How should armour work in FF?

[CharlesX]

Something which bugs me about FF is the way shields, mail and helmets often give your adventurer a generic attack strength bonus, where they are more likely to be defensive than affect the damage you do to your opponents. The same problem applies to a sword which increases your attack strength, although somehow that seems more understandable within the simplistic system. I prefer TWOFM shield, which gives your adventurer a 1 in 6 chance of affecting blows, or KOD, where the Dwarvern Breastplate affects damage at the expense of attack strength (I don't know whether this is worth the trade-off, if ever), or LOTSW where mail simply absorbs damage, and affects rolls against Skill. Complicating things is where wearing armour gives you a Skill increase, a particular problem in early FF - why would wearing a chainmail suit make your dexterity any greater?

   Better FF writers such as Green and Hand find ways around this as I've stated. Tbh I think this is more a problem in earlier FF where writers such as Livingstone handed out Skill bonuses like sweeties, which he mainly grew out of except for his old-fashioned (and to be fair, probably over-criticised) Eye Of The Dragon. The FF RPGs seem to work in this more nuanced way, where armour affects damage level while at the same time affecting Skill rolls, not just attack strength, either.

[scouserob]

I agree, it makes more sense for the benefit of non-magical armour to be damage reduction.
For a non-magical weapon a similar damage increase would be more appropriate than a Skill/Attack Strength boost.
(Either an inverse of the Shield in Warlock of Firetop Mountain or just a straight damage boost like the sword in The Shamutanti Hils.)

A Skill or Attack Strength bonus from magical weapons, armour, etc, seems OK to me though.

The damage modifier mechanic seemed to work well, as you say, with the aforementioned Shield in the very first book so I wonder why rolling dice for extra damage with improved weapons wasn’t attempted in those earlier books.

I doubt it is the added complexity.
the rules for using Luck in battle involves 4 different damage modifiers (and a luck modifier) so a new weapon damage modifier rule would have to be pretty convoluted to rival that.

[tyrion]

Let's have a look at how Shields work in two rpgs I'm currently playing.


Dragon Warriors:

Shields work in the same way as in wofm, you block a hit on a roll of 1 on d6.
Armour is slightly different; if you have been hit, an armour bypass roll is made to see if the weapon gets through the armour. In ff, this could be a d6 roll if you are hit, on a 1-3, no damage is taken. In dragon warriors, you suffer a penalty to hit if you are wearing armour you are not trained for, and your stealth score is also affected, so similar to a skill penalty overall.

Dungeons and dragons:

Shields and armour decrease your chances of being hit (so an attack strength bonus), but again if you are not trained to wear it you suffer a penalty to skill checks (so a skill penalty).

So if our typical ff adventurer is not trained to wear chainmail, he has a -1 skill penalty, as it is more cumbersome than he is used to. However, in combat, it has a chance of absorbing damage, or giving a -2 penalty to opponent's attack strength.

[slloyd14]

A simple way that Lone Wolf uses is that armour simply raises your initial hit point score (endurance or stamina) and shields provide a combat bonus.

Raising your initial stamina is a way that doesn't involve extra dice rolls.

[misomiso]

It's very difficult to make work in the current system.

You could have chainmail reduce all incoming damage by one, however this is very powerful so you would need to balance for this.

You could have a shield that blocked 2 out of 6 hits totally that came in (average hit you take becomes 1.33 and not 2)

Helmets could be a special case that blocks certain specific incidences and attacks (rock fall, Clubs from an ogre etc)

[Pete Byrdie]

I think sometimes FF combat, and probably most RPG and gamebook combat, is seen as being more detailed a description of the fight than it really is. I don't see an attack round as two opponents lunging at each other and one lands a blow which does 2 points of damage, I think it represents a more complicated series of parries and repostes which wears one fighter down. Armour doesn't simply reduce damage, it changes how a person fights. It part of his weaponry, in a way. The advantage of mail is in renders a sword's cuts on those areas useless. Plate is mostly impervious to sword attacks. This improves a fighter's options for closing and parrying. I think they should be an attack strength bonus. You could argue attacks from more percussive weapons like warhammers and certain axes reduce that bonus if you wanted to get technical. And certainly those armours will have a SKILL penalty attached, insofar as SKILL is used for everything in FF, so the attack strength bonus would have to exceed any general SKILL penalty.

