Sunday, July 29, 2018

Staff-Armed Swashuckler in Felltower

Kalzazz asked about our staff-armed swashbuckler PC in DF Felltower.

Upsides

- good reach. You have reach 1,2 with both attack forms.

- cheap weapon. You have a lot of spare cash for equipping your guy, unlike every other swashbuckler.

- great defenses vs. melee and missiles. Buying Parry Missile Weapons for a staff-armed Swashbuckler per DFD Swashbucklers p. 14 is necessary. Once you have it you're going to be remarkably hard to hit, especially given the naturally defensive qualities of the staff.

Downsides

- limited weapon selection. Your main focus is the staff, which means you do thrust crushing or swing crushing damage only. No cutting, so you give up +50% to +100% injury multipliers. No impaling, so you give up one-shot eye knockouts on living foes and the x3 multiplier to the vitals. While a few foes are vulnerable to crushing (See, Amorphous Stone meta-trait or Vulnerability: Crushing), most are not especially so. Skulls are easy to armor on things with brains, and many things have No Brain, Homogenous, or Diffuse and thus can't be usefully attacked there.

- limited non-magical enhancement options. You've got fine, ornate, and not a lot else to upgrade your staff with. They're cheap, but that's about it.

- competition for staves. Magic staves are also very useful for wizards, clerics, and staff-armed martial artists. Not every magical staff you find is even going to be a useful weapon, and many of them will have been created by and for spellcasters, not fighters.

- always two-handed. Much like greatsword-wielding knights, you've given up a lot of functionality with a two-handed weapon. You can't have a ready weapon and a potion, a concoction, a throwing weapon, a shield for its DB, hold onto a friend or a rope, etc. You're either armed and ready or not, you can't be that and something else. This comes up a lot in my games, as PCs try to "grab so-and-so and drag him to safety" without dropping a weapon or losing any defenses. Not possible with two-handed weaponry.

Overall

The staff-armed swashbuckler in our game has mostly have a very limited effect so far. This is because:

- he's 250 points and been adventuring with a group well north of 250 points. Most of the other front-line fighters are in the high 300s and one is 500+.

- the player is somewhat inexperienced. He hasn't really been able to maximize his abilties because he's still not that used to using them.

- the inherent offensive and utility limitations of a two-handed weapon armed guy with a crushing-only weapon makes it tougher for him to make an impact.

I think this is a survivable and interesting character, but with his strong defensive abilties comes a lot limitations. As long as the player can find a way to maximize the good and minimize the limitations, he should do okay.

19 comments:

  1. One of the pre-gens in Hall of Judgment is a glaive-armed swashbuckler. Her schtick is Move 11 so she has a 2-yard step, and whatever the thing is that lets you retreat an extra hex, so when she retreats, she goes about as fast as I usually jog. Backwards. she was very effective in blind-test.

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    1. I image the character would be effective. However, I go strictly by the templates, with few exceptions. Polearm isn't on the list of options, so, no glaive-armed Swashbucklers in my games.

      You'll point out, I'm sure, that I allowed a Polearm-using Martial Artist. That's true, but I think not including Polearm on the Martial Artist was an oversight of a common martial arts trope - the polearm-swinging Shaolin monk - and so I rectified that.

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    2. Where I think Spear and Glaive Duelist is an overlooked Swashbuckler option. How am I to build my Oriental Spear Duelist now?

      (I just bought spear instead of sword and took the Weapon Fencer (Spear) Perk from one of the Pyramids)

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    3. I run strictly from the templates, so you couldn't do that in Felltower. But you can do it however you like in other games. I know that's obvious, but it's worth pointing out - I made my choices, and those choices put restrictions on people. That you could do otherwise with the ruleset doesn't mean you can do so in my particular game.

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  2. What about a point in Spear and another in that perk that lets you switch skills for free? Spears are almost as cheap as a staff, and you'd get a respectable thr+3 impaling attack at a small penalty for when you need it. If you're using the Low-Tech weapon rules, a Very Fine spear is a bargain.

    -Joel Sammallahti

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    1. I'm not using Low Tech's rules, but only DFRPG's, for weapon prefixes so no Very Fine spears, here.

      If I did, though, that would probably be a useful choice, but only marginally. While you do get those nice eye shots and vitals hits, it's not much of a damage add. You'll get cutting with the spear head, with a Tip Slash, of course. But at some point I think you stop using your staff as a staff except as you can justify a switch back to that skill for the Parry bonus. And FWIW, I don't give a +2 to using a Spear to parry with Staff skill; that parry bonus is listed for the the staff with staff skill, so I apply it only to that weapon.

      So I also think you give up a lot to get basically get a thr/impaling and thr/cutting attack with a "staff" by using a spear.

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    2. It also allows you to use the staff/spear one handed (at some penalty) when you need to.

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  3. Also, a spear can be silvered, which could very well be relevant in Felltower.

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    1. At what point are you just a spear-armed person wasting points on Staff, though? You'll have a spear, you'll lose the +2 for parrying with a staff, and you need a staff to use Parry Missile Weapons. You're as much a staff-armed swashbuckler as a knight who has swapped out a greatsword for a bastard sword and shield is a two-handed sword fighter. Just be that, instead.

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    2. You become a spear gal instead of staff gal when spear starts being your standard attack rather than your backup.

      I've played a (non-DF) staff PC before (modeled off of Zula from Conan the Destroyer, and she was awesome fun) - and having a sharp end to poke with and a short blade to cut with are useful backup plans for when smacking the heck out of it with a stick is not sufficient, but the smacking *IS* the still plan A most of the time. Staying threatening and defended when you need a hand free to drag that darned bard out of trouble again (not bitter) is also a backup plan rather than a primary activity.

      Felltower seems so full of stuff that is resistant to this or that a multi-function attack seems almost necessary. If bludgeoning it with wood will be useless more than half the time maybe a staff expert is indeed a mistake. But in less resisty games, a staff expert often benefits from using a spear instead, just because it offers lots of useful fallback options.

      I found the main disadvantage was that a spear is an obvious weapon, and one of the useful tropes of "fast staff fighter" is the ease of passing for a civilian. However, it is usually pretty easy to grab a regular staff and hand off the spear to an ally. Not a problem in Felltower anyway.

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    3. Again, like I said above, I think you give up the main advantages of the weapon you chose just to gain the benefits of the other. You may as well not run make that character, at that point.

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    4. ...
      You don't allow someone to use a spear as a staff with staff skill? Or are you just talking about the turns when the PC is using spear functions? If the latter, it's just a different, improved version of a backup weapon, which is a very common thing to have.

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    5. I don't give a spear used in this way +2 parry, I don't let it gain WM (Staff) bonuses - it is a spear used butt end first. So you lose out on a lot to gain little.

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  4. I admit I don't see why a staff couldn't have silvered end caps

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    1. Or Silver Inlay (Inlay, Expensive, Extensive. +14 CF) straight from DF Treasures.

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    2. You do, then, get the disadvantages of not using an all-wooden weapon. But yes, I'd allow someone to get metal end-caps and silver them.

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    3. I'm having trouble coming up with a list of "advantages wooden weapons have over metal weapons".

      In other words, aside from immunity to various metal eating monsters and effects, what does wood have that metal doesn't?

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    4. I have a fair number of monsters that can't corrode wood, mostly to explain why there are still doors.

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