The Combat Chapter - Githubissues

The integrated Tome/Srd combat section is probably usable in its current state with a little formatting, but do we want to spruce it up a bit? I'm talking updating the language but leaving the mechanics functionally the same in most cases. For example, standard attacks, full attacks, natural weapons, two weapon fighting, and multiweapon fighting could be made to read much more easily. Right now it's pretty confusing if you want to know how many attacks with what your four-armed monk gets.

Also, turn undead, why is it here? If you want something to reference for class features, shouldn't it be generalized?

Etc. I'm asking because I've written some such things up previously, and if there is interest in doing it I could type it up for review.

Turn undead was traditionally in the combat chapter, but it could be moved to the class chapter in a sidebar like familiars. I'm tempted to errata it as well so it's useful for more than zombie hordes, and there's a couple of revisions we could steal for it.

And I do want to clean up the language and tone a bit otherwise. Not sure what you're proposing with respect to attacks though, I'd need to see something. I tried to clean out up myself a while ago, but it deviates a bit from current mechanics.

As for as attacking goes, here's what I'd do.

I'd expand the concept of 'primary' and 'secondary' attacks so that the language covers both attacks made with secondary natural weapons and iterative attacks, in that they're normal attacks at a -5 penalty.
Include the rules on attacking with natural weapons in the standard attack entry
Change Full Attack to be a series of Standard Attacks, each additional standard attack being a secondary attack. At any point during the full attack you can make up to one attack with each natural weapon as a secondary attack.
Change two-weapon fighting to multiweapon fighting. This is just done as part of a standard attack. You declare one weapon you are weilding to be your primary weapon, all others used are off-hand. The whole attack is at a -4 penalty, plus an additional -2 penalty for each off-hand weapon. If an off-hand weapon is not light, that's an additional -2 for that weapon. You can use unarmed strikes, but this prevents you from using one of your arms (or 'arms' as the case may be) to make another attack during the standard attack. No natural weapons as part of multiweapon fighting.

As for Turn Undead I'd want to change the mechanic to be something that doesn't require you to look at two tables. Maybe just force every undead around you to make a Will save. Will saves already scale. Higher CR undead have higher will saves. Intelligent undead typically have higher will saves. You could also just make it a generic thing not specific to undead, and just have each class feature note what it allows them to turn or rebuke.

Edit: I should note that the multiweapon fighting does not produce the same modifiers as two-weapon fighting. I don't think this even matters, I've never even heard of someone two-weapon fighting with the 'normal' penalties of -6/-10 because it's a terrible deal. The 'normal' penalties under this version are -6/-8 (-6/-6 with the off hand being light) this seems more reasonable, but I don't even see that as being a good deal.

On Turn - saves scale, but are a serious departure from the current setup where all of the zombies go (subject to turn damage roll) or none go. You could replace the turning check with a turning EL check, and then that much EL worth of undead go away starting with low level things. That scales just as well and retains the "low level chaff goes first" feel of the existing mechanic. Needs detailing for turn resistance and a decision about potential additional resource costs to cover the awesomeness of turning multiple demiliches.

On multi-weapon - I like the idea of merging two-weapon and multi-weapon rules together, but that last part doesn't seem like the way to do it. Tome gives two-weapon at a 0 penalty with feat, and you're suggesting replacing that with a basically crippling penalty. Did you want to kill TWF as a style or something?

If I were going to redo iterative attacks, I think I'd go with the following:

Everyone has a natural slam attack, if they don't have any better natural weapons that would replace the slam attack. This is not a clearly defined or handed weapon, and may involve any limb or head at any given time. Note that this requires a redefinition of the Monk's attack, but we should do that anyway because term confusion.
Claw, bite, gore, and any other specific natural attack is better than the slam attack of a similarly sized creature. These attacks replace the inferior slam in all but the most extreme cases.
You gain a number of attacks based on your BAB.
You can use each of the attacks to make an attack roll with any equipped or natural weapon, though you may not use a natural weapon more than once per round. I.E. if you have 2 attacks from BAB and are using a long sword, a short sword, armor spikes, and knife boots you may make up to 2 attacks in a round as a full-attack action using those weapons for any of the individual attacks. You could also toss a slam in there if you wanted to headbutt or knee a dude for effect or whatever, but no more than once per round.
TWF is renamed Multi Weapon Fighting, and grants you an addition set of iterative attacks. You can spend those like your base iteratives, but may not spend more attacks on any given weapon than you have normal iterative attacks. I.E. if you have MWF and 2 attacks from BAB and are using a long sword, a short sword, armor spikes, and knifeboots you make up to 4 attacks in a round as a full-attack action using those weapons for any of the individual attacks to long as you did not any specific item more than 2 times. You could also toss a slam in there if you wanted to headbutt or knee a dude for effect or whatever, but no more than once per round.
Multi Attack allows you to use all of your natural attacks in a round at -5. If you have sufficient BAB to generate iterative attacks, you may spend an iterative attack on a natural weapon to decrease the penalty to -2 instead of -5.

