Warrior, Rogue & Mage Fails the Test

In my last post you can see that I'm trying to decide which game I'm going to use for my upcoming Crowfield campaign. I had set my sights on Warrior, Rogue & Mage (WR&M for short). Unlike the other systems on the list, I wasn't really all that familiar with this one. I had read the rules and was impressed, but sometimes the way a game reads and the way it plays are very different. I mentioned to James that I wanted to run a quick combat, and he volunteered. I told him he would be fighting a skeleton.

Making the Character

The first step was for James to make a quick character. Because this was just intended for a test and not for long term campaign, I told him not to think about it too hard. This is what he came up with:

Nameless Character

Warrior 6
Rogue 2
Mage 2

Hit Points: 12
Fate Points: 2
Mana Points: 4
Base Defense: 8

Skills: Athletics, Awareness, Sword
Talent: Tough As Nails

Every character starts out with 250 silver. I told James that I got the impression that armor was very important in the game. He took my advice and bought "heavy plate", which was the best armor he could afford. On top of that he added a large shield and a sword. Together they were 140 silver, meaning he would still have another 110 to spend on normal adventuring gear if we were playing a campaign.

This seems like a reasonable starting character.

As we said before, his base defense was 8. The armor adds +7 to his effective defense, and the shield adds another +2 . This means his effective defense was 8 + 7 + 2 = 17. Yowza!

The armor also gives an armor penalty of 9, but that only applies to spell casters. We can ignore that.

I pulled the stats for the skeleton straight from the book. I used the variant with rusted armor, just to add to the challenge.

The Combatants

Stat	Character	Skeleton
Warrior	6	3
Rogue	2	3
Mage	2	0
Hit Points	12	9
Fate Points	2	0
Mana Points	4	0
Defense	17	8
Skills	Athletics, Awareness, Sword	None
Talent	Tough As Nails	Half damage except from blunt weapons or axes

The Fight

Step 1: Initiative

There was no roleplay to lead up to this, so initiative would be determined by a die roll.

The skeleton rolled a 6! WR&M uses exploding dice, so it gets to roll again. The second roll was a 3. 6 + 3 = 9.

James has the Awareness skill, so he gets a +2. Still, he needs the dice to explode to beat the skeleton. He rolled a 3. 3 + 2 = 5.

The skeleton gets the jump on the character and gets to go first.

Round 1 (Skeleton)

The skeleton goes first. Right away I see that there's going to be an issue. The character's effective defense is 17. That means the skeleton needs to roll 17 or better to hit the character.

Let me repeat that: The skeleton needs to roll 17 or better on a d6 to hit the character.

I'm exaggerating a little. The skeleton has a Warrior rank of 3. That means +3 to the roll. So the actual d6 roll only needs to be a 14 or better. The only way for that to happen is if the skeleton rolls a 6, then rolls a 6 for the second roll, then rolls 2 or better on the third roll. Anydice.com tells me that there is an approximate 2.3% chance of this happening. This means that the skeleton will hit the character about once every 43 rounds.

Anyway, I roll the dice. It's a 4 (rolled) + 3 (warrior) = 7. It missed. No surprise.

Round 1 (Character)

The skeleton's defense is 8. Which means that the character needs to roll a 8 or better on a d6. But the character has a Warrior of 6, plus he's using his sword and has the sword skill, so he gets another +2.

Another problem.

The character needs to roll 1d6 + 8 and get an 8 or better. I don't need anydice.com to figure this one out: the character will never miss. WR&M doesn't even have a "automatically miss on a '1'" rule.

James gets a 5 (rolled) + 6 (Warrior) + 2 (sword skill) = 13. He hits. No surprise.

He rolled another 5 for damage, but it's reduced to 2 because of the skeleton's talent. The skeleton now has 7 hit points remaining.

Conclusion

We didn't finish the fight.

We didn't see the point. The character will never miss, and the skeleton will almost never hit. Dealing an average of 2 hp per round, the character will finish off the skeleton in about 4 rounds. I guess that means that there's a 10% or so chance that the character might have been hit at some point in the combat, but it wasn't enough risk to make things interesting.

The exercise wasn't a waste of time. It showed me that Warrior, Rogue & Mage will not be the game I use for the next campaign. I will look over the rules some more in case I made a mistake somewhere, in which case I'll give it another try.

If you're familiar with WR&M, leave a comment or drop me a line to let me know what I could have done to make it better. For now, though, I think I'm going to go with a D&D retroclone of some sort.