Module Armor Pieces

To reflect better the way that armor is done in this setting, there will no longer be full sets of armor that you buy, instead, you'll have to purchase each piece separately.

You have 4 armor slots that you'll need to buy pieces for: the legs, arms, chest, and helmet.
Each leg will be counted as one slot and each arm will be counted as one slot, so you don't need to buy a piece for you left and right arm, only your arms.

You'll need to keep track of each DR separately but you won't have to worry about hit locations as they;re the difference between your attack and the defender's total, which I keep track off, so I'll tell you where the blow lands.

This also means that you can use called shots to target unarmored portions of your opponent, in addition to the auxiliary effects found here.

The price is as follows:
Chest is base cost,
Arms and Legs are 1/2
Helmet is 1/4

You average Def and Initiative penalty (rounding towards legs).

You also average speed penalty (rounding towards arms).

Rathgin has picked out his armor set. He's chosen a Banded Mail helmet, Chain mail body and arms, and Studded Leather legs

The Defense penalty he receives is -4 (-4 for the Banded, -5  each for the Chain, and a -3 for the Studded, giving him an average Def penalty of -4.25, but since he's wearing Studded Leather on his legs, he rounds down to -4)

His Initiative penalty is +1 (+2 for Banded, +2 each for Chain, and a +1 for the Studded, averaging to 1.75 but rounded towards the legs)

Rathgin's speed penalty is +2 (+1 for Banded, +2 each for the Chain, and a +0 for the Studded, averaging to 1.5 but rounded towards the chain, since the cover his arms.

Movement penalties start at the highest penalty and moved down 1 category for every piece not penalized, or for every 2 penalized less then the highest penalty and made 1 category worse for every piece of armor penalized the same as the highest penalty. It can never be penalized more the highest penalty. This doesn't include helmets.

Rothgin's suit of armor has a movement penalty 75% max on jog, run, and sprint. His highest penalty is 75% from his Chain mail Chest. He's got his Studded Leather has no movement penalty so it would go to full but he also has his Chain mail Arms drags him back down to 75%.

If he wanted, Rothgin would swap out his arm piece for Studded Leather and then he'd have no movement penalty but he wants the extra protection knowing that his arms are going to receive a beating.

New Combat Manuever: Strike the Weapon

     While blades and weapons meet all the time in the melee, it's an entirely different matter to try and willfully strike your opponent's weapon in an attempt to break it but it is a tactic that was employed on the battlefield, especially against pole-arms.

     By forfeiting your attack you may instead choose to attack their weapon. Unlike attacking a weapon of someone that's holding you at bay to move it out of the way, this is a deliberate strike to deal damage. The attack is against the defender's shieldless defense +6.

     On a hit the attacker rolls a reduced damage die that's as follows:

• All piercing weapons only deal 1 point of damage
• All crushing weapons use the lower of their two damage dice
• All non-polearm hacking weapons deal the higher of their two damage dice
• All hacking pole arms use the lower of the two dice rolled and they drop the +3

      Weapon breakage rules are similar to shield breakage rules with pole arms being treated as bucklers in terms of breakage and every other weapon treated as medium shields. The more damage, the more likely you are to break the weapon

      If a weapon falls it's breakage save, it doesn't shatter but instead the strike lowers the quality of the weapon, depending on the amount of weapon failed by (as per the usual rules found on page 197 of the PHB). After -4 the weapon shatters and is useless.

Fighting Unarmed with 1 or 2 hands

    Normally when attacking with an unarmed attacked you add your FoS to the special results sum to determine if your move was successful. This is the case whether you use two hands or one, which seems a bit silly.

     When fighting with ONE HAND, you add your damage modifier from strength to your special results sum. In this case it acts like a reduced FoS and doesn't add anymore to the damage.

     When fighting with TWO HANDS, you'll add your full FoS, just like normal.

New Combat Manuever: Power Attack

     Commonly called "Baseballing", Power Attacks allow a trade of accuracy and defense for power.

     While an Aggressive Attack is a series of feints designed to open an oppenent up, a Power Attack is a series of aggressive swings forcing an oppenent to move out of the way or get his head caved in. Power Attacking is also used to try and smash shields and weapons.

