Rules ideas
Hi,
The issue here is, how detailed should your combat system model be?
I figure characters pretty much always use all of the combat tricks they know, so it is reasonable to just factor them in to skill levels
On the other hand, I can see coming up with a limited list of combat tricks and using the results of tricks picked to modify relative skills. Something like Empires in Arms combat, where if you pick echelon and the enemy picks ... by picking the right trick you get a big edge on the combat chart
The big reason I did not go for that in designing Fire and Sword is that I wanted combat resolution to be quick. Players stopping to think about their tactical options would slow the game down a lot. Also, there is an upper limit to the amount of rules complexity you can expect players to remember; neither my players nor I always remembered all of the existing F&S rules so it struck me that adding something like this would push the rules over the complexity limit.
If I were to add anything to Fire and Sword combat, it would probably be something like a -3 or -5 modifier to skill every time a character had to roll to resist incapacitation. This would cover the effects of getting tired, blood loss that did not incapacitate a character, etc. As it stands, Fire and Sword assumes that RQ is correct in having characters mostly go down in one blow, and pushes that to an extreme. I know this simplification is expensive in simulation quality, but it seemed worth it to reduce what we had to keep track of.
Also, there is an overall upper limit to the complexity of the rules, and I did not want combat to take up almost all of the complexity available.
In general, you should only add a rule if not having it significantly reduces player enjoyment of the game.
Ray,
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