For those using RoT either as a setting or just as expanded Fantasy rules vs the base game, what are your thoughts regarding the relative damage of weapons? It seems that Ranged weapons have a distinct advantage, and I'm wondering if I'm missing something.

Let's assume primary characteristics of 3.

• Sword: 6 damage (3+3)
• Greatsword: 7 damage (3+4; with the added zinger that you need a good Agility to use it, so you can't focus solely on brawn)
• Bow: 7 damage (flat damage)
• Longbow (usable with a 3 agility at no penalty): 8 damage (flat damage)
• I'll leave crossbows out of this since they might do massive damage (factoring in pierce) but they're very slow. Longbows aren't.

For the sake of the argument, I'll throw in magic damage, but I have less issue with these given all the other flexibility and benefits a magic attack can include.

• Attack spell (not empowered): 3 (based on a casting characteristic of 3)
• Attack spell with staff: 7 (3+4)
• Empowered with staff: 10 (3+3+4; a little misleading, since it will miss more often and do less damage for net successes since it's +2 difficulty)

I guess I'm a little surprised the typical melee attack (a sword slash) and the typical ranged attack (an arrow shot from a longbow) wouldn't be on par for damage, or that the longbow damage actually exceeds a greatsword!

The big disadvantage to melee being lower damage is it's less likely to overcome soak to even do damage.

So how have these stats worked out for you folks?

I personally dont have a problem with them. There are many more factors to consider then just damage.

For magic you need to factor in that each spell cost 2 strain and the penalty for threat and despair are much higher.

For sword you add Defensive 1 and crit rating of only 2 instead of 3 on a bow. plus the option to use a shield or other weapon.

For greatsword you add Defensive 1, Pierce 1 and a crit rating of only 2.

Bows and sword and longbow and greatswords have the same number of Hardpoints so same possiblity for upgrades also.

For range factor in that if they are engaged with a melee they add extra difficulty to the check. If you allies are engaged they upgrade the check. So in the melee vs range discussion distance is a factor. Also for range the opponents can have cover same goes for casters.

So its like a classic fantasy role in the party system. Your ranged combatant will be a glass cannon high damage low soak, maybe. And your melee fighters need to be though so they can stop those nasty melee critters from reaching your ranged and casters.

Again your system wont break if you adjust these numbers as you see fit unless you go complete wacky . Would encourage you to try them out first maybe talk to the players and let them know that the damage is something that can be adjusted if it feels wrong.

4 hours ago, Dragonshadow said:

For those using RoT either as a setting or just as expanded Fantasy rules vs the base game, what are your thoughts regarding the relative damage of weapons? It seems that Ranged weapons have a distinct advantage, and I'm wondering if I'm missing something.

Let's assume primary characteristics of 3.

• Sword: 6 damage (3+3)
• Greatsword: 7 damage (3+4; with the added zinger that you need a good Agility to use it, so you can't focus solely on brawn)
• Bow: 7 damage (flat damage)
• Longbow (usable with a 3 agility at no penalty): 8 damage (flat damage)
• I'll leave crossbows out of this since they might do massive damage (factoring in pierce) but they're very slow. Longbows aren't.

For the sake of the argument, I'll throw in magic damage, but I have less issue with these given all the other flexibility and benefits a magic attack can include.

• Attack spell (not empowered): 3 (based on a casting characteristic of 3)
• Attack spell with staff: 7 (3+4)
• Empowered with staff: 10 (3+3+4; a little misleading, since it will miss more often and do less damage for net successes since it's +2 difficulty)

I guess I'm a little surprised the typical melee attack (a sword slash) and the typical ranged attack (an arrow shot from a longbow) wouldn't be on par for damage, or that the longbow damage actually exceeds a greatsword!

The big disadvantage to melee being lower damage is it's less likely to overcome soak to even do damage.

So how have these stats worked out for you folks?

How many bullets does a Great Sword hold?................

The damage might be similar or identical at a characteristic of 3, but most often a character will have a characteristic of 4 in their chosen field, which more often than not tips the damage in favor of melee weapons.

• Sword 7 damage (3+4) + free offhand
  • Shields are very good defensively
  • dual wielding is really good offensively
  • Hold a torch, carry something, ability to do things with a free hand
• Greatsword 8 damage (4+4)
  • greatswords do have a agility requirement, other 2 handed weapons do not
• Bow/Longbow 7/8 damage (flat damage ratings)
  • requires ammo
  • penalties when you are in melee
  • penalties when your allies are in melee with the target

As for soak, with a brawn of 3 and a sword, that is a damage code of 6 (3+3) + net hits. So minimum 7 damage. By the time things have that much soak you should either have a way to handle it or the GM isn't playing fair in my opinion.

