[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

Nightshade,

Look at it like this.
In RQ2, if you hit someone for 5 or 6 ponts, AND got past the parry, armor took off another couple of points, as did protection (fairly common in RQ2), resulting in a minor injury.

But that's an issue of the presence of magic in the system, not an aspect of the combat and armor systems themselves.

And 5-6 points was fairly low in our experience; the expected damage was usually closer to 8, and that was assuming no impaling weapons were present.

In Strombringer, once you got past the parry, the armor mght stop some of the damage (or not), and what got through might still be enough for a Major Wound, taking the foe out of the fight.

On the other hand, while the roll means you could get very little protection, you could also get rather more than you got in RQ1 and 2; 6 points of armor was a fair bit, barring magic, in RQ1. In fact, it was full plate as I recall.

The major wounds (high damage vs low armor roll) came up a lot more often than the sever or location take out results in RQ.

I might believe it was more common than severs, but not than location take outs, which I usually saw multiple times in a given fight.

Plus, with RQ, there was all sorts of magic to help protect or heal a combatant, so a disabled or even severed limb (heck even Death in some cases) was a recoverable injury. In Stormbringer there was no such option. A lost limb (thanks to amajor wound) stayed lost, since there was no "Healing 6" , and the injuried mostly relied on first aid and natural healing.

I agree the magic made a difference, but that's an issue of magical availability; as I said, it doesn't have anything to do with armor or the combat system.

PLus SB1 had cultural stat mods that made the game even more lethal. A human with a 2D6 Damage bonus was possible. Even the max stat limit of 100 was significantly higher than RQ2's "max+min" method.

You obviously never encountered PC ogres, trolls and even great trolls in RQ.