Smoking Frog

Drooling, indeed. A very well done cover, I must say. A December release for C&C2 will be conveniently placed for Christmas. [rubs hands together] Perhaps it will show up in my stocking instead of the usual lump of coal! I'm becoming more and more enamored of the idea of having a rule set tweaked for a specific setting and play tested to smooth out the rough spots rather than a one-size-doesn't-quite-fit-any-setting approach. I'm very much looking forward to the chance to use Renaissance for other black-powder settings. Best wishes on this project. It sounds like C&W are on a very promising path.

I doff my hat to your masterful turn of phrase. Shakie could not have verbed that noun better.

I'll try to peruse your home brew rules and see if I can come up with anything constructive. The article on the armor test was very interesting. It's very thoughtful of them to find that it takes exactly double the oxygen; it's pretty easy to require a 2x fatigue rule. That, of course, only applies to armor that weighs in the 30 to 60 kg range that they tested. This seems to indicate that the extremely heavy armor was best used when mounted. Unless you're French, of course. If you're French, dismounting and walking toward long bowmen is the best idea; otherwise some of you might survive.

Excellent. I've got some scattered notes I'll pull together and do some more noodling. Always nice to meet a neighbor. I'm on Roosevelt Island, a little bit of suburbia in the middle of the East River.

Hmm. I'm now entertaining the idea of stealing your idea for a combat monograph. I was kicking around a somewhat similar idea. I thought it would be helpful to have a set of rules that combined various options and spot rules to give a flavor of particular historical periods. So you'd have a group of rules that tried to simulate ancient Roman combat, "dark ages" combat, High Middle Ages, Late Middle Ages, Renaissance/Early Modern . . . etc. etc. One could take your idea for mass combat rules into this as well: perhaps tweaking mass combat to reflect the flavor of various time periods. But you've really identified the rub with any work like this: you need to have it play tested to death (pun intended). Each combination of rules would play differently and there's no way to guess at all the crazy things various players might come up with to derail your intentions.

It's better, by far, to have a "done" book after GenCon than an almost done book at GenCon.

I think this again relates to an the idea I've been kicking around for a bit: Initiative -- who gets to initiate and who has to react -- should be divorced from size, reach, and so forth. The nimble guy with a short fast weapon, because of his speed, should be able to start an action forcing the slower guy with the big, slow weapon to react. Exactly WHAT the nimble guy gets to do, however, depends on things like weapon reach and size. He can't just storm forward and run himself onto the other guy's sword. (Well, he could, but that would be really, really dumb.) But a system where you have initiative and issues like reach and size separate adds complexity that has to be worked out in the middle of combat; the SR system rolls these up into a single abstract number (for the most part, of course; there are situational variations). But divorcing speed and reach avoids the problem of an axe and dagger being indistinguishable: Instead of Speed 1 + Reach 3 = SR 4 versus Speed 3 + Reach 1 = SR 4, you'd have Speed 1 versus Speed 3, and then what you can do with your initiative depends on how you are able, if you are, to get inside the swing of the axe. [For what it's worth, so far, I like the MRQII system of making initiative depend on DEX and INT. I'm eagerly awaiting RQ6 because I'm assuming they will tweak all the systems in the "better" direction.] If something like "realism" is a goal, I think the only test you can apply is whether combat worked out historically the way the game system you are using would have it. The example of the long axe and dagger is a good one: Were Anglo-Saxon house-carls mowed down by men armed with long knives? Obviously not, but that may be mostly to do with armor: The knife would not likely get past the house-carl's armor, so he can just move back a bit and smash his unwise opponent. But take off the house-carl's armor, and I would give the knife man a good chance to prevail. If he could get in close and use the short length and speed of his knife to his advantage, the house-carl might not be able to get an effective blow in.

That is definitely one reason to roll INT into initiative; combat actions include deciding to run, deciding to leap around, change weapons, and other things that represent evaluating the best of multiple options. Also, if you have a game with spell casters who have high INT but only indifferent DEX, it puts them on better footing with the high DEX types. If two people are close enough that they can step and strike (like no more than weapon-distance apart), I would think that weapon skill would be the overwhelming factor in who got to act first.

I would think that the spear is/was the all-time most popular weapon because it is the easiest to use, and having some reach with a pointy end gives even an inexperienced man some confidence when going into battle. But against a more skillful opponent, I would expect that the length advantage could be easily neutralized or even turned against the spearman. If you don't need to worry about penetrating armor, the flexibility of a staff, whether quarter-staff, bo, or jo, makes them extremely effective because they can be employed at varying distances, which gives the wielder some nice options for dispatching an opponent.

There's another interesting twist to height: when cultures started to urbanize, average height dropped significantly because food was more scarce in the city (and perhaps more diseases as well).

