Swashbuckling Fight! hack

[Valannor]

@ctrail

I am confused by this, though. With the typical Power and Forte of B4, you’d need a B8-B10 to do that level of damage. With a B4 Power and a 1h weapon that’s not possible unless you get 5+ successes. That level of success should be pretty rare, and when it occurs it makes sense to me that it should be a fight ender. I’m not sure why you are seeing those kinds of hits so frequently, in my experience you see a lot more superficial and light wounds.

This might be a function of the type of characters we play and the amount of FORKs we use… perhaps I should open a separate thread to see how people handle FORKs in Fight!

A typical example might be something like a character with B6 Sword skill. Say he is fighting an Orc. Say he has additional skills in Sword Forms-Wise and Brawling. Say the Orc scripts V1A1 Great Strike, and the PC scripts Strike. He realizes he has the upper hand here, so its Sword+wise+Brawling (8 dice), plus maybe a Persona, (9 dice) against Ob1. If he gets 4-5 successes, and 1 is a 6, and he opens that up… say 6 successes. That’s 5 over Ob. With an Add 2 regular sword, that’s a Mortal wound he can move one location. If he only has chest armor, bye-bye orc. He declares chest. You move it anywhere and its Mortal.

If he has no armor on head, but has armor elsewhere, he still has to declare legs (else, moving from arms to head costs 1 success. Even with leg and chest armor, that strike goes to the head. 2 successes to move, 2 to add, for a B7 (usually Midi) to the orcs unprotected head…That’s a -2D to mister orc, and that’s just on V1A1…

If we allow more FORKs, dice pool gets even bigger. Plus, armor 1d everywhere means the PC is less likely to dump 3 persona into that first Strike, on account of 1 success on that armor roll will negate his massive Strike.

Again, I understand this is all highly situational… YMMV, but I find any chink in any of your armor locations, is quite deadly. Maybe we allow too many FORKs into our rolls during Fight!.

@ctrail

Part of this may just be the players needing to adapt their style to armorless fighting. If everyone uses more defensive actions, fewer blows will get through and the ones that do will be less solid, leading to less fight ending wounds.
Maybe the trick is to remove Feint or make it harder? You see a lot of parrying and counterstrikes in the kind of Errol Flynn fiction you are talking about, the counter to that strategy is feint, so maybe make the counter weaker to increase the behavior you want to see? Maybe combine that with making the off-hand weapon give a nice defensive bonus to encourage blocking, so that the defender typically has the advantage.

Swashbuckling should be all about Counterstrikes, blocks, strikes. Perhaps if Feint is eliminated from the menu, but then that seems to me like messing with the Fight rules, whereas my hack is just the equivalent of having everybody walk around all the time with gambeson cloth armor from head to toe, but without looking silly

Upon further reflection, perhaps the 1D bonus from my hack should cease to be in effect whenever you’re hesitating. (can’t react to protect yourself in time).

Messing with PTGS is another way to go about it, but it seems more fixed to me… My hack is variable. Even if you have 1D protection, you can still roll traitors and get hit anyway…

Thanks for replying