Shattered Kingdoms

For game balance the system needs tweaked, six shots from a shuriken should not exceed an axe, but that is game mechanics.

Personally with most of the training and fights I have watched the guy with the smaller faster weapon wins. It's efffective to get in make five cuts over vital areaS get out than it its to try and get one good cut with a bigger weapon. Landing a god hit with a larger weapon is allmost a guaranteed kill but you increase your chances of a vi tal strike and/or bleed out with five fast strikes. Unknowingly I think D has made a good representation of a real fight.

IMO, the problem is that the game's biased too much towards speed. I'll grant that once you get in range, a knife is a far better weapon than an axe. But where's the chance of getting clobbered before you get inside? There's a reason peasants mounted their cleavers on sticks to create polearms.

It'd be nice to see damage inflict a speed penalty, just as it inflicts a concentration penalty. Take a big shot from that axe or polearm, and you can only manage to get in 1-2 knife blows next round instead of a full set.

Fights are won on speed, the fastest person is the winner.

Taking a heavy blow should add a penalty, that would add a whole new programming dynamic.

Getting in on a person with a larger weapon is eaier than you think if you understand the weapon, how it moves and how to time your pass. Granted terrain and spacing will play a part along with your size versus theirs, but once you step in on a great axe and run a cut along the inner wrist or across the back of the hand their ability to hold the axe becomes limited. On a step in you can slit the inside of the wrist, up the forearm, and under the bicep in a flash. The movement is quick and easy to time on someone with a larger weapon. I worry more about the other guy when he has a knife like me cause I know I am getting cut in that fight no matter how good I am.

I'd interject and say it's probably the fault of the heavy armor bonus and the way magical damage works that makes faster lower damage weapons better than slow heavy hitting weapons.

Stance probably plays a role in it too. Aggressive stance is trash compared to defensive. I can guarantee that a defensive character fighting an aggressive character will outperform the aggressive character. The extra damage, and to hit just isn't enough to overcome the bonus to dodge and the hilarious increase to armor protection that defensive stance grants. In fact I think that bonus is bugged because I noticed at one point that while I was wearing a landsknecht and no shield, I still took roughly the same damage.

Stances could use some tweaking. As it is, aggressive stance is hardly worth it. Gaining shield block and that extra protection is worth far more than what seems to be a negligible increase to damage and hit.

That sounds like a more reasonable assemesment from the game mechanic viewpoint than real world practicality.

Also on that a man in heavy armor should not move as fast as one in light and then again not as fast as one without. Perhaps make the advantage of heavy armor balanced with mobility reductions?

Let's not bring real world mechanics in this. I don't want to get into all the flaws of how armor and weapons work from a real world perspective, and how wrong SK does it. I'll just leave it at that if a guy wearing steel gauntlets wants to violate you with a shuriken in his hand, then he's going to do just that. Hell, a credit card in your wallet is enough to cause enough damage to someone that they'll think twice about [REDACTED] with you again.

And you're wrong about the mobility issue. A full plate of armor weighs only about 40 lbs, evenly distributed over the body which doesn't hamper movement much at all. The problem with armor comes from the helmet and the reduction in visibility, not any perceived weight you think it might have.

That's fine, but mobility should be a factor maybe, that way you have to choose between 6 attacks or heavy armor bonus, dodge reductions, things like that, maybe it is less the weapon system and more the armor system needs overhauled?

edit: It's not the weight it's the flexability thing when you sectgion off your torso and tie yourself to imovable chunks of metal you start to reduce your ability to flex. I don't see many guys able to drop into full splits and bounce up in full plate.

Perhaps instead of upping the damage that slow weapons do, add an armor negation trait to them? While some of the slow weapons because they have long shafts and are reaching, others are slow because they are designed with weight behind them to help sunder armor.

The fact that weapons of the same subtype behave similarly I think is a good thing. All katanas for example should have similar stats. However their should be a way for builders to make katanas like say, "the katana of immaculate truth" or whatever its called, get bonus's to things like speed and accuracy and damage based on the fact that they are of superior craft. Then those changes to the weapons base subtype stats should show up on lore. That way you get the best of both worlds. You get weapons of the same subtype acting in a similar fashion, yet you also get the uniqueness of having them not be -exactly- the same. This way is more fun and also makes more sense. It also makes it possible for people to specialize in a wider variety of weapons.

And yes axes need to be fixed. It's true, fast weapons are better, but only to a point. I would argue though that alhspiess are better than battle spears despite the fact that battle spears hit once more per round, because ahlspiess do far more damage. But If someone else is hitting you anymore than once per round more than you, it's going to hard to deal with. And obviously an enchanted fast weapon is going to get the modifier for it's enchants applied more often than a slow weapon. So if you have a weapon that's 5 hits a round, enchanted at 11/11, and those 11 enchants add say 5 damage, then that 5 damage gets multiplied 5 times for every hit you land. Then you add 11/11 enchants to a weapon that hits 3 times a round, well that 5 damage only gets multiplied 3 times. So it's 25 bonus damage versus 15.

I thought that mobility was already factored into the game. I thought that the less load weight and items you carry in your INV, the better you are able to fight and defend yourself. This attribute is tied into your load and items carried info on your attributes sheet. Not that it makes a difference for the axe issue, but I thought those two numbers impacted your fighting you quite a bit.