Shield and Forge Armor, why not?

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The Undying
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Re: Shield and Forge Armor, why not?

Post by The Undying » Sun Aug 20, 2017 10:25 pm

For what it's worth, the price will be much higher than 400 silver. Let's make a default assumption that our Forger can get one success. The cost ends up being 1800 (50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400) if my math is correct. It's also take ~2 months (likely not all at once). Remember that you pay 50 silver PER RANK on each test.

Telarus
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Re: Shield and Forge Armor, why not?

Post by Telarus » Mon Aug 21, 2017 12:24 am

Agreed. Factional npcs in my game will often walk around with up to +4 Forged gear (depending on rank/position in the faction), as I assume the factions have that kind of organizational setup. I think of this as "masterwork" quality. Forged gear +5 or more is much more rare due to costs, logistics, etc involved, but Named leaders, etc will often have their items forged/enchanted past +5.

When I ran my Greyhawk mashup game, I also had the town of Hommlet's Weaponsmith Adept (5th Circle) teach the players a blood magic ritual that would restore up to +4 Forging on found treasure that had been Forged with a special blood magic ritual (& runic seal) that was common to smiths in the area since before the Scourge. Takes an hour long blood magic ritual (PER/ForgeWeapons vs 6+ Forge Rank, hope you don't botch) and 2 strain per +1 Forge Rank to restore the forge bonus. Weaponsmiths in fully equipped forges only pay 1 strain per +1. The bonus will last for 1 month (enough time to theoretically get it to a forge and let the Weaponsmith bind the magic to a year and a day again).

Bam, instant +2 Swords/Daggers/Axes/etc from moldy old treasure chests (that aren't thread items), but it takes some identifying and work to make use of them (but not dragging them back to your friendly neighborhood Troubadour/Wizard/Weaponsmith/etc).
Last edited by Telarus on Mon Aug 21, 2017 4:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Mataxes
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Re: Shield and Forge Armor, why not?

Post by Mataxes » Mon Aug 21, 2017 4:13 am

Reciprocity wrote:
Sat Aug 19, 2017 11:19 pm
My apologies for bring up an older topic. But I'm looking for clarification about something Panda said:

There are several things here I want to address, but I am not in a position to do so right now. GenCon wrapped today, and tomorrow morning I set out for the drive back home, arriving late Tuesday or sometime Wednesday (depending on how the drive goes).

Give me a week, and if you haven't heard from me, give me a poke as a reminder. There is a lot of insight and development history that informs the decisions we made. It may or may not persuade your GM, but might at least open the lines of communication.
Josh Harrison - josh@fasagames.com
Earthdawn Developer, Forum Admin

Personal Website: www.loremerchant.com

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The Undying
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Re: Shield and Forge Armor, why not?

Post by The Undying » Mon Aug 21, 2017 6:13 am

Mataxes insight is always welcome. For those interested primarily in background and maybe some initial thoughts on 4ED design, I give you Update #27 from the Kickstarter. This is, I believe one of the Lost in Time developer's blogs linked off of the main Kickstarter page. In order to contribute to indexing on this forum, and put information more widely available, I'm also going to copy-paste all the text from the entry. Keep in mind, this is not my text, this is probably something Mataxes wrote up during the previews.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/78 ... sts/748169

Earthdawn Line Developer's Blog: Let's Talk About Forge

In last week's preview, I gave a broad overview of changes to a number of talents in the upcoming fourth edition. I mentioned Forge Weapon and Forge Armor, and indicated that I wanted to go into a bit more depth on those talents, because I started talking about it and found out it was going to be worth a whole post on its own.

This is that post.

It requires me to go back into the history of the various editions of Earthdawn -- these talents, perhaps more than almost any other, have seen a wide variety of changes over the years.

In the first edition, core rulebook, Forge Blade allowed a Weaponsmith to permanently increase the damage step of a weapon, up to a (theoretical) maximum bonus equal to the Weaponsmith's rank in Forge Blade. The rank actually limited the number of times the Weaponsmith could attempt to use the talent on a particular weapon--including failed attempts. The DN was the weapon's damage step -- the higher the damage step, the harder it was to forge, and there was no restriction on terms of it being used differently on thread weapons.

