MagicRealmWiki | Main / Modified Fumble Table

Having used (and preferring) the optional combat rules for some time, we felt that the balance had shifted away from heavier characters, monsters and natives, too much in favour of the faster ones.

Armour tends to get blasted away quickly by line ups from fast opponents. The white knight wasn't a great monster slayer, he was a chump that needed to beg the Order to bodyguard for him.

The damage results seemed to be levelled out too much, a direct hit by a weak, fast attack would often end up the same as a strong, slow one.

We wanted some random variation to the result (so we don't have safe slaughters of certain monsters while on a workhorse), but maybe not as much advantage toward speed as the official fumble rules give.

So we like an optional rule to alter the fumble table slightly.

(1) On a result of 1 or 2, the attack does one higher level of damage (instead of 2 or 3). On a result of 0 or less, the attack does two higher levels (instead of 1 or less). This means fast attacks don't increase all the time so easily.

We have also tried the following, to give a little bit of advantage back to undercutting.

(2) The penalty for an undercut is 3 (instead of 4). This one causes undercuts to be more useful, but still likely to be slightly less damaging.