Weapons And Armor, Crafting And Design

[Old Man]

I don't quite see the link between OCV and versatility. Multiple attack vectors and thus harder to parry? For all swords?

 

Compared to other melee weapon types, yes. Most melee weapons can only effectively be used to swing or thrust but not both. Conversely swords can be used to stab and cut. Many swords have a preferred mode of use but at Hero levels of granularity it usually doesn't matter.

 

Note that the 4th ed weapon chart was the one most clearly built from HKAs and advantages. The resulting chart was boring, but at least it was balanced. Charts in subsequent editions have been more...arbitrary.

[Markdoc]

Actually, I'm with MHD here. 2d6 killing is insane damage for a longbow. Adding AP simply moves you into OMGWTF territory. Historically longbows were hugely effective against unarmoured troops, quite effective against moderately armoured troops and rather ineffective against heavily armoured troops. The English did not first downgrade and then abandon the longbow for random giggles. The spread of effective plate armour simply meant that longbowmen became less and less relevant and the focus shifted to the heavily-armoured man-at-arms. The arrival of effective guns made longbows obsolete as frontline weapons - though they hung on as low qualty scouts and support troops for a couple of generations.

 

This interpretation is supported by modern recreation testing. Longbow arrows - even from bows with very heavy pulls - simply bounce off period style plate armour at anything outside point blank range - and do little damage even at point blank range. I've actually had the opportunity to test this personally, but you needn't take my word for it - there's tons of videos on youtube making the same point.

 

Cheers, Mark

[Christopher R Taylor]

They abandoned longbows because guns were better.  Longbows took a lifetime to learn to use properly, and some modern dude trying to test this hasn't done anything like that kind of training.  They shot through oak, let alone armor.  Longbows killed knights off their horses, historically in real battles.  Real knights in real armor.

[Old Man]

But what kind of armor? At Crecy the French wore mail with some plate. The full plate worn at Agincourt was effective against arrows but lethal in mud.

[NuSoardGraphite]

The "ethnic cool" factor in play again. Just like katanas for some kind of reason had a parry of 2/3 in GURPS instead of the usual 1/2. Or the insane amount of damage a longbow does in HERO (or, strangely enough, a francisca).

 

As of now, I'm more inclined to remove the (IMHO) superfluous advantages, but when the next campaign turns out to be more cinematic, I might feel more generous

But if they gave the Two-handed sword a +1 OCV, why not the No-dachi?  Why does the Falchion have it and not the scimitar?  I am not aware of the Falchion being a recipient of the "Ethnic Badass" factor.

 

Lets just face the fact that the designers of 5th and 6th screwed the pooch here and the most fair way of doing things is to remove the bonus from all swords so that there is solidarity, or roll it back to 4th edition and give it back to all of them, because swords are cool.  I have chosen to go the latter route.  That's just me, I'm a fan of the sword.  IMO, compared to other melee weapons, it's beauty and elegance cannot be overstated.

 

It is ultimately just my opinion.  To be fair to Hero, I feel it does weapons better than 90% of the games out there.  To find a better damage system, one has to step up to far more complex damage models like Rolemaster or Twilight 2000

[L. Marcus]

Ah yes - chain mail. Should it be built with a Half rPD Against Piercing Weapons?

[mhd]

Compared to other melee weapon types, yes. Most melee weapons can only effectively be used to swing or thrust but not both. Conversely swords can be used to stab and cut.

It's quite easy to put a spike on pretty much anything. Never mind hafted weapons, which can be at least as versatile as a greatsword (which might've gotten its exceptional bonus due to the late Fechtbuch reverence, which seems the millenial equivalent to the 90s "ninja are like totally sweet" supposition).

 

Lets just face the fact that the designers of 5th and 6th screwed the pooch here and the most fair way of doing things is to remove the bonus from all swords so that there is solidarity, or roll it back to 4th edition and give it back to all of them, because swords are cool.  I have chosen to go the latter route.  That's just me, I'm a fan of the sword.