In The Adept's Way, a rule was introduced that limited the maximum bonus a weapon could receive to the weapon's base damage step. In this case, a standard broadsword could get a maximum bonus of +5. It also introduced a restriction on using it with thread weapons--the DN for these items is the item's Spell Defense, required a higher success level, and could potentially damage the item (though this was left up to GM discretion).

There were a couple of problems that sprang up with this version of Forge. First of all, the potential damage of a mundane weapon (especially two-handed weapons) outstripped the damage of all but the most powerful of thread items, and given the difficulty of using the talent on thread items, it didn't really give players much incentive to use what was arguably one of the most innovative features of the game. Even the ability of thread weapons to provide bonuses or abilities outside of raw damage had a hard time overcoming this imbalance.

Secondly, the permanent boost the talent gave to mundane items resulted in a bit of potential setting problems--for example, the Kingdom of Throal outfit all of its infantry with fully forged broadswords. This messed with the economics of the setting, making "fully forged" weapons the standard in the setting. This only helped exacerbate the issues of damage balance between forged weapons and thread weapons; and also caused a bit of a setting disconnect for some players in terms of the economics. How special is an item if any mundane soldier is carrying one?

Forge Armor didn't really have these problems, but only because the talent became available so late in the game (Eleventh Circle) that it didn't see much use in your typical campaign.

Along came Second Edition, which tried to fix the relative power of the Forge Blade talent by imposing a time limit on how long the effects of the talent would last. The duration was the Weaponsmith's rank in Forge Blade in months. It kept the maximum damage limit from the Adept's Way, but didn't say anything about using it on thread weapons. It did add another restriction -- the damage bonus could be applied to ammunition, but not the bow or crossbow (so the damage boost a ranged weapon could get was limited by the amount of ammunition you could have forged).

There were a few problems with these changes. While the duration was intended to address the setting concern of having an armory full of maximum damage weapons, the duration was kind of fiddly, and didn't give clear guidelines about whether the duration could be renewed by the Weaponsmith. If not, it really weakens the talent because you need to discard a weapon once the duration wears off and get a new one. If so, maintaining a stockpile of high-damage weapons is simply a matter of manpower. It also didn't really do anything to address the issue of damage balance between a fully forged weapon and the damage steps you would get from most thread weapons.

Forge Armor was lowered to Sixth Circle in Second Edition, but introduced the same limitations on its use as Forge Blade. I don't know how much use it typically saw in games, but introducing it earlier did make it more possible it would see use (given the time required and duration limits, though, I don't know how effectively it would have been used).

The Classic Edition tried a slightly different approach. It dropped the maximum damage bonus to the weapon's size or base damage, whichever was lower (the quarterstaff was the reason for that caveat). The duration was extended to a year and a day (a fairly stock duration, and less fiddly as a result), and while a higher success level was needed to use it on thread items, the DN was calculated the same way. The DN was made higher, however, setting it equal to the weapon damage step+9 (making it harder, in general, to use). It explicitly spelled out that the duration could be extended through the use of the talent. The reduction in the damage bonus, and the approach to thread items made it a little bit more balanced in the comparison between mundane versus magical items.

Forge Armor was back at Eleventh Circle, once again relegating it to occasional use (if at all). It introduced the same limits as the Forge Blade talent, limiting the maximum bonus to half the original value.

Third Edition kept many of the Classic modifications in terms of duration and maximum bonus, but made a significant change: the talents could no longer be used on thread weapons or armor. Instead, thread items automatically earned their maximum damage cap from the forge talent at rank 1, and went up from there; it also introduced the concept that a weapon or armor needed to be fully forged before it could be enchanted into a thread item. The intent was to eliminate the question of balance between mundane and thread weapons--thread weapons by their very nature were better than the best mundane weapon available.