Using a sword with a shield, again, is a whole different discipline. One doesn't simply fend off incoming blows. The two work in harmony. Again, an attack strength bonus.

Armour and shields increase the chances of avoiding being successfully attacked and increase the chances of attacking successfully. Sounds like an attack strength bonus to me.

[adrius]

Not sure how many here have played Gamebook Adventures, but I felt that one captured this rather well:

• Have one separate statistic each ("Offense" vs "Defense") between 1 and 6 where 6 is highest. Better weapons and combat skills raise Offense, while better armour raise Defense. The equivalent of Stamina is represented as "Vitality".
  
  
• During a battle, pit the attacker's Offense against the defender's Defense by rolling the number of dice equivalent to the attribute score;

• Order the dice for each side in descending order, then compare one-by-one. If the highest pair are equal, then compare the next, etc. Any side with less dice will take a value of 0 when compared to the extra dice's value from the opponent.

• The attacker wins the round (dealing Vitality damage equal to the his side's dice roll) as soon as he has an edge.

• In this way there is less dice variation at higher levels, thus the improvement from 1 to 2 (e.g. barehand to dagger, or unarmoured to basic shield) is much more significant than from 4 to 5, for example. 

For FF, I believe there's a couple books that introduced the "Armour" stat? That one can then be readapted as the equivalent of "Defense" here, while Skill becomes "Offense". Thus enemies would then have three listed stats: Skill, Armour, Stamina.
Then pit Attack Strength against Defense Strength, but both are determined with just adding the value from one die roll (seeing that the variation from having two attributes is already significant enough).

The downside would probably be, adding unneeded complexity where it isn't necessary, in particular for adventures where the player's equipment do not significantly change. It would also take twice as long, due to each side exchanging one set of attacks in two rounds instead of one.

[CharlesX]

Thanks for the several replies here, I will come back about some of them.

   I think a problem arises in the case of heavy weaponry your adventurer (or even warrior-wizard, sometimes) may or may not be trained to carry. While magic weapons are perhaps uncontroversial in being an attack strength bonus, a plate mail suit might weigh heavily if worn by say a Barbarian rather than a Knight. The shield in TWOFM looks big and leaving aside that an attack strength bonus would unbalance the game, a simple defence bonus as given seems very fair. I don't disagree at all it makes sense for both swords and shields to carry an attack strength bonus, not sure about helmets tho. Basically I agree a bit wi Adrius where he says (perhaps implying the FF system is simplistic and\or wanting in design terms?) the Gamebook Adventures is a competitive system. I've played several Gamebook Adventures, and their combat system is great in terms of creating opponents both believable in terms of their distinct attack and defence abilities, but more to the point nuanced and dramatic fights, where with FF facing a 25 round fight against a Pit Fiend (for example) can get tiring. 

[Wizard Slayer]

I think the beauty of the FF combat system (for some of us) is its simplicity. Just two stats (three if you want to include Luck) and some basic rolls and basic damage effects.

A few combats, rules or special items introduce modifiers for variety which is nice. If there had been an attempt to introduce across-the-board rules to deal with generic armour, I think the temptation would have been there to do the same for differing weapons and it ends up being a rabbit-hole of complications. Weapon/armour stuff definitely should always be Attack-Strength bonuses over Skill though!

I think it's interesting that this kind of "shield mechanic" was used in the very first book (for what is after all not a magical or otherwise exceptional item) and then never again for a long while, as if it was something that Ian was experimenting with but decided against in the long term.

[Pete Byrdie]

Feb 20, 2023 11:50:51 GMT Wizard Slayer said:

I think the beauty of the FF combat system (for some of us) is its simplicity. Just two stats (three if you want to include Luck) and some basic rolls and basic damage effects.

A few combats, rules or special items introduce modifiers for variety which is nice. If there had been an attempt to introduce across-the-board rules to deal with generic armour, I think the temptation would have been there to do the same for differing weapons and it ends up being a rabbit-hole of complications. Weapon/armour stuff definitely should always be Attack-Strength bonuses over Skill though!

