It came from the GURPS forums: Low-Tech armor and fire damage

Precis: An examination of the effects of fire on low-tech characters.

Over on the GURPS forums, there's a thread on what happens to a fantasy character in light armor who gets dropped into a bonfire. The short answer is, not much in the short term, as his armor protects him for most of the direct damage from fire. People then pointed out additional consequences, and I wanted to go through all the rules and see what happens.

In this example, three delvers are dropped in a 15' deep pit filled with a perpetual fire. The delvers are Neil Knightly, a ST 14 HT 13 Knight in DR6 plate harness; Theo Thiefly, a ST 11 HT 11 Thief in DR2 leather armor; and Will Wizardly, a ST 10 HT 12 wizard in a DR 1 padded cloth robe. Will was hit by a magebane potion before being dropped in the pit and can't cast any spells. All three made Acrobatics rolls to reduce the distance fallen to effectively 0 yards and took no damage on landing: they're at full HP and FP but have no way of leaving the pit.

Fire, Heat, and Smoke

Their immediate problem is the flame of the fire pit. Fires of ordinary intensity do 1d-1 bu damage per second (Basic 433) as large-area injury. Armor DR protects normally. Neil's and Theo's armor have full body cover with no weak points, so the average of their torso DR and worst armor DR is 6 and 2 respectively, but Will is wearing a pointy hat instead of a full face helmet, so the average of his torso DR and the least protected hit location is 1/2, rounded down to 0. Neil's armor will completely protect him from the flame damage as the maximum damage of 5 is less than his armor DR; Theo will take 0-3 injury from the flame each second, averaging 1 point of damage every other second, and Will will take 1-5 points of injury from the flame because the minimum damage from a non-crushing attack is 1 and he has 0 effective DR. On average, he takes 8 points of injury every 3 seconds.

All of their clothing and armor is resistant to burning, and requires at least 10 points of burning damage in a single attack to ignite. Prolonged exposure has about a 1/6 chance of igniting something every 10 seconds, which isn't a concern since they're already surrounded by fire, but it might effect their gear eventually. Their flesh, being highly resistant to burning, will not ignite in this ordinary fire.

Their second problem is the heat (Basic 433). The temperature comfort zone for humans is 55 degrees wide and maxes out at 90 degrees F; any heat over the zone maximum plus 6 times the zone width is considered intense. In this case, that's 420 F, and the fire is burning at well over 800 F. Each delver's armor protects them against the effects of heat for 3 x DR seconds, and then they have to make HT rolls every second or lose 1 FP. They'll start to risk unconsciousness after losing FP equal to their HT, and FP loss of more than twice their HT is converted to HP loss. This isn't a concern for Will, who will be killed by the flames long before this is an issue, but Neil has to worry about it.

The final problem is that fires produce smoke, which GURPS treats as a poison (Basic 439) with a 10 second delay and a HT roll to resist. Failure causes coughing. The rules say that dense smoke causes damage but don't specify a mechanism: I'm going to rule that dense smoke has a secondary effect of choking, caused by failing a second HT roll to resist or failing the first HT by 5 or more. Each delver can avoid the effects of the smoke by holding their breath, which they can do for 2xHT seconds (see Basic 351: being on fire is mild exertion, but they were surprised and didn't have a chance to take deep breaths before falling into the pit). After that, they either breath smoke or lose 1 FP per second.

Slow Cooking a Knight

Will is doomed, and quickly. The flames burn him for more than HP damage within 6-7 seconds, and then he falls unconscious within a few seconds more. He probably dies before he inhales enough smoke to worry about coughing, as he hits -1xHP and his first HT roll to resist death around 11 seconds and -5xHP  and automatic death around 24 seconds.

Theo is not much better off. The flames do cumulative damage equal to his HP after 23 seconds, just as his breath gives out. He falls unconscious a few seconds later. He goes below -1xHP after 40 seconds, and dies sometime between then and 90 seconds, when he hits -5xHP.

Neil is in comparatively good shape. His armor completely protects him from the flames, protects him from the heat for 18 seconds, and he can hold his breath for 26 seconds. He doesn't have to make a single HT for 18 seconds, and even when he does, his high HT means he only fails 1 in 6. On average, Neil should be conscious long enough to watch Theo and Will die, though he passes out shortly after that. He doesn't take any HP damage for nearly 3 minutes, and he doesn't accumulate enough damage to risk death for nearly 6 minutes. He has good odds of surviving for over 10 minutes, but will inevitably die around the 12 minute mark.

