I have a few (small niggly) questions about Fallen Empires, and I know Vincent is busy with the main 2E project, so I wonder if anyone else has any opinions (probably starting a short campaign on Thursday):
1. The Child of Battle:
Do you think there’s necessarily any connection between choosing Distinctive Armour and your choice of light/heavy armour as your Equipment picks?
If not, do you think there should be any mechanical advantage to having Distinctive Armour? (like forcing characters who are about to fight you to ‘Go into Danger’?)
2. Wolfshead:
Does the Mount get any armour by default? Does it match the Wolfshead’s equipment choice?
3. The Sword Master:
I find it strange that the ‘Terrifying Weapons of War’ are in some cases the same or worse that ‘Serious Weapons’. OK, so this is just based on the number of ‘Deadly’ tags they have – am I missing something here?
4. Shoulder Another Rider:
I would’ve thought that this should take into account the relative strengths of the mounts, but maybe not…
Thanks!
1. The only connection I would see is how one would describe your armor. You still pick if you’re going to have 1 or 2 armor, but you get to add the tags from your distinctive armor.
As for advantage, from a purely mechanical standpoint no there is no advantage. From a fictional standpoint if I were MCing for a Child of Battle I would ask questions like crazy about the armor and make sure it gets brought up within the fiction a bunch. If the player took the time to choose something from a playbook, they want to use it. So should there be a mechanical advantage? My opinion, no.
2. As written I’d say no. I could see no reason why the mount couldn’t start with armor just like the PC and just let the PC declare that their mount has armor, but I’d probably limit it to 1 armor because I can’t imagine a horse or elephant in full plate.
3. Mechanically they’re about the same, but to be fair, in AW a small gun and a machete can do the same harm, but it’s all in the fiction. If I’m living in the FE world and see a few short swords, no big deal, but then I see some dude come in with a sword as long as I am tall, bricks would be shat. Could probably build a nice wall with them…
Point is, fictionally the terrifying weapons of war were only for folks who did killing professionally used them. If these weapons are in play, folks would notice. It’s more so a fiction vs. mechanics thing again.
4. Yeah I agree with you there. Their strength scores would make sense in that case. Course good luck shouldering a rider on an elephant when you’re on your camel.
Hope this helps, mate.
I was also wondering the same: My Child of Battle has some cool distinctive weapons, but they are worse than a mere Strongholder’s longsword… I guess it’s all about the fiction here.
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Some thoughts (from someone with 0 play experience)
1) Combat moves are very abstract/narrative (as opposed to the highly specific actions in say d&d)
2) Given 1, there’s no reason why a character can’t switch between weapons from move to move (or even mix multiple weapons in a given move)
3) Given 2, from a purely mechanical standpoint, there is little difference which exact item carries which tag (especially when considering the set of deadly tags)
4) Given 3, the Hardholder always gets the set of deadly tags (hand to hand, on the field), while the Child of Battle and Sword Master get to choose what set to build across all their weapons (the Child of Battle can easily pick any 2 tags and the Sword Master gets enough weapons to cover the whole set with ease)
5) The Sword Master gets access to weapons with the “pierces armour” tag, the Child of Battle can get the even more awesome sounding “ignores armour” (are they meant to be different? either way stripping armour from foes can be as good/better than deadly depending on the situation)
6) Given the above, Sword Master and Child of Battle have a much better range of options in combat than the Strongholder
7) That said the sword seems slightly out of line mechanically being the only weapon that has 2 deadly tags (apart from custom Child of Battle weapons and the 2 Sword Master weapons with (on the field, vs mounted))
In case your curious, I re-wrote the equipment list partly to deal with the issue of the Terrifying Weapons of War not actually seeming that terrifying. I also added some narrative tags (like messy) to most of the weapons. I actually see the moves as strangely concrete, in that the description of the ongoing fiction should absolutely (IMHO) effect what move is rolled, even to the point of a different type of attack (or intent behind it) generating a different move. I posted the list, and some of my thoughts on the Apocalypse World forums (http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=7586.0), under a topic titled “AW: Fallen Empires, alternate equipment list.” There is a little bit of a discussion going on, mostly around the tags. You might find those more or less useful, but sounds like my range adjustments might be useful to you given you had the same issue with the “deadlys” I did.