6 minutes ago, Mobiusllls said:

He didnt hesitated, he got mad. "DONT TELL ME HOW TO PLAY MY CHARACTER" remember? (Despite being able to be bullied,seduced,intimidated and everything else by receving rolls in all editions and mostly all rpgs).

Indeed. Ultimately, an outburst is in the same family of events as "you lost an opposed Intimidate versus Willpower check" in 40k; the idea of "your character is scared, what are you going to do?" is hardly a new concept. Ditto for "you're getting angry now".

But yes, as noted, you decide what form the outburst takes (with a bit of sound-boarding from the GM. But you have one, and it has a negative effect on your character in some way.

Hi

one thing I think is important to add at this point about defence in armed martial arts :

First, my players and I are all martial art practitionners, we do ''chanbara'' Iaido and Kendo, so we are quite familiar with japanese sword martial arts.

In real-fighting martial art, your defence indeed depends on your skill. eventhought you are not actually ''parriying'' blows, defence is about combat senses : knowing what your adversary is about to do just before he does it, controling the distance and reacting swiftly.

That's why I also think this version lacks of a ''passive'' defense system : because in real-life, your defense does increase with your level.

In many ways the "passive defense" lives in the Fitness skill's ability to reduce critical strikes. Heck one of the suggested Fitness subskills is Defense and that if the subskill is used Defense should be used to resist most effects rather than Fitness.

@Kyros Skyfall But going back to @Gallows point (the thread got somewhat hijacked) He was not talking about parrying, necessarily, just observing that it seems strange (and I completely agree) that It's always a TN of 2 to hit someone, regardless of their skill level.

My group (of varying ages and experience levels: I've been playing since 1E, once since 3E, one has a lot of experience with 4E, and two that have only recently played 4E) has been testing the 5E system, and at various ranks. We did observe the oddity related to the fixed TN that was the concern. Once everyone gets up into the 4+ ring range, especially if they also have a 3-4+ skill, combat gets weird. Misses basically just don't happen unless you roll really really bad, but everyone is so much more durable. It just creates a disconnect of sorts. It *works* better than I would have expected. With low TNs, attackers get more extra successes, which helps offset the durability, so it technically does balance out where combat between two characters of equal rank takes about the same amount of time. But it *feels* very different.

Currently, we're leaning strongly towards the house rule that the base TN to hit you is (Your highest ring + Your lowest Ring) / 2. When we tried this, it makes it where the experienced characters can take on much more fodder, and you still see the occasional miss even when equally matched characters fight, and the bonus damage is a little lower. Fights take a little bit longer, and as a really odd side effect strife buildup is accelerated (you have to keep more to get hits in). Funnily enough this doesn't do a whole lot, we found outbursts to either be fairly common in skirmishes, and with the house rule they ended up being about the same frequency, although sometimes happening earlier. But once the outburst occurs, strife becomes irrelevant for the rest of that skirmish, essentially (except in one spectacular case, where in one of our Rank 5 tests, a character with 18 Composure managed to accumulate Strife somewhere into the mid-20s, and then got hit with a bleed, and then gained a strife because he had to keep it and immediately died, something like a Severity 23 Crit I think).

TL;DR: If you want TN to scale, I'd recommend (Your highest ring + Your lowest Ring) / 2.

2 hours ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

In many ways the "passive defense" lives in the Fitness skill's ability to reduce critical strikes. Heck one of the suggested Fitness subskills is Defense and that if the subskill is used Defense should be used to resist most effects rather than Fitness.

This.

Defense does scale. You roll a check to reduce your damage. The First to tears on the critical damage table are pretty much Missed.

It's already neigh impossible to hit someone who is taking a defence action. Adding to that, would make combats where players would spend hours missing.

@AndyDay303 : from what I read, even the lowest effet on the critical strike table means you took a critical strike : so you still get the ''incapacitated'' condition and the fight is still over for you unless you take the void stance. from my point of view, whatever the critical strike table says, once your wounds equals your resilience the fight is over for you unless you uses void stance or uses the warrior's resolve kata.

@Hood281 I actually was not talking about parrying but about that strangeness you mentionned. It feels indeed strange to have a general fixed TN for the attack actions. What I was trying to say is that it is not only strange as a gameplay feature, but also it is not very logical in a realistic point of view.

Plus I noticed that some Katas loses any interest as you and your adversaries get more experienced, because the TN to resist them is also fixe : this should also be scaling a way or another.

but your experience about scaling the TN is a great thing to repport, probably the most usefull post on this topic yet^^. When you say characters becomes more durable, is it because they get way more resilience or becaue they diminishes severity more? about how much more resilience point are they getting per rank (aproximately)?