How Real is It?

This depressing article suggests that GURPS over estimates the lethality of fires: lethal fire damage takes 3-4 minutes, not less than half a minute as happened for unprotected Will. It also over estimates the effectiveness of armor protection: death comes from "first degree respiratory burns" which means your lungs burn out.

Fire damage in GURPS should probably be reduced to 1d-2 or 1d-3, but being in or on fire should also be treated as an respiratory agent with an onset time of 5 seconds that does 1 bu, resisted by HT, with a symptom of -1 HT at 1/3 HP damage and -2 HT at 2/3 HP damage. Fire respiratory damage would also be cyclic for every 5 seconds as long as the victim is in or on fire.

Table Talk: How Much is Too Much?

+Peter V. Dell'Orto at Dungeon Fantastic posted on his approach to rules arguments in play, and I received some email feedback on my last session. And that got me thinking about the various gaming groups I'm in, and how much time we spend talking about the game, or arguing about rules, or just shooting the breeze during the time we could be gaming. It makes me wonder how much is too much? Should any off-topic talk be forbidden?

Edit: Joe at the Collaborative Gamer shared his views on this topic, too, and +Christopher R. Rice at Ravens N' Pennies talks about dealing with rules lawyers.

Types of Off-Topic Talk

I have a feeling that not all types of off-topic talk are equal, and different types should be tolerated at the table in different amounts.  Rules arguments are different than rules discussions are different than meta-game discussions are different than general chatter.

Rules Arguments: Repeated back and forth between player and GM about the rules for the game is generally unpleasant for the actual participants and any bystanders. Peter has a firm "hell no" rule against it, which seems to work for him, I guess. Rules arguments aren't something I like at my table, but I empathize with a player who wants to understand how the rules work and have them consistently applied so I'm not firm about cutting off rules arguments.

Rules Discussions: My online group has a bunch of rules tinkerers in it, and when the rules don't work right or unclear, there's sometimes a discussion of what to do about them. Often times, its "hey +Doug, how is Technical Grappling supposed to handle THIS," followed by a lamentation that the Technical Grappling playtest didn't spend enough time dealing with Spheres of Madness grappling SM -1 quadrapeds when the whole fight is happening at the bottom of a lake. Sometimes, this kind of discussion is necessary and fruitful, and sometimes it's a big waste of time that should be revisited in email. I don't have an easy way to tell which way the discussion is going (or if its going to turn into a rules argument), so it's hard to say whether I should cut this kind of stuff of earlier than I do. Peter's blanket rule makes more sense to me as I reflect on it: it's a bright line in a murky area.

Meta-Game Discussions: Talk about play style, or scheduling, or other things outside the game but related to it. I generally try to clamp down on this stuff, since it's better to use limited play time to play than to talk about playing, but I also think it's better that people are engaged and talking about the game rather than watching a movie or whatever. Sometimes I deliberately end the game a little early and initiate a discussion about this kind of stuff. It's helpful to get feedback in real-time.

Off-Topic Chatter: Depending on the group, this can be a huge distraction or more important than the actual game. My boardgames group, made up of some former co-workers that get together irregular at a Friendly Local Games Store, is much more about the chatter than the game: we're friends, but we don't see each other much, so games night is a reason to get together and socialize. My online group uses text chat for this kind of stuff, and that's pretty successful, and I don't feel bad about clamping down on off-topic chatter for that reason.

Changing the Table Style

So in the groups I run, there's a fair bit of rules discussion and (unfortunately) some rules arguments. I don't like the latter, but I'm torn about the former: I enjoy that stuff, and I suspect some other people do too, but it's also a distraction from the game that annoys some of the other people. I'm not sure there's a consensus, one way or the other, and I'm entirely sure that I don't want to have to be the conversation monitor for a group of my peers just because I volunteered to sit in the GM's chair.

I guess this one of those things that needs to be put into an explicit social contract, except that the act of writing down an explicit social contract seems to go against the implicit social contract of "we're all peers, adults, and friends, and shouldn't need to hire a lawyer to enjoy an evening." Assuming that's the implicit social contract and not just my projecting my feelings out onto the group at large.

