Combat Pacing

[Ineti]

I'm enjoying this conversation too. No offense taken or intended in any comments given or received.

Originally posted by Scottomir
unbalanced rules with end effects not thought all the way through when designed

I think that's a very risky assumption to make. One person's 'broken' is another person's 'What? That works just fine!'

I don't know what the designers had in mind for the ideal goal when designing the game, and may never know since a look at the credits page of the core book shows me that the majority of the designers, developers, and authors of the core book are no longer with Decipher, for one reason or another.

It's entirely possible they purposely developed a flexible, open-ended system that relies on significant Narrator discretion. Based on what I've read in the core book, I think that's pretty much where they were going. I don't know for certain, though.

Is the system as 'crunchy' as some would like? No. Is it as free-form and dice-free as others would like? No. I think it does make an effort to find a middle ground, with enough flexibility built in to allow a Narrator to go into deeper detail, or to drop the majority of the rules and go with a more storytelling, narrative driven approach that all but ignores die rolling.

Was every rule and option in the core book playtested to the nth degree? I have no idea. All I know is that 99 percent of the rules in the book have worked for me, as written, for over a year. I also know that there have been a lot of people online who have creatively disagreed with the rules.

What I'm still trying to figure out is whether a) the rules are in fact broken and I'm doing something horribly wrong in my game, or b) the rules are fine as written but gamers are finding the rules not to their liking and alternately changing them to suit or falling back on the 'this doesn't work for me so it must be broken' idea.

*shrug* All I know is that it works for me. If you don't like the mook rules, change them. I did.

[Ineti]

Originally posted by Scottomir
While your variable-success point above does provide a very generalized way to incorporate the relative toughness of the foe, it doesn't address the issue that the character's own Strength doesn't matter.

That's the point of the mook rules, though. It doesn't matter if the hero is a warrior or a Hobbit or a woman or a one-eyed Dunlending with a limp. The point is that the character is a hero doing heroic things like dropping a dozen Orcs.

Whether the hero does it with a sword or an axe or a dagger, they're still being heroic. If you want more detail than that, either modify the mook rules to taste, or use the standard method of resolving combat.

I can envision a mook system that realistically handled combat so that a powerful warrior like Boromir does more damage than say Pippin, but the paperwork involved doesn't interest me. Heroic combat shouldn't be concerned with how much damage one did and with what weapon against what armor. The bottom line is did the hero get the job done?

YMMV and all that. I think this is bordering on a philosophical discussion, but what do I know? I sucked at Philosophy 100.