I agree with that conclusion, and I'm a bit torn between the two options myself, to be fair

 

It is ultimately just my opinion.  To be fair to Hero, I feel it does weapons better than 90% of the games out there.  To find a better damage system, one has to step up to far more complex damage models like Rolemaster or Twilight 2000

Well, one could probably do more even within what HERO already provides, but it would often clash with genres and require additional steps. Who wants to deal with Reduced Penetration for every edge attack or compare rPD and DC before deciding whether it's normal or killing?

 

I always liked the different armor types that HârnMaster, GURPS or Artesia provided. The latter is even remotely related to HERO

 

Ah yes - chain mail. Should it be built with a Half rPD Against Piercing Weapons?

Nope. Works perfectly fine against them, too, or nobody would've worn it. Early plate was cheaper, if I recall correctly. It took quite a while 'til we got something that's actually better than good plate. Plenty of historical reports of mail-clad knights resisting arrows just fine.

[Markdoc]

They abandoned longbows because guns were better.  Longbows took a lifetime to learn to use properly, and some modern dude trying to test this hasn't done anything like that kind of training.  They shot through oak, let alone armor.  Longbows killed knights off their horses, historically in real battles.  Real knights in real armor.

 

Real knights ... in armour mostly made of chain mail. Knights on completely unarmoured horses. Foot who were either unarmoured, or lightly armoured. That was in the 1300's. By the 1400's, full plate harness for knights was becoming the norm. Munition plate was becoming common for infantry. Knights no longer relied on mounted charges but as often as not would dismount and advance on foot ... aaaand, not surprisingly, the English started losing battle after battle to the French as the longbow lost its effectiveness. And - mark you this - all a half century before handgunners had made any significant appearances on the battlefield.

 

It wasn't just in France either. In Italy, mercenary companies composed of English veterans put out of work by the truces did great business in the 13th century. There too, English longbowmen gained a fearsome reputation ... until the Italians learned that heavily-armoured knights on foot could take them - and that easily. Once the foot advance became popular, the English companies withered away.

 

But it's in Britain that the effect is most pronounced. English armies in the 1300's and 1400's were heavily biased towards longbowmen in terms of numbers. But tactics changed dramatically over the century around 1400. In the 1300's the Longbowmen were often highly dominant and many battle were won or lost during an exchange of missiles. Through the 1400's, although longbowmen were still present in very large numbers at every major battle, they more and more became a supporting arm to heavily-armoured men-at-arms who fought primarily on foot. By the early 1400's the bows were being relegated to scouting, skirmishing and garrison, while the heavy infantry became the decisive arm and the melee the crucial point of the battle. And again, this happened long before the spread of guns. It's not that longbowmen suddenly disappeared. It's not that they stopped training or being recruited in their thousands. It's not that they were less effective than they were before - English longbowmen did fearsome execution on the lightly armoured Scots and Welsh in both centuries.  It's just that armies that relied on longbow fire to stop or weaken their enemies starting losing all the time. It's worth noting that even at Agincourt, Ursin notes that the Constable's guard (who had the best armour) were relatively unhurt by the sustained arrowfire - and that they advanced across the field under fire and engaged the English in melee - but that casualties were heavy among the ordinary knights.

 

The decline of the longbow cannot be attributed to guns because it started 3 generations before guns had any effect on battlefield tactics or even appeared on the battlefield. The earliest version of the weapon that became decisive (the arquebus) first started appearing on battlefields in the mid 1400's - 3 generations after the shift towards heavily armoured men-at-arms as the key battlefield arm had started. Likewise, the fact that longbowmen took a long time to train is of no relevance at all. The decline of the longbow started - and continued - despite the fact that longbowmen were being trained in greater numbers than ever. When guns started to appear in numbers, it's not like they replaced longbowmen because it was easier to train and equip them. On the contrary, guns were expensive, specialist instruments and for more than a century they were restricted to specialist troops - highly expensive mercenaries, at that. In England, mercenary handgunners made an appearance at the end of the War of the Roses. The small company of mercenary handgunners at Bosworth is credited with determining the form of the battle, as the Lancastrians apparently decided that a direct attack into their fire would be disastrous ... a consideration that the thousands of longbowmen present did not occasion. That's because by then commanders knew that men at arms on foot could walk through the arrowfire with relatively light losses - but that armoured men advancing on foot would have to weather several volleys of gunfire, which could not be ignored. 

