I find the RAW to lenient on hit ratios in combat.

Combatants hit very often and Defense and Active Defense don't impact enough on these results, IMO.

What this does is to force characters to wear a lot of armour, since Soak becomes the most important defensive Stat.

Boring.

Of course, armour needs to stay a major component of battlefield survival, for realism's sake.

But I would like very skilled warriors to be able to dodge and parry effectively also !

In V2, a character with 2 attacks, WS 65 and specialisations in dodge and parrying weapons could very effectively avoid two hits per round with a bit of luck.

So instead of upping general difficulty for melee attacks, say to 2d, or to an opposed roll, I'm thinking of just making Active Defense actions more effective.

Here's my idea:

Normal Defense cards give 1 Misfortune plus 1 Misfortune for Expertise.

That's a basic card, I'm OK with that. Maximum 2 Misfortune dice.

Advanced Defense cards provide 1 Challenge die. I would let the card also give out 1 Misfortune PER LEVEL of Expertise and Specialisation !

Thus an Advanced Dodge could dish out 1 Challenge and 4 Misfortune dice ! This would be the dodge of a super trained warrior, but still, it could happen.

Is this too powerful ? I'll tell you more when I test it. But one element contributes to keep this in balance. Active Defense Cards are based on different skills: Coordination, Resilience and Weapon skill. Most warriors will train Weapon Skill and possibly Resilience to withstand more damage and block effectively. But to max out all three Active Defense cards would take a lot of investment. (9 EPs at minimum). Also, remember that you need to be a Rank 3 character to buy a level 3 expertise.

So starting characters that concentrate on combat will typically have WS trained with a specialisation and maybe Resilience trained. By buying one Improved Defense Card, they will gain a great card that will give them 1 Challenge die + 2 Misfortune dice for added defense.

If that seems too powerful still, I would rule that with these Improved Defense Cards, you cannot use more than ONE on any one hit. That could be justified by the fact that an expert dodge is a trained reaction that doesn't mix with a block or a parry.

Thoughts ?

I dont know, my players use lots of armor AND active defenses and it makes them very potent.

Defense values from cards/armor plus added defense from active defenses makes a big difference. Also the improved defense cards are VERY helpful.

Basic enemy npcs really suck compared to players and have higher probability of missing than heroes. Player characters are easily optimized while NPC's for the most part have lot of built in negative modifiers in their actions, along with lacking stat blocks.

I'm basically stuck having to give the npcs access to basic active defense cards just to keep up.

I hear you Panzer.

I totally agree that the hero vs mook conundrum is not my cup of tea. I prefer opponents that can put up a fight.

That is why many of my monsters will have Active Defense cards.

For the others, I'm counting on the A/C/E Pools to save the day for the critters.

But I multiply the A/C/E pool per number of PCs. So 4 PCs, 4 times the A/C/E pool.

Why ? Because the A/C/E pool represents all those cards/skills that the monsters don't have and they need them desperatly if they want to be effective.

This said, I rarely use more than 2 or 3 Agression points in one go.

Also, I tend to divide monsters in groups that equal the party in number. So say 12 Goblins attack a party of 4, I'll spread them out into 4 groups of 3 Goblins for initiative purposes. After each and everyone of the monsters initiative slots, I'll remove recharge tokens from actions. So actions for monsters are shared, but recharge faster than the RAW dictates.

Jericho said:

I like that idea, and may use it myself.

I have a simple recharge rule for A/C/E.

Every second round one point is added to A/C/E pools for each NPC sharing the pool. To make sure I remember it I use a stance ring, turning it every round and whenever it's green I add to the pool.