This had, I think, the unfortunate side effect of making the talent not particularly useful. It's great for earning a little bit of extra money, but for a player character Weaponsmith, it stops being useful once you get into Journeyman circles and all of your close combat people start picking up thread weapons that are better than anything you can come up with.

Forge Armor got moved down to Eighth Circle in Third Edition, and given the same limitations as Forge Weapon, was almost irrelevant as soon as it became available, given what thread armor or shields granted right out of the gate.

All of that is a long bit of history, laying out what we see as the issues with Forge talents based on where they stood previously. With that history in mind, we wanted to approach the Forge talents in Fourth Edition with an eye towards keeping them more relevant for player character Weaponsmiths, making the talent capable of providing useful bonuses into the game's higher circles, without resulting in the potential setting craziness of every soldier having a "super weapon".

The new version of Forge Weapon does a couple of things. It eliminates the damage cap--the maximum bonus is going back to the original ED1 rules. In addition, the DN for all forge tests is equal to 6+ the number of boosts that it has received. This standardizes the difficulty regardless of weapon (in all prior versions it was harder to raise larger weapons because the DN was based on the weapon's damage step). It keeps the year and a day duration, and allows that duration to be extended, but the maximum damage step a Weaponsmith can maintain is equal to their rank; if you have a weapon with a +6 forged bonus, and need to have it renewed but the only smith you can find is Rank 3, the bonus will drop to a +3 when he is done with it.

What this does is make highly skilled Weaponsmiths in demand. Low bonus weapons will be relatively more common (as most apprentices and Novice characters can maintain them), but it will make weapons with higher damage bonuses the property of officers and nobles (and by extension, adepts), rather than the common soldier. The bonus also explicitly stacks with thread weapons. Gone should be the days of the talent being rendered useless by the introduction of thread weapons to your group. This higher cap also means that weapons are expected, in general, to deal more damage at higher circles of play, which will help overcome the armor of higher circle opponents.

Forge Armor is being lowered to Fifth Circle Weaponsmith, hopefully making it a talent that will see use in Fourth Edition. It has the same framework as Forge Weapon, but allows the bonus to be added to either Physical or Mystic Armor -- even armor that doesn't have an inherent Mystic Armor bonus can have that rating increased.

That will do it for now. Thanks for sitting through the lecture, and I hope this change to the Forge talents interests you.

Lys
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Re: Shield and Forge Armor, why not?

Post by Lys » Mon Aug 21, 2017 10:00 am

Calamrin wrote:
Sun Aug 20, 2017 4:51 am
Experienced GMs usually house rule things from past experiences of seeing things that seem to break game balance. Our GM whos also very experienced has made forged armour and weapons very difficult to get hold of... which is fine, but saying that we dont have a weaponsmith in the group....so i can see you being annoyed that hes capped the bonuses. So im kind of saying if two experienced GMs are house ruling it, there must be some kind of balance issue with it....and game balance is so important....there are so many flawed systems out there....and eathdawn is definitely one of the better ones.
Well my GM has 20 years experience and he hasn't house ruled Forging in that manner, so let's not pretend there's some kind of experienced GM consensus here. Our play experience thus far suggests that it works just fine so long as the Forge bonuses are roughly equal to the player's circle. In fact i think ED4 was excplicitly balanced on that assumption. This will tend to be the case, since it's not possible to impart a greater bonus than the Weaponsmith's rank in Forge Weapon/Armour. Plus it takes time to actually complete the ritual, which is completely wasted if the roll fails.

We've actually been glossing over the time a little, the unspoken house rule is that a Forge job actually only takes a day or two, but the Weaponsmith can't work on the same item again for at least a week or two. So the last time i tried to get my flowing blade +4 and war hides +5 reforged, both of them were failed rolls even though the Weaponsmith was Eighth Circle. He did feel bad and gave me a discount on my dragon-tongue whip +3, which he was able to improve to +6 in one go. However we had to leave a few days later, so there wasn't time for a do-over on the failed ones. It's too bad, we're 6th Circle so i wanted everything to have at least a +6 forging on it. Also have a glaive (polearm) at +5, a dagger at +3, and an espagra cloak at +3.

