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Re: (TFT) Re: New Armor in TFT. John's comments and corrections.
Rick,
I have some concerns about your armour scheme.
Philosophical argument, YMMV: It means light armour literally has no
effect on many basically ordinary people. It becomes a why not feature
of a character, very difficult to leave off without making your
character just worse than everyone else. TFT always tried to cater for
unarmoured fighters, Celtic maniacs and the like, and yes it went way
further than is realistic but still, the core idea of "armour keeps
you alive at the cost of slowing you down" is one that's probably
worth keeping. TFT let that slide for high ST but to let it slide for
everyone cuts something I liked.
Eliminating magic numbers was a design objective. But there are still
basically magic numbers. it's generally good to have a ST that's one
less than a multiple of four. An ST that is a multiple of four kind of
sucks.
Armour at any level can be divided into armour that defeats your ST
(you pay full penalty for wearing it), armour that your ST partially
defeats (less than full penalty) and armour that your ST totally
defeats (no penalty). That has two effects:
* The penalty of armour as a function of ST is flat, then falls, then
is flat again. Which is pretty weird. You might expect it to be
falling from absurdly high numbers for low ST, then go flat.
* The system strongly encourages your character to adopt armour that
your ST either just defeats or almost defeats, or possibly very heavy
armour if you laugh in the face of penalties. Going to lighter armour
just loses you protection without benefit. Going to armour a modest
distance beyond the defeat line incurs big penalties at the margin,
relative to the optimum armour. So all characters of a given ST will
tend to have similar fitouts. I think that's undesirable, though
admittedly it's what happens now in weapons.
--
Here's an example (leaving out the chain variant armours for clarity):
the German ST 14 with a two-handed sword fighter "Wulf" from the Melee
example of play, who in basic Melee doesn't wear armour. For him:
Cloth stops 1, -0 DX, -0 MA
Leather stops 2, -0 DX, -0 MA
Boiled leather stops 3, -2 DX, -2 MA
Scale stops 4, -4 DX, -3 MA
Obviously not wearing armour is a silly move, as is wearing cloth. But
because leather is benefitting from his ST, and boiled leather isn't,
the penalty jump from leather to boiled leather is kind of nasty. I
don't think many characters will choose to make it (at least until
they get their ST up a few points higher). On the other hand the jump
from boiled leather to scale is actually smaller than the one from
leather to boiled leather. So the character is pushed strongly into
wearing leather armour and away from boiled leather with heavier
armour options less affected. I doubt this is what you intended.
Flavius Marcellus, the Roman in that fight, is ST 11, carries a large
shield and wears chain. (DX penalties? A soldier of the empire fears
not these things.) For him:
Cloth stops 1, -0 DX, -0 MA
Leather stops 2, -2 DX, -1 MA
Boiled leather stops 3, -3 DX, -2 MA
It's not as severe but again we have the odd distortion that the jump
from cloth to leather is larger than the jump from leather to boiled
leather. So characters at this ST will be pushed into cloth and away
from leather. It's all a bit odd and a bit gamey, making the game less
accessible to a new player unwilling to do analysis.
--
I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe a non-linear scheme where
e.g. you have a ST needed to defeat armour completely, and the harm
from being below that level goes up like roughly the square of how far
you are below. Or else make penalties fixed and say that strong people
wear thicker armour that stops more hits (I think I like that idea but
it's got magic number issues). Right now I don't think this is going
where we need it to. Sorry.
--
David
On 24 May 2016 at 12:04, Rick Smith <rick_ww@lightspeed.ca> wrote:
> Hi John, everyone.
> You go to this page, ...
>
> http://tft.brainiac.com/RicksTFT/GM_Stuff/GM_Title_Page.html
>
> And click on the Downloadable files page (in the middle of
> the page). From there you can select any of the files that have
> been downloaded. At this time, the only file is Advantages of
> Great ST.
>
> Warm regards, Rick.
>
>
>
> On 2016-05-23, at 4:50 PM, John Linzy wrote:
>
>> Rick:
>> I may be having a brain fart here (I am of that age now) but I don't seem to
>> be able find your "Advantages of Great ST" article. What's weird is that I
>> know I've seen it before but I'm sure I've gone through all the links on
>> your TFT site and am just not seeing it.
>>
>> Could you have mistakenly dropped a link?
>> j
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: tft-admin@brainiac.com [mailto:tft-admin@brainiac.com] On Behalf Of
>> Rick Smith
>> Sent: Sunday, May 22, 2016 9:01 AM
>> To: tft@brainiac.com
>> Subject: (TFT) Re: New Armor in TFT. John's comments and corrections.
>>
>> Hi John.
>> They work the same. Calling them "Goblin Chain" and "Elven Chain"
>> allowed me to not have to call things, "Very Light Chain", "Light Chain",
>> "Not Quite So Light Chain", etc.
>>
>> I've heard of double mail and (I think) I heard augmented mail some where.
>> I have not idea if they are historical terms or something someone made up.
>> In any case, they only capture the idea of "this is heavier and better
>> chainmail".
>>
>> In general, my armor rules are very highly abstracted. The layered armor
>> and armor for particular body parts in GURPS, just seemed like busy work,
>> which added nothing to the fun of the game. In my game, people can get
>> light armor or heavy armor, which all works the same way, and I don't worry
>> about trying to make it more realistic than that.
>>
>>
>> You are quite correct. I've fixed the typo and uploaded it to the
>> website.
>>
>> Thank you very much for the help, it is appreciated.
>>
>> Warm regards, Rick.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 2016-05-22, at 7:46 AM, John Linzy wrote:
>>> Rick:
>>> A question and a correction:
>>>
>>> Q) Do you have any write-ups on the different armor types to explain how
>>> they differ? Goblin chain, Elven chain, etc.
>>>
>>> C) I think the second paragraph contains a typo. You've misspelled full
>> as
>>> "foll"
>>>
>>> Thanks for posting this!
>>> john
>>
>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: tft-admin@brainiac.com [mailto:tft-admin@brainiac.com] On Behalf Of
>>> Rick Smith
>>> Sent: Sunday, May 22, 2016 2:20 AM
>>> To: tft@brainiac.com
>>> Subject: Re: (TFT) New file added to Rick's rules. New Armor in TFT.
>>>
>>> Sorry,
>>> the Armor is here...
>>>
>>> http://tft.brainiac.com/RicksTFT/Weapons_Equipment/TFT_Armor.html
>>>
>>> It is in the equipment part of my pages.
>>>
>>> Warm regards, Rick.
>>
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