Wereboar, excellent points as always!
Some work by Morlac earlier, using an editor, also showed that the number of attacks depends upon both level and the type of character.
The point about attack mode is also a good one. I remember the table in W7. It explains why the Diamond Epee, with decent damage and excellent bonuses to both initiative and "to hit" is such a mediocre weapon. It only has a "thrust" attack. Perhaps against some foes it would be excellent.
Scott, I honestly was only able to understand part of what you wrote about my posts. It was not clear specifically what you were referring to. Several of the things you said in our respective discussions above are speculations, of course, but you clearly labeled them as such, and I have no criticisms of anything you said in those posts. I think many of your ideas were very insightful and several of your arguments solid. We need speculations as the hypotheses we then measure against. It is only when it becomes advice that it ought to be fact, or, if not, at least labeled as the way things "might" work.
Regarding penetration, my evidence is observing combats in my game, after turning on verbose combat messages. I often see where an attack hits the foe, but then does not penetrate. The only evidence here is that the game does define and recognize a "hit but does not penetrate" event. It does not prove there is a second calculation for it. Of course it could be like one of the alternatives Sultan pointed out, where one range in the roll might be "hit but not penetrate", and the other "hit and penetrate", but then the percentages would need to change for each different foe. In many other games there is this dual aspect of an attack being effective, where one part is whether the attack connects and the other whether it does anything. There are generally very different things that determine success or failure for each aspect. It is possible that these two calculations were combined in W8, but more likely there are two, separate calculations. made. In many games the same roll is used for both calculations, as I suggested. Both possible explanations (yours, mine, or other ones) are speculation and not fact. The speculations are good on the way toward getting the facts, but let's not jump the gun. We should be compiling evidence, like the observation I just spoke of, the evidence from several players that Diamond Epee is a mediocre weapon (although that could be measured better), and, for the level impact thing, the evidence Wereboar and Scatter spoke of from their games.
[ 08-20-2003, 08:16 PM: Message edited by: EEWorzelle ]
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