I think it's interesting that this kind of "shield mechanic" was used in the very first book (for what is after all not a magical or otherwise exceptional item) and then never again for a long while, as if it was something that Ian was experimenting with but decided against in the long term.

Aye, I've been (knowingly) over pragmatic in my response to this question. The FF system is simple, and that's fine for a gamebook. Nobody wants to buy a gamebook and have to learn a whole RPG system to play it. Attack Strength is a perfectly good and simple way to measure the likelihood of successfully attacking an opponent or being successfully attacked, and nothing else is required to account for armour or shields, especially as history shows that such accoutrements are an integral part of those things.

However, adding some different mechanics to the play might be fun for the player regardless of the logic behind it. It might give the player a greater sense of involvement, and that's, arguably, more important than anything else.

As for why TWOFM's shield rules did not become standard; I can't help but feel the creators of the system didn't really have a clear idea of its potential use. It was just a way to measure two opponents against each other. They were feeling their way through from the beginning.

EDIT Also, it kind of doesn't matter. Each book is its own thing. I assume (but can't remember because I haven't played it for 25+ years) that AFF has rules for these things, and they need consistency. But each gamebook only needs to make sense on its own terms

[misomiso]

Feb 19, 2023 16:55:02 GMT adrius said:

Not sure how many here have played Gamebook Adventures, but I felt that one captured this rather well:

• Have one separate statistic each ("Offense" vs "Defense") between 1 and 6 where 6 is highest. Better weapons and combat skills raise Offense, while better armour raise Defense. The equivalent of Stamina is represented as "Vitality".
  
  
• During a battle, pit the attacker's Offense against the defender's Defense by rolling the number of dice equivalent to the attribute score;

• Order the dice for each side in descending order, then compare one-by-one. If the highest pair are equal, then compare the next, etc. Any side with less dice will take a value of 0 when compared to the extra dice's value from the opponent.

• The attacker wins the round (dealing Vitality damage equal to the his side's dice roll) as soon as he has an edge.

• In this way there is less dice variation at higher levels, thus the improvement from 1 to 2 (e.g. barehand to dagger, or unarmoured to basic shield) is much more significant than from 4 to 5, for example. 

For FF, I believe there's a couple books that introduced the "Armour" stat? That one can then be readapted as the equivalent of "Defense" here, while Skill becomes "Offense". Thus enemies would then have three listed stats: Skill, Armour, Stamina.
Then pit Attack Strength against Defense Strength, but both are determined with just adding the value from one die roll (seeing that the variation from having two attributes is already significant enough).

The downside would probably be, adding unneeded complexity where it isn't necessary, in particular for adventures where the player's equipment do not significantly change. It would also take twice as long, due to each side exchanging one set of attacks in two rounds instead of one.

This is similar to some mods I made for my own gamebook -

You ended up with four stats: Weapon Skill, Defence, Stamina, and Luck,

The difference was that Defence acted like an 'Armour' class from DnD in that it was a 'target number' for the attacker to try and beat when rolling their two die for attack, rather than have the combat round be a 'roll off'.  It worked quite well (imo!)

Rolling all the die you suggest is an interesting idea but could be too complex.

[soulreaver]

It depends on if you want it to be 'realistic' or not.

If you want it to be realistic there could be stats to determine both how likely the armour is to get in the way of a blow (eg, a full-body plate would be more likely to protect you than just the codpiece) as well as another stat to determine the damage reduction you could expect (cloth armour would do little, metal armour would do a lot), perhaps even with different values for different weapons types (plate is far more effective against piercing/edged weapons than bludgeoning attacks etc).

However, I think that's overkill and can't really be incorporated into the current combat system. You'd need wholly different, more complex combat rules, and that kind of goes against the spirit of Fighting Fantasy.

I think Attack Strength bonuses are actually fine given the current system. They are an abstraction - the comparison of Attack Strength represents both combatants struggling to harm each other. If one opponent is better armoured, it's reasonable to assume they'll have more options available in battle to power through an opponent's attacks unhurt and land a damaging blow of their own.