"Blows per Round", "The Order of Striking", and more

[MiltonMan]

DD v5 (or at least what we have of it so far!) has been a huge influence on how I run OD&D. I'm particularly fascinated with a the preservation of Fighting Capability and the usage of Chainmail's conventions (regardless of whether or not such usage was "intended" with the LBBs).

One aspect, however, that I have had hesitation implementing in the past is a combo of Chainmail's "lighter weapons gain additional blows" and it's order of striking. Both of which the WIP v5 has included.

So waysoftheearth do you have any insight to share? I'm particularly interested in the following:

• In CM, lighter/shorter weapons' increased # of blows and parry riposte is offset by their notable penalties against armor. Such penalties are of course absent in DD and OD&D, save for giving up the first blow due to reach. Short of using something akin to the mess of "weapons vs AC" table, are daggers just that good against man-types? My gut reaction is that this pushes switching to a dagger past an option and more into the territory of almost always being the correct choice. Especially if you have armor, magical items, or HD to make that loss of the initial blow a matter less. I can see the swords being tossed aside already! 

• Is the order of striking affected in any way with these extra blows? For example, if a person with a dagger (A) is fighting a F2 with a two-handed sword (B) would the order of blows be: B B A A A; or alternating returned blows: B A B A A?

• Giving up a blow mid-round to switch to a lighter weapon could be "free" (i.e. giving up a blow to switch to a dagger could grant additional blows). A side effect of the "additional" wording but definitely makes sense for a quick draw? How would this affect the order of striking?

These are more of immediate questions that come to mind and I have no issue with this turning fighting into quite a nasty affair, but given how much DD dives into CM I'm sure there's some interesting insight on the matter!

Personally, I think the usage of reach (weapon class) and DD's streamlined parrying make weapon choice quite interesting without being too complicated (a real problem when looking to Chainmail's man-to-man parrying). I'm wondering if this "blows per round" can really be of similar benefit? Or is this too finicky to be worth it and on the chopping block?

[waysoftheearth]

Hey MiltonMan, thanks for your interest in DD v5

Your message is timely, as I am just now embarking on revisiting v5's representation of combat.

A few crucial pieces of historical evidence have surfaced since the last WIP release of book 2 (2017!).
The critical piece (discussed here; the salient post being this one) is that the CM turn sequence very largely has one round of combat per turn, rather than an indeterminate number of rounds per turn. What this ultimately means for DD5 is that the number of blows struck per round/combat turn will be driven moreso by the detail of CM's M2M blows per round, perhaps somewhat as reflected/simplified in Holmes (see my post here).

That detail is largely man vs man (i.e., weapons vs armor) and a bit more thinking needs to be done in order to integrate fantastic monsters (without explicit weapon or armor types) into the fold. A work in progress...

To answer your specific dot points:
* DD5 already includes a weapon vs armor matrix in the appendices, so you can--if you choose--use the 2d6 matrices to retain the detail of weapon vs armor performance. The challenge, of course, is that monsters will need weapon and armor types. I'll have a think about this. Alternatively, I have a personal house rule (for the d20 system) that heavy weapons treat all targets as AC6. I might think about including some variation of this in the appendices as a simple translation of the weapon vs armor matrix into the d20 system. TBC.

* Right off the top of my head I don't recall that the order of striking is impacted by the number of blows per round in CM or the 3LBBs. So yes, in your example, it would be B B A A A. The combination of multiple blows (due to higher FC or HD) with the initiative rule seems to be a decisive combination. It's not until EW (April 1976) that we see actions spliced into segments of the melee round; that's a finer level of granularity that DD v5 probably won't touch on. Again, all TBC.

* From (fairly distant) memory, I was keen that "additional" implied adding an extra blow, especially in order to avoid the possibility that higher FC might have a multiplying effect on number of blows per round. It was a while ago now, so I'll need to refresh my memory before I try to say anything too clever on this one

The long and the short of it is: I'll be doing some work on the combat section in the not too distant future, so don't get too hung up on what's there now. I hope that helps some...

[MiltonMan]

Thanks waysoftheearth! These are indeed helpful insights. And a special thanks for the helpful links as well. I do a lot of lurking on here and the discussions on CM's applications have long been my favorite.

And good to see such conclusions as well, since I do run one melee round per turn. It's exciting to hear developments for combat in v5 given how keen I am on Chainmail in my OD&D games.

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I must say the "heavy weapons treat targets as AC 6" seems to be a good abstraction of the minutia of CM's weapon vs armor matrix! It would certainly be an appendix rule I'd use. With the considerations for weight and length also factoring into things, I could see applying that the weapons that "deserve" it according to CM's matrices. Perhaps for maces, battle axes, morning stars, flails, halberds (I treat this entry as "poleaxes"), two-handed swords, and pikes. Could be a nice way to preserve these heavier/longer class weapons given their disadvantage with subsequent initiative and lack of parried riposte. It would likely even the odds against a lighter weapon's multiple blows as you mentioned in the linked thread.

And because it's such a cool detail, allow swords, spears, polearms, and daggers this same AC 6 bonus vs plate-wearing foes that are dismounted and stunned/prone to reflect their CM bonus.

With relatively simple considerations for length, weight, and ability to deal with armor, that seems like a wealth of interesting choices that are far more useful than attempting to normalize and adapt modifiers for a 12x8 matrix imo! And if I want to go full-on CM, well as you say the matrices are in the appendices...