What system has the best sword Fighting/close combat rules.
Really want a good fantasy/dark ages game and D&D 5e doesn't cut it for me. I need something more deadly and D&Ds characters with huge pools of hit points isn't working.
>>48115032
I mean, you could just dial down the total amounts of HP if that's your main issue. Or go for AD&D if you want a change of pace but not necessarily a completely foreign system.
If overall combat isn't thrilling you, maybe check out the Song of Ice and Fire system or second edition Warhammer Fantasy RPG. The latter's a bit more focused on how badly your shit gets kicked in, but they're both a bit less hit-soaky than D&D.
>>48115032
Real life. Pick up HEMA along with a handful of your friends and then begin larping.
>>48115141
Honestly D&D really isn't my type of game I typically play Dark heresy in Shadowrun 4th edition but my players requested that I run something in a fantasy so I went with the most popular choice of D&D 5e
>>48115032
RuneQuest 6/Mythras has the best combat I've seen. Since you want dark and know d100 knock offs, play the game FFG 40K games wish they could be.
More seriously, check the free rules. There's a link to the core floating around here frequently if you like it.
>>48115032
Riddle of Steel should have been the first and only answer to this thread.
>>48115321
Agreed. RQ6 especially has the most realistic and still conveniently playable combat system that I have ever seen.
The Riddle of Steel and the games that came from it, Song of Swords, Blade of the Iron Throne, and Band of Bastards.
RuneQuest 6.
>>48115373
What's one thing Riddle of Steel does adequately apart from stabbing people in the balls?
>>48115393
Also, there is a free PDF version for downloading, just search "runequest 6 pdf" and you should find it. It contains everything essential, if not all of the character creation quirks or magical styles - for free.
>>48115416
Not that anon, but it answers the OP's request perfectly. That's enough.
>>48115393
That's the real magic - RQ6 has gravitas without the crazy crunch. Your combat skill uses the weapons your character would be trained in, has the benefit you want, weapons have a few options for special effects; attack or defend with a weapon, apply effect, prevent or deal damage.
>>48115439
I literally attached the odf to my post, bro
>>48115482
>>48115321
Does Rune quest 6 have good magic rules? My players stated they want lower magic, closer to Witcher or A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones.
>>48115032
Hmm, if you're looking for a more lethal fantasy setting but don't want to go low-magic, you can look at AD&D as has been suggested. I wouldn't say that fighters are incredibly meaningful, but it's not as pronounced as it is in later editions. Moreover they have their specific roles and do actually have strengths to speak of.
Alternately, you can check out Earthdawn. 4th edition just came out, and it does improve on earlier editions in some meaningful ways. (Also, d4 and d20 made their way back into the step chart, which I don't like personally, but eh.) It has meaningful wounds, straight-up spellcasters are less powerful, everyone has magic in a way and can do superhuman stuff, and the setting it comes with is pretty amazing. It's sort of nobledark I'd say. There's pirates and slavers to fight and eldritch horrors to kick off your front lawn. On the other hand it's not a game that's focused on really modeling close combat super-accurately. For that, you really should just go do HEMA.
>>48115416
It's HEMA with dice. No other "answer" in this thread even compares.
>>48115032
Riddle of Steel or one of its successors. Song of Swords has a general and a playable alpha, not sure about the status of the others.
>>48115541
RuneQuest 6 has 5 magic systems, magic scalable from no to high magic, and all of them are good for different reasons.
>folk magic is weak spells used in daily life, low entry and easy to learn spells
>animism is binding spirits to your whim and using them for great effect, higher skill = more and stronger spirits you can control
>sorcery is sculpting magic into the effect you want
>mysticism is king-fu influenced use inner power to make things easy, enhance stats, or do some cool wuxia shit
>Thiesm is creating a small pool or miracles you can perform after worshipping, the higher your rank in a cult the stronger you are
GURPS
>>48115800
Bovine is published but with questionable factors and a somewhat narrowed focus.
Builder has a playable alpha that I've not touched.
