Playing at the World by Jon Peterson

Playing at the World by Jon Peterson

Author:Jon Peterson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0615642047
Publisher: Unreason Press
Published: 2012-10-18T05:00:00+00:00


While the mundane medieval system of Chainmail ignores endurance, the fantasy system in Chainmail, from its first edition forward, does implement an endurance system, though it does so quietly and with significant ambiguities. The first inklings of it appear in the descriptions of fantastic creatures, among the small subset that are vulnerable to

normal attacks, meaning attacks from mundane soldiers. Ogres, for example, have a melee capability of six Heavy Foot, and ogres are killed when they have taken an accumulation of six missile or melee hits in normal combat. Rocs, for their part attack as four Light Horse and defend as four Heavy Horse, and thus require cumulative hits equal to a number sufficient to kill [four] Heavy Horse to be killed themselves.221 While giants remain unspecified (though mentioned) in the first edition of Chainmail, the missing text for their system appears in the International Wargamer, which clarifies that they defend as 12 Armored Foot, and Giants must take cumulative hits equal to a number sufficient to destroy 12 Armored Footmen before melee or missiles will kill them. [IW:v4n8] The key word shared by those sentences is accumulation or cumulative, suggesting again that the hits aggregate over the course of the game until the limit is reached and the creature is killed. The fantasy rules in Chainmail therefore already exhibited an endurance system that prefigures the hit points of Dungeons & Dragons.

Contrast this with another figure type in Chainmail, the lycanthrope. Although they defend as four Heavy Foot, it takes four simultaneous hits, from either missiles or melee, to kill a Lycanthrope in normal combat.222 Basilisks follow this same rule: they defend as a Lycanthrope. The rules here draw a distinction between cumulative hits and simultaneous hits: simultaneous hits, presumably, must all be dealt in the same turn. Although the rules are not entirely explicit about this point, the implication of this

221 Chainmail, 43 44. The first edition of Chainmail

e, like all mundane

the second and third editions. Four here is thus an educated guess, derived from the fact that they Monsters & Treasure eventually awards them six hit dice. 222 Ibid., 41. distinction is that if a werewolf suffers no more than three hits in one turn, then it is effectively undamaged, and can withstand another three hits without perishing the following turn, and again the next turn, and so on. As such, the management of simultaneous hits is effectively a mitigation mechanism rather than an endurance mechanism. This is especially significant in the Chainmail rules because precisely this language applies to Heroes and Super-heroes as well: Four simultaneous kills must be scored against Heroes (or Anti-heroes) to eliminate them. Otherwise, there is no effect upon them. This second sentence, there is no effect, explicitly identifies the

simultaneous rule as a mitigation system and informs how we should read the text about lycanthropes. Without a great deal of clarity, the rules for Super-heroes state they act as Hero-types in all cases, except they are about twice as powerful. In the Fantasy



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