Plate Armour

[knightkrawler]

I ruled that "when rolling for your movement points you must ignore one of the die results".
That means if the hero is augmented by something giving him a third movement die he still gets to pick two from three results.
If he may only roll one die then he basically has to get rid of the armor.
That's fair, methinks.

[cynthialee]

the guys who wrote the original rule had no clue about armor
Plate armor DOES NOT SLOW YOU DOWN enough to worry about. When I saw a man do cartwheels in a full suit of plate I knew most of what I thought I knew about armor is bogus.
Of all the bogus and stupid rules in the game ...the plate mail movement penalty rule is the lamest. In fact it is so bad and uninformed that any self respecting EWP would toss this rule out on its ear.

[knightkrawler]

Please, don't take realism into account with HQ. That's horseshit.
A short sword should allow for diagonal attacks because you fight mostly lunging and poking with it.
A longsword however, takes a swing and thus is less effective for a distance represented by a diagonally adjacent square.
Where to stop then trying to figure out inconsistencies with reality?

The movement penalty might be unrealistic and this might be born out of the cluelessness of the writer,
but it has its purpose in making heroes think if they wanna be a freakin' tank and, by extension, if they wanna play defensively,
which makes the game in effect boring when played vanilla and without bow-wielding goblins who can open doors and move-attack-move.

[cynthialee]

Oh baloney.
The game was designed to be modded and vanilla is fine for beginner tables, but it is meant to be built on and modified by players. When we come across issues of realism verses game play I will tend to err on the side of game play, but when we come across a rule that so blatantly flies in the face of the reality then I must take issue.
If one must insist on a movement penalty for plate then no more than a 1 point loss on the dice rolled is appropriate. As for being a tank....yeah that is what the stuff is for.

[Big Bene]

I think Cynthia's point is valid, but there's still some "but".

There's a common misconception in modern times that plate armor was so cumbersome that knights could hardly move in it or even not move at all other than on horseback. There are even wooden cranes in castles, which the tourists are told have been used to lift the otherwise immobile knights on their horses. Of course these construcs are not older than 19th century.

This is BS indeed. Plate armour was designed to be as articulated as possible and to distribute the weight evenly about the body. Of course it hampers some moves, but much less than one would think, and you can certainly move full speed in it.
I've seen this too at many occasions at LARP games and renaissance fairs.

But:
While I don't have plate armor I've worn chainmail for several hours on many occasions, and it definitely takes it's toll. You have to carry an additional 30 pounds (more in the case of plate). Even if it's distributed to the best and you don't feel it at the moment, it will exhaust you in the long run, at least to some point, depending on your fitness. As HQ is a game that simplifies realistic effects into more vague, but playable rules, it may be this long term effect that is represented by the movement penality.

[knightkrawler]

Nobody doubts that what Cynthia and you, Bene, say about the weight of plate armor being exaggerated.
BUT the only BUT that counts in terms of HQ is what rule makes sense and what doesn't? There are only five stats that differentiate one item from another and that is the point of stat modifying, not realism and neither naturalism. Because - well, tell me more about the Chaos Warrior' armor and especially the helmets, the shortsword (which I mentioned) and your fists accounting for no attack dice (as the original rules imply and the only point of "naturalism" I have addressed with my rules). The list goes on.

I consider my point about the plate armor and defensive heroes and tanks still valid.
Of course you could just make the thing more expensive, say 1200 gold, but then it makes sense to offer another piece of equipment that in the end result of a defend roll adds another die, maybe a tower shield (for +2DD) or a piece augmenting the plate armor (+1DD, movement penalty), if only to make heroes think about tactics. They won't do that when they already 6 DD. I've never heard of a player wanting 7 DD.

So, to incorporate this tactical thing you need to keep plate armor as is or you augment and change the game so much that it is
- a full-fledged RPG as Cynthia plays it and is NOT the purpose of the game as she claims. It's a possibility and I welcome any full ruleset offering this to me, but vanilla HQ was NOT "designed to be modded". It has flaws and almost forces you to mod it WHEN YOU'RE OLDER THAN TEN, but the creators honestly thought it's better than that. They wanted to put out a simple and ready-to-play boardgame and guess what - they did.
- or a game so all over the place with its statistics that you end up with rolling 18 attack dice against a goblin defending with 8.
The combat dice system caters to the simplicity as there are limits and very little gradation between better and worse. The numbers basically move between 0 and 6, not between 0 and 99 like in MERP. Trying to tamper with that scale means trouble. At least to me.
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Here's another reality snippet: plate armor protects you more against blade weapons (4 DD) than against blunt weapons (3 DD), more against strikes and swings than against an aimed poke. Chainmail basically but not exactly the other way around. Nobody has addressed that, have they? Why? Because it's pointless. The combat dice rolling and the stats represent probabilities. If we go so far as to tamper with that, we need injury zone dice to see where on your body you've lost your body point.

I'm exaggerating, but only slightly.

[cynthialee]

Seriously dude?
You act as if the original designers had some brilliant and unsullied concept of this game. They didn't. They screwed up in a number of places and it is up to us, the EWP to fix it.

And I only play HQ RPG about 75% of the time. When ever I show a new player the game it is always vanilla.

[knightkrawler]

a full-fledged RPG as Cynthia plays it and is NOT the purpose of the game as she claims. It's a possibility and I welcome any full ruleset offering this to me, but vanilla HQ was NOT "designed to be modded". It has flaws and almost forces you to mod it WHEN YOU'RE OLDER THAN TEN, but the creators honestly thought it's better than that. They wanted to put out a simple and ready-to-play boardgame and guess what - they did.

Now, where exactly do you read this unsullied and brilliant stuff?
In a different thread, I shat all over the creators' work method as recently as today.
They did botch up in a number of places, but that was because they designed a game for 10 year old FUTURE WARHAMMER players and the game was meant to be a stepping stone instead of a cult classic grown-ups play.
How on earth would I be rewriting (and I mean, linguistically re-creating the way of writing the rules for this game) HQ if I thought it was unsullied?

[cynthialee]

Your attitude speaks volumes dude.
You smack down everything I have to say and every time it is you pointing to the base rules and defending them.
I don't care that you rewrote the rules somewhere else. Every time the two of us interact you crap on my ideas and opinions.

[knightkrawler]

Where am I smacking you down? Quote me, please.
I try to make a point, which is: keep plate armor close to what it is. I give reasons. You counter. I counter. What's the problem here?
I presented to you in my last post my theory of how HQ came to be. I see modding as a possibility, you see it as a task.
You make an RPG out of it, I don't play RPGs, but 'It's a possibility and I welcome any full ruleset offering this to me',
and you accuse me of smacking you down.