 

You mention that the gun replaced the longbow because it was better. Yes, that's true enough. But better how? It's not cheaper (quite the reverse). It's not easier to make (again, quite the reverse). You couldn't put more gunners into the field than you could put longbowmen (again, quite the reverse). Add to that it was cranky to use, required specialist supply trains, was even more sensitive to weather than bows were, and had a far lower rate of fire. So what was it good for? One thing - and one thing only. At mid to close range it could make big holes in contemporary armour. Longbows could not do that ... which meant that all the other advantages counted for nothing.

 

Matthew Bane did exhaustive testing firing arrows from  at close range. His results are instructive. Against "high quality riveted maille", the needle bodkin (an AP arrowhead) and curved broadhead (a regular hunting arrow, but also used in war) penetrated 2.8". That's not necessary a lethal wound - but it is could certainly be an incapacitating one. Against a coat of plates, the needle bodkin achieved 0.3" penetration. The curved broadhead did not penetrate but caused 0.3" of deformation of the metal. Results against plate armour of "minimum thickness" (1.2mm) were similar to the coat of plates, in that the needle bodkin penetrated to a shallow depth, the other arrows not at all. So against mail, the longbow is very effective. Against plate, really not effective at all. And not surprisingly, contemporary commentators actually wrote the same thing - and history shows that as plate became common, longbows faded away. And it's not just Bane. Every test so far has given the same kinds of results, whether using reconstructions of the actual bows used or hydraulic rams, which can inexhaustibly shoot more consistently than the finest trained archer. It's not a question of modern archers. Training lets you fire for longer and use a heavier bow. it improves your aim, it improves your speed. It does not, however, let you magically add kinetic energy to your arrows. a 130 lb draw is a 130 lb draw, regardless of century - and tests have also been done with these uncharacteristically heavy weapons ... with the same results

 

So yeah. 2d6 for a longbow? That would suggest that a longbow would punch right through plate armour nearly 30% of the time when all testing and history says it could do so very rarely. That's insane. Just to add the yucks factor, I fell impelled to note that adding AP to that 2d6, makes a longbow an excellent weapon for taking out armoured vehicles in Hero system - on a good roll, you can penetrate the armour on an MBT! Imagine the surprise of the crew!

 

Though to be fair, it's partly a problem with the way Hero system handles damage  (and every other game system that I know of does not better and often worse). In real life, if a weapon is actually stopped by armour, it does little to no damage (there are a few exceptions - weapons with a great deal of momentum can harm you even if they are stopped, but that's not really the kind of thing that we are talking about here). Flexible armour of course can let damage "leak through" without penetration, but rigid armour doesn't. So a system that "substracts" damage is always going to have this problem, because damage doesn't scale nicely. A .45 fired into your chest at close range will almost certainly kill or incapacitate you. A .45 fired into your chest covered with rigid body armour at close range will make you flinch ... but that's about it. If you doubt me, watch the many idiots on youtube demonstrating the latter part. Upgrade the weapon or ammo to something that actually goes through the armour and you are straight back into death/incapacity territory.

 

cheers, Mark

[L. Marcus]

Hm. So, max damage from a bow would end up at 1 1/2d6.

[mhd]

Matthew Bane did exhaustive testing firing arrows from  at close range. His results are instructive. Against "high quality riveted maille", the needle bodkin (an AP arrowhead) and curved broadhead (a regular hunting arrow, but also used in war) penetrated 2.8".[...]

Are we back to bodkins being considered anti-armor projectiles? I thought that was discredited a couple of years ago, as there's scant evidence for hardened bodkins.

[Markdoc]

Not discredited so much as still uncertain. Bodkin points were used on war arrows, we know that much: both from contemporary writings and from finding actual arrowheads. Their effectiveness against leather armours like cuir bouilli is undoubted, and Bane's work suggests they are marginally better against heavier armours than broadheads. But that's about it. As far as I know, no-one has found masses of hardened bodkin points, so it could just be that they were made to save money.

