Forums of the Megaverse®

Not sure how well this would work, so I'm posting it here for folks to offer their two coins

In real life combat, there's a small but real chance that a weapon could get "stuck" or bound up in a fight - wedged in an opponent's shield (I've seen this happen during testing, and it's why most warriors wouldn't actually just go Hell-for-leather swinging as hard as they can at the enemy's shield), or the ground, or an unfortunately placed bit of wooden furniture, or the opponent's guts/flesh (especially swords). This usually only requires a fraction of a second's extra work to fix, but how could it be done in Palladium? In a life-and-death struggle, taking a fraction of a moment to have to rip your axe out of the opponent's shield is going to cost you, because it leaves you vulnerable.

I trained with spear fighting and the drills were so repetitive to strike with a stabbing motion of a question mark (well, the top hook part) for the reason of ensuring that the chance of the spear head getting stuck in minimised.

In game terms the smallest action cost is 1 action. So maybe if you are using house rules of, for example, a percentage chance of the weapon getting stuck I guess it takes an action to free it (if still in range). Perhaps in that example a roll would only be used for parried blows??

This is the sort of situation natural 1 tables are built for.

Jefffar wrote:This is the sort of situation natural 1 tables are built for.

My thought exactly; I'd be more likely to just use a narrative approach, rather than a formal table, but "natural 1" is where these come in for me.

(I'd also limit the natural 1 result to requiring a certain level of miss... you should not be flubbing 5% of all attacks)

At one time, I was toying with the idea of fumble/accident rolls that would incorporate things like this. My idea was to require a second roll to determine the severity of the incident, with the roll being d20 plus the combat training skill level. As long as the worst results are at the bottom of the number scale and then get better as the result rises, then the bonus from the combat skill level would guarantee that the fumble/accident results would be less difficult to overcome as the character's training increased. I never put it into action because I was having a hard time coming up with a plausible (to me at least) chart for ranged weapons. Didn't want to leave archers and crossbowmen out of the "fun".