     While Power Attacking, you receive a -3 to Attack and Def in exchange for an additional none penetrating damage die. If the weapon has two different damage die, use the larger of the two.

     If you hit, you also add the difference between your FoS and their's for determining knock-backs.

     Like Attacking Aggressively, if your oppenent has Given Ground or Scampered Back, the Power Attack's damage is halved.

      Example: Red and Blue are locked in epic struggle. Red is growing angry and so he switches to a move offensive fighting style: he decides to start Power Attacking with his long sword.
      On the first round of attacks Red swings and gets a 15 on his roll. Blue counters but only gets a 13 so the attack lands.
      Red's damage would normally be 2d8p+3 (Red's got a strength of 15/73) but because he Power Attacked he instead rolls 2d8p+1d8+3 for damage. he rolls a 3, 2, and 8 on his dice. Even though he rolled an 8 on a d8, it doesn't penetrate because it was his bonus die from Power Attacking, so his total is 13, not too shabby but again, because he was baseball batting his attack, he adds the difference between his FoS (+8) and Blue's (+3) to determine whether or not it was a knock back.
      So the total was 13 damage but 18 for knock-back, sending Blue staggering back against the onslaught.

      The next round of attacks go by and Red attacks again with a Power Attack. This time Blue Gives Ground, but his defense only ends up totaling 7 against Red's 11. Red rolls a 5, 6, 4, giving him a total to damage of 18 but because Blue moved back, Blue only takes 9, however Red's total for knock-back was 14, meaning that Blue's managed to hold his ground. And, hey, at least he didn't take the full 21 damage.

Ranged Combat Breakdown

Ranged combat can be tricky especially if you pick a bow.

Here's the reason:

While traveling it is impractical to keep your bow strung for a long period of time. If you're GM is vindictive (like any good GM) he'll slowly have your bow lose it's power and then if you'll be out 75 sp (if you picked up the longbow), which is a bummer. So that means that you'll be walking around with your bow unstrung.

So at the beginning of combat, if you are caught with your pants down (and let's face it, this will be 75-90% of the encounters you'll have), you'll have to string your bow and then wait your full weapon speed to shoot. This could leave you basically inactive for the first 20-30 seconds of combat, which at lower levels is practically the entire combat.

You can toss the bow aside but that means you'll have to settle for a thrown weapon or a sling.

Personally, I love the sling. Easy to ready, it's a great go-to for weaker characters and it does a moderate damage with a pretty good range. However, it'll never have the range or the damage that a bow will.

So really, the sling is great starter weapon and I usually grab it for my weaker fighters and thieves. It's not great for a character that plans on being a mainly ranged weapon as the more BPs you spend on it, the less you get in return.

You could always pick up a thrown weapon but you should be aware of a few things:

The strength bonus you get for thrown weapons doesn't make any sense. If you have strength penalty, your thrown becomes less powerful by getting a running start. You might argue to the GM that you should always get your strength bonus and then get a +3 to damage if you get a jogging start.

That makes them more effective overall.

Additionally, there is a knife and a throwing knife. A hand-ax and a throwing ax. While it is heavy implied in the rules that they are, in fact, the same weapon, it never actually makes the connection. If you can convince your GM to make them one in the same, they have the added bonus of switching from melee to ranged without having to wait your full weapon speed to attack it somebody engages you.

All throwing weapons have the same main benefit: they are fast as sin. Most you can draw and throw in under 10 seconds.

Javelin has the greatest range and range of damage but is a bit slower then the others and less likely to actually penetrate.

The throwing ax is a nice medium. It's biggest strength is that it does a fair amount of shield damage, meaning that if you're pretty swole and get a running start, you can put a dent in someone's shield.

The throwing knife is the quickest out of the three but does the least amount of damage.

I usually pick up the javelin or throwing ax for my stronger fighters, while I tend to favor the throwing knife for my more manly thieves as it doubles as a melee weapon in case someone closes with them.

The last are the crossbows. To be fair, I don't have a lot of experience with them. Crossbows roughly equal to bows except for their reloading time which is a pain. The best use for crossbows, I've found, is for NPC peons forming some sort of blockage. Since only one has to fire it, you have maybe 5 additional NPCs all reloading crossbows. Forming a battery of about 20-30 men, you can effectively lay down a constant fire.