I don't really have a conclusion. Every group is different, and everyone is going to have a different view about what to do. I'm learning more and more toward Peter's approach of "no rules arguments," simply because it's a bright line that's (hopefully) easy to enforce.

Magic Economics: How much should spellcasting cost?

GURPS Magic has a section on the economics of creating magic items, which is fairly reasonable: it starts by assuming the monthly wages of wizards capable of enchantment, and works from there to determine how much enchantments would need to cost for them to be able to earn those enchantments. Which is fine, but it's something of a static analysis: if a wizard earns an Average wage (as defined by the GURPS rules), then magic items cost so much. But it doesn't really address what a wizard should earn, assuming that should be a setting detail.

The thing is that a wizard's earnings should be based on the opportunity cost of not paying a wizard to cast some particular spell. If a wizard can produce some service that people would want to buy for less than other providers, then people seeking that service are going to bid up the wizard's payments until the cost matches the other providers. Since many things that a wizard can theoretically provide have no easy to price equivalent service (what's the value of a Teleport Other spell?), this exercise can't necessarily determine how much a wizard should get paid, but it can put a lower bound on a wizard's wages. If a wizard can maintain a Wealthy lifestyle by casting Create Food, there's little reason to think that he's going to work for Average wages by enchanting objects.

The Opportunity Costs of Candles and Continual Light

As mentioned, a lot of spells provide services that don't have an easy to price equivalent. But some spells do. For example, Continual Light provides enough light to eliminate darkness penalties in a 1, 2, or 3 yard radius for an average of 7 days. $7 of tallow candles provides 1 yard of light for 7 days; a $20 lantern and $14 of lantern oil provides 2 yards of light for 7 days. A wizard who can make an acceptable living by casting Continual Light for $7 or less can undercut candlemakers and oil salesman; a wizard who needs more money than that might have a niche market (underwater lighting, for instance) or need to find other spells to earn money.

Continual Light is an interesting spell for this example because it is easy to learn: it requires Magery 0 and a single prerequisite within the same college. Even an IQ11, Magery 0 spellcaster can learn with not much effort: learning two hard skills, one to a professional level, is equivalent to getting a BS with a major and a minor. It has a linear energy cost of 2 per yard of light produced, so 2 energy for a 1 yard light and a 4 energy for a 2 yard light, nicely matching the doubled cost of moving from candles to lantern oil.

Using the standard magic system, a hypothetical IQ11, Magery 0 spellcaster with Light-9 and Continual Light-13 can recover 6 FP per hour, succeeds in casting Continual Light 86% of time, and can expect to produce 20 castings of a 1 yard Continual Light per 8 hour working day. Selling these spells for a mere $6 each and leaving some leeway for disastrous critical failures (roughly twice a year, our wizard forgets how to cast Continual Light for an average of 2 weeks and every other year he summons a demon) gives an income that is high end Comfortable, if not Wealthy, in GURPS terms. A delving or enchanter grade wizard, with IQ15, Magery 3+, and Recover Energy-15 puts out 95 castings a day and is Very Wealthy if not Filthy Rich.

In a Threshold system, a wizard's spellcasting frequency is limited by the lower of his Threshold or his Recovery Rate. Thaumatology suggests a Recovery Rate of 8, which puts the sample minimal spellcaster at a low Average wage, and a delving grade wizard (without an increased Recovery Rate) at Average or possibly Comfortable. My College Ritual Book system suggests that Recovery Rate should be purchased as an advantage. A low end spellworker with Recovery Rate 10 makes at least Average wage, and a delving wizard can earn Comfortable to Wealth wages, depending on his exact Recovery Rate.

So what does this mean?

This is a pretty simple thought experiment, but it strongly suggests that most lighting in a world of magic should either be Continual Light spells, or that wizards should be paid more than the standard GURPS model. The standard model assumes that wizards get paid Average wages and that spells cost about $1/FP to cast. More realistically, wizards should get paid Wealthy to Filthy Rich wages and spells should cost $5/FP to cast (or probably more, since this analysis doesn't begin to factor in the rarity costs of being the only IQ16 wizard in 200 miles who knows how to cast Teleport Other).