 

In my games,I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, allowing them to be AP (even though I am aware that's likely a stretch) but at the cost of doing 50% less damage.

 

Cheers, Mark

[L. Marcus]

... Isn'there an Adder that allows one to disregard Defenses? Something like three points for negating one PD or ED ... Or am I thinking in GURPS terms now?

[Old Man]

It's quite easy to put a spike on pretty much anything. Never mind hafted weapons, which can be at least as versatile as a greatsword (which might've gotten its exceptional bonus due to the late Fechtbuch reverence, which seems the millenial equivalent to the 90s "ninja are like totally sweet" supposition).

 

 

Obviously you can't "put a spike on pretty much anything" and have it be effective, or it'd have been a much more common practice.  Spikes were not added to Viking axes, or Indian maces, or English hammers, or Eastern European flails.  Spikes do appear on certain polearms, but at that point you're already starting with an unwieldy weapon and there's little penalty to adding yet another projection to the head.

 

I've actually toyed with the idea of breaking out melee weapon damage into different types, and changing the rPD of armor accordingly.  In that case I'd have taken away the +1 from swords, but given them the ability to choose between (effective) piercing or slashing damage.  Never got around to fleshing it out though.

[Lucius]

I've been giving  daggers Autofire 5 shot. Besides such factors as being throwable and easily concealed, a main advantage of a short light blade is that you can use it more often.

 

Not "faster." If you charge me with a knife and I have an ax or spear, I will hit you first. Assuming you survive that, you will likely hit me more often. I give the longer weapon an initiative bonus, the dagger or dirk gets Autofire.

 

I am thinking of giving swords Autofire 2 shot.

 

 

At the moment, I am giving swords a Skill Level that is only usable if you already have a Skill Level usable with swords.

 

As I've said before - hopefully not in this thread, I hate to think I repeat myself that much - Swords have been used by every culture with the technology to make them, from the time they are available until firearms become widespread, and are always the weapon of choice of the professional warrior. Most other melee weapons are obviously derived from tools; a sword is designed to be a weapon. 

 

Now, I can accept a system that simplifies melee weapons and classifies them by damage class and STR Min and leaves the distinctions as flavor text, but if a set of weapons tables is going to go quantify differences it makes no sense for swords to come out as inferior weapons. In fact for any class of weapons to be clearly inferior violates Alexander's First Law of Weapons Tables, but it's especially ridiculous for it to be swords.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary elaborates: a weapon is not "inferior" in this sense if it is a worse choice in a fight but, for example, is cheaper, or easier to make or use, or otherwise fulfills the requirement of having "some reason that someone would actually use it."

[Lucius]

 

 

Though to be fair, it's partly a problem with the way Hero system handles damage  (and every other game system that I know of does not better and often worse). In real life, if a weapon is actually stopped by armour, it does little to no damage (there are a few exceptions - weapons with a great deal of momentum can harm you even if they are stopped, but that's not really the kind of thing that we are talking about here). Flexible armour of course can let damage "leak through" without penetration, but rigid armour doesn't. So a system that "substracts" damage is always going to have this problem, because damage doesn't scale nicely. A .45 fired into your chest at close range will almost certainly kill or incapacitate you. A .45 fired into your chest covered with rigid body armour at close range will make you flinch ... but that's about it. If you doubt me, watch the many idiots on youtube demonstrating the latter part. Upgrade the weapon or ammo to something that actually goes through the armour and you are straight back into death/incapacity territory.

 

cheers, Mark

 

So, we should be using Damage Negation to model armor rather than Resistant Defense?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

the palindromedary wants to know how to stop crab cannons

[mhd]

Obviously you can't "put a spike on pretty much anything" and have it be effective, or it'd have been a much more common practice.

If the versatility would've been that advantageous throughout history, people would've tried more. And to be fair, the age where cut & thrust swords were common is also an age where the spike count is increasing. Versatility also doesn't help you if one of its parts is mostly ineffective. And the cutting part of swords can be pretty much ignored by anyone armored.