>>48115684
HEMA isn't accurate to real fighting, though. It's like making a world war two game based on 'accurate simulations' of paintball matches. It ends up being inaccurate, unengaging, and only worthwhile to sloppily masturbate to while listening to Matt Easton mumble on youtube.
What is Glorantha?
>>48116244
>I want realistic melee game
>just do HEMA
>well this game is HEMA in game form
>HEMA is bad tho
Classic /tg/.
>>48116425
OP here, I don't even know what HEMA is. Looking it up online Historical European Martial Arts. I need to point out that I'm not looking to LARP.
>>48116510
Hema is more of an attempt to recreate European martial arts from manuals and fencing.
It isn't larp, more part history project and part martial art.
>>48115032
You probably passed the Song of Swords threads on your way in. That's your best bet for something that's still updating.
>>48115373
>>48115413
These guys know what's up.
>>48115416
Many things, but it does that really well.
>>48116547
I can ask them but from personal experience I don't think they would be very interested in that.
>>48116510
Riddle of steel isn't larp, but an RPG hailed as the most accurate recreation of historical martial arts in a tabletop game by organizations such as HEMA and ARMA.
>>48115800
Not to mention a dieselpunk spinoff.
>>48116227
Builder seems pretty good from the limited bit that I've seen of it. A bit less crunch-focused than the others, though as a TroS clone, it's still pretty crunchy.
>>48115800
>>48116227
>>48116649
>>48116739
Honestly Band of Bastards is the only TRoS clone/successor attempt I've seen so far that doesn't miss the fucking point.
What is the difference between Song of Swords, Blade of the Iron Throne, and Band of Bastards?
>>48115032
You should consider using GURPS. It will probably suit your needs.
>>48115032
Fashan.
codex martialis makes dnd melee tolerably enjoyable
>>48116967
SoS takes TRoS and adds a ton of overcomplicated subsystems and completely extraneous mechanics to an already somewhat complex system topped off with a batshit insane magical realm acid trip of a setting.
Blade of the Iron Throne makes completely pointless changes for the sake of making changes and "consolidates" stats into a handful of esotericly named stats that give no indication of what the fuck they're even supposed to be at all at a glance. It has approximately one good idea in the entire system (bladed weapons dealing greatly reduced blunt damage to people in plate armor), and the setting is a poor attempt as Sword & Sorcery & Sandals and character creation mechanics are tailored to the specific genre instead of being more open and general. Also the last PDF I've seen of it used art stolen from deviantart and the fucking PC game Mount and Blade.
Band of Bastards is an actual attempt at streamlining TRoS while still keeping to the original spirit of the game.
>>48117385
no that's autism
>>48115321
Is Runequest 6 and Mythras different games?
>>48118617
No you're autism.
Anyone have a link to Band of Bastards to share?
>>48119665
It's free on their site, look up "band of bastards RPG" so you don't have to sift through 10 pages of porn results to find it.
>>48119876
>look up "band of bastards RPG" so you don't have to sift through 10 pages of porn results to find it.
It's Deep Sounding all over again.
Still looks pretty cool. Do we have a rough idea when it'll be fully released?
Can someone tell me how GURPs with the Martial supplement compare in melee combat to Riddle of Steel?
>>48115032
>>48115373
How do you implement Riddle of Steel's system into D&D?
I'm not OP btw.
>>48121385
You don't. You drop D&D and play Riddle of Steel instead.
>>48115032
Hackmaster. K&C decided to drop the joke of being spoof-D&D and made their own system. It is the best I have ever found.
>>48118989
No, RQ6 is being renamed to Mythras because The Design Mechanism lost the license. Runequest reverted back to Chaosium/Moon Design/Whoever who are creating a new Runequest 7 based off Runequest 2. Just go with Mythras. The free version of RQ6, Runequest Essentials is also still available, just do a search. It has some of the magic systems missing from the Mythras Lite pdf.
>>48116856
Oh shit it's "Why do you have so many daggers man".
>>48115416
It's a great character creation system and it's mechanical reward for roleplay is actually pretty interesting.
Also, it's magic system is what D&D should be, if not mechanically, then thematically.
>>48115032
Burning Wheel is my favorite system right now.
In fight you proceed by exchange.
