(02-09-2015, 02:10 PM)Warren Castille Wrote:(02-09-2015, 02:05 PM)Knight Kat Wrote: Then again, I think some of you are referring to combat in controlled environments like the Grindstone where weapons are blunted or peace-bound. When the advantage of weapon effectiveness and lethality is removed, strength and size does become a bigger factor. That is why MMA and Boxing have weight divisions.
Just to clarify, weapons aren't blunted at the Grindstone. We keep healers on stand-by to stop people from being killed, and the only rules are no killing and no magic. There's still plenty of blood spilled, you're just not allowed to try and decapitate someone.
Wait, I thought the Grindstone had rules against other things, like contact poisons which induce paralysis, which can't be realistically and fairly represented in dice-rolling? Just checking to make sure.
On the subject of relative advantages:
A character like mine, who relies mainly on small weaponry, footwork, what measure of hand-to-hand prowess he has, and skullduggery, will always be at great disadvantage against, say, an armored knight who's bigger, weighs more, has a longer reach sans weapons, is armed with sword and shield, etc., in a "fair fight". Any sort of direct confrontation, i.e. a traditional exchange, is going to result, more often than not, in the less armored and less well-armed man (or woman) losing.
Which is why those kinds of characters don't engage in "fair fights". Sand thrown in the eyes, a shove to knock the heavily armored man off the docks and into deep water, weapons coated with poisons as mentioned earlier, etc. A mage is going to blast a knight out of his boots from a distance. An assassin is going to look to get the drop on a mage. So on and so forth.
You can't, and IMO there's no need, to "balance" anything because with the right application of thought (see: skullduggery) any character should, theoretically, be able to triumph over another in the absence of a sport setting. It's when you get into "fair fights" and regulated contests that things get murky.
The trouble with dice isn't that it's random. The mere possibility of a David felling a Goliath goes to show that having a random element is actually more realistic than not having it. The trouble with dice is that, unless you implement a system such as Fate-14, pitting rolls against rolls without modifiers doesn't allow for a character's history or experience to impact the results as they should.
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