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If we speak historically/realistically, light armours like gambeson can stop sword slashes and even arrows (from light bows), like it is decent armour by itself. People just don't know, if there's more explicit writing about what can do what, would probably have the same effect. Plate armour is fine as is, people over exaggerate "blunt trauma" against it, its supposed to be the best in-class armour, if you want to counter act its prevalence, then some sort of 'cost' can be associated with it. For ex, you pay for it or need some sort of 'proof' that a player forged it.

A statue for Nicolas 1st of the Grand Harvest year 183 of the Second Age In gratitude for his decades of work for founding, building and leading the Free City de Chambery-sur-Petra, making it his life's work and fully dedicating himself to the prosperity of the city and the happiness of its peoples. The Citizens of Chambery and the Northern Geographical Society have decided to commission a statue in the Honor of Nicolas Emmanuel von Wittenbach. Message from Nicolas : When I first heard I would be getting a Statue I did not know what to think about it, it is rare that anyone would be getting a statue within their own lifetimes as it is such a tremendous honor. I love Chambery and most of all I love its people who bring it to life! Chambery was always a dream of both mine but also the NGS, to be a safe haven for Guilds, Societies and associations to do their work in peace. For Scholars, scientists, Historians, alchemists, engineers, Astronomers and so much more to be able to do their passionate work and thrive in a perfect environment for it. And of course for its citizens to be a beautiful place they can call home, a place where everyone can come to enjoy themselves or relax from their troubled lives. I full heartedly want this place to continue and thrive as it has in the past years. Receiving this gift from all of you just gives me more motivation to further my commitment to Chambery and its peoples. Hence to show my commitment and values even more so I have decided to drop all my nobles titles and Nobility, I never wanted any of them as it was my Brother Karl who was the one who so deeply desired it, and after he left I inherited it all, only keeping it due to my tenure as Chanzlé of Petra and to secure a good future for my Children. But I am not Chanzlé anymore, and my children are all grown up and have a bright future ahead of them. So I will return to be a simple commoner holding the elected office of Bourgmestre. As the charter of our great Free City says, "The hereditary peerage and other aristocracy “...” shall hold no sway over the free riverland peoples of Chambery-sur-Petra” words I wish to live by as I want Chambery to remain a beacon of freedom for all its peoples. In addition with the permission of all the citizens of Chambery, I would like to adopt the Moniker “De Chambery” a new name that any elected Bourgmestre may hold from now on while holding Office. While I do not intend to abandon my family name, I just wish to re-enforce my life commitment to our great Free City and its values, after all Chambery is my Family.

need gun far easier to shoot myself with a gun than with a bow probably.

Ludwig of Merryweather read the missive while standing guard at one of the watchtowers "Viel Glück, Lady Vandalore." The Ranger said as he folded the copy in half and took out his spyglass to look for any mountain brigands - as the bannerman looked around, he sang a Waldenian song quietly

nerd emoji

Make it happen I need my Harry Potter battles now +1

+1

I made MOST of these changes to balance and grammar. ET discretion because it's an event use only spell. Clarified in the redlines.

As a lil Eminence dude, I agree with @Luxury. I don't think this fits nor is it really needed. Incanter's flow is pretty good as is. Besides we all know why we really take Eminence. It's for the two magnum opus slots that we'll never fill.