In an exchange, there is 3 volley. You divide your actions into these volleys depending on your Reflexes. If you have 3 Reflexes, you get one action in each volley, for example.
You then pick actions from a list (there is 18 different actions I think) There is things like Strike, Counterstrike, Block & Strike, Avoid, Charge/Tackle, Feint, etc.
You pick them in secret and you show them when everyone has chosen, so you enter the combat with a plan of actions.
Different actions have different interactions. A Strike against a Block is simple. A Counterstrike against a Strike allow you to ignore the advantage of the weapon you're fighting (A spear has usually advantage over a dagger) and to ignore some of the damage your opponent is doing with his strike.
Finally, you take damage in wounds. The first hit you take can be a traumatic wound, cut off one of your limb and take you out of combat right off the bat. That's why you invest in armor and shields.
It's very refreshing after D&D
>>48122027
... no?
>ctrl+f harnmaster
>0 results
son i am disappoint
Not OP but I'd like to hear more about the RQ6 combat system. Anyone who can give a brief overview of its strengths and weaknesses?
>>48122186
Doubling this very much! Harnmaster is one of my all-time favourite systems. It handles realism in combat fairly good without being overly complex. The magic/religion system also works great. Only problem that I have with it is the character creation which is quite heavy and need a bit house ruling to give players some choice over their characters.
>>48122335
Well, I have no issue with character generation being long and complex, provided the mortality rate of PCs isn't high. If you plan for a 2+ year real world time campaign, then a character generation of 2 hours isn't asking too much.
Incidentally though, mortality tends to be high in out-of-the-box Harnmaster. As a GM, I tended to give the players as set amount of hero points (effectively rerolls).
>Anonymous 07/05/16(Tue)12:11:28 No.48122428â–¶
> >>48122335
> Well, I have no issue with character generation being long and complex, provided the mortality rate of PCs isn't high. If you plan for a 2+ year real world time campaign, then a character generation of 2 hours isn't asking too much.
> Incidentally though, mortality tends to be high in out-of-the-box Harnmaster. As a GM, I tended to give the players as set amount of hero points (effectively rerolls).
True. I also did fate points in our last campaign, but not in my current campaign. I want my players to treat combat as a last resort. Just like people do in real life and it seems to be working. They are actively planning ahead instead of rushing into fights they know nothing about.
What edition you play and do you just roll everything in character creation? I'm interested of how other people handle the character creation.
>>48122483
Wow I really fucked up the formatting. Meant to reply to this >>48122428
>>48122483
Not playing anymore currently but we used to play first edition. In the first fight I GM'd, one of the farmboy PCs had his skull crushed early on. That was a sobering experience which caused the player to basically ragequitPussy.
>>48115373
Going with this. I use a slightly modified version of this in my "homebrew" shit, and it's fantastic. One thing though, is the combat in RoS tends to be a little too deadly, even for someone looking for that. I'll explain RoS combat, and then my modifications, for those that don't into stealing books.
Combat is divided into rounds, which last about two seconds each, and are comprised of two bouts.
A bout is one exchange between combatants. For each bout, the combatants declare if they will be defending or attacking. If you're attacking, you cannot spend dice to defend yourself, and if you're defending, you cannot spend dice to attack. Initiative is something you either have or you don't. The combatants roll for initiative, and the person with the higher roll has it, and that simply means they attack first. What's interesting here is that initiative can be stolen, for example if the initiator fumbles, or the other combatant successfully parries the initiator, etc..
Anyways, say I'm attacking you, and you're defending. I declare that 10 dice from my combat pool go into the attack, and you declare that 12 go into defending that attack (by the way, neither person knows if the other is attacking/defending or the amount of dice they declared until both have declared, this leads to situations where both defend or both attack, which I'll cover in a moment) We roll our dice, and count the number of successes. If I get 6 successes on my attack, but you get 7 on your defense, you successfully defend against my attack. If it was the other way around, then I have one success over your defense, which is a barely successful attack. If I had 5 or 6 over, it would be a massive success.
