even +4 (Orc) racial bonus. A few levels in they'll have a +1 weapon or a +2 Str item, and not long after they'll have both. They probably have Power Attack - and in a system where one big hit is so much better than a few little ones, it's probably better to take the AB penalty and just gamble on getting lucky.
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Except that throwing your attack away ruins your critical chance, and a crit is the best way to breach armour at most levels, so a keen weapon and not using power attack (especially since neither power attack nor strength work at range) will often work just as well or better.
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As much as I love making Arcane Archer builds with ~5000ft of range or whatever, that's not usually relevant to most fights.
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It's primarily just a "**** you" to spellcasters. "Oh, you're going to fly a hundred feet above the ground? Well I can kill you in one round anyway from across the map with my four counts of 2d8+5+10d6. Bite me, spellslots.".
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But more importantly, I think it's getting off-track a bit; you're adding a whole other level of complexity whilst you're still trying to grapple with this maiming and DR thing. I would actually forget the guns for now unless you are, for example, deliberately trying to balance the other combat such that weapons struggle to deal damage because you deliberately want to make guns more powerful or something.
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How can I be "adding" something when it predates the matter at hand? The gun rules were one of the first things I wrote. Also, I don't need to make other weapons struggle to make guns powerful. Guns are already powerful without me having to do much to help them. The sheer range and rapidity of late-game firearms makes them a great vessel to carry a whole bunch of 10d6 sneak attacks, or +FU favored enemy bonuses, or high-end infusions, or vorpal hits, or what have you.
Oh, and that's not even mentioning heavy weapons. Here's a quick question: What deals 20d6 fifty times in a single round? A ship of the line in a broadside.
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Anyway, it sounds like maybe the idea that 2hp per HD being too low has been settled upon?
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Yes, such has been stated.
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Otherwise you are basically adding a threat to most anything which deals damage at all vs a low-level character; I would personally be tempted to allow the DR to go a bit lower and the threshold consummately higher so that it's a bit less of a deviation from the standard game and allows wearing down through hp in a more normal fashion whilst still adding some extra threat to big hits.
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The DR works well. Sabotaging the DR for regular gameplay for the sake of an optional rule seems like a bad idea to me. Scroll down for replacement ideas, by the way.
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Here's another question - when maimed, a character does not drop unconscious but suffers a penalty and begins bleeding, correct?
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Yes. Again.
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Does regular healing stop that bleeding?
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No, but lesser restoration does. (It's also the same spell that heals a broken arm or reverses ability damage, so that's convenient.)
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You're unlikely to want to spend many actions on it but if you have some swift-action way of healing yourself even for just 1 point and that makes you stable and not in danger of bleeding out any more, that potentially makes that less of a threat. That said, I think the penalties are probably the important thing, especially once people have so much health that losing 1/round is not a big deal.
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Well, that isn't how it works, so it's a moot point. But if you have a swift-action way to cast lesser restoration, that would work.
Anyway, here are the models:
1. 2*HD, save DC 10 + 1/2. Knockout maims have no saving throw. (Above slightly tweaked.)
2. 4*HD, save DC 10 + 1/2. Knockout maims have no saving throw. (Above slightly tweaked.)
3. 1/4 HP, save DC 10 + 1/2. Knockout maims have no saving throw.
4. 1/2 HP, save DC 10 + 1/2. Knockout maims have no saving throw.
5. Maim on knockout only, no saving throw.