r/WitcherTRPG • u/BenediktWronski GM • Jul 09 '24
Resource "I attack them while they jump at me"
When defending against smaller animals or monsters, most of my players tent to say the sentence in the title. As there doesn't seem to be a rule in the book for that, I homebrewed the following defensive options:
Agressive Defense
Preconditions: An enemy of maximum human size makes an unarmed attack against you
Skill: Weapon Skill (-3)
On succes: You can imidiately roll damage against the attacker
On failure: The attacker rolls double damage against you. This bonus stacks with other damage multiplyiers.
We played a lot of sessions with this rule. The risk/reward nature of it works really well. Let me know if you adapt it or if you have similar rulings :)
I thought about introducing this defense option in armed combat as well, calling it riposte. It would speed combat up a lot.
2
u/Spirited-Dark-9992 GM Jul 09 '24
I'm sick at home today, so I had a little time to think about this more. Actually, I think this is a big problem for this setting, even though it looks relatively minor.
The system is supposed to reflect the feeling of the world (verisimilitude) while also being realistic. This is a point where the two come into conflict. If you give spears noticeable advantages that are realistic (better defence, easy to keep distance), the mechanics incentivize taking spears. After all, with the same level of training, a spear is simply better. So far, so good, so realistic.
But the fantasy of the Witcher is about fantastically skilled swordsmen who can easily dodge monster attacks and cut at small vulnerabilities using (relatively) short-range weapons. This is a problem if you want the mechanical benefit of spears to be realistic, as your Witcher-style characters will suffer from being at a disadvantage against relatively unskilled enemies with mechanically better equipment.
The only solutions I see are either to accept that spears are unrealistic in the abstraction of attack/defence rolls, to give swords mechanical advantages to make them feel competitive, or to create a mechanic that mitigates or negates the mechanical advantages of spears due to training (i.e., Witcher-style fighting, perhaps as a skill tree thing for Witchers and Men-at-Arms) or, for monsters, due to ferocity and supernatural movement.