>>48122565
cont'd
Then, you roll for how devastating the wound is based on amount of success, and roll damage. Typically, one or two hits will kill you. The first hit may not, but it will mean you're heavily wounded, and you lose dice in your combat pool after that, which makes for an easy victory after a successful attack. As a side note, this game doesn't use armor class as such, but armor simply means damage reduction.
Moving on. If two people defend in the same bout, they simple circle each other. If two attack, there is no defense and it is a straight matter of: The initiator's successes are counted and damage is rolled against the other combatant, and if that combatant is still able to fight, his successes are counted against the initiator.
An example of the wound table might be like 1-6, where one is a flesh wound, and six is a beheading. I can't remember off-hand what the actual table is, so you'll need to verify if you use this.
ANYWAYS, on to my modification. It is almost exactly the same, except I use something called a "health pool" which is based off of a character's constitution. When an attack lands on them, a portion of the damage is taken as a hit to the amount of dice in the health pool. The character rolls their health pool each time they take a hit, and if they meet the required amount of successes to survive, they do. Eventually, with the reduction (which should be between 2-5 dice each time out of a health pool of 10-ish) it will be impossible to get a success on the save, and that blow will kill the character.
I did forget to mention the role that stances take in this game, but it's basically this: You declare your stance (the generic three are neutral, aggressive, and defensive) and it gives you a bonus to that type (neutral gives no bonus either way). For example, you might gain two extra dice for defensive maneuvers in your defensive stance, but two less when acting as the aggressor.
>>48122627
cont'd final
Warrior types will gain many other stances, but those are the basic three! I will now green-text a tl;dr of the rules, with my mods at the bottom.
>combat round is 2 seconds, comprised of 2 'bouts'
>bout is one exchange between combatants
>start of bout, each person declares if they will attack or defend
>has a combat pool, and uses dice from that for these actions
>"I roll 6 dice from my combat pool to attack"
>"I roll 7 to defend"
>compare the successes, and who is victorious depends on that
>cannot defend while attacking, or vice versa
>this means that two people attacking, both will hit for sure if the second person isn't killed by the first blow
>both defending is just them circling each other
>assuming an attack hits, compare how many successes over it was to a wound table, and roll damage for that
>usually one or two hits is death
>Now for my mods
>instead of using a straight wound-table, characters have a health pool derived from their constitution
>each time they are struck, they roll the dice in their pool and must get a few successes to survive, depending on how bad the attack was.
>if they survive, a few dice are removed from the health pool
>this makes it harder to survive with each blow, until it becomes impossible
>this equates to it taking from 2-5 hits to kill a person (at all levels) instead of 1-2, although a really great attack can still 1-hit someone.
I forgot to mention that the dice pool refreshes at the end of each round!. If you have 10 dice, and use 6 to attack/defend during the first bout, you only have 4 to attack/defend in the second bout. I hope this shit is readable, lol
>>48122565
>>48122627
>>48122668
interesting read, thx, anon! wish somebody would do sth similar for runequest
>>48122102
Sorry you used very similar language to a gentleman in the SoS thread who was quite frustrated at the verity of weapons that were stated in the book.
>>48122627
You don't roll damage in TRoS... It's based on your attack successes.
>>48115032
Take a look at Symbaroum. There's a thread that pops up every few days or so. Really high quality dark fantasy that's quite deadly.
>>48122709
There's actually a wiki with the TRoS rules in their (near) entirety.
http://knight.burrowowl.net/doku.php?id=rules:rules
As said, you don't roll for damage in TRoS, anon was remembering wrong. Damage is based on your MoS+Strength+Weapon damage bonus, while your opponent gets a total DR of Armor+Toughness, compare resulting wound level to damage chart based on where the attack hit. Wounds range from 0 to 5+, where 0 is a scratch with little effect and 5+ is pretty much just messy instant death.
Anon's house rule is... kind of extraneous actually, the system is super deadly but isn't actually as deadly for players (specifically the PCs, they're the heroes so they get extra bonuses) as he's implying, as there are a number of built in ways to not die in 1 or 2 hits.
1) Wear fucking armor and/or invest in your Toughness stat.
It's actually a well known problem with the system that a character with high Toughness and heavy armor is virtually invincible. People actually put more effort into making houserules to fix THIS problem than the system being "too deadly."