Which isn't to say that all PC wizards should be rich and well-employed, casting Continual Light all day. PC wizards tend to have all kinds of issues that make them unsuitable for employment, such as Obsessions with becoming liches or an Elder Thing ancestry. It just means that NPC wizards who lack those issues should be well paid, and willing to charge people a pretty penny for spell-casting services.

Aside: What About Enchantment?

At the start of this discussion, I noted that the GURPS Magic treatment of the enchantment of magic items assumes certain wages and works out the cost of magical items from there. It does have a brief section on changing those assumptions. The cost of Quick and Dirty enchantment goes from $1/point to $25/point (Filthy Rich enchanters with Enchantment-20 could easily have Continual Light-20 and be raking it in on the lighting market, so they don't come cheap) while Slow and Sure enchantment goes from $33/point to $666/point.

Alternately, people can ditch the GURPS Magic enchantment rules, which don't produce very fun or interesting results anyway. In Dungeon Fantasy, PCs can't become enchanters, and the exact details of the enchanting process are unknown. It's entirely possible that Q&D items are still $1/point because it doesn't take a master enchanter and a circle of five enchanter-grade wizards costing $6600/day to produce 4 Q&D items/day. Maybe a single enchanter can pump out 6 of them a day.

Melee Academy: Using Your Friends to Keep Your Reach Advantage

Melee Academy is a monthly cross-blog article and link-fest among the GURPS blogs, with each article focusing on some aspect of melee tactics. There's supposed to be a theme each month, and this month's theme is using Reach.

My contribution is an extension of Peter Dell'Orto's "Keeping Your Reach Advantage." Peter focuses on individuals using a reach weapon. I'm focusing on groups.

Shield Walls and Reach Weapons

GURPS tactics heavily favor concentration of force. Making multiple attacks from multiple sources is one of the best ways to overwhelm a target's defenses: each additional defense is at a penalty, of course, and while a Retreat gives a big bonus to Dodge and Fencing parries from a single attacker, it doesn't apply at all to attacks from a different attacker. In Dungeon Fantasy, the usual way to achieve this concentration of force is two reasonably skilled attackers making Rapid Strikes, Dual Weapon Attacks, or Extra Attacks on a single foe.

Reach weapons can explicitly be used to attack through the hex occupied by an ally (Basic p388). If two defenders with Reach 1 weapons stand in front of an allied spearman with a Reach 2 weapon, all three of them can strike an enemy adjacent to the two front characters. Even if the enemy has a Reach 2 weapon of his own, he has a -4 penalty to attack the spearmen, since the two defenders in front act as cover. The spearman can control the range easily because any foe with Reach 1 weapon has to step in Close Combat with one of his allies in order to reach him, and striking out of a close combat is a difficult business and the swordsmen still count as cover. Even if the foe decides to make a Move or Move and Attack to get to the spearman, he has to make several difficult Evade attacks to get to the spearman if he has to go through the defenders.

Taking Advantage of Reach with a Shield Wall

If the defenders have the appropriate perks (Shield Wall Training, Sacrificial Block, Sacrificial Parry, and/or Teamwork), they can even use their Defenses to defend for the spearman. Between their defenses and the use of their bodies as cover, the spearman is well enough defended that generally suicidal maneuvers such as All-Out Attacks become viable. Two defenders and two spearmen in a 2 by 2 formation can put up to 6 attacks (a normal Attack from each of the defenders and an All-Out Attack Double from each of the spearmen) against a single foe, mostly likely overwhelming any defenses.

There are a lot of variations on this tactic. Two high skill characters acting as defenders (such as a DF Knight and a DF Swashbuckler) can easily hold the line while making Defensive Attacks to improve their own defenses, while lower skill characters with Reach 2 melee weapons (such as a DF Wizard with a staff or a DF Barbarian with a two-handed flail) use All-Out Attack (Determined) to increase their odds of hitting with a big, powerful attack. Low skill guards acting as defenders on the front line can allow high skill characters standing behind them to unleash their most powerful attacks without worrying about their own defenses.

Shield walls with reach weapons are also a good trick for monsters. 8 orcs in a single line abreast are spread too thin to overwhelm a pair of PCs - each PC is attacked by only 2-4 orcs at a time. If the orcs have a shield wall and a second rank with Reach weapons, each PC can be attacked by 5 orcs, and 3 of the orcs can make All-Out Attacks. Many PCs have a hard time defending against 5-8 attacks in a single round.