That gives you MWFs with the same penalties as TWFs to start, charges 4 armed people a lot more feats than the TWF guys to run around with quad-shortswords and quad SA damage, and answers the question of how many attacks a four-armed monk gets out of the box (answer: 1 without feats). Similarly, this allows people to walk around with a weapon on every limb without getting attacks for all of them like the 4-armed monk would, and I really like both of those things. It does make multiple MWF feats a bit of a downer though, and we might want to write a couple of slightly different ones for people who wanted to go the whole Shiva route. Multi-attack monsters (that feat could use a better name) also get largely the same results, though early multi-attack creatures lose a few bonuses in the translation (and I don't think I care).

Penalties: It's actually the tome TWF feat that reduces the penalties to nothing, while the rules for TWF are actually exactly the same between Tome and 3.5. You'd just reword the TRD TWF feat to say that it reduces penalties by 6 and achieve the same effect of "No penalty for two-weapon fighting"

Everyone Has a Slam: I wouldn't necessarily call it a slam attack, but redefining unarmed strike to be a natural weapon has merit.

Natural Weapons as Part of Iterative Attacks: Here's where it gets tricky. Your method produces a simple and functioning MWF system, but it does diverge to a greater extent from 3.5 in a few ways.

If you don't specifically declare how many different weapons a creature can use as part of MWF, you end up with oddities. Standard player races have two arms, but monsters are sometimes expected to wield 4 or more weapons. If you don't make an exception for many-armed creatures you end up with them making less than the expected number of attacks. If you base it on how many weapons a character is wielding, you end up with characters making more than the expected number of attacks because they are wearing armor spikes or knifeboots or whatever.
- To simplify it, it might be for the best to say that a character using multiple weapons can use typically only use two, unless specifically specified in their entry. Then the mariliths and what have you just have a line "Mariliths can use up to four weapons when multiweapon fighting"
If natural weapons now take place of one of your iterative attacks during a full attack, monsters (and PCs with natural weapons, like the monk) now make less attacks on a full attack. This is a direct downgrade.
- Example: A monk with a +6/+1 bab and his slam. Currently, on a full attack, he could make two attacks with weapons AND a slam. Under your set of rules he just gets two attacks and one of them can be a slam.
- If the monk was two weapon fighting he'd get 4 attacks with weapons AND a slam attack as a full attack. Under your system he would get 4 attacks, and one of them could be his slam.
- Either way, the monk (and any character with a natural weapon) makes one less attack. Low BAB monsters potentially make MANY less attacks. A monster with 3 natural weapons would only be able to make as many attacks as its BAB would allow. You'd need to rewrite many of the monsters to achieve compatability with this system.

If I have misunderstood, let me know.

Has anyon else in the community ever tried to tackle this? Do any of you remember a TGD thread about this? ...that could help a lot if it exists.

I missed that the listed penalties were "without TWF feat" penalties, and that resolves my largest concerns about the rules / terminology updates. So I'll nitpick a couple of other things before moving on:

The part about changing full attack to a series standard attacks, which are themselves either primary or secondary seems needlessly complicated, as standard attack doesn't seem to be a thing that matters in any way.
What is the penalty for fighting with 3 weapons if you possess the tome TWF equivalent feat? 4 weapons? 12 weapons?
Why no natural weapons as part of MWF? Thri-kreen with two longswords can't hit with those and their two remaining claws and their bite in a full-attack sequence?
The multi-attack feat is a monster feat that allows you to attack with your secondary natural weapons as part of a full-attack action at -2 instead of -5. Is that feat still around in your setup?

Looking back over my rambling I think I worded a few things poorly. Using the slam is supposed to take up one of your other attacks but not happen more than once per round. So you could longsword and headbutt someone with your +6/+1, but you couldn't sword/sword/headbutt them. The natural weapon restriction is there to push bite/claw/claw/wing/tail routines, since iteratives otherwise allow repetition of the best attack mode.

The monk is not getting shafted there, but I'd still want to redefine the monk's attack to not be a slam anyway. It's a non-natural natural weapon and that exception seems like it just deserves it's own type to avoid term confusion.

Anyway, the idea behind the approach is that the number of arms or weapons (natural or manufactured) you have is not as important as the number of openings you could expect to generate in a round of combat. And it made sense to base those openings on BAB initially, and allow expansion of then with feats. 4 armed guy are cool, but I don't want them to have to be powerful races to balance out their ridiculous SA damage increase over a 2 armed guy. Feats cover the opportunity costs of utilizing those sorts of things though, and so attacks were capped pretty strongly.

Yeah, it changes attack routines quite a bit, but the multi-attack update was there bring them back into line a bit. You can bite/claw/claw on a CR1 creature, they just take multi-attack and get to do those attacks with -5s instead of -2s. (until they have higher BABs anyway). The marilith is an outlier though, and I don't know what I'd do with that one off hand.

