From: Colin Watson (watson@computing-science.aberdeen.ac.uk)
Date: Fri 12 Nov 1993 - 20:21:43 EET
It's true, RQ gives heavy emphasis to armour. A shield is only as good as your parry skill and it only fends off one blow (normally). Armour doesn't require any skill to use and defends against all attacks. It might be better if larger shields were easier to use (higher base %) and could defend against more than one attack. This would be instead of having higher AP. (Anyway, were hoplite shields really *that* much thicker than heater shields?)
I'm sure ancient soldiers would have chosen shield&no-armour because they felt more agile, but this isn't really reflected in the rules. (Ok, they're better at dodging; but this isn't a great help when their main defence is shield parry.)
Maybe ENC should be subtracted from parry chances. This way there is some advantage to running around with a big shield and no armour. Make base parry % higher to compensate for the loss; so people in armour have about the same chance as always to parry, but lightly armoured chaps get a better parry chance.
Seconded. The outcome should depend on troop strength & strategy, not luck.
I haven't played Dragon Pass but we did hack together a set of mass-combat rules of our own for RQ. It was smaller scale than DP: it worked for tabletop battles with armies of less than ~1000 men. The troop stats were derived directly from RQ (stats/weapons/armour/skills mapped almost exactly). There were no dice rolls involved except for a Battle Lore skill which determined the order of statement/action for each round. One day I might type these rules up if there's interest...
>Incidentally, the Empire's PR is
>that they can control chaos,
___
CW.
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