Disadvantages of Shield Walls

The biggest problem with a multirank shield wall is that the characters in front can't Retreat into hexes occupied by people behind them. For some archetypes, like a heavily armored knight, this isn't a problem. A highly mobile skirmisher like a Swashbuckler who depends on Retreats to augment his defenses may find the costs of a Shield Wall to be higher than the benefits.

Another problem with a multirank shield wall is that the concentration of bodies invites area attacks. An alchemical fire grenade lobbed into the second rank of the shield wall catches at lot more people than the same grenade lobbed at a loose collection of skirmishers. 

Shield walls also invite enfilade fire: an arrow fired into the front rank may not hit the target, but there are plenty of targets beyond that it might hit. If the second rank are all making All-Out Attacks, an arrow that misses a defender in the front may hit a defenseless character in the back.

And in Dungeon Fantasy, there are a lot of things that can frustrate shield walls. A group of Acid Spiders are tall enough to walk over most SM+0 defenders, ignoring the entire question of Evade as they move to attack the relatively dangerous spearmen in the second rank. Flying, burrowing, insubstantial, and some diffuse monsters can also move past the defenders with relatively little risk.

Conclusion

Shield Walls require some investment in skill and weapon selection, but can have a big pay off in combat. Even a 4 person delving band can adopt a 2 by 2 shield wall in a narrow corridor, and more delvers or henchmen make the shield wall even better. Smart, organized monsters can also use shield walls to create a disproportionate threat.

More Melee Academy Links

• At Dungeon Fantastic, "Keeping Your Reach Advantage."
• At Gaming Ballistic, "Reach Basics."

Adjusting Swing Damage in Dungeon Fantasy

Inspired by a comment I made in response to "Noodling around with DR in Dungeon Fantasy."

In every edition of GURPS, there are two major types of low-tech damage: swing/cutting, representing swung swords and axes and other weapons that act as levers to multiply the user's strength; and thrust/impaling, representing spears and rapiers and other sharp weapons that do not have the same leverage effect. Armor absorbs damage, and the resulting value is (usually) multiplied by x1.5 for cutting weapons and by x2 for impaling weapons to produce injury. (There are other types of damage, but most weapons are one of these two types).

In theory, thrust/impaling weapons are better against unarmored targets, and swing/cutting weapons are better against armored targets. In practice, the base damage for a swing/cutting weapon is at least 50% better than thrust/impaling weapon, so swing/cutting weapons almost always do more damage. 4th edition's revision of Weapon Master (to add per-die bonus damage) and addition of Injury Tolerances (representing various things like doors or skeletons that are more resistant to impaling attacks) magnified the superiority of swing/cutting weapons: a ST13 Weapon Master gets +4 damage when swinging his sword, but needs to be ST19 to get the same bonus damage when thrusting. And if that Weapon Master has to face skeletons, golems, and other common monsters of Dungeon Fantasy, then not only does his thrust/impaling blow do less base damage, it does even less injury than normal. His swing/cutting blow does more damage and gets full x1.5 injury past armor.

In serious DF games, all this has the unfortunate tendency of homogenizing weapons to swing/cutting weapons like swords and axes, with the occasional flail. Spears are not cheap, versatile weapons; they're the weapons of people who don't understand how the game mechanics work. All swashbucklers end up using Edged Rapiers, as these versatile weapons combine swing/cutting damage with fencing parries and a flexible 2-hex Reach. All serious fighters need ST13, if not ST17, and need to be Weapon Masters to get that bonus +4 or +6 damage.

All that has some weird secondary effects. A ST17 Barbarian does 3d+2 (average 12.5) with his oversized ax, while a ST14 knight/weapon master does 2d+7 (average 14) with his broadsword and gets better parries and Rapid Strikes. Second line combatants, like thieves and clerics, can't begin to compete with the DR necessary to challenge the strong weapon masters. Monsters with reasonably low DR that can be penetrated by a ST12 cleric's ax have effectively 0 DR against the knight. And on the other side, monsters with high ST and swing/cutting weapons (such as stone golems or ogres) become extremely swingy: very few delvers wear enough armor to absorb or meaningfully reduce a 3d+6 cu attack, so delvers either get through a combat unscathed or get splattered.

