Re: Chewing on proficiencies, maneuvers and combat.
Posted: 25 Feb 2017, 16:34
There are two points to address in that argument. The first point is the argument about reach control vs. firearms. To the former, I'd argue that it still makes perfect sense to get the bonus from reach control when you have a firearm. If someone is trying to perform a ranged attack on you in melee, you don't have time to parry the incoming projectile, and you certainly can't parry a bullet. Realistically, you're trying to knock the weapon aside before it leaves the person's hand or is fired. We say the latter explicitly in the description of the maneuver. If you are at rapier distance from me, you'll have a harder time knocking my pistol aside than if you were at dagger distance from me. If you're at spear distance from me, you're going to have a much harder time knocking my pistol aside than if you were at rapier distance from me. It isn't rules bending, it's rules as intended.Benedict wrote: (Re: Reach vs pistols)
For similar reasons, if I have a rapier and dagger, it's not rules-bending if I have dice from reach control but thrust at you with my dagger from rapier distance. I wouldn't try to make someone switch to firearms for firing a pistol in their off-hand any more than I would make someone switch to Daggers to thrust with their off-hand dagger, or switch to brawling to make a Grab with their off-hand.
The second point to address is swapping proficiencies mid-round. That just seems like a headache. You're already doing enough die-pool math during a fight in getting out your dice for the pool, calculating reach, dividing up dice for the tempos, paying activation costs and getting bonus dice from maneuvers. Adding in a formula for changing proficiencies mid-round is not worth the trouble.
A third point worth making is to again point out that melee proficiencies and ranged proficiencies are different things for a reason. I'm not sure if we made this explicitly clear in the last draft, but you don't make melee attacks with ranged proficiencies. If I find myself in melee and all I have is a crossbow, I don't use the crossbow proficiency to parry an incoming attack. I'd use brawling or mass weapons, depending, probably with the "improvised weapon" penalty. A musket would probably be mass weapons or pole-arms, as they are more wieldy as combat weapons - especially with a plug bayonet. Pistols are an exception because in melee they are an off-hand weapon like a dagger is. You fire one and then turn it upside down to use as a club. If you were using it by itself or in a pair, I'd call it a mass weapon. If you're using it with a sword in the dominant hand, use the sword proficiency of your choice.
They would all be mass weapons. The only time I'd ever lean on something like that as Brawling is if we were talking about an improvised weapon (say, a table leg) or something that's really niche like a sap or a blackjack. Otherwise, it's a mass weapon. If we want to help differentiate axes, flails, and so on, then the best place to do so is by coming up with more emphases. Since Mass Weapons only has the one at present, this is something I'm certainly open to.Benedict wrote:That makes sense. Tbh the thought occurred just as I saw the weapon groups quote. Then it struck me. What about flexible weapons, like flails? Just toss them along axes/hammers/maces? Also small mass weapons like throwing axes, short clubs, etc?
We don't currently have penalties for handedness in ranged weapons regardless, per the Ranged Proficiency heading on page 51, so no. We don't bother with penalizing the off-hand weapon currently anyway. Maybe it's something that we should consider for the sake of simulation, but it hasn't been a real problem in testing and doesn't seem quite worth it.Korbel wrote:And what about throwing daggers, axes and javelins? Can be done with your left hand? No penalties? Just to make sure.
Ideas. Nothing I want to announce yet. We shuffled the maneuvers around quite a bit. Made the whole thing more dynamic, removed some redundancies, and even added some new tricks. We're in the process of making sure everything works as intended first, then we start layering the proficiencies back on.nemedeus wrote:I remember asking about exactly that a while ago here on the forums...
already got specifics about montante and halfsword emphasis?
Answering this out of order:DannyBoy wrote:I get that emphasis is meant to distinguish the different fighting styles, but I feel that it doesn't pay proper service the sheer diversity of fighting styles that exists irl.
The difference between the two setups for proficiencies is in the presentation more than quantity. All of the original fighting styles are represented -- we've even gotten some new ones. What has changed was the way we calculated your dice in each.
Originally, we had it set up so that most weapons could be used with more than one proficiency because we wanted to emphasize the differences in style rather than have them play as weapon skills. We had this idea that a master swordsman might have several different styles he's mastered for his weapon and switched between them as advantageous. This worked beautifully at the beginning but broke as we made two changes (both, in my opinion, have been solid improvements). First, we got rid of variable AC (and a forum discussion on reviving the concept showed the wisdom of this improvement). Second, we moved from a longer list of specific maneuvers and techniques to a shorter list of more flexible techniques -- something that this draft is going even further with. The two combined to greatly reduce the appreciable difference between some proficiencies.
