Eldritch Adventures

While discussing the weapons in EA with a couple friends, it came up that overall the morning star is the best weapon on a speed vs. damage rate.

A bit of background. Combat in EA is not like most rpgs. Initiative is continuous, meaning you roll for your next slot as soon as you finish your turn. With a fast weapon and good stats, you can attack multiple times before someone with a slow weapon may attack. This is all very good, except the initiative was modified from a standard “everyone goes then roll again” system. The damages on the weapons weren’t as glaringly unbalanced then. So after a few hours of entering weapon damages and speeds into a spreadsheet and tinkering, I decided that certain classes of weapons will have an average speed. The ratio between speed and damage was going to be as near to 1 as I could make it. I should note here that when I say damage, I mean the average damage on the dice, excluding any bonuses; so 2d6 has an average of 7. This threw out my first idea that one handed weapons do one die of damage, two handed weapons do two dice, and polearms do three dice. Polearms are hard hitting but incredibly slow. Upside to them, anything you smack with it is most likely going to stay smacked.

So now the weapons are all “balanced” to a speed/damage ratio of 1. This means that the overall dps per weapon is consistent. The only variation now involved is character strength and skill. And armor.

Speaking of armor, the initiative process was to roll 1d10, add weapon speed and subtract character Speed. This is now roll 1d10, add weapon speed, add 1/2 armor DV (defense value), subtract the average of Speed and Perception. This makes moving in heavier armors slower as well as adding a perception component. One of my friends pointed out that how fast you move in a combat is not always about how fast you move, but also how well you notice openings. Hence the addition of Perception to the equation.

The only real thing left to finish up is the magic system. I don’t know how many times I’ve changed it, but each time it is because I am unhappy with it. All I really need to do is finish writing out the spell descriptions for a couple hundred spells. Tedious work, but it needs to be done. Then a lot of play testing. Which means people interested in running the same encounter over and over again to generate the data I need. Any volunteers?