The entire situation is very unsatisfactory.

What's the Real Problem?

The swing damage chart goes up too fast compared to thrusting damage. Each point of ST increases swing damage by 1, but it takes 2 points of ST to increase thrust. So while a ST10 guy with a broadsword does 1d+1 cutting and 1d impaling, and has some reasonable choices for strike type to make depending on his target's armor, a ST17 guy does 3d cutting versus 1d+4 impaling, and there's rarely any reason to thrust. Up to about ST14, and without Weapon Master, the ST table works. Past that, it rapidly spirals into unreason.

What are Some Solutions?

There's been a lot of suggested fixes for this: limit striking ST for humans to 14 (unsatisfactory); create a very complicated ST table (too complicated in play); doubling DR for armor (complicated and unsatisfactory). None of them have been very successful. Most of these solutions require even more rules fixes and carve-outs, such as adding armor divisors for spears or special rules for dwarves or whatever else. They don't address the fundamental problem, which is that swing damage goes up in value too quickly as ST increases.

Reducing Swing Scaling

The solution I'm proposing is fairly simple: get rid of the +1 to swing damage for every +1 to ST. Instead, the swing damage table goes up at the same rate as the thrust table: +1 to swing damage for every +2 to ST. Use the following table:

ST	Thrust	Swing
10	1d-2	1d
11	1d-1	1d
12	1d-1	1d+1
13	1d	1d+1
14	1d	1d+2
15	1d+1	1d+2
16	1d+1	2d-1
17	1d+2	2d-1
18	1d+2	2d
19	2d-1	2d

The progression should readily apparent: +1 to swing damage on even ST scores, and +1 to thrust damage on odd ST scores, with Xd+3 converting to (X+1)d-1.

How does the new table work in practice? Here's the damage for an ordinary thrusting broadsword for various STs, without and with Weapon Master:

Broadsword Damage for various STs, using the old and new tables

ST				Old Swing Damage	New Swing Damage	Thrust Damage	Weapon Master Swing Damage	Weapon Master Thrust Damage
10				1d+1	1d+1	1d	1d+3	1d+2
11				1d+2	1d+1	1d+1	1d+4	1d+3
12				1d+3	1d+2	1d+1	1d+5	1d+3
13				2d	1d+2	1d+2	2d+4	1d+4
14				2d+1	1d+3	1d+2	2d+5	1d+4
15				2d+2	1d+3	1d+3	2d+6	1d+5
16				2d+3	2d	1d+3	2d+7	1d+5
17				3d	2d	1d+4	3d+6	1d+6
18				3d+1	2d+1	1d+4	3d+7	2d+5
19				3d+2	2d+1	2d+1	3d+8	2d+5

And on on the high end, here's the amount of injury past armor for a ST17 attacker versus various DRs, again without and with Weapon Master.


Broadsword Damage past armor by DR for ST 17

DR	Old Sw/cu	Old Thr/im	Old Sw/cu WM	Old Thr/im WM	New Sw/cu	New Thr/im	New Sw/cu WM	New Thr/im WM
Average Damage	3d (10.5)	1d+4 (7.5)	3d+6  (16.5)	1d+6  (9.5)	2d (7)	1d+4 (7.5)	2d+4 (11)	1d+6 (9.5)
0	15.75	15	24.75	19	10.5	15	14.25	19
1	14.25	13	23.25	17	9	13	12.75	17
2	12.75	11	21.75	15	7.5	11	11.25	15
3	11.25	9	20.25	13	6	9	9.75	13
4	9.75	7	18.75	11	4.5	7	8.25	11
5	8.25	5	17.25	9	3	5	6.75	9
6	6.75	3	15.75	7	1.5	3	5.25	7
7	5.25	1	14.25	5	0	1	3.75	5
8	3.75	0	12.75	3	0	0	2.25	3
9	2.25	0	11.25	1	0	0	0.75	1
10	0.75	0	9.75	0	0	0	0	0

This last table brings out some of the points I mentioned above: under the normal rules, there's almost no any reason to use an impaling attack, since cutting attacks always do more damage. The new table makes thrusting attacks much more valuable: they're higher damage in almost all instances, though with the usual caveat that targets with Injury Tolerance rapidly reduce the value of impaling damage.

