11 Comments

These rules make non-magical damage types matter, unlike 5e, where they exist without any distinct function.

Try to remember that these tend to work both ways. Wearing the wrong armor to a battle can give the advantage to the adversary before knowing what weapon they wield.

These rules assume an abstract attrition system for health/damage status. Some fettling may be required to adapt to a hit location specific system.

Expand full comment
author

What armour you wear indeed becomes important too! And yes for hit location specific systems you’d need to do some more hacking, particularly if you use piece-wise armour where type depends on location!

Expand full comment
Nov 4Liked by Murkdice

Oh nice! Although, wouldn't it make more sense to have armor reduce the effectiveness of one specific type of weapon? Sure, it complicates the math a bit, but it makes things like wearing plate on top of gambeson (which is very historic) feasible and easy to manage.

Also, how do you work helmets and shields into this? I get it's a minimalist system, but to me, that bit of character customization matters a lot.

Expand full comment
author

You could definitely look into adding those! I'm quite concerned with speed and simplicity of resolution, hence why I'm not thinking much about armour layering and piece-wise armour. But you can definitely work those in!

Expand full comment
Nov 4·edited Nov 4Liked by Murkdice

Also, second question: why is Bludgeoning good against Plate and not Chain? Seems to like like those two should be inverted. By which I mean, a lot of the weapons meant to be explicitly anti-armor (eg. the rondel dagger) were made to get in between the armor plates with a stabbing/piercing motion. Also, solid plate distributes blunt force very well, much like the bullet-resistant ceramic vests of today, while floppy chainmail does not.

I'd have written it such that Piercing was effective against Plate, Slashing was effective against Cloth and Bludgeoning was effective against Chain.

Expand full comment
author

I guess it depends on what era of weaponry you look at! Equally I’ve seen material that suggests bludgeoning weapons in some medieval periods were a bit more effective against plate than slashing/piercing weapons. Especially if you are using damage reductive armour, bludgeoning will still do about the same damage against mail as plate, it’s the other two types that get reduced in practice.

That said it sounds like you maybe want to get more into the specifics of weapons beyond the three basic categories! There’s cases of armour piercing longswords and other nuances you can get into. But this hack is supposed to be pretty simple, and is mainly there to make weapon choices interesting but simple to manage, rather than aiming for simulation.

Expand full comment

Love this. It's a simple way to fill an obvious gap and turn armor skinz into meaningful choices.

Bringing this one to my own Cairn game - thanks!

Expand full comment
author

Amazing to hear that! I would definitely use this with Cairn in the future myself.

Expand full comment

Nice rule! I have done smtg similar but it is more complex... i will publish this rule in the expanded rulebook of my game in the next week!

Expand full comment
author

Awesome!

Expand full comment

My rule in a nutshell: there is one roll only. This is to determine the hit: the attacker action resolution check against the defender one. In this contest, the attacker subtract the weapon level (it is a value from 1 - i.e. a dagger - up to 4 - i.e. an halberd); the same does the defender (in case he defends with a weapon). If the attacker hits the target, there is no need to roll for damage: this is the difference between the two previous results where the attacker weapon level is now added (it contributes to the damage) and the level of the target's armor is subtracted (it smooth the damage). That is the normal rule (which you can better read in the online core rules here: https://viviiix.substack.com/p/core-rules-chapter-vi). The additional rule I mentioned before is that for the damage calculation, the armor varies according to the type of attacker's weapon and therefore the damage can be different according to the weapon used and the armor worn... similar to yours but definitely more complex! Thanks and ciaooo

Expand full comment