Skeleton Dungeon Armor Playtest (Plus Revised Fighter Art)

My wife and older kids each designed a simple, five-ish room dungeon with some basic encounters. They were allowed to use either a selection of goblins or skeletons, and everyone chose skeletons for some reason. Partially this was done to see what each could concoct given a set of limited options, but mostly it was to see how armor performed this go around using a straightforward system of granting DR in the 3-8 range, with no scaling, resistance to damage types, or other complicated mechanics.

The initial party consisted of two human fighters, a human rogue, and a human pyroturgist, and will only be adjusted due to character death (in which case, we'll randomly roll to determine the race and class of a replacement character). All gear is randomly generated using the class-specific tables, and in each case no healing items were rolled. In addition, cleric and druids are no longer adventuring classes because it doesn't make any sense, meaning that the party had no access to immediate healing.

Also, to give you an idea of character durability, both fighters had 11 WP and DR 5 due to medium armor, while the rogue and wizard had 6 and 4 WP respectively, and a DR of 3 due to light armor.

Melissa's dungeon was a fairly basic crypt, with two branching paths. We ended up choosing "correctly" at the start, discovering a magic spear after a few rooms containing a few skeletal warriors each. These guys have 7 WP, a Defense of 13, DR 3 due to their ragged armor, and deal 1d8+3 damage on a hit. Nothing too crazy, and in the end only one fighter was down 4 WP in total, so all in all I think that was a pretty good exchange.

The other path featured a room with a half dozen skeletons, and a skeletal knight at the end. The group of skeletons wasn't that much of a hassle, given that they were bunched together and so were either destroyed or heavily damaged by the wizard's Fireblast, though before they were polished off Fighter A ended up losing another couple of Wound Points.

Again, not bad considering we were outnumbered and a handful of encounters in, though we did retreat a bit to bottleneck their numbers; ironically it was the lone skeletal knight who almost single-handedly wiped us out. See, because of the changes to how monster WP is determined he only had 15 points. This doesn't sound like a lot, and it isn't, it's just that he was clad in "rusted" plate armor, giving him a still decent DR of 5, and wielded a longsword that allowed him to inflict an average of 14 damage per strike.

Again, the most WP anyone had was 11, and at this point one of the fighters had been whittled down to something like 5, which was about what the rogue and wizard started with. Doing the math this meant that, on average, he could take out any one of them in a single blow. Which he did, starting with the rogue.

On the upside, we don't do that nonsense mechanic where you are either perfectly fine or just immediately fall unconscious or die at 0 WP (at least, not without suffering a lot of damage at once). Instead, characters become Critically Injured: they can still keep doing stuff, but suffer a penalty and lose WP every round. This meant that the rogue could still try to attack, it's just a shame that our daughter kept rolling so badly that the Critical Injury penalty didn't even matter.

The fighter was the next to get hacked into the negatives, and it's only thanks to the wizard's Scorching Ray and the skeletal knight suffering from his own missing streak that we just barely managed to squeak by. After a few Medicine checks to stabilize everyone, we snagged the loot and dragged our asses out of the crypt.

Bad rolls aside, this armor playtest went a lot smoother than the rest. Personally it bugs me that "heavy reinforced" armor will "only" have a DR of 8, but we think, coupled with a slightly lower Defense and much lower WP all around, 2nd Edition is finally at a sweet spot where you won't feel invulnerable against Medium-sized and smaller foes.

Though, part of that will be due to new weapon/attack traits, which grant stuff like extra Armor Penetration if you roll high enough, as well as some other monster-specific mechanics will give Small and even Tiny critters a chance at harming characters in plate.