Implications

On the positive side:

• More weapons are useful. Spears do competitive damage to swords and axes at all levels of ST, at least against living targets. Picks (swing/impaling weapons) come into their own for breaking into heavy armor.
• More templates can usefully contribute to melee combat. The ST12 cleric swings for 1d+3 with his broadsword, versus 2d+4 for the ST17 knight with Weapon Master. The knight is still better, but his average damage is no longer nearly twice the cleric's maximum damage. Unarmed martial artists still have issues, but at least their damage is somewhat on par with everyone else's.
• Armor is more useful since damage is lower. A ST20 ogre with an oversize axe does 2d+4 cu damage, which can be partially absorbed by heavy mail, instead of 3d+5 that can't be.
• Lower damage means that one-shot kills are going to less likely. For the players, this means they have more time to get in over their heads without the first successful hit doing so much injury that the delvers can't move fast enough to flee. For the GM, since his monsters are going to last longer, he doesn't need to put as many foes into a given encounter to challenge the PCs, which means the game will run faster.
• Armor behaves about the way it would realistically. Even a strong man with a broadsword has a hard time penetrating full steel plate. Light armor (DR3 or 4) protects against light weapons used by normal humans.

On the negative side:

• ST, already probably overpriced at 10 pts/level with the old table, is almost certainly slightly overpriced with the new table. Bruno has suggested 8 points/level, which sounds about right (with Striking ST costing 3 pts/level).
• Heavily armored foes, like dwarf knights in dwarven steel plate with Armor Mastery (DR11 + 2 tough skin) or sword-armor golems (DR17), are much harder to deal with in straight melee combat. These types of foes are going to have to be grappled, knocked to the ground, and all-out attacked for damage into vulnerable chinks in their armor. Arguably, that's how knights were defeated historically, but it's a bit of a change from the dungeon fantasy tradition. Not all groups are going to want to bring out the grappling rules for every fight.
• Players who enjoy making one-shot kills on powerful foes are going to be in for disappointment.
• Knights and barbarians lose some utility as the "big, powerful hitter" guys, especially against big, armored monsters.
• GMs are going to have to modify the published damage values for monsters that use swinging weapons.

Swing/cutting attacks will stop being the go-to attack for all foes and all target locations. They will still be useful attacks, targeting weaker limb armor or fighting Unliving and Homogeneous foes. Thrust/impaling attacks will be common for attacks to the torso, vitals, face, and skull, which seems to match historical fighting styles.

On the balance, I think this is a change for the better. I do need to playtest it some time, probably after I get done replaying Dragon Age 2 again.

Changing the Tide: Reworking the Sargasso Sea

The Sea Wyvern's Wake adventure in the Savage Tide Adventure Path has a sequence where the delvers' ship is trapped in a creepy and eldritch sargasso sea. In the adventure, it's not much of a puzzle: the delvers are harassed at night by creepy assassin vines and vine horrors, they find a journal telling them to go to the center of the sargasso to kill the mother-plant that is summoning the vines, they go to the center and kill the Mother of All in an epic if unrealistic battle.

Even as a simple DF adventure, it's pretty linear and doesn't require much thought. However, my players like thinking, exploring, and solving puzzles and mysteries a lot more than they like straightforward combat. They'd just had a few sessions of straightforward combat, and I figured they'd lose interest if I gave them another. Instead, I adapted the premise to create an interesting puzzle monster.

My first step was to declare to myself that an eldritch horror from beyond time and space, the kind of thing that creates a 10 mile morass of floating vines to entrap ships on the high seas, can't be killed by unsophisticated direct damage. I didn't really stat it out, but I was thinking DR 30 (not versus silver), 1000 HP, Instant Regeneration, Magic Resistance 20, and so forth. The massive DR, HP, and regeneration meant that fighting the thing straight up was an impossible battle, while the weakness to silver was the first step towards giving them an out.

The next step was to think about ways to hurt this thing. I knew I wanted it to be vulnerable to silver weapons because a lot of PCs in my games, over the years, have bought silver weapons that weren't really useful and I wanted to make up for that. I could also provide hints to the vulnerability with vague allusions to moon metal or were-bane, or confuse the issue by alluding to night metal or heavenly metal (which most players would think to be meteoric iron). I finally decided on a multi-ingredient poison or herbicide.