The worst offender is the triad of Messer, Saber, and Sword & Buckler. The latter two are literally identical, save for the emphases. Messer is only different in that it trades Beat for Half-sword and Murder Stroke. They can all be used with the same weapon, which is what we intended but because they are so similar it doesn't meet the design goal we set out for. If I already have Sword & Buckler, is it worth investing in an entirely new proficiency to get free draw cuts from Saber? No. That's a maximum of 2 dice I'd be saving. Likewise, if I already have Sabers, Sword & Buckler's emphasis at most grants me one-die-in-six as a bonus and only to follow-ups (on a d10, that drops to 1-in-10!). Messers is the slightly more tempting of the group, but even then is it worth it to switch? If I have Sword & Buckler at 10, I'd be spending 6 SA points to buy Messers at 6, then a further 34SA points (40 total) to be on even footing. Either that, or I leave my Messers proficiency lower, but I'm then losing a nontrivial amount of dice from my pool whenever I switch to it.
We have a similar problem with spears v. polearms v. mass weapons. The differences between them just weren't enough to justify learning a second proficiency if you could already use the weapon with another.
Defaulting works now like it did before. From one proficiency to another (one weapon group from another), it's half your highest proficiency rank. You don't get the benefit of any emphasis unless you have learned one. You can only use emphases that you have, and that your weapon qualifies for. Even if you have the Sabers emphasis for Swords, you get no benefit from it unless you have a curved sword, etc.DannyBoy wrote:It's also not entirely clear on how defaulting would work in the new system,
Let's say you make a character with rank 8 in Swords (someone can feel free to suggest another name. 'Swords' feels lackluster by comparison to the others). Upon learning it, you immediately get a free emphasis from the Swords list. You choose Sword & Shield. Later, you spend some time in Poland and decide that their saber fighting is pretty neat and want to learn their style. Without learning anything, if you pick up a Polish Saber you still get your 8 dice in swords to fight with. You can use it in your existing emphasis if it qualifies (in this case, the saber is irrelevant. It depends on whether you're carrying a shield), or you can fight with it without the benefit if any emphasis. You still have the 8 dice.
If you choose to learn Saber, then you're going to pay a cost for the emphasis (whatever we decide that is. Still being chewed upon) but now you can add it to your list of styles for the Sword maneuver. In a fight, you can only ever benefit from one emphasis at a time, so you need to decide at refresh which you're using.
If on the other hand, you picked up a spear, you default at the normal value (4). If you decided to learn Polearms, then you'd do so at default+1, and have that as your new rank. So in this case, spend 5 SA points to pick it up at rank 5 and you'd learn your first Polearms emphasis for free.
I can already hear someone out there beginning to formulate the objection "but that's not entirely realistic. If all I've ever learned is messer fighting, I shouldn't have as many dice with Sword & Shield as I do Messers."
Yes. I'm fully willing to grant this. On the other hand, we're already dealing with an abstraction. If we wanted to go for the most realistic approach, we would have to go back to TROS-style default charts where some things default more favorably than others and when buying a new proficiency or picking up an unfamiliar weapon in combat, you need to work out which grants the most favorable defaulting for what you're trying to do, to a maximum of rank 6 or whatever cap they imposed. We tossed that out early on as more trouble than its worth in favor a simpler "equal to half rank" because to us it wasn't worth looking up. This approach isn't particularly realistic either but is easier in play. The trade off is that it ultimately means no one learns more than one proficiency for a given weapon because the defaulting costs are too high for styles that should be much more closely related. I think the above solution is thus far the best of both worlds.
Why would skills and proficiencies be similar? Mechanically speaking, skills and proficiencies are two very different creatures that have almost diametrically opposite functions. Skills as a category represent a bunch of broad abilities that each have multiple applications. Proficiencies are a handful of incredibly specific abilities that all have the same central application (killing an opponent. Every single skill is more broad in nature and application than any single proficiency, and every single proficiency is way more complex than any given skill mechanically. Skills don't come with maneuver lists and activation costs, after all.DannyBoy wrote:and it doesn't seem to mesh well with how skills are presented. Why would you have a massive list of different skills but only 4 or 5 different proficiencies?
If we wanted a more apples-to-apples comparison, you'd need to look at how the social skills are presented in comparison to proficiencies, as they are all ultimately oriented towards a single task in the way that proficiencies are all ultimately oriented to the same task. As it stands, we have Coerce, Command, Manipulate, Negotiate, and Orate. Five different strategies to get someone to do what you want, each with their own side applications. Amusingly, we also have five proficiencies at present: Brawling, Longswords, Mass Weapons, Polearms, and Swords -- at least, until we finally get around to adding Lances in there.
That does seem to be a major benefit. Immediately to come to mind, one could even represent fencing guilds fighting in different ways by giving them unique emphases. If you were playing an Edo-era Japanese-setting with the competing sword-schools, all the characters would likely have the same one or two proficiencies but depending on the school they belonged to they could have very different sets of emphases to represent them.nemedeus wrote:Personally i think emphasis is an excellent way to represent any fighting style that goes beyond differences in different kinds of weapons. Even moreso, making your own "fighting Style" is very easy that way. You can just write a new emphasis.