@SqueeG no one on the Den has dealt with handedness, but we could put something up there for feedback certainly.

Surgo has a version of Turn like the one I'd prefer, but I don't think it goes far enough. Other turn revisions on the Den are similar to PF's channel energy, which I'm not opposed to but not enthused by either.

Alright, I've refrained from making another comment until I had some time to think it out. But first I'll answer your questions from before.

Why No Natural Weapons as Part of MWF: Because they never were. If you were to TWF or MWF in 3e/3.5/Tome, it had no bearing on how many natural weapons you attacked with on a Full Attack (aside from claws being used instead as hands, of course). You always got to attack with each of your natural weapons in addition to whatever normal attacks you made, or got to make a single attack with one weapon as a standard attack. So a Full-Attacking Thri-Kreen with two longswords (in two of its claws), claws, and a bite would make whatever attacks/iterative attacks it was eligible for with its swords, and then get to make one additional attack with each natural weapon it had completely separate from the iterative attacks.

Penalty Examples: Assuming all the off-hand weapons are light, here's the breakdown (And the penalties with the MWF feat). Keep in mind that iterative attack routines are at a further -5.

Two Weapons: -6/-6 (+0/+0)
Three Weapons: -8/-8/-8 (-2/-2/-2)
Four Weapons: -10/-10/-10/-10 (-4/-4/-4/-4)
Each Additional Weapons: -2 more

Now, here's how I've changed my mind on this.

Natural Weapons As Part of Multiweapon Fighting: Natural attacks can still only be used once each during a full attack, however, now you can do this as part of standard MWF. You can use as many natural weapons and as many normal weapons as you can wield as part of the same attack routine when MWFing (if you want). If you have iterative attacks, you can also spread out your one use of each natural weapon between different attack routines. However, when calculating penalties for the number of weapons you are wielding, only count each type of natural weapon you are using once. That is to say 4 claws (or two bites, or 1358 tentacles), while being four separate natural weapons, only count as one when MWFing. If you attack with only natural weapons during a full attack, you don't have to count one of your primary natural weapons when determining and applying penalties.

Example #1: A dragon that has a bite, two claws, and two wing attacks. He makes a full attack with all of his weapons. His bite is primary and he's only using natural weapons, that means for the purpose of determining penalties he only counts his claws and wings. His penalties look like (Bite +0/Claws -6/Wings -6).
- In 3.5 the penalties would have been (Bite +0/Claws -5/Wings -5)
Example #2: The Thri-kreen from before. He's afforded 2 longsword, 2 claw, and a bite attack. The two claws get lumped together, so he calculates as if fighting with four weapons. Sword # 1 -10/Sword # 2 -10/Claws -10/Bite -10. If the thri-kreen were to use only his natural weapons, there would be NO penalties, since he could exempt his claws (primary) and then only has a bite.
- In 3.5 the penalties would have been (Sword # 1 -6/Sword # 2 -12/Claws +0/Bite -5)

Two things to note:

If the dragon had a high enough BAB and had iterative attacks, he could have spread out those natural attacks and reduced the penalties on one of the secondary weapons to nothing, if the thri-kreen had at least a +6 BAB he could also have reduced the penalties slightly on the first attack but increased them slightly on his iterative attack.
The Tome TWF feat, and therefore the MWF feat we'd use, reduce the penalties by a MUCH greater degree than 3e/3.5 equivalents. In a Tome game all of those penalties would be reduced by 6 with one feat, whereas in a 3.5 game they'd get reduced by 2 with one feat.

Concerns: I know multiweapon fighting was complicated before, is this more complicated or more confusing? Also, under this set of rules, do secondary natural weapons still incur a -5 penalty, or do they just have an effect when MWFing.

I'd like to hear your thoughts.

The natural attacks question was just to make sure that you still got them on a full attack, since your language didn't make that clear. Sorry for the confusion, but thanks for the clarification.

This is probably more complicated and confusing than the original version for natural weapons. Most of that comes from the counting and the single exemption for attacking with only natural weapons. That might be remedied by treating all natural weapons as a single weapon for the purposes of determining additional penalties (so you get all of your natural attacks with only -2 more), or treating them as two weapons when attacking with only natural weapons (-6 all around) but 1 attack at no penalty. You didn't mention the multi-attack monster feat, but it doesn't seem like a great fit in a game with scaling feat anyway.

For manufactured weapons it's less confusing, but seems likely to cause very different attack values for many-weaponed creatures (like the Marilith, who suffers -8s with her 6 weapons with the feat, and isn't worth doing in that way anymore), which may also be confusing but doesn't bother me so much. Additional feats to reduce quad-wielding or even oct-wielding penalties might be worthwhile, but probably hard to do in a scaling fashion (though a damage MWF, a status MWF, and a defensive MWF that stacked together to give you oct-wielding and a pile of other abilities might work out).

SqueeG / awesomeTome

The Combat Chapter #24