Quote:
Originally Posted by lawrence.whitaker
Surely this is a simple matter of commonsense? Why on earth would you need an explicit statement?
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Hi Loz,
I think you took me a bit too literally there
. Brontosaur is a reductio ad absurdum just to ram the point home (in case it needed it...
). The point being, if you have a judgement call - ie "well, of course you CAN'T parry a brontosaur, that's absurd", then at some point you enter the fuzzy ground where it's more "hmm... well you *might* be able to parry that great troll maul / griffin claw / elephant tusk, but I'm not completely sure". Your judgement then, in the current case of parry-blocks-all-damage, is that you have to somehow imagine that a weapon parry could conceivably block all the damage / knockback / whatever before you can allow a parry to happen, ie a relatively arbitrary GM decision - and before you know it you're houseruling so you don't have to be quite so arbitrary.
Whilst my point is, if you go with the old "parrying-weapons-absorb-a-certain-amount-of-damage-but-let-the-rest-through", then you have a watertight rule with no arbitrariness and you no longer have the problem of trying to decide whether the attack can actually be parried or not. Sure, you can *try* and parry that brontosaur / troll maul / griffin claw / elephant tusk / whatever, but you're probably gonna get squished unless you're sewn into your armor real good!
Anyway, it's an old argument, and I'm completely happy with the new BRP paradigm as long as you *don't* separate Attacks & Parries - it's just that in my campaign we *do*, so I think I'll be houseruling. No big deal.
Mind that bronto!
Cheers,
Sarah