I think I'll try another home-made rule to make the defence scale, but less than the attack does, to see if it balances the fighting time and the striffe effect. (I'm thinking about ''you can increase the TN of one test targetting you by [rank/2] per round. rounded up for bushis, and down for the rest : this way you get a little bit more defense, but only against one attacker, so you're still in trouble when you're against multiple adversaries.).

what do you think of it?

to the developper team : you should probably work on a scaling system you would at least propose as an optionnal rule, in the final version of the book.

On 10/10/2017 at 8:13 PM, Rawls said:

Outside of a duel, do combat outbursts really matter?

You better believe it!

Your enemy has an outburst in combat. Thinking quickly, you point you weapon at him, shouting, "Face me, Matsu-san, or be named coward!" That's just a TN 1 Command roll, and if he refuses the Clash, he'll lose Glory. If he accepts, you've got him.

As the Clash begins, he reduces his Strife to his Composure, so he can't bid squat. You are welcome to bid a free Strife, just to make sure you go first.

Make a Center action using your Fire ring. Make darn sure you Keep an Opportunity. Use that Opportunity to give your opponent 2 Strife. He just went over his Composure, and now you can make a Finishing Blow.

That's called the Quart of Blood technique. You do that, a quart of blood just fall right out of a person's body.

Quote

from what I read, even the lowest effet on the critical strike table means you took a critical strike : so you still get the ''incapacitated'' condition and the fight is still over for you unless you take the void stance. from my point of view, whatever the critical strike table says, once your wounds equals your resilience the fight is over for you unless you uses void stance or uses the warrior's resolve kata.

That is not correct.
I think you are refering to the receiving wounds paragrap here but that does not apply.
First wounds accoding to page 143 is the points of dmg that is applied by a weapon when it hits.
That means wounds is the name for the hp points of this system
Now according to page 168 you suffer the incapacitated condition when your wounds exceed your resilence.

When you suffer a critical strike you look on the servrity o the weapon, the guy you hit can make his fitness 1 check to reduce it and than you look what number you get on the crit table. After that you apply what is written in there. None of the boxes actually mentiones the incapacitated condition. Therefore a crit does not make you incapacitated as it is its own condition and has to be applied to trigger the end of the duel. (References page 168 to 169). So the critical strike table does not apply it either as it does not deal dmg and therefore does not inflict wounds( which is the name of the hp here. Yes I know thats confusing)
This becomes clearer as the finishing blow on page 162 explicitly makes it clear that there is a difference between dmg done and therefore wounds inflicted and the effects of the crit table.
So no the effects on the crit table do not automatically cause the incapacitated condition.

31 minutes ago, The Grand Falloon said:

You better believe it!

Your enemy has an outburst in combat. Thinking quickly, you point you weapon at him, shouting, "Face me, Matsu-san, or be named coward!" That's just a TN 1 Command roll, and if he refuses the Clash, he'll lose Glory. If he accepts, you've got him.

As the Clash begins, he reduces his Strife to his Composure, so he can't bid squat. You are welcome to bid a free Strife, just to make sure you go first.

Make a Center action using your Fire ring. Make darn sure you Keep an Opportunity. Use that Opportunity to give your opponent 2 Strife. He just went over his Composure, and now you can make a Finishing Blow.

That's called the Quart of Blood technique. You do that, a quart of blood just fall right out of a person's body.

Skirmish --> Clash is not a scene progression, so they are still outbursting and their Strife is still above the Composure. It still means they will trigger a Finishing blow first time they gain Strife above their composure, which can be useful to exploit with Fire Stance.

Taking Center action in scenario you picted is needless, as you can do the same while simply Striking - it would give you two attacks instead of one. Despite popular wisdom, taking Center as your first action in a duel when you have initiative isn't really the best move, or even a good one.

3 hours ago, The Grand Falloon said:

You better believe it!

Your enemy has an outburst in combat. Thinking quickly, you point you weapon at him, shouting, "Face me, Matsu-san, or be named coward!" That's just a TN 1 Command roll, and if he refuses the Clash, he'll lose Glory. If he accepts, you've got him.

As the Clash begins, he reduces his Strife to his Composure, so he can't bid squat. You are welcome to bid a free Strife, just to make sure you go first.

Make a Center action using your Fire ring. Make darn sure you Keep an Opportunity. Use that Opportunity to give your opponent 2 Strife. He just went over his Composure, and now you can make a Finishing Blow.

That's called the Quart of Blood technique. You do that, a quart of blood just fall right out of a person's body.

So outbursts in skirmishes are bad because the skirmish can suddenly become a one-round duel? That's a poor way to balance things in my opinion. For one thing, are GMs really going to trigger a skirmish every time their PCs have an outburst in combat? For another, Matsu-san, when fighting the Lost, Goblins, Bears, etc will not have to worry about this mechanism. It's a balance feature that only works in skirmishes against Samurai. Again, poor balance imo.

