TurtlesAWD
2016-01-13, 02:52 PM
A group of friends and I are going to be starting a campaign in L5R 4th edition soon, for all of us it's our first experience in the setting/rules so we've been doing a few mock fights to figure out how the game feels and to get a handle on the rules, particularly for combat. With that in mind a couple of things have come up I wanted to ask about.
The first question I have has to do with mounted combat. Horses apparently move on the rider's initiative but attack on their own initiative. Does that mean when they're moving on the player's turn they're using their own actions rather than the player's? So on a mounted charater's turn, their horse uses two simple actions to move and the player's character then uses their own separate actions?
This seems to be the case, but it seems to allow for some weird things like having a guy declare the full defense stance and have his horse carry him 120 feet across the battlefield in the same round. Full attack specifies it can't be done while mounted but I don't recall a similar restriction on full defense.
The second issue I recall from our experimentation sessions is that... armor piercing arrows seem pretty awful. They ignore some Armor TN as I recall but they do nothing against reduction. So given that they roll a single d10 and heavy armor gets 5 reduction, they can essentially do 5 damage not counting an explosion? This seems to defeat the purpose of having an armor piercing arrow as it seems likely that firing an equal number of normal arrows may hit slightly less frequently but do more damage over a given number of shots. This wouldn't even be considering the potential other ways characters can gain reduction, which could reduce that single die of damage that an armor piercing arrow does to nothing at all if it's at least a reduction of 5. I would assume that armor piercing arrows would interact with reduction mecanically in some way but I see nothing about that in the core book. The tsuruchi school is viewed pretty favorably from the discussion of it I've seen online so maybe this isn't an issue that ever comes up?
The first question I have has to do with mounted combat. Horses apparently move on the rider's initiative but attack on their own initiative. Does that mean when they're moving on the player's turn they're using their own actions rather than the player's? So on a mounted charater's turn, their horse uses two simple actions to move and the player's character then uses their own separate actions?
This seems to be the case, but it seems to allow for some weird things like having a guy declare the full defense stance and have his horse carry him 120 feet across the battlefield in the same round. Full attack specifies it can't be done while mounted but I don't recall a similar restriction on full defense.
The second issue I recall from our experimentation sessions is that... armor piercing arrows seem pretty awful. They ignore some Armor TN as I recall but they do nothing against reduction. So given that they roll a single d10 and heavy armor gets 5 reduction, they can essentially do 5 damage not counting an explosion? This seems to defeat the purpose of having an armor piercing arrow as it seems likely that firing an equal number of normal arrows may hit slightly less frequently but do more damage over a given number of shots. This wouldn't even be considering the potential other ways characters can gain reduction, which could reduce that single die of damage that an armor piercing arrow does to nothing at all if it's at least a reduction of 5. I would assume that armor piercing arrows would interact with reduction mecanically in some way but I see nothing about that in the core book. The tsuruchi school is viewed pretty favorably from the discussion of it I've seen online so maybe this isn't an issue that ever comes up?