Thanks, folks. You've convinced me that there's no inherent problem.

I probably should have mentioned that I'm toying with making melee damage flat rather than basing it on Brawn, like Rob Walker's Sky Wars setting. I likely will use an assumed Brawn of 3 for damage, but I'll stick to the bonuses listed per weapon from the Terrinoth book. Brawn will still play a large factor in melee since it helps drive the number of dice rolled (and affects the number of net successes). Flat base damage also helps talents like Finesse (Sky Wars has Finesse as a weapon property, but I was thinking of allowing it when encumbrance doesn't exceed number of hands required, so both a long sword and a quarterstaff would be finessable under RoT encumbrance amounts).

Regardless of what I decide, this has been a helpful discussion to help provide a context for each attack type. Thanks!

3 hours ago, Dragonshadow said:

Thanks, folks. You've convinced me that there's no inherent problem.

I probably should have mentioned that I'm toying with making melee damage flat rather than basing it on Brawn, like Rob Walker's Sky Wars setting. I likely will use an assumed Brawn of 3 for damage, but I'll stick to the bonuses listed per weapon from the Terrinoth book. Brawn will still play a large factor in melee since it helps drive the number of dice rolled (and affects the number of net successes). Flat base damage also helps talents like Finesse (Sky Wars has Finesse as a weapon property, but I was thinking of allowing it when encumbrance doesn't exceed number of hands required, so both a long sword and a quarterstaff would be finessable under RoT encumbrance amounts).

Regardless of what I decide, this has been a helpful discussion to help provide a context for each attack type. Thanks!

Im curious to why this tweak ? Again system wont break if you like it do it but your brain will hurt when you need to calculate this on the fly for npc and monsters and balance it against brawl. When you read statblocks for any npc or monster it assumes weapon + brawn so either your npc will work under different rules which can be totally legit as long as your players know it from the get go. Or you will need to adjust it on the fly if using other stats then your own.

If you like the finesse part maybe just tweak the finesse talent to use agi instead of brawn for damage, when encumbrance doesn't exceed number of hands required or make it a improved finesse talent. But you risk agi becoming a superstat at the expense of soak though but you would be able to do melee and range equally well.

Btw im no way a RAW advocate anything goes especially in this system just have fun with it.

23 minutes ago, Archellus said:

Im curious to why this tweak ? Again system wont break if you like it do it but your brain will hurt when you need to calculate this on the fly for npc and monsters and balance it against brawl. When you read statblocks for any npc or monster it assumes weapon + brawn so either your npc will work under different rules which can be totally legit as long as your players know it from the get go. Or you will need to adjust it on the fly if using other stats then your own.

If you like the finesse part maybe just tweak the finesse talent to use agi instead of brawn for damage, when encumbrance doesn't exceed number of hands required or make it a improved finesse talent. But you risk agi becoming a superstat at the expense of soak though but you would be able to do melee and range equally well.

Btw im no way a RAW advocate anything goes especially in this system just have fun with it.

It's tough to make a case for flat ranged damage but allowing melee damage to double dip against brawn by using it as a base and as a roll. Even with flat damage, a good roll still does more damage, which already reflects how your brawn made you hit harder. There's no reason for brawn to factor into the base damage as well.

As I mentioned, though, I haven't decided for sure to go with flat damage. I still see brawl's base damage just being brawn+0, and magic damage is your casting characteristic. So really all three (four if you count brawl separately from melee) damage types use a slightly different calculation than the others anyway.

Whatever system I'd use would apply equally to NPC's and PC's, so I'd take on that level of pain in service of hacking the stats. That's only fair. But in the end, maybe it "ain't broke enough to fix it" in my mind and I'll just go largely as written.

Perhaps the easiest ground for me is your suggestion to make Finesse encompass damage as well as base characteristic for the attack roll. It's cleaner to swap one characteristic for the other entirely .

if its really picking your brain you could just make ranged a agi+weapon say 3 for bows 4 for longbow. so many options

But tbh try it out as written. IF all your pc make melee heavy persons allow them to shine for an encounter or 2 and then hit them with ranged adversary from across a canyon with a narrow bridge requiring coordination to cross. Dont do it all the time but make their skill and stat choices matter for good and for bad situations. So it dosent matter that the damage is not always equal

9 hours ago, Dragonshadow said:

It's tough to make a case for flat ranged damage but allowing melee damage to double dip against brawn by using it as a base and as a roll. Even with flat damage, a good roll still does more damage, which already reflects how your brawn made you hit harder. There's no reason for brawn to factor into the base damage as well.

