Genser

16 hours ago, Morien said:

Now we have encountered situations in the adventures where the PKs need Chirurgery and they are in the middle of nowhere, but that is where hermits and witches and beautiful daughters of a local poor knight become so useful. 😛

Tempted to insert the scene from Blackadder where he visits "The Wise woman". 

51 minutes ago, Tizun Thane said:

The norman chainmail is only ten.  So against 3 saxons with 5d6 damage, no PK is feeling at ease, trust me (And Morien, of course ^).

Maybe you should first test the rules as written, before making any change.

Absolutely.
I haven't implemented any houserules as of yet. So I have just been checking out different Houserules and doing brief playtests by myself. We played through the first knighting ceremony and all that jazz. All we agreed on is that we wanted it to be hella lethal. And being so used to 5e I guess we were kinda scared that it would become too easy. My only other "view" of KAP comes from watching playthroughs on YT, and that is ofc no substitute to playing the game ourselves. 

13 hours ago, Morien said:

Downgrade armor. Trust me, you start feeling very vulnerable when all you have is a 8 point byrnie and a 6 point shield (half of the time), and facing two enemies hacking at you with 5d6. KAP is a quite forgiving system in some sense, but you can be taken out quite easily by a single critical hit or a couple of good hits past the shield. I don't know how it is in 5e, but in KAP, getting ganged up on when you are not encased head to toe in plate armor is always bad news.

Playing it more as a Dark age early viking age would suit our playstyle. Downgrading armour is a great idea :) 
What about making armour more variable. Like have 1d4 - 4d4 armour(Maybe even more for later periods.), while having a d8 as a shield die? So if a character is caught in a bad situation while not wearing armour, they are pretty screwed. but if they are dressed for battle in full byrnie and a large shield they would be more of a tank. But the enemy could still hit them in a weak spot of the armour. Hence the variability of the die roll instead of a flat armour rating. Also, more and more data shows that shields were used more actively as a defence, not just as a Passive block. so giving it the possibility of absorbing 8 damage would reflect that. So armour dice are d4s damage is d6 and shield is d8. This leaves a lot of room for variability. Average for 4d4 is 10, and the average of a 1d8 is 4.5 so 14.5ish damage reduction. While the potential is as low as 5 damage reduction or as high as 20. 

IDK. Just a thought. 

13 hours ago, Morien said:

Finally... there is no resurrection spells in KAP, and healing spells are not in Player-control, either (until Codex Mirabilis, at least). So getting hit hurts, and getting hit multiple times tends to mean that it is time to rest and take it easy for a month. You can't just cast all the healing spells, raise the dead PCs, and continue on the next day. The vulnerability is somewhat built in. 

This lack of fragility in D&D is why I'm considering leaving the system all together. Low level characters are vulnerable. But past lvl 5 characters just seem to pop back up as if nothing happened. Hey a giant smashed you into the ground. You were at minus a bazillion HP, but your buddy cast a healing spell that gave you 1 hp and now you are back in the fight. It's a bit cartooney. 

13 hours ago, Morien said:

Easier option: Use normal KAP up to 15, but disallow the use of Yearly Training to raise skills above 15 (normally, that is where the rules shift from 1d6 skill points to 1 skill point). This seriously slows the skill progression down, and you probably won't see many skills above 20 even if you allow Glory for that, too.

Love it! Can't remember if this is a thing already but tutoring could maybe be an option as well. Pay X amount of £ to increase 1 point from level 15-20. Or maybe a tutor grants one extra chance to succeed in a skill advancement roll. In real life being rich usually helps right xD 

42 minutes ago, Morien said:

You will only have a 10% chance on any skill to advance in experience checks, meaning 10 years per +1 on average, so why even bother with experience checks at that point? Or maybe that rule is just for skills higher than 14 and others use the normal rules of rolling over? That would be more reasonable, but still not very heroic.

I should probably have prefaced everything with that my players and I like to feel very vulnerable as characters. So we tend to go for the unheroic.
The thought was that skills progress normally until lvl 14. and from there, you need to really dedicate your time to improve those skills. hence the 10% chance of improvement. So if you had a bunch of skills at 14, you would have to choose one to improve past that, but you would still be able to distribute 3 skillpoints to other skills. But I get that it is quite convoluted and it would halt the skill progression. I will go back into my notes and revise! You make great points that I need to consider.