 

Still, swords are quite manageable, especially compared to other weapons, so if every category of weapon should have a bonus, I can't argue against that, being of the socialist European persuasion.

 

I still get the feeling that spears and polearms are sold short, but that's the case in almost every RPG. Just like slings.

 

I've actually toyed with the idea of breaking out melee weapon damage into different types, and changing the rPD of armor accordingly.  In that case I'd have taken away the +1 from swords, but given them the ability to choose between (effective) piercing or slashing damage.  Never got around to fleshing it out though.

I tried my hands at that, too, but that quickly leads into "perfect is the enemy of good": Wouldn't that also require a bit more thought about what's "normal" damage and what's "killing" damage?

[NuSoardGraphite]

So, we should be using Damage Negation to model armor rather than Resistant Defense?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

the palindromedary wants to know how to stop crab cannons

A combination of Resistant Defense and Damage Negation would be a lot more accurate.

 

For example, soft armors would likely have no Damage Negation and low to moderate Defense.  Medium grade armors (Scale and Chain mail) would probably have 1 level of Damage Negation and moderate Resistant Defense.  While heavy armors (Plate mail and Full Plate) would be likely to have 2 levels of Damage Negation and high Res Defense.

 

So that 2D6K longbow damage cuts right through soft armor (as it should) but chain mail would be pretty effective (drops to 1 1/2D6k vs 6 Defense) and against full plate it only does 1D6+1k damage (vs Defense 8!) bouncing off routinely.

 

I would avoid giving armor more than 2 levels of Damage Negation or they will become too powerful. (maybe a really magical set of armor could have 3 levels, but that seems a bit much)

[L. Marcus]

I dunno if polearms really gets sold short - Reach is a very good ability to have. But there is one feature that I've never seen as a rule: various polearms come with hooks, the classic halberd being a prime example. That should be good to Grab with.

[Markdoc]

I thought about that, but while damage negation gives you the effect that small hits do nothing, it would tend to make big hits less threatening too. It could work, with some tweaking, I think.

 

I've played around with several ideas, but haven't put any radical changes into practice, because I am not sure exactly how much realism we actually need in the game.

 

Here's some of the ideas.

1. Simply use BOD to determine if an attack penetrated defences. If it does, you wear the lot.

Pro: simple to apply, maybe slightly more realistic than what we have now.

Cons: probably a lot more lethal than real life - so, not actually really realistic. Armour can still reduce damage even if penetrated (in the Bane example above, the chain reduced penetration to a bit under 3 inches ... it was nearly 6" with no armour That's a downscale from lethal to maybe lethal). Also - major problem - probably far more lethal than we actually want: it makes 1 hit kills likely.

 

2. Add a bonus to damage that penetrates armor. I've played around with the hit location table and you probably want to make the bonus an adder rather than a multiplier, but one approach (I've tried several) is to decrease base weapon damage, but then apply multipliers based on the BOD that gets through. This does not disadvantage normal attacks as much as you might think, since they can fairly readily leak some STUN through defences without a multiplier, but a killing attack that has no multiplier does no STUN damage at all. This makes killing attacks "spiky" in terms of damage - either they do nothing (if they don't penetrate) or they do potentially nasty damage. This is not a bad compromise, but it has some wierd effects with regards to weapon choice, and it still doesn't address the problem of longbowmen mowing down knights in plate harness llike they were wielding battle rifles.

 

3. Use a modified version of the impairing rules. In this case, when you take BOD damage, simply make a BOD roll with a penalty equal to the damage you took. If you fail, you are impaired and the duration of impairment depends not on a random roll, but on the amount of BOD you are down. Fail 2 rolls and you become disabled.