As I mentioned, though, I haven't decided for sure to go with flat damage. I still see brawl's base damage just being brawn+0, and magic damage is your casting characteristic. So really all three (four if you count brawl separately from melee) damage types use a slightly different calculation than the others anyway.

Whatever system I'd use would apply equally to NPC's and PC's, so I'd take on that level of pain in service of hacking the stats. That's only fair. But in the end, maybe it "ain't broke enough to fix it" in my mind and I'll just go largely as written.

Perhaps the easiest ground for me is your suggestion to make Finesse encompass damage as well as base characteristic for the attack roll. It's cleaner to swap one characteristic for the other entirely .

Brawn is a fairly underused stat outside of melee, hence it's scaling there. It makes the big musclebound brute scarier than the waif. There is actually quite a bit of balance complexity that goes into melee scaling with brawn, and the finesse style feats keeping that scaling. It really really makes those feats overvalued by 1-2 talent tiers because you get the best of everything and brawn continues to be a dumpstat mechanically even for melee based characters. On a mechanical level it's kinda just removing the characteristic. On a simulationist level it's saying "real muscle power down't matter when you hit things". And, on a narrative level it kinda does all sorts of funky thing "You mean that rail-thin guy just hit me for how much? oh ... that big buster sword is based off his agility/cunning/wisdom."

Now all that said. It's all really minutiae that can really depend on the people at the table, their playstyles, and how the game is run. For example, if all melee weapons are "powered" or enhanced with magic, or *insert some other reason brawn wouldn't matter anyway* like lightsabers, then it functionally doesn't really matter. However i would urge you to ask yourself some questions before making a change like this.

• What problem does this solve?
  • Is that or How is that already handled by the system?
    • Does that work?
      • If not why?
  • Does this fix that problem?
  • What are the gains of doing it this way?
  • What are the costs of doing it this way?
    • Are those costs acceptable?
  • What are the side effects of doing it this way?
    • Are those side effects acceptable?
  • Will this make the game more fun for those at the table? (this is really the most important question)
  • Am i changing something just to change something? (this is the second most important question, and often a difficult one to honestly answer)

On 1/7/2019 at 6:57 AM, Dragonshadow said:

I  probably  should have mentioned that I'm toying with making melee damage flat rather  than basing it on Bra   w   n...

That shouldn't cause any problems as a house rule. The rules even assume a Brawn of 3 when pricing melee weapons, so you're on the right track. Personally though; I would do the reverse and make ranged weapon damage characteristic-based. I would make most weapons Agility-based, except for certain thrown and muscle-powered projectile weapons (like most bows, thrown knives, or javalins); which would be Brawn-based (for damage).

I would have preferred if bows had Brawn + X for Damage calculations. Crossbows would still have flat Damage ratings. Still though, it's not really too big of a deal.

I use 2 house rules at my table to even out the damage and allow for some different builds with my players.

1. Bow (and Crossbow) damage is HALF base damage (round up) as damage, and gains HALF base damage (round down) as Pierce. This has almost no effect in the standard case (vs soak of 3-4), but allows bows exceed melee weapons in damage against armored targets (by virtue of having higher base damage as noted in OP), and allows melee weapons to be more devastating against un-armored targets (like mages). It has the added effect of having Block (shield) and Barrier spells become more against ranged weapons, which stops the Ranger in the group from one shoting the necromancer NPC at the start of every combat.

2. Bladed weapons (sword, Greatsword, etc) apply a minimum BRAWN rating of 4 when determining damage. This is to normalize their damage and allow builds that make use of Finesse to make better use of melee weapons.

I haven't had any problems with this in the game. Generally ranged options do 1 more basic point of damage than melee of a similar variety. That being said my party consists of a mage, an archer, and a 2H signature weapon, so the damage difference is moot. They are all murder bots.

I would play through several sessions before changing the mechanics at all honestly. Outside of some fairly large and iconic rivals/nemesis, the minions seem to have a soak in the 1-3 range. Rivals toggle from 2-5 depending on role. The average bowshot/sword swing is probably going to drop a minion one way or another.