48 minutes ago, Morien said:

Finally, KAP combat is quite realistic. Even if you have skill 20, if you are attacked by two knights of skill 15, you are in heaps of trouble. Even two spearmen with Spear 12 can give you grief in early phases, when all you have is a chainmail. That, by the way, is another thing to keep things dangerous for the PKs. If you don't let the technology to advance past the chainmail, the combats will remain much more dangerous.

Thank you so much for the insight Morien. I'm still completely new to the ruleset and I don't have a firm grasp on the balance just yet. 

1 hour ago, Morien said:

If you are ONLY using it for Skill 1, I would be tempted to make it 50/50. A confirmation roll of 11+ is a critical. This way, you have an equal chance for a success (2.5%) as for a crit (2.5%), which matches skill 2 having equal weights for success and criticals (success on 2 (5%), critical on 20 (5%) ).

Good point! For skills of 1 I think a 50/50 would work well!

Here's my current tinkering with skills, progression and crits. Note I'm horrible at math and probability. If you could give your thoughts on it, that would be much appreciated. It is quite different from your house-rules though. 

Starting skills cap at 14 except one "Notable" skill which is 15. Players can improve 3 skills by one point each year from skill lvl 0-14. To progress beyond 14 the players need to choose 1 skill to improve each year. This improvement only happens when rolling a nat20 or the current skill number.  If the players get any checks to a skill throughout gameplay this also uses the same rules. I'm considering capping skills at 20. And using only +2 and +5 as modifiers. (I'm very stingy on the modifiers).

Criticals - Skills of 21 and above use an extended critrange, so a skill of 21 would crit on a roll of 19 and 20. And a modified 17+5=22 would crit on 18-20.  This way even a skill of 20+5 would only crit on 15+. I think that is fair. 

Both crit - In the event of both combatants critting the one with the higher die roll wins, and if it is a tie then Both are downgraded to normal hits. In a non-combat situation the player wins draws. 

I get that this slows down skill progression by quite an amount, but it also limits the insanity that is skills in the 30s. I want to try to keep the game grounded in some reality. 

26 minutes ago, Morien said:

However, a more elegant way to do this would be to have the confirmation roll for nat20s, and judge that the current 'half-critical' is simply a success. I might go with that in the future. In the confirmation roll, you roll your (modified) skill again, and if it is a failure, nat20 is just a success. This is similar to how critical hits work in D&D (or at least Pathfinder, since I have not played 5e), where if you rolled a hit in the critical threat range, you roll to hit again and if it succeeds, you have confirmed a critical hit. Otherwise it is just a normal hit.

Thank you for the quick reply :)

In D&D5e it is a crit on nat20 and fumble on nat1. However there is an ability which Fighters get that's called Improved critical, where you crit on nat18's-20's in higher levels. 
I guess I would do something like that for the comfirmation roll. So if the player rolls a nat20 when their skill 1, they would confirm it with a target of 18-20. That way you still have a chance for a crit albeit a small one. 80% chance of it being a normal success, and a 10% of  getting a crit. 

On 9/9/2019 at 10:02 AM, Morien said:

II.1.) Criticals, fumbles and confirmation rolls
Regardless of the skill, a roll of 1 is always a potential fumble, and 20 is always a potential critical (except if your skill is 1 or less, in which case it becomes just an ordinary success). Furthermore, in a crit-crit tie, we downgrade both to normal successes and compare the actual modified rolls: so if Skill 25 rolls 18+5=23 and Skill 20 rolls 20, this becomes a normal success for 23 and a partial success for 20.

Hi Morien, I'm trying to introduce a group of D&D5e players to KAP 5.2 and I came across your houserules. I really enjoy what you and your group have been doing. However I'm having some trouble understanding how do you rule it if a player has a skill of 1 and rolls a Nat 1? is it still a potential failure, seeing as it is the only number that would become a success in the regular ruleset?  The (except if your skill is 1 or less, in which case it becomes just an ordinary success) might be throwing me off here. 

Example:

My player has a reading of 1, he rolls a nat1. Does he Fumble or does he succeed?
or
My player has a reading of 1 and he rolls a nat20. Does he get a critical success or just a normal success? 

Thanks :)