I started with belladonna. It's a poison, but it was also used as a cosmetic, and "beautiful lady" is an easy translation into a lot of languages, at least at a recognizable if not accurate level. Garlic was another easy choice. It's historically a cure for just about everything, is the kind of thing that might reasonably be found on a sailing ship, and has a bunch of funky slang names that are generally recognizable. Two of my players are from the San Francisco Bay, so I was worried that I would give the game away immediately by calling it "the stinky rose".

I was stumped for the last ingredient for a while. I wanted at least one ingredient that if the players couldn't figure it out entirely, the delvers would at least be able to find some close substitutes. That made me think of white wine vinegar, since the ships might have white wine to use as a substitute. A wikipedia search on the varieties of vinegar confirmed that vinegar was a good choice, because of all the varieties, and I finally chose Jacob's Tears vinegar as a strange one that had alternate names.

Finally, I wanted them to have to apply the poison to a specific place. The original adventure has the Mother of All living at a bottom of a 100' shaft lined with budding and growing vine horrors. It's creepy, but a bit stupid: the adventurers can start by standing at the top and dropping damaging spells and attacks straight down, while the Mother can teleport anywhere in the Sargasso Sea so she can either move to the top of the shaft and fight the adventurers or teleport the heck away and completely frustrate any chance of victory. That's weak adventure design, since it means the adventurers only win if the monster gets the Idiot Ball. I wanted the Mother to be a static foe, but clearly some kind of creepy producer of additional threats - a mother indeed. I liked the imagery of the original shaft of budding vine horrors, and it had a nice resonance with the literal meaning of kindergarten - "child garden" - which inspired another clue. The heroes would need to shoot the Mother in the kindergarten.

As this was supposed to be a puzzle, giving them a single list of "moon-metal, stinking rose, pearl barley vinegar; apply to the budding vines" would be something of a let-down. Instead, I came up with the idea that each of three ships previously trapped in the Sargasso had tried to create the poison with varying degrees of cluefulness and resources. The various logs' allusions and half-references could be compared to each other to resolve the puzzle. I ran the clues by Bruno to see if it was too hard - I figured the combined mental resources of 5 people at a table had to be at least as good as one very bright gamer. She figured it all out and even realized the Mother was a load-bearing boss.

I was happy, and wrote up notes and hand-outs here.

Actual Play

As it turned out on the tabletop, I forgot that my players were essentially a committee, and a committee is less bright than the individual members. I had to gently steer them away from some of their more insane half-conclusions, and as it turned out, none of them really knew that belladonna was used as a cosmetic. Eventually, though, they managed to figure out the poison and make it.

When they finally arrived at the Mother of All's rooms underneath a wrecked ship, I had a sudden insight: if there's only one thing to shoot, they're going to shoot that one thing. I probably should have thought of that earlier. So I ended up drawing a bunch of stuff on the map: a collection of venus flytrap-like mouths, a "bunch of weird electrical things, some kind of weird organic Tesla coils and Jacob's ladders", a bunch of weird organic pump-like organs, some "strange polyp like growths", and "a patch of open space in which new vine horrors periodically bud and grow." Then I had to clarify that the pumps were not the thing's heart and didn't look like hearts and for all they could tell, were being used to drain the water from the below sea-level chamber they were in.

The players now had several targets to chose from, and being players, they fixated on those dang pumps. I don't know why. More gentle steering and reminders that pumps are not necessarily hearts when dealing with eldritch biology of some kind of creepy Cthulhuoid plant eventually allowed the players to remember the phrase "essence of motherhood." They couldn't read the word "kindergart" on the print-outs, which was my mistake for putting the blur too close to the word. Though Bruno managed to read it on the PDFs so I'm not sure how I was supposed to catch it. Eventually they shot a silver-coated meteoric iron poisoned arrow (the scout had a collection of silver-coated meteoric iron arrows, so they didn't even have to take the chance on silver versus meteoric) into the nursery, the Mother of All retreated, and we had a fun chase sequences as the delvers fled the suddenly sinking wreck and tried to recover loot on the way.

It was a pretty memorable experience, and a lot of fun. I strongly recommend that other GMs either steal this puzzle or come up with something similar the next time they need to put their PCs up against a nigh-unkillable monster.