Band of Bandits Fecht on 4chan (large image warning)

[Fight King]

4chan only has the Song of Swords thread up all the time.

8chan doesn't seem to have any Riddle, Blades, Swords or Bastards threads on it currently.
We were planning to advertise there as well but they saw Song of Swords General and panicked and shouted and didn't want to talk about the game at all.
So if you post a thread on 8ch don't call it 'Band of Bastards General', just call it something else that doesn't imply you'll have a thread all the time, despite it not hurting anyone.

Although maybe that's inappropriate to ask a hard-boiled 4channer... ?

If there was such a thing that would kind of defeat the point.

[nemedeus]

they saw Song of Swords General and panicked and shouted and didn't want to talk about the game at all.

Huh. And here i had hoped 8chan to have developed a good, laidback board culture...

What DO they run? D&D 3.X? Pathfinder? ... surely not D&D 5e. Right?

If there was such a thing that would kind of defeat the point.

Heh.



On another note, how's Song coming along, anyway? Is the old 1.9 beta doc still the current one? Checking just now, their Website (opaquegames.com) has been suspended.

[Fight King]

An Imageboard essentially runs everything that is interesting.
Anyone can start a thread, no one registers to the site either, and they'll discuss whatever happens to be of interest in their own isolated threads.

So somewhere is a Pathfinder Thread, a thread for 3.5 and a thread for 4e, and a thread for GURPS, and a thread for OSR, and a thread for 'why is this allowed', and a thread for why your Paladin is going to fall, or 'why you would possibly play an elf you faggot'.
Really the best thing to do is to stop being timid and jump in, you can always just lurk if you're afraid that someone will be mad at the idea of what you said. Keep in mind you're entirely anonymous to these people and they can only really respond to the validity of your opinion. Granted a lot of the responses can be quite vulgar depending what board, or what topic you may be discussing.

I don't know why 8chan was so pissed about the idea of a General on their board, might just be an 8chan thing since 4chan doesn't mind so much.
Also the /tg/ boards are usually quite civil in comparison to the rest of whatever-chan you happen to be on.

For example here are some people who are:
Discussing world building nicely: http://boards.4chan.org/tg/thread/46460 ... ng-general

and a thread complaining about shitty players nicely:
http://boards.4chan.org/tg/thread/46447 ... ith-shitty

[nemedeus]

Oh i wasn't talking about civility, i was talking about not being pussies.

Good perspective otherwise.

I'd say though, it wasn't that i was being too timid or afraid of the haters... not at all.
No, the biggest hurdle with chans, for me, it was keeping track of the damn thing! There's too damn much going on, any given time. Both in the individual threads and on the boards in general.

I don't know why 8chan was so pissed about the idea of a General on their board, might just be an 8chan thing since 4chan doesn't mind so much.

Yeah that's really weird.

Also the /tg/ boards are usually quite civil in comparison to the rest of whatever-chan you happen to be on.

I noticed that as well.

[Fight King]

No, the biggest hurdle with chans, for me, it was keeping track of the damn thing! There's too damn much going on, any given time. Both in the individual threads and on the boards in general.

There is a Catalog for a reason, it lets you see all the active threads on that board.
Threads also die off, all you have to do is make a new one and people will eventually come post on it.

[higgins]

I really should've considered the limitations of this ancient relic of a Forum before posting such large images.

We looked at several options, but none of them archived nearly as well. Decent search that goes way back was an absolute must for us.

Looking up Weapon TNs was never really a weakness of SoS or TROS

That ain't a problem at all in these 1vs1 Fechts, as you call them. In play though, undefined items tend to crop up quite a bit. And I completely agree on the DR/TN balance. TFOB was completely broken in that regard, despite the pretty art.

So far your take on the combat is pretty simple, I feel like it's a cleaned up version of TROS.
The weapons are done in a more narrative style, so that it doesn't matter so much the official historic weapon as the concept is. Which is something I like.
Restraining is neat, prone isn't such a game ender.

Thanks for the kind words.

BTW, how does SoSwo handle the restraining issue? Say, with grabs. I'll grab you, so, you'll go all in with a pommel strike without preempting and cave my skull in just after I've successfully grabbed you.

Also, what's this yellow die that you guys miss so much?

[nemedeus]

And I completely agree on the DR/TN balance.

Care to educate my filthy plebeian self?

Also, what's this yellow die that you guys miss so much?

Knowing 4chan, it might just be the "pissing oneself" die. *runs away*


Edit Edit: edited the TN question out because after i read over the thread again i felt i didn't need to ask anymore. All the while, higgins writes an immensely interesting essay about it. So i put it back in.

[higgins]

And I completely agree on the DR/TN balance.

Care to educate my filthy plebeian self?

Story time.