This has the charm that it's simple as heck, and also that it matches well with real-life combat reports from Iraq. I can't find it now, but there was nifty report I read from a military doctor who commented that the injuries in Iraq basically fell into three categories - minimal, incapacitating and fatal. With improved battlefield care, injuries that would have been fatal over time a few decades ago now are typically incapapcitating. But the type of injuries that were incapacitating on the battlefield or fatal on the battlefield had not changed very much since WW2. The major modifier here was body armour, which in his analysis decreased the percentage of fatal injuries (particularly strong effect) and incapacitating injuries, but had no apparent effect on minor injuries. What body armour didn't do was turn fatal injuries into incapacitating ones or incapacitating injuries into minimal ones. It just prevented some of them. The downside is that this is amajor change to how the game plays now, and could quickly lead to what's called teh "death spiral" where injured PCs lose the capacity to fight and then are quickly overwhelmed. Realistic, but not necessarily fun.

 

4.which leads me to the solution I have adopted. I didn't want to drop the damage on weapons too much because a heavy bow or a longsword should be pretty lethal to a guy in his undies. I did make some changes to reflect the capapbilities of the weapons, and in a few cases STR min dropped, but on the whole weapons are not too different from what's in the various Hero books. But I increased the protective value of the armours. So "soft" armours gained +1 DEF and rigid armors gained +2 (Cloth becomes 2, leather becomes 3, but boiled leather becomes 5, Brigandine becomes 6, both Chain and Scale become 7 and Plate goes all the way to 10. Plate + Chain ceases to be a seperate sort of armour, but simply becomes "plate in some locations, chain on others". The final tweak was that muscle-powered missile weapons recieved a -1 DC penalty for every -3 in range modifiers. So, no penalties out to 16 metres, then -1 DC out to 96 metres, -2 out to 96 metres, or -3 beyond that. That's probably too generous on my part (people who have never actually worked with primitive missile weapons are always surprised at how short their effective range actually is), but at least it helps simulate the well described fact that even powerful weapons like longbows or central asian composite bows had limited effect at longer ranges against armoured troops.

 

cheers, Mark

[mhd]

I dunno if polearms really gets sold short - Reach is a very good ability to have.

That's one of the issues, in that regard they've been "sold long". There were lots of polearms that weren't even that large and reach wasn't the primary and sole objective. Just like a bayonet isn't the primary characteristic of a musket. But do any two-handed axes in fantasy art look like a pollaxe or lochaber? No, most of the time they're those silly He-Man doubled bladed types. So there's often an artificial distinction, assuming that every polearm in the hand of players is of the 3m+ type. Which wouldn't be that great in the situations that players face most often, unless we're accounting for it doubling as a ten foot pole.

[L. Marcus]

In 6E2, there's only one weapon that can be described as a ten foot pole, and that's the longspear (Length given as Extra Long, so Reach +3m). The other polearms are given a more "sensible" +2m.

[NuSoardGraphite]

 

 

I still get the feeling that spears and polearms are sold short, but that's the case in almost every RPG. Just like slings.

 

I disagree with this.

 

Polearms get to:

 

Set vs Charge

 

Weapon Length rules

 

Unhorse

 

Some can be thrown.

 

Sounds like they have several decent advantages to me.

 

[rravenwood]

I didn't want to drop the damage on weapons too much because a heavy bow or a longsword should be pretty lethal to a guy in his undies. I did make some changes to reflect the capapbilities of the weapons, and in a few cases STR min dropped, but on the whole weapons are not too different from what's in the various Hero books.

 

Is there any chance you might post/upload your modified weapons list, to have a better idea how it all fits together (with the other changes you made for armor & missile weapons)?

 

I must confess to squirreling away a good number of house rules and suggestions which you've posted here since I started reading these forums.  They largely seem both sensible and playable - I appreciate your sharing!

[Markdoc]

Thanks for the comment! I like a good rule as much as anyone, but if it interferes with play, it's no good, IMO. Thus in many cases, I emphasise playability and simplicity over "realism".

 

That said, here's the stuff: http://www.herogames.com/forums/files/file/214-markdocs-fantasy-hero-weapons-and-armour/

 

It might be a short while before it is OK'ed by the admin. and thus accessible.

 

cheers, Mark

[rravenwood]

Awesome, I've downloaded it now - thanks again!