Combat
I know that like many of you, I have come to realize that combat is an intergral part of any RP system and it will continue to be one for ages to come. After all, half the fun of the game is to beat something else up with your incredible powers and feats of strengths, so of course combat will be an important part. How many times though have you gathered your group together for a night of role-playing and quickly come up to a battle that takes three or four hours to accomplish?
It’s not that the battles are entire armies fighting, but rather that each side has so much damage they can take verses what they deal that it takes hours to widdle down an opponent before it, or the party, is finally killed off. With this in mind, Swords and Sorcery has reworked the most common combat systems out there so that not only do players and opponents only have a handful of life, but now damage done is equally balanced. Having played AD+D 2e as a rouge, one issue I noticed is that even at a higher level, my back stab damage was simply not enough to save my hide once I got close enough to an opponent to use it, and 4e has the same problem as well. And D+D is not the only system out there that has these problems, a rouge based character sneaks in, strikes an opponent and then is leveled because his damage isn’t enough to subdue or kill his opponent. That changes now, and a character that specializes in sneak attacks will do quite a bit of damage and as they grow more powerful they can even kill an opponent in one strike with a little luck.
Besides just damage done, what about damage received? The idea that many games hold a single defense score just seems a bit silly to me. After all, why is it that a touch based attack such as Heat Metal, Surge or a number of touch poisons have the same chance of damaging a nimble acrobat as they do a heavily armored knight? Well, Swords and Sorcery takes that one score and splits it into two, giving characters a base Dodge and base Armor scores that take into account the different way attacks work. Now a very nimble acrobat has the same chance of avoiding damage as a heavily armored knight does, but instead of it showing the same way the acrobat would dodge the attack while the knight would simply not be damaged by it. You might be asking how is this any different than the single defense system, and the answer is simple, touch based attacks now have meaning. If you are a deadly sword singer and have your sword glowing with ethereal power that can cut through armor like butter, it does not help at all against the acrobat who simply dodges the attack, though the poor knight is in trouble since his dodge is so low and his armor cannot protect him.
This overhaul on combat is not the only amount done, but I do not want to get into the rest of the changes quite yet as they relate far more to other aspects of the game I hope to describe better in future posts. For now, the biggest thing I hope you see is that combat has quite a bit of focus in the Swords and Sorcery world in order to make it a bit more fair and far more realistic than in other systems. Just be warned, watch out for that Kobold, for even a powerful adventurer can be taken down if it gets a little lucky and pulls of a few good tricks.
Until next time, peace favor.
