Month: October 2006

The dreaded encumbrance rears its head.

Now that you are no longer all lightly armed barbarians and some of you are starting to aquire significant levels of armour, we need to start doing encumbrance properly.

You need to work out your actual encumbrance at the start of the next session and then deduct your encumbrance from ALL skills in the following categories:

Agility (including parry)

Manouver (including attack)

Stealth

Magic

So there.

Seriously though – this will give a trade off for those of you who aren’t in tin cans and makes the whole heavy armour thing more realistic. Also makes you think about whether to bring that extra 100′ of rope at 15 ENC with you.

New combat system (probably stolen by my subconscious from either Pendragon or HeroQuest).

Take your attack skill and divide by 5 to get a number between 1 and 20.

Opponent does same with either Parry or Dodge.

Each of you rolls a D20, attempting to get under your target number. A 20 is a fumble.

Defender is under target number, attacker is under target number = parried hit – attacker does damage equal to the amount he exceeds the defender by, capped by the maximum damage for his weapon.

Defender is over target number, attacker is under target number = hit, attacker does his score in damage, capped by the maximum damage for his weapon.

Attacker is over target number = miss.

Then just roll another d20 for the location and deduct armour from damage as normal. If the attackers score was equal to his target number, its a critical and doesn’t deduct for armour.

Only three dice rolled rather than 4 (6) and parries are more progressive – which is probably important as you get to higher skill levels. More chance of a fumble and critical though, and the chance of a fumble and critical are not influenced by your skill.