TROS had three different weapon TNs for each weapon: Attack TNs for both swing & thrust, as well as a Defense TN. So, a weapon with TNs 666 was good across the board, while a weapon with TN 667, was good in offense, but less good in defense. A weapon with 766 was good with thrusts and defense, but not so good with swings, etc. TN5 was insanely good and only the rapiers had it.

So, basically you wanted at least one ATN6 (either swing or thrust, as it was rarely both) and a good DTN. If your weapon's DTN sucked, you picked up a shield. This worked out fairly well, as the statistical difference between TN6 and TN7 isn't a massive one.

Now, TFOB wanted to model a broader spectrum of weapons compared to TROS core and quickly ran out of TNs. So, instead of actually testing anything, they started giving out TN8s so that their weapons wouldn't look identical. But TN8 is a much, much tougher deal than TN7, which meant that a lot of those weapons were either one trick ponies (completely relying on their one good ATN) or turned out to be flipping useless. I especially remember the feared Dacian Falx, which drew the worst short straw in TFOB and had a primary ATN8. Clearly, the Romans would have laughed their asses off instead of improving their helmet design.

Where the DR comes to play is that theoretically you could give weapon a crappy TN, but a high DR, to make it more of a risk vs reward thing, but in practice it didn't work, as the TN affects your whole pool. And a good TN helps you get more successes, and thus gain more hits, and get better MoS, and better MoS means more damage anyway. In short, you can't fix it that way.

This whole TN issue is actually one the main reasons BotiT uses d12 dice for their games, as it allows for a less abrupt statistical curve and more "viable TNs" than a d10. Back in Enigma of Steel days, there was even talk of using pools of d20s for even more granularity. Yikes!

So, naturally, we ran into the TN issue as well. Agamemon kept pushing that the current way is broken, and I kept saying we didn't have anything to replace it with. Then Agamemnon said something else and I remembered this post from waaay back on TROSfans:

Maybe we could persuade Jake to re-evaluate the stats he gave for the weapons for more granular approach? In my opinion, that's really the only way we fanboys would stop arguing what the real TNs would be like.

Maybe you could. I know a lot more about weapons now than I did then.

...which means even more of them would be 6/6 now, lol.

Jake

Going from that direction, we wondered what would happen if we made ALL the weapons TN6. It sounded insane at first, but then I was struck with inspiration, put Agamemnon on hold and presented him the new TN based wound system, which simplified a SURPRISING number of things.

The rest is history. Or so I hope.

[Fight King]

We looked at several options, but none of them archived nearly as well. Decent search that goes way back was an absolute must for us.

4chan was pretty good at archiving things on /tg/ but now that it's moe is down I'm not sure where things are saved. I know the threads themselves are preserved for a week after they finally drop off the board.
/tg/ archive is still around at least.

That ain't a problem at all in these 1vs1 Fechts, as you call them. In play though, undefined items tend to crop up quite a bit. And I completely agree on the DR/TN balance. TFOB was completely broken in that regard, despite the pretty art.

Don't even worry about weapon stats, I think most people were excited to keep those on hand.
Worry about Armor.

Armor and figuring out your carry weight was the longest part of character creation. It got to the point where a lot of people just had pre-made sets that they made themselves as a 'go to'.
There were also a lot of weird combinations that weren't historically accurate but were better purely in a gaming sense. Like wearing a skull cap, an nonrestrictive visor and that one thing that covered your neck and lower face.

BTW, how does SoSwo handle the restraining issue? Say, with grabs. I'll grab you, so, you'll go all in with a pommel strike without preempting and cave my skull in just after I've successfully grabbed you.

There is no restraining quality, instead certain maneuvers are written to have a similar effect through other means. i.e if you fail to stop a trip or a hook you could lose your weapon and your maneuver, or be forced into prone which essentially eats your entire dice pool.
There are also a lot of instances where you might state an attack and your opponent will state a defense & offense maneuver like Block & Strike/Thrust which then forces the original attacker to quick defend.
Though that can be prevented by just being smart enough to declare a simultaneous offense/defense technique, current ruling allows you to announce your attack dice and then announce your defense dice after your opponent announces their reply.

Grappling has been changed so many times and so has Grab. Originally you would 'restrain' the attack coming at you but only if you grabbed the arm that was making the attack. I think the current version is built around contesting offensives, where each offense is a defense when comparing successes.

Also, what's this yellow die that you guys miss so much?

Red is offensive, Yellow is Cautious & Blue is Defensive.
In the World of Kung Fu- I mean in Song of Swords if you throw Red you must make an attack, if you throw Blue you may not attack(and have to defend as a result, this used to give access to an over powered maneuver called Total Block).

But if you throw Yellow then you don't have any such restrictions, you simply take initiative from blue and lose it to red. Essentially it is the most adaptive stance to take.

In our Roll20 room we've made cards that we simultaneously turn over to show orientation.

[Siggi]

Going from that direction, we wondered what would happen if we made ALL the weapons TN6.