2) The Drama Points rules from the Companion supplement. http://knight.burrowowl.net/doku.php?id=rules:drama This should be #1 really, and are what makes anon's houserule kind of pointless (though, in his defense, they were added in a supplement to the core rules). Drama points can be spent to lower wound results directly, if the DM wants a less deadly game then he should be more liberal with Drama Point rewards.
3) Milk your Spiritual Attributes for bonus dice. More "indirect" than Drama points but TRoS isn't a game about murderhoboing, you shouldn't be fighting at all unless it's in your best interest, and if it's in your best interest chances are you have AT LEAST one SA you can do some logic gymnastics to justify applying to the scene and getting extra dice from.
>>48115321
So far, I'm not even just disappointed, I'm straight up confused as to why you'd want to try and push this game on people. The free rules look awful.
>>48123677
The combat rules are really good and offer more options than simply "roll to see if I hit the target with my weapon, then roll for damage."
You can trip enemies, you can disarm them, grapple, get different kinds of bonuses from fighting as a unit, impale enemies with your weapon, damage their weapons and shields, the way that the weapon reach works in the rules is not only reasonably realistic it is also simple and functional from gaming perspective... Oh and the magic users are balanced with non-magic users.
>>48123677
What do you think is shit?
These are a light-weight free introduction to a large system - the full book is about 10x the page count.
>>48115032
Not to dissuade you from switching systems, which I personally think is the best course of action, but if your players are like some of mine and refuse to play any other fantasy I have a quick-fix solution:
I have in the past made D&D rather deadly by simply giving the players their max total HP at 1st level and nothing else for any other level. They can still gain HP from feats, features, and magic but they do not gain any from gaining levels.
The biggest problem with this is changing high-CR monsters so theyre not overpowered. Usually I just made their HP a lot lower too.
>>48116856
I think that depends on what you think the point is, exactly. BoB is very tight and functional, but it's a lot more limited in scope. SoS suffers more bloat, but you can do more stuff with it.
Blade is literally just TROS with the numbers filed off and some tits on the page.
>>48115032
Gurps is pretty good for gritty reality
>>48124168
>>48124244
Different Anon here. The RQ Essentials rules look very interesting, I always loved CoC.
>>48125119
I'd agree. BoB's combat is a lot simpler, and some of the elements of it work exquisitely well. Each proficiency has an Emphasis that encourages you to use them the way that those weapons were used historically, which is a really cool idea. There are also fewer maneuvers, but they have multiple uses, and the concept of followup attacks is genius.
SoS has its own strengths too though. Alone of the successors to TROS, SoS has a coherent system for fighting enemies in plate armor without simply repeatedly whacking them until they die. You can target the gaps in armor with specialized weapons. The armor rules and weapon rules also have a lot more depth. There's a bit more bookkeeping, but it adds a lot of depth and character customization to the max.
So, you can make a case for both of them. I hope both will tighten up their weaknesses before they release.
>>48126611
>before they release
Speaking of which! Check it!
>>48122286
>>48126949
Astonishing! After a year of effort, they've managed to format a single page!
>>48127009
I know we're as surprised as you are!
>>48115032
Rolemaster. Crits are what kills and anyone can crit if they are lucky enough. Hit points are just there to show how much bruising you can take before you start taking negative and finally fall over. You don't parry in Rolemaster, you die. Simple as that. Just like real life.
>>48128927
>You don't parry in Rolemaster, you die. Simple as that. Just like real life.
>You can't parry in real life
>>48128927
Anon confirmed for never having playing RoleMaster and devoted half OB to DB.
>>48125119
>Blade is literally just TROS with the numbers filed off and some tits on the page.
No, Blade is TRoS if every decision it made was executed poorly or accompanied by some aspect that makes it completely stupid.
>let's change the dice.... To d12s!
>lets consolidate the stats.... And give them shitty esoteric names that give little to no indication as to what they represent!
>lets make the game more mature... By putting tits on the border around every single page!
>lets make the game focused on on S&S style gameplay.... At the expense of anything else!
And so on.
