At 10:07 PM 4/1/04 -0500, ErolB1@aol.com wrote:
And that example is a reason why I disagree with your argument. I'll accept that a poor-quality weapon is likely to break when "stepped on sideways" like that. But I'd expect a good-quality weapon to be tens of times less likely to break after being stepped on sideways, and a very-good-quality weapon to be hundreds of times less likely to break. Good blades flex. Or to put it another way, good blades aren't abuse-*proof* but areabuse-*resistant* And furthermore, I can't imagine abuse in combat to be anything other than a smooth continuum. I don't expect it to suddenly jump from "not enough to break a cheap sword" to "extreme enough to break even the best sword."
Well I wasn't saying to remove the increased chance for durable weapons not to break. I was just saying that hardly any weapon is really indestructible, and many unexpected things can happen in combat. Maybe a wonderful sword will often resist being stepped on sideways, but a thousand other things could happen to it (getting caught firm somewhere when a large force gets applied at a bad position, getting hit by a big hammer, or just swinging full force and hitting a stone pillar). Also add "bent into an unusable condition, but probably recoverable after combat" to the list of things that effectively take a weapon out of action.
I guess we partly just disagree about the continuum of severity. I tend to see combat as an extremely variable, extreme, and unpredictable environment. I suppose ideally I'd suggest that an 18 should indicate some unexpected result with many more possibilities than a weapon breaking or dropping. IMO GURPS does a pretty good job of this, although I tend to make up my own critical event tables. If the system wants to be very simple though and only consider dropped and broken weapons, then I think allowing weapon quality to say, essentially, "you almost never have a major unexpected setback in combat due to the quality of your weapon" isn't really fair. It lacks imagination about the possible range of things that could happen, and tends to stack the deck further in favor of the high extreme.
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