Making light armours viable The Techlock - Armaments post does well in summarising how well different kinds of ranged weapons can pierce different types of armour. While it can definitely be improved upon, it at least gets the job done. Along with a revamped version of the Armaments post, The LOTC team should consider writing up a 'Techlock - Armours' post conveniently categorising and educating people on different armour types while providing solid redlines people can readily refer to when arguments break out. For example, a full plate armour loadout may have a redline of reducing the number of blocks the wearer can move per turn. Whereas lighter armour loadouts would still permit full or only slightly inhibited movement. Something as small and simple as enforcing different official movement speeds for different armour loadouts would be both historically authentic and intuitive. It go a long way towards making light armour legit viablle. Historically, light infantry could harass heavy infantry with ranged fire and maintain a safe distance because of their superior tactical mobility. Light infantry had a clear tactical role on the battlefield that current movement rules make impossible to reflect. By allowing more lightly equipped players to viably kite more heavily equipped players to death, light infantry would finally have strength and purpose on LOTC. This would also be a lot easier to implement and enforce than an arbitrary stamina system. There isn't any actual need to nerf the protectiveness of plate armour, buff the power of existing mundane projectile weapons, or buff the protectiveness of light armours. Mobility was the entire point, and it makes for a great defense of its own. Ranged changes When it comes to the ranged changes, it'd probably be best to keep the system as simple and intuitive as it currently is. The old system of having a set number of emotes to shoot a specific type of ranged weapon worked alright. It can be summed up in like 1-2 sentences and it's easier for people to remember and keep track of. It also makes realistic sense. The emote counts for self-bows and arbalests really just needed to be reduced to 2 and 4 respectively to be viable in the action economy. And if we're going the magic system route, having a mana-like stamina system to limit how many projectiles someone can shoot from a certain weapon type before they get tired seems like it'd just make mundane ranged weapons even more useless. Given how short battles tend to be in terms of number of rounds and how there is no standardised system to determine the success of hits or how much damage they'd do, in practice the limit would be probably either be so low it'd be frustrating and unrealistic or so high most people won't bother to memorise the system. Heavy Crossbow categorisation As for the suggestion for a new crossbow/arbalest categorisation, it would definitely be for the better if the team went ahead with merging the crank crossbow and (windlass) arbalest into one simple category it can write redlines around. But I don't think it'd be advisable to call or think of the category as 'armour-piercers'. It's worth nothing that what many people here call the 'crank crossbow' and 'arbalest' really are practically the same weapon. An arbalest is basically a medieval crossbow with a steel prod. That implies a draw weight so high that ordinary human muscles alone won't manage it anymore, necessitating a special loading mechanism to pull back the prod. The windlass and the cranequin (crank) just happened to be the two most powerful loading mechanisms available to medieval crossbowmen for drawing back the steel prods of their arbalests. The windlass and cranequin aren't exactly the same. Different loading mechanisms are capable of different mechanical advantages, which in turn decides the maximum draw weight they can manage. Tod's Workshop, a YouTuber who recreates and field tests historically authentic medieval weapons, notes that the windlass has a mechanical advantage ratio of 78:1 and can manage draw weights exceeding 1,500lbs. Meanwhile, the cranequin is actually capable of a significantly higher mechanical advantage ratio of 182:1 and pulling back draw weights exceeding 2,000lbs. But when it comes to categorising weapons for the purpose of crafting a simple and practical combat system, this shouldn't matter too much. All it means in the end is that they both enable the use of crossbows with extremely high draw weights. It'd be more intuitive and appropriate to call it the 'Heavy Crossbow' category. While the arbalest is certainly a powerful weapon, regardless if it's windlass or cranequin-loaded it just wasn't powerful enough to beat the kind of armour implied by the average goon with a plate armour skin. Describing the category as 'armour-piercers' would be a bit of a misnomer that'd only encourage the kind of powergaming people hate about arbalests and (often wrongfully to a huge degree) dread about firearms. The 'power' of a medieval crossbow mainly depends on its draw weight, draw length, how quickly the prod's material allows it to revert back to its original shape, and the properties of its projectiles. The main bottlenecks limiting an arbalest's power are its short draw length and the material properties of medieval steels. Steel can only bend so far before it reaches the point of plastic deformation or snaps. A steel prod will not bend anywhere near as far back as, for example, a yew wood bow with equivalent dimensions. The highest-quality medieval steels weren't exactly terrible, but they weren't quite on the level of homogenous modern carbon steels either. So increasing a crossbow's relative draw length to be more comparable to a self-bow just isn't a option unless the prod is made of certain fantasy metals capable of bending more without breaking. One can also increase an arbalest's draw weight by making the prod larger and thicker. But the further one goes in doing that, the heavier and more unwieldy the crossbow becomes. And at some point, it