I'm convinced that the RQ3 model of strike ranks is rather "flawed," because it rolls into a single number dexterity, size, and weapon length. I also don't like that it leaves out intelligence, and I was glad to see that MRQII rolled that into the initiative mix. I think you have to take into account the speed of the mind as well as the speed of the body, although I would think that both of those are dwarfed by the importance of skill/experience. For my money, who goes first has to depend at least somewhat on who is the most talented. Size and weapon length have nothing to do with who can initiate an action; indeed, to the extent that a big weapon might be more bulky and harder to maneuver, a long weapon may even be slower than a small one. So who initiates an action should really just depend on speed of body and mind, with the additional factor of the wielder's skill level. Having a longer weapon is no guarantee of always hitting first. If you want some evidence for that, you can find videos on youtube of the Tenshin Shoden Katori Shinto Ryu kata involving sword versus naginata (glaive), and sword versus short sword. It's clear that the combatant with the shorter weapon has to do something about the longer reach of his opponent's weapon; but it is equally clear that he is able to do things about it, including parrying offensively to move the opponent's weapon off line. In my not-at-all-humble opinion, I would say that the best way to do initiative would be to base who gets to initiate an action just on speed (mind, body, skill) and then take into account things like SIZ and weapon length when deciding what he can do with his initiative. That is, the combatant with the sword may have initiative on the combatant with the spear, but the fact that the spear is longer presents an obstacle the swordsman has to get around to do something.

We frequently suffer from the "tyranny of labels," to steal one of my favorite quotes. You could easily define "religion" as just the particular view of ultimate reality, and that is particularly true when talking about fictional worlds in RPGs. Thinking that existence pulses with an infinite "dao" -- or what ever name you give it -- that is impersonal but that humans can tap to do work in the physical world is no less a view of ultimate reality than believing that there are personal beings of great power that one can tap to do work in the physical world. In Glorantha, ultimate reality is defined to include runes, gods, and so forth. If you don't want to play in a setting with personal deities, that's fine, but you're not playing in the setting as it was conceived. And if you want to play a character in a setting with personal deities who has a disdain for personal deities, that is certainly an option, but he'd be a pretty weird guy in that world, I would think. In a world where divine intervention and "magic" were frequently seen, people would behave much differently than in a world where those things are talked about but not seen (or not necessarily seen as what they are). If in a particular game world you have "real" consequences for certain behaviors, then a game mechanic that reflects that "reality" is just a way to get players to roleplay their characters in conformity with the world's reality. That is not really different from having a combat mechanic that makes players roleplay their characters in certain ways. (Like not attacking when heavily outnumbered or against extremely powerful creatures.) Whether you have a passion and trait mechanic or an allegiance mechanic, or something else, would not seem to matter as much as making sure the mechanic was pointing players in the direction of playing the characters according to the 'reality' of their world. In fact, if all the players played their characters scrupulously according to their chosen beliefs, you probably would not need any mechanic.

That's for sure. I'm often reminded of the comment (from Philip Roth?) that non-fiction only has to be true, but fiction has to also be plausible. When you make up the story, people demand a lot more plausible connections and "reasonable" behavior than history has ever produced.

I'm a big fan of Alephtar's various historical settings, and absolutely love TCE. One of the things I love about historical based settings is that I could never invent the amount of fascinating detail I can find just by doing some mundane research. Consider how the following scenario seeds just fell into my lap: I discovered that during my favorite dynasty (the Tang), my favorite poet (Bai Juyi) was the governor of my favorite city (Suzhou) (in the year 825). That is quaint, but not particularly interesting. Until I read that Governor Bai had a canal dug so that tourists could more easily reach Tiger Hill, which is the nearby tomb of King Helu of Wu (who died around 486 BC). It's called Tiger Hill because after Helu was buried, a white tiger came to guard the tomb. And consider that Helu is supposed to have collected magical swords and tested them by cutting through rock. Wu was a strong state during the Spring and Autumn period, was considered to be only semi-civilized, and may in fact be related to the wet-rice farming culture that entered Japan around 300 B.C. To top all of that off, nearby Suzhou is Lake Tai, one of the most famous in China, and there's no doubt that a powerful dragon has to live there. I invented zero facts here, but I think I've got enough adventure seeds to make up several scenarios. (I asked myself what might have been dug up when the canal was being built, and what sort of non-Han-barbaric magic might Wu have possessed.) To get something like that, I would have to work a long time if I were inventing all the facts from a fictional setting. Historical settings aren't for everyone, but I think there are some tremendous upsides to them.

Unfortunately, French is one of the many languages I am terrible at. My wife is fluent in Chinese, but I can't manage to get her to translate things for me.