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The Undying
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Re: Shield and Forge Armor, why not?

Post by The Undying » Mon Aug 21, 2017 12:34 pm

One GM disagreeing doesn't mean there isn't a problem, much the same as a few GMs agreeing the there is a problem doesn't necessarily mean there IS a problem. All people have their own interpretations and preferences, and even if it's isn't Rules As Written, it maybe be"wrong" RAW, but the table isn't "wrong" if they want to play it the altered way.

As to whether 4ED was designed with the idea of players having Forging equal(ish) to Circle, maybe Mataxes will weigh in on that. If you have a citation, I'd love to read the material. To my knowledge until Mataxes chimes in, however, the only material I'm aware of on 4ED Forging is what I posted above. There's an assumption that higher Forging become progressively rarer. However, in much the same way firm guidance is never provided with Adept population density, let alone Adept-turned-merchant density, it's an exceptionally vague statement left entirely for a GM to interpret. And that's if the GM ever even sees that guidance, as I don't believe it's actually printed anywhere in published material.

Without specific GM guidance, it ultimately doesn't matter if it was designed that way or not. The only published info the GM has to go on is service cost. So, if you end up with a few players spreading the cash around on a variety of things while one player eats dirt and sleeps on the street so they can throw all their cash at Forging, things will quickly move past their Circle. In my specific experience, 4ED's removal of the "spells don't cost LP" optional rule created a lack of money sinks for magicians, so my Elementalist has been rocking +7 Blood Pebble since easily Circle 4. Frankly, it'd be much higher if it weren't a pain to remove AND my GM didn't say that Rank 8 Forgers weren't available on the regular economy - an arbitrary decision he made because he saw Forging getting out of hand. Meanwhile, the Warrior had to Forge both weapon and armor (and our Scout single-handedly supports the Healing Potion industry).

Calamrin
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Re: Shield and Forge Armor, why not?

Post by Calamrin » Mon Aug 21, 2017 2:19 pm

Lys wrote:
Mon Aug 21, 2017 10:00 am

Well my GM has 20 years experience and he hasn't house ruled Forging in that manner, so let's not pretend there's some kind of experienced GM consensus here. Our play experience thus far suggests that it works just fine so long as the Forge bonuses are roughly equal to the player's circle. In fact i think ED4 was excplicitly balanced on that assumption.
Yes you are right, it was worded badly on my part...id definitely had a few beers.

I should have said, well thats not the first case ive seen of GMs altering either the availability or level caps on forging.

I agree with Undyings last post....theres next to nothing on guidelines other than cost.

You cant just say ED4 was explicitly balanced for forge bonuses to be roughly equal to a players circle.... if its not mentioned in the book (i apologise if it is, im still learning! )

Oh and Undying that blog post was fantastic....it actually does make things a lot clearer, and makes sense.

Telarus
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Re: Shield and Forge Armor, why not?

Post by Telarus » Mon Aug 21, 2017 7:15 pm

I would like to comment on the subject of Armor Defeating Hits.

Previously, from 1st Edition forward, it took an Excellent Success (+2 Additional Successes in modern parlance) to achieve an Armor Defeating Hit. This was up to double the target number for lower target numbers, and x1.5 for higher target numbers (looking at the 1E Success Level Table). Once achieved this allowed you to totally ignore Armor.

According to AnyDice.com:
@ Step 10 Attack vs Physical Defense 9 (being generous), you can get an Armor Defeating Hit (result 18+) about 10.16% of the time.

@ Step 16 Attack vs Physical Defense 15, an Armor Defeating Hit (27+) occurs 8.76% of the time.

Not terrible odds, and as a result combat felt "swingy" at high circles. Now, let's run those odds with 4E.

I'll give you odds of +1, +2, and +3 Additional Successes (+2, +4, +6 Damage bonuses), with the same Steps and Difficulties.