will face diminishing returns. The limited draw length of a crossbow meant that even the heaviest arbalests were only roughly equivalent in power to the strongest self-bows, which compensated for their lower draw weights with higher draw lengths and the higher speeds at which their materials flexed. For a crossbow to qualify into the aforementioned 'Heavy Crossbow' category, the basic requirements would be that it 1) needs a powerful loading mechanism to handle its extreme draw weight and 2) is light enough that a normal human being can typically wield it without needing support its weight with a bipod, tripod, or some other kind of stand. The second requirement limits the handheld arbalest to a rather low practical power ceiling, to the point it wouldn't really be appropriate to call it an 'armour piercer'. The main drawback to the arbalest, as an infantry weapon, is that its prod and loading mechanism were relatively heavy. The weight of a medieval arbalest and its accessories were in the ballpark of 7 kg. In comparison, a historical zweihander weighed up to 4kg and historical halberds weighed about 2-3kg. Arbalests weren't weapons medieval soldiers could comfortably carry around everywhere they go on campaign. The weight of arbalests meant soldiers mostly only brought them out during sieges, when battle lines are mostly static and tactical mobility isn't much of a concern. By the time we got the archetypical knight in shining plate armour in real life, the arbalest had been rendered obsolete a long, long time ago. Late Medieval plate armour came about to counter the rise of handheld firearms. The arbalest could not contend with the latest developments in armour technology and metallurgy. It also could not complete with the much cheaper and more powerful handgonne, arquebus, and musket. According to historian Alan Williams in The Knight and the Blast Furnace (Chapter 9.5, Page 947), the typical arbalest simply could not produce the necessary kinetic energy to effectively pierce the armour of a knight wearing early 15th-century Milanese-style plate armour. Contemporary armourers also made it a standard to prove the effectiveness of their armours by shooting them at point blank range with arbalests and showcasing the shallowness of the resulting dents. Armourers in later centuries also did the same thing with pistols. If the most important pieces of plate armour (such as the breastplate) could be pierced to serious or lethal depths by an arbalest bolt or pistol bullet, they were practically unsellable. Not even counting fantasy materials, LOTC players have easy access to the best armours of the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods. Meanwhile, the strongest mundane ranged weapon available to counter them was historically developed to combat armours and metal quality standards from many generations prior. Basically, if you shoot a guy square in the breastplate with the typical arbalest, even at point blank range, your target generally should not be going down. An arbalest bolt won't pierce deep enough to cause serious injury. It won't even significantly knock them backwards either thanks to Newton's Third Law of Motion. People wearing modern bulletproof vests can casually get shot square in the chest with a 7.62x51m NATO cartridge fired from a battle rifle and still not go down. An arbalest bolt might be multiple times heavier than a modern rifle bullet, but they're still being loosed with only a fraction of the kinetic energy. The arbalest is just not that strong, especially not against the standard armour the average player will probably be wearing to battle. For an arbalest to consistently defeat plate armour, the weapon would need to either 1) be upscaled to crew-served siege artillery (at which point, you end up with the 'Mounted Crossbow' already described in the Armaments thread) or 2) incorporte certain fantasy materials and energy-efficient design features from modern-day compound bows and crossbows. If LOTC needs a medieval-friendly niche for an actual 'armour-piercing' mundane ranged weapon, the team is deadass better off just implementing handheld firearms rather than forcing arbalests into a role it eventually became completely inadequate for. Using crossbows while mounted For the ruling on using crossbows while mounted, it'd make more sense to restrict reloading on horseback rather than just completely banning its usage on horseback entirely. Operating a cranequin mechanism on top of a moving horse would be awkward for sure. Even moreso for a windlass, which necessitates the use of a stirrup at the end of the crossbow to anchor the whole weapon system to the ground as the user winded up the windlass. But there shouldn't be anything stopping a cavalryman from holding up and aiming a crossbow that's already loaded and doesn't have its loading mechanism attached.

It's not true. How can it be true? How can it be true? No, no, he isn't gone, he's not, he can't be, it's too soon, they never got to- There were no letters. There was nothing. There was nothing. And for the first time ever, Kiva feels truly broken. How can it be true? He wasn't even old. He was supposed to grow old. They were supposed to watch him grow old. They were supposed to be there for him. Was he in bad health? Was part of it their fault? Should they have reached out? Dimitri, Dimitri, their second friend. Sure years passed with little contact, but years mean little to an elf. They feel so stupid. Kiva wails. It's not fair. It's not fair. They never got to say goodbye.

Fix to Plate Armour maybe??? I believe a potential fix could be brought to us through the history of plate armour. Historically plate armour was incredibly weak to blunt force trauma. It was also heavy and hard to use for prolonged periods of time. So maybe a direct counter could be something like a mace or hammer etc? And a certain number of emotes using plate armour could cause the person- no matter the race to be affected by it in someway? Just throwing my thoughts out there.