Rick,
I was mostly throwing them out as an example of
the dice bidding like was being discussed in the note I responded to.
I didn't mind them as much as you, it was just
another mechanic that had to be taken into
account for me. With that said, I do think that it had major scaling issues.Â
While, <=40 attribute characters it added an
occasional dramatic save and an additional
theatric attack vector (higher dice attacks),
once you started talking about > 40 attribute
fighters you started to have problems. Once you
are at a dex where a 5 vs DX roll becomes
trivial, then you are nearly invulnerable to
starting players who can't ever count on a 4d
attack succeeding. This always resulted in
campaign issues when the party came up against
"boss" level characters where only the most
advanced character or two had a chance of scoring melee hits.
I think GURPS has a mechanic where after the
first parry/dodge/whatever you are at additional
penalties for each subsequent dodge/defend/parry
in the same turn. That might be a good way to address the issue.
This is, of course, if you actually want to
introduce parry/defense into TFT combat instead of just leaving it abstract.
--Thomas
On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 3:27 PM Rick Smith
<<mailto:rick_ww@lightspeed.ca>rick_ww@lightspeed.ca> wrote:
Hi all, Thomas.
 I hated those rules even tho my character (Flinch) was hugely helped by
them. I took a very high DX since I was a thief / spy character. Dave told
me that the campaign was not heavily oriented towards combat so I took
ZERO weapon / defense talents. My weapon was a crowbar, since clubs
didn't require a talent.
 It turns out that Dave's campaign was huge for fights. I was hosed right?
 No. I had DX.
 In combat, my character could not be hit. I became a combat monster,
who was far more capable than characters with more attributes than me
who took many combat talents, and had armor.
 One thing I like about TFT was that the three attributes were about equal
in importance. Dave's rules totally broke that.
 Additionally he had talents which made the situation worse. I would have
been less put out about the rules, if NO talents modified the parrying rules.
(Now it could be argued that better design of the talents might have made
the situation better rather than worse - which is a fair point. But I would
hardly hold up Dave's Thail campaign as an exemplar of parrying in TFT
done well.)
 Warm regards,
 Rick.
On 2016-09-30, at 12:05 PM, Thomas Fulmer wrote:
> Dave Seagraves has a fairly well developed
set of Parry Rules. The attacker chooses the
number of dice to roll to hit (min 3). The
defender rolls two dice more than the attacker
to parry. Some of the advanced weapons talents
give bonus dex to parry ratings to make it
easier for higher talented fighters to parry.
>
> So if you are attacking a high dex figure,
you have to make "complex attacks" of 4 vs Dx
or 5 vs Dx in order to get them up to a high
enough number of dice to make them have a
chance of missing their parry (6 vs Dex and 7 vs Dex in these examples).
>
> I think people who have played under the
rules have mixed reviews overall, but I found
them relatively easy to understand and use. It
definitely biases the combat system towards dex
heavy characters though. It's not enough to be
strong and have a big weapon if the thief can
parry you 99% of the time with his short sword.
>
> --Thomas
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