@ Step 10 Attack vs Physical Defense 9, Success+1 (+2 Damage) happens with 21.09% odds, Success+2 (+4 Damage) happens with 8.13% odds, and Success +3 (+6 Damage) happens with 2.76% odds.

@ Step 16 Attack vs Physical Defense 15, Success+1 (+2 Damage) happens with 26.78% odds, Success+2 (+4 Damage) happens with 12.36% odds, and Success +3 (+6 Damage) happens with 4.99% odds.

Karma effectively adds +4 Steps to the attack test.

Now, depending on the Armor the target is wearing, any of these could be a "total" or "partial" Armor Defeating Hit. So the player is now rewarded more often for rolling well, but the rewards are scaled down for the "you rolled well, but not well enough for an Armor Defeating Hit" gap that existed in the previous editions.

So basically, each Armor type has it's own "total Armor Defeating Hit success level" without introducing complex rules or listing it on the Armor table. Success+1 "defeats" through Padded Cloth. Success+2 "defeats" Leather, Espagra Scale, Crystal Ringlet, & Obsidiman Skin (and "defeats+2" Padded Cloth). Success+3 "defeats" Hardened Leather, Hide, Blood Pebble, Living Crystal, & Ring Mail (and "defeats with a bonus" he prior armors), etc, etc.

Armor still becomes important for well trained non-Adepts facing Adepts (in prior games, the odds meant it mattered very little unless the character had an impressive Phys Defense), and Adepts consistently get better at cracking through armor. IMO all very good changes for the gameplay.
Last edited by Telarus on Mon Aug 21, 2017 8:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Reciprocity
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Re: Shield and Forge Armor, why not?

Post by Reciprocity » Mon Aug 21, 2017 8:10 pm

Great addition with that blog post Undying. I also look forward to Mataxes post when he gets back.

Game mechanic question: assumptions, I'm a circle 5 weaponsmith, with forge weapon at rank 5 and perception at 16. I would like to increase a broadsword from forge 4 to 5.

My DN is 10. (Base 6 plus 4 for previous forge). I roll 2D10 for rank 5 Per(16) and I can add 1 karma for discipline talent. I need 5 successes, or in plain speak 10+5+5+5+5 or a 30 to make forge 5.

I have to do this in a single roll?

Does the free talent craftsman help? Does the circle 1 ability to add karma to make or repair weapons/armor help?

Am I missing something? Because 2D10 plus1D6 requires a good roll plus at LEAST one dice to explode.

Oh - Telarus. Does that mean you like armor defeating hits or don't. Seems your saying the two mechanics are about equal.

Thanks for the answers and patience with the new guy...

Calamrin
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Re: Shield and Forge Armor, why not?

Post by Calamrin » Mon Aug 21, 2017 9:45 pm

Reciprocity after reading your post, and rechecking the talent im now very very confused...its clear as mud!

8 hours a day,for seven consecutive days...check i get that

"Makes a forge weapon test against a DN 6 + number of forge enhancements the item currently has."

That reads so many ways its ridiculous:

So in example of+4 to +5 sword DN 6+4=10

Or do u need +4 sucesses DN6 +5 +5 +5+5 =26

or as Reciprocity says 6 (+4) +5 +5 +5 +5 =30

Its just so daftly open ended in interpretation.

It aslo doesnt help they give examples that are clearly obvious about maximum rank and duration, yet ignore giving examples of actually improving weapons/armour with costs/stats/time involved!!

Also Undying you corrected me on wrong costs for buying forged, and i just assumed i was being a noob, but read it.....

"The services of smiths can be bought in larger cities, but the more skilled the smith the higher the cost. The typical cost is 50sp times the smiths rank in forge weapon per attempt"

If your info based on older editions im sure its right, but they sure didnt write it well into 4ED for people who hadent played the older editions for at least a decade!

it clearly says "for each success the weapons damage is increased by +1"

So reading it many many times i cant see how someone new to the system that cant have the view forged weapons are cheap and easy to come by....thats just how it reads straight out the book.
Last edited by Calamrin on Mon Aug 21, 2017 10:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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