@Teveshszat i disagree : if you took a critical strike, that means your wounds exceed your resilience - it is the very condition of getting a critical strike, unless you use a kata or another technique - so in most cases, if you take a critical strike that means you're down, exception made of the special techiques that inflict critical strikes directely.

31 minutes ago, Kyros Skyfall said:

@Teveshszat i disagree : if you took a critical strike, that means your wounds exceed your resilience - it is the very condition of getting a critical strike, unless you use a kata or another technique - so in most cases, if you take a critical strike that means you're down, exception made of the special techiques that inflict critical strikes directely.

That is incorrect.
A critical strike is triggered most of the time by spending 2 opportunities when you take the strike action. Besides this standard method you also can get it through some technqiues like heartpiercing strike and ofcourse through finishing blow.
Yes you also suffer a crittical strike when exceeding the resilence value but thats not the only method and also not the most common one.
The critical strike table still does not give out the condition you need to end the duel and you can´t say that per default every crit does casue them as most ways to get a crit do not rely on the fact that the wounds exceed the resilence value.
Therefore no the lowest result on the crit table does not cause the conditions to end the duel automatically. As the condition are tied to the fact that you are exceeding the resilence value, not tied to receiving a critical strike.

@Teveshszat ok, you are right and i was wrong. thank you for pointing it : I had to check again and i missed that opportunity use on the strike action. Now I must admit rules take a whole different sense.

I need to meditate on that, but it seems now the game need all the more defense scaling thant before (I think I'm gonna go throught a lot of testing before next post).

Anyway thanks again for clarification Teveshszat :-)

Play a few games and you will realize just how tough TN2 is to hit consistently, especially hard to get with opportunities.

It's sounds a lot easier than it is in practice.

6 hours ago, SideshowLucifer said:

Play a few games and you will realize just how tough TN2 is to hit consistently, especially hard to get with opportunities.

It's sounds a lot easier than it is in practice.

Can I mention that I hate that the entire area below the post form is made up of clickable links that all wipe out your post? Not that I lost this post 5 **** times.

A 3/3 (ring/skill) hits TN2 97% of the time, that seems consistent to me. Avoiding all strife he still hits it 55% of the time, a 3/5 or 4/4 hits it with no strife about 75% of the time.

Now what about the 2s2o threshold for critical fishing? ~42%-3/3, 63%-3/5, 72%-4/4, 83%-5/5. (all with strife)

This makes it seem like the fishing for criticals is probably inferior any time you get your hands on a war weapon and rely on two hits to incapacitate. And while it's super easy to hit generating critical is on the low end of reliability in the early/mid game (before 5/5).

still, the damage system seems largely flawed to me, cause it does not make logical sense :

you are still as esay to toutch (and inflict critical strikes on) when you're an experienced warrior as when you're a debutant. some may say you can use the ''strike like the air'' kata to improve your defense, but only if you had the opportunity to strike first (whitch does not make sens as I said earlier, because a skilled martial artist is just ''passively'' more difficult to hit).

actually, a character that is uncouncious or unaware of your presence is still a TN 2 to hit !

finaly, you can get in ridiculous situations where your armor stops all the damages, but you still get a critical strike that inflict you a deep scar, or worst : a severed hand ! you can get a severed hand but no damages !

really, the combat system should not go throught beta without deep modifications : a system has to make logical sense.

@Kinzen You're right, a skilled combatant is harder to hit. The question is, where is that represented in the rules? Some have pointed out that techniques cover that, to some extent (e.g. Striking As Air), and I expect we'll see even more techniques that raise the TN in the full version. By that logic, a skilled combatant is harder to hit because they have the technique; anyone who lacks those techniques might not be a "skilled combatant". Like courtiers--they'll need to buy other techniques, or they won't be able to keep up with courtiers.

Buuuuut if that's not enough, and if high skill should make someone harder to hit, then I think there's probably a straightforward solution based on two premises:

1. As others have said, rename "Wounds"* and narratively decouple them from getting hit. They can still represent cuts and scrapes, but also the effort of weaving out of the way, last ditch positioning, etc.
2. Here's the new part: include skill in the Resilience calculation.

Here are two possible options to include high sill in resilience:

1. Add your lowest Martial skill to your Resilience. OR
2. If your highest Martial skill exceeds both your Water ring and Earth ring, add the difference to your resilience.