Crossbows popularity came from the fact that it was easier and quicker to train men to use them.

I would only recommend crossbows to players that have a small following of NPCs to reload for them.

If you're set on bows, you'll find that the first few levels will be frustrating as you'll have to pull out and string your bow, which will delay when you can enter the fray.

There's a few things you can do to counter act that:

Ditch the armor entirely.

If you do then you automatically drop an initiative die.

If you're not an elf, you can pick up the Improved Awareness talent. The talent doesn't stack with class or race bonuses to the initiative die but it doesn't say anything about not stacking with the bonus gained from not wearing armor.

That means that you are starting combat at two lower initiative die (a d12 becomes a d6, which is pretty awesome). That means you'll be able to act quicker then almost everyone.

If you do go this route, I also recommend picking up the Dodge talent so that you get your Dex vs ranged attacks. That'll make it a little harder to hit you.

That won't completely negate the time you have to wait to string your bow but it'll certain be a huge improvement. Ditching your armor is not a bad strategy but YOU WILL BE SCREWED IF YOU GET INTO MELEE COMBAT.

So keep in mind the exit: that depends on the type of campaign but if you're in the forest a lot then go for Grel. Full speed through the underbrush paired with hiking/road marching plus long distance running and you will never have to worry about being caught.

Bows greatest strength is their range and damage. A long bow is the hardest hitting, quickest, and farthest reaching weapon in the book. Grab the Advanced Sighting and you gain roughly an additional 50 feet of range from which to tag your enemy.

Once you invest the BPs into specialization then you can get your shooting down to 6 seconds per shot. It's getting there that's tough.

The real difference between short bows and long bows are their proficiencies cost (which doesn't matter to you as a cleric of the Patient Arrow) and the fact that Long bow costs twice at much, which means that you won't be able to buy your long-ranged death-dealer unless you purposely stash BPs away to cash in for... while... cash. Less BPs means less talents and specializations which means you'll be less effective out of the gate.

You'll need a minimum of 15 BPs to afford a long bow without dipping into your other starting SPs. That's enough to get you +2 in everything on your bow. Pretty good if you ask me.

You can also go the route of borrowing cash from other players. I had a player do this. His reason was that his ranger was the body guard of the rogue and that the rogue wanted him to have the best equipment. This tied their backstories together and tickled my soft stop as GM, so I allowed it. This allowed him to save his precious BPs to make him a better archer.

If that doesn't suit you or your GM says no, then you can try to save some BPs by relying on your starting cash roll to mitigate the cost. It's a risk but you might be able to save enough BPs to get maybe an additional +1.

Always pick up Advanced Sighting with your bow. It's great. You can also use it to rationalize it being able to see farther and you might convince your GM to give you an extra something-something on Observation checks that require you to see you long distances. I'm a pretty hard-ass GM and even I thought it made sense.

Well, this has become a regular essay and I'm so sorry that this ballooned into the monstrosity that it's become. I hope it was helpful at the very least. We can also talk about what you can do in melee to not get curb-stomped.

Throwing Weapon Damage

I've decided to redo how thrown weapon damage is done because I can and how it's done doesn't make any sense to me.

Thrown weapons will now always benefit from your strength damage modifier, no matter what. So if you have a +2 damage modifier, and you chuck a throwing knife, it's a d6p+2. Same goes if your modifier is a penalty.

Additionally, if you find that your character is a little weak in the arm or you want some extra power behind your throw, you can get a jogging or running start. If you are going at least 10 ft/sec (that's jogging for medium sized creatures and running for small sized creatures) then you receive a +3 to damage.

You still cannot specialize in thrown weapon damage.

NPA/NPD and Unarmed Attacks

     If you successfully score a Near Perfect Attack or a Near Perfect Defense, you may instead forgo the standard bonus to gain a free unarmed combat maneuver against your opponent.

     It doesn't effect your count or switch your to fighting with two weapons (attacking with both). If you are using an Advance Combat Maneuver, you still add any bonuses of penalties from that.

     If you are swapping out a Near Perfect Attack, you'll still need to roll a separate attack roll for the unarmed maneuver.

     Obviously, you must be in melee with your attacker to gain this bonus.