Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Armour

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Armour

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The armour mechanic in AFF where you need to develop an Armour special skill to avoid a SKILL penalty when wearing armour is a little bit genius. Much better than the artificial "this type of character can only wear this" you see in a lot of other games. I really like the concept of it but there's a couple of details I think need tweaking.

These are the things I was trying to improve:

1. The SKILL + Armour special skill targets seem a bit low. If you have a starting character with 7 SKILL and 2 Armour they can wear everything but a Chainmail Hauberk or Plate Armour. It just doesn't seem to leave much room for improvement. Another 2 points (140XP) into Armour and they can wear everything and never need to get Armour to 5 or 6.

2. There seems to be a loophole when it comes to using shields without the Armour skill. There's no penalty for small shields and the SKILL penalty for a large shield doesn't mean too much to a specialist Wizard who avoids melee anyway. So it seems Wizards should all be running around with shields.

3. This is a bit of a side issue but personally I'd like there to be more variety in armour for starting characters. They all have nothing or a leather cuirass (unless they have the Knight talent). When you consider how competent AFF starting adventurers are you'd think some would be a little better equipped. It also means there's a sudden jump in how tough the party is after their first adventure (or when they next get to a town). A leather cuirass only stops 0.33 of a point of damage on average, compared to 0.83 with a leather hauberk, two and half times as much and that's without getting a shield too.

So this is what I suggest:

Armour that can be effectively worn__________SKILL+Armour
Leather Cuirass or Shield__________________________7
Leather Hauberk or Leather Cuirass & Shield_________8
Chainmail Cuirass or Leather Hauberk & Shield_______9
Breastplate or Chainmail Cuirass & Shield___________10
Chainmail Hauberk or Breastplate & Shield__________11
Plate Armour or Chainmail Hauberk & Shield________12
Plate Armour & Shield___________________________13

There's no difference between a small and large shield for the purposes of the armour requirements. The penalty for not meeting the requirements is unchanged except they also affect spell casting rolls.

Characters start with the armour of the players choice of those they can use without penalty based on their SKILL and Armour special skill. If shields are chosen they will be small.

Statistics: Posted by SkinnyOrc — Sun Oct 16, 2016 10:49 am

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October 16, 2016 at 06:56AM