That bonus could be part of the normal calculation, or they could be added by techniques. Those certainly aren't they're only options, and they may both be very wrong, but they're at least discussion fodder

To keep things balanced/even, other skill groups could similarly influence other derived attributes (though the relationships might require some creative explanation): Social skills --> composure; Scholar skills --> vigilance; Artisan skills --> focus

*I do not want to be part of that semantic argument

On 14/10/2017 at 5:19 AM, WHW said:

Skirmish --> Clash is not a scene progression, so they are still outbursting and their Strife is still above the Composure. It still means they will trigger a Finishing blow first time they gain Strife above their composure, which can be useful to exploit with Fire Stance.

Taking Center action in scenario you picted is needless, as you can do the same while simply Striking - it would give you two attacks instead of one. Despite popular wisdom, taking Center as your first action in a duel when you have initiative isn't really the best move, or even a good one.

I disagree. i Believe that if your enemy strike will hurt you more even if he is being second (lost the initiative.) Defense and mindgames (Center is both) is a good option.

Otherwise, you go for a kill, become frustated that your oponent can parry and hope that he dont return the favor in his action.

Hi, it's me, your friend who loves simple systems and cares veeery little about actual fights to replicate.

I can see how having the same TN to hit a master swordsman and a drowsy peasant is weird. I also appreciate how a simple +1 hop in TN is a big deal and +2 hops in TNs can seriously break the game (much like facing someone with very large Reflexes scores could screw things royally in 4th ed in terms of pacing a fight where nobody hits the other dude).

So hear me out, here is my fix:
At Rank 3, every bushi, monk and ninja gets their TN to hit bumped to 3.
At Rank 4 or 5 (haven't decided yet), every shugenja and courtier does too.

Voila.

According to the email, this will not be something changed.

I'm also not fond of character weapon skill not being a factor in defense. I understand why it's difficult to change mechanically. Perhaps changing the fitness roll to a combat roll would help, or by adding some sort of reduction mechanic based on combat skill, a bit like parry in edge of the empire.

Fundamentally, I'm not fond of it because it fails to support the sorts of samurai fantasies that the game should be representing. This sort of resource attrition based scaling prevents a single highly skilled combatant from defeating larger number of lesser foes, a staple of samurai fiction and mythologies. Musashi's legendary duel with the Yashioka school being perhaps the most famous example of such. It simply wouldn't be possible with the system as written.

3 hours ago, Chrislee66 said:

I'm also not fond of character weapon skill not being a factor in defense. I understand why it's difficult to change mechanically. Perhaps changing the fitness roll to a combat roll would help, or by adding some sort of reduction mechanic based on combat skill, a bit like parry in edge of the empire.

Fundamentally, I'm not fond of it because it fails to support the sorts of samurai fantasies that the game should be representing. This sort of resource attrition based scaling prevents a single highly skilled combatant from defeating larger number of lesser foes, a staple of samurai fiction and mythologies. Musashi's legendary duel with the Yashioka school being perhaps the most famous example of such. It simply wouldn't be possible with the system as written.

Dare I ask, have you tried? There are rules for lesser foes, and it would be interesting to see what a fully-operational Rank 6 bushi looks like.

On 15/10/2017 at 5:33 PM, Teveshszat said:

That is incorrect.
A critical strike is triggered most of the time by spending 2 opportunities when you take the strike action. Besides this standard method you also can get it through some technqiues like heartpiercing strike and ofcourse through finishing blow.
Yes you also suffer a crittical strike when exceeding the resilence value but thats not the only method and also not the most common one.
The critical strike table still does not give out the condition you need to end the duel and you can´t say that per default every crit does casue them as most ways to get a crit do not rely on the fact that the wounds exceed the resilence value.
Therefore no the lowest result on the crit table does not cause the conditions to end the duel automatically. As the condition are tied to the fact that you are exceeding the resilence value, not tied to receiving a critical strike.

Do remember that, by default, whenever your Wounds exceed your Resilience you suffer the Incapacitated condition, even if the crit has 0 severity.

23 hours ago, Chrislee66 said:

I'm also not fond of character weapon skill not being a factor in defense. I understand why it's difficult to change mechanically. Perhaps changing the fitness roll to a combat roll would help, or by adding some sort of reduction mechanic based on combat skill, a bit like parry in edge of the empire.

Fundamentally, I'm not fond of it because it fails to support the sorts of samurai fantasies that the game should be representing. This sort of resource attrition based scaling prevents a single highly skilled combatant from defeating larger number of lesser foes, a staple of samurai fiction and mythologies. Musashi's legendary duel with the Yashioka school being perhaps the most famous example of such. It simply wouldn't be possible with the system as written.

Have you tried out Minion Group rules? Because you definitely can have "one versus many" bloody mountains scenarios using minion rules. Kakita critting a minion group is probably taking out at least 3 members of it with one action, if not more.

This game is not designed around PVP scenarios where player characters are fighting other player characters. NPCs - both legions of minions and single powerful adversaries - have their own rules tailor crafted for being, well, opposition to player characters.