I remember just how excited I was when I finally got my hands on The Flower of Battle. All those fancy weapons with cool pictures, TNs and special rules looked so great! Now I see that all that different TN thing is not as fun as it seemed then. While it adds realism, in practice it works just fine with the unified TN, as I could see after running several BoB duels.

Yet, there's one thing that still gnaws at me: the thought that all the weapons just can't be so identical in terms of attack/defence. Can a belt knife be as good at parrying attacks as a parrying dagger? Same question concerning arming sword and, say, battle axe.

While I was waiting for the Weapons rules to be published, I was pretty sure that guys would use the Advantage & Disadvantage mechanics to simulate such weapon qualities. Even while I was reading the Duelling Kit, I expected to see an additional property description to appear, that would make certain weapons parry as disadvantaged.

Now I can already hear Agamemnon saying something like: "Oh, we considered that, but came to think that it would complicate matters too much, and the players are surely going to forget to use those qualities anyway".

In my opinion, making some weapons less handy to parry with would do good to the system and make those axe wielders watch over their shields. Mind you, I'm not offering to implement Advantage & Disadvantage rules to other weapon qualities such as Strike or Thrust, etc. (that would create monstrosities such as "Rapier: Swing -1c (disadvantaged); Thrust +2p (advantaged); Parry: disadvantaged vs Heavy, advantaged vs Fencing).

Just a TN+1 parrying penalty for the most unwieldy weapons - that's all that I suggest.

[higgins]

Just a TN+1 parrying penalty for the most unwieldy weapons - that's all that I suggest.

In fact, we had that.

The problem wasn't actually the complexity, but the narrative effects. If your opponent is already disadvantaged by their weapon, then putting them prone would have no further effect, etc. Positioning rolls faced a similar issue.

[Siggi]

You're right, and I've already thought about that after posting my comment. But surely something may be done about it. For example, if the character becomes disadvantaged, then his Unwieldy weapon is even further disadvantaged that he is (joking!) .

Alternatively, the Unwieldy quality may as well incur an additional activation cost for defensive maneuvers performed with the weapon in question.

[nemedeus]

@higgins: i sent you a message (telling you here because of what you said about your smartphone. What is this, a touchscreen for ants?)


Now, about unwieldy parrying...

In my game all weapons had stat for parrying bonus (default +1). Hammers, Axes, Daggers, and such, had +0. Polearms, Swords, and also Buckler, had +1. Shields had anything above that.
Unarmed Parries against weapons were at +0 -- with a decent chance to take a wound anyway, of course.

That stat was removed since, for:

I came to the conclusion that the biggest draw in parrying is a weapon's size, so having a longer reach than your opponent would enable you to parry better.
Until someone repeatedly stabs you in the face with their dagger.
...
...
...
DOES THIS REMIND YOU OF ANYTHING.

[myanbar]

BTW, how does SoSwo handle the restraining issue? Say, with grabs. I'll grab you, so, you'll go all in with a pommel strike without preempting and cave my skull in just after I've successfully grabbed you.

There is no restraining quality, instead certain maneuvers are written to have a similar effect through other means. i.e if you fail to stop a trip or a hook you could lose your weapon and your maneuver, or be forced into prone which essentially eats your entire dice pool.
There are also a lot of instances where you might state an attack and your opponent will state a defense & offense maneuver like Block & Strike/Thrust which then forces the original attacker to quick defend.
Though that can be prevented by just being smart enough to declare a simultaneous offense/defense technique, current ruling allows you to announce your attack dice and then announce your defense dice after your opponent announces their reply.

Grappling has been changed so many times and so has Grab. Originally you would 'restrain' the attack coming at you but only if you grabbed the arm that was making the attack. I think the current version is built around contesting offensives, where each offense is a defense when comparing successes.

Furthermore, Song of Swords has "canceled" maneuvers. If you have declared a maneuver but circumstances change after your declaration and you are no longer able to perform it, your maneuver is "canceled." You don't do it and you regain half the dice you allocated to roll to it, rounding down. This is in contrast to "negated," where you lose all of the dice invested. Negation is what happens if you succeed at a defense in any Riddle of Steel successor game, and BoB's Restraining works in a similar way. For example, if I declare a Beat to your sword, and you declare a sword Thrust at me, and my Beat succeeds, your Thrust is canceled.

[nemedeus]

Btw, i'm casting my vote to rename the Dueling Kit into "Fecht Kit". ("Fechtbuch"?)

German words, fuck yeah!


So i read over Swong again and first, i wanna say that i like Grit. I liked it so much back when i first read it a year or so ago (more like two by now), that i stole a good deal of it for my own game.

The rest, though... Yeesh. That's a lot of detail. Way too much for my taste.
I mean, it's practically the TRoS equivalent of The Dark Eye. That's the stuff nightmares (10d6 sanity damage) are made of.