Response to Brokkr

lol, arm's combat code will never see a revamp. there is no one on staff competent enough to come up with a system, and they are too proud to use an outside source. hence why the only actual solution that might ever exist is to let players just build their characters to the meta rather than do the suicide dance for it.

also, i'm still waiting on my2sids to post the actual strength breakpoint. i can see that dope logged in and reading this thread.

If you don't intend to fight, strength is nearly irrelevant as long as you can wear whatever you need to wear without getting encumbrance penalties. So if your plan is to play a non-combat miscreant, you can put strength last, or maybe second to last just so you don't roll poor and make it so you can't even carry the basics. Same goes for crafters, although if you're an indie, being a really weak crafter gets annoying because you have to carry more shit around than most.

There's another exception to the "strength>all" rule, though: elves. Elven strength caps so low that you'll need a literal max roll to get a damage bonus at all, and the most you can get is +1 at 15 strength, which isn't worth going for. 15 for an elf is like 19 for a human: the highest you can get before class bonuses, and you only have a 1.56% chance of hitting the max roll. If you do hit exceptional, you have no way of knowing whether it's 14 or 15, so you can't really go for a "strong elf." That means you might as well just try to get the lowest strength roll that has no damage penalty, which is 10, or 'good' for elves. That's pretty doable at #3 priority, allowing you to go agi end str wis to try to get an acceptable health/stun number. You can also go strength #2 just to be fairly sure you don't get <10, but then you're likely to get less than 100 health/stun.

The only reason to play a fighting elf is if you're going to capitalize on its high agility, so you'll be prioritizing agility first. If you get a top agility roll, the bonuses to things affected by agility are crazy high, but you never become truly scary in combat when you have no damage bonus. That's the unfortunate reality for elves. There are ways you can be deadly without strength, but those ways tend to be much more difficult, unreliable and skill-dependent, and usually someone with high strength would do the same thing considerably better. Like maxed backstab does approximately 50-100 damage, so an elf can certainly backstab someone to death, but the lack of power in their follow-up attacks means a low backstab roll isn't very deadly at all whereas a strong human or dwarf backstabber could kill with a low roll by adding 2x wounding hits immediately afterwards.

Melee damage is a relatively simple formula. It has six main components:

1) Weapon damage dice. Most weapons have damdice that's not so different from their D&D counterparts. A shortsword will typically do about 1d6, a longsword 1d8, a particularly big and nasty weapon like a halberd or greatsword might be 1d10 or 2d5 or something. Many also have a -1 modifier, which I think comes down to material, so a bone sword may be 1d8-1. That's the reason you can sometimes have blows bounce off of unarmored humans if you don't have a bonus from strength.

2) Strength bonus. See this thread for specifics.

3) Location. Every hit location has a damage modifier. I don't know what they are for sure, but my experience suggests that body is 100%, head is 200%, neck is 250%, wrists are 150%, arms/legs are 75% and hands/feet are 50%. Waist very rarely gets hit but seems to be 100%. Strength bonus is applied before the location multiplier, which is why hits to the head and neck are so dangerous. If you have +4 damage from strength and hit the neck, that becomes +10 damage.

4) Armor. It's a flat reduction, so a breastplate with 3 armor makes you take 3 less damage from any attack to the body. I suspect this is applied after location multipliers, which makes head and neck armor unimpressive and doesn't prevent those giant hits to those locations. You should still wear head and neck armor, but it only really helps against weak attackers.

5) Etwo bonuses. These are tied to strength. You get half your strength bonus on top when you etwo something, plus (str.bonus*etwo.skill)/100. So if you have +4 damage from strength, you get another +2 baseline and then (4*etwo.skill)/100, so at 50 skill you get another +2. If you have AI human strength and master two handed, you get a whopping +11 total damage when you etwo. That becomes +27 damage when hitting the neck!

6) Offense vs. defense can add a tiny bit of damage. It's very little. The formula is: dam+ = (your offense - their defense)/50. So you need to have 50 points more in offense than they have in defense to get +1, and I don't think you can really get +2 because you'd have to have 100 offense over them, which is only going to happen in cases like them being blinded and resting or something like that. I believe defense can reduce damage taken in the same way.

So let's say I'm a human with exceptional strength (+4), 75 in the two handed skill, and a 1d8 weapon. That gives me a base damage range of 1d8+9. If instead I had no strength bonus, my damage would just be 1d8. So 10-17 damage vs. 1-8 damage. That's an outrageous difference. The stronger character's average damage is more than three times as high and the minimum hit is ten times as high. If the strong guy hits someone in the head, that's 20-34 damage. For the weak guy it's 2-16. I hope this illustrates how fucking retarded strength is.