Bear in mind, too, that lances as implemented in GS are actually footman's lances. From armouronline.com:

>The footman's lance was essentially a spear used solely for thrusting. Generally, lances were considered to be a cavalry weapon but foot soldiers used a smaller version of them during the iron age throughout the known world. The main difference between a spear-proper and a footman's lance is that spears were often designed such that the spear tip broke off upon impact with the target. Lances, conversely, were designed such that the tip would not break off in the hands of the wielder. Other than that, though, a footman's lance is a spear.

http://www.armouronline.com/encyclopedia_of_historical_weapons/276/footmans_lance.html

>> the original reason lances are mechanically different from spears is because the "lance attack table" from Arms Law was intended to be used for attacks delivered from a charging mount.

Spot on, though I'd forgotten. Led me to remember this too:

>>m
>
>But there is no horse here to mount.

This dates back to the days too when those very mounts, like functional armor, were "in the works." Thanks for the memory jolt.

>"This is a fine point about the size to weighting rationale. Lances would be naturally weighted to the same or more of a degree than the claid due to size, yes?"

Weapon size has no factor in the crit weighting of an item. You'll need to find a warrior trained in polearms to guage the level.

*Claids may be the exception but only in terms of flavor for Gemstone. I think you're stating what you are because of the website RP/flavor description of claids in specific.

Rath hit the nail on the head with this one.

RT and DF are the standard methods of representing the "size" of a weapon as compared to other weapons (And the Lance has a lot of both!). Changing this format to include crit weighting as a standard would devalue crit weighting as a stat entirely as it would become the norm as opposed to something special.

Gamemaster Konacon
Squares Team

>Is it intended that lances and halberds only receive half their enchant bonus in the parry DS formula when compared to the other two-hand GRIP polearms?

I took a look into this, found the cause, and am now investigating whether this was the intended behavior or not. I'll keep you updated. Thanks for bringing this up!

Gamemaster Konacon
Squares Team

The issue with lances and halberds halving +enchant DS should be fixed. Let me know if you see any further issues like this!

>When a polearm is held with 0 weapon ranks the user receives a DS bonus. That bonus is (30 * stance), where stance is 50% + (stance/2). So, the DS bonus ranges from 15 in stance OFF to 30 in stance DEf. However, once a character trains 1 rank in polearms that bonus decreases slightly and continues to decrease with additional ranks. It may be intended that both the natural polearm bonus and the weapon enchant bonus both decrease with increasing skill ranks but it would be nice to know for sure.

Can you show me some examples of this?

Gamemaster Konacon
Squares Team

To add to my previous post.

For a character with 32 weapon ranks, 37 STR bonus, 17 DEX bonus, and a +20 polearm, I expected to see a polearm parry DS of 98 in stance DEF. The actual parry DS is 91.

Expected formula: ((Weapon ranks + STR/4 + DEX/4 + weapon enchant bonus) * 1.05) + 30 (polearm bonus)

((32 + 9 + 4 + 20) * 1.05) + 30 = 98 DS

What I'm actually seeing is:

((32 + 9 + 4) * 1.05) + 18 (weapon enchant bonus) + 26 (polearm bonus) = 91 DS

Mark

>I'd say you were seeing that 1.05 is something smaller rather than those other effects. Maybe the two handed version of poles gets +1/3 rather than +1/2 that THW get or something like that. - Rathboner

No. It's definitely using the two-handed weapon parry formula for the base DS (Ranks + ST/4 + DE/4) * Stance Mod. With stance mods .30, .45, .60, .75, .90, 1.05 from offensive to defensive, respectively.

I rolled characters and checked this by changing stat mods and weapon ranks. The issue is with the weapon enchant and natural polearm bonuses. I couldn't find any set of mods for either or both that would satisfy the empirical data.

To see what I mean, compare the polearm bonus results for each stance with 1, 10 and 32 weapon ranks from the table I previous posted.

Ranks	Off	Adv	For	Neu	Gua	Def
1	15	17	21	23	25	29
10	15	18	20	23	25	27
32	14	17	18	21	23	26

Mark

>The deviation increases with weapon ranks and stance. That says to me that the stance mod isn't quite what you think it is. If you had the stance mod right, that pattern wouldn't be there. There isn't enough data there for to to readily pick out the truncation pattern so I can't quantify it precisely, but that looks like the weapon rank dependency in defensive is around 0.9-0.95 rather than 1.05 - Rathboner

That's what I thought at first, but here's the problem I'm having with that.

Character A : 8 weapon ranks, 29 Str bonus, 20 Dex bonus, 30 Polearm bonus

Base: 8 + 7 + 5 + 30 = 50

Def DS:
empty handed: 136
w/0x hal: 184 (48/50) = .96

Gua DS:
empty handed: 124
w/0x halb: 167 (43/50) = .86

Neu DS:
empty handed: 112
w/0x halb: 149 (37/50) = .74

For DS:
empty handed: 101
w/0x halb: 132 (31/50) = .62

Adv DS:
empty handed: 89
w/0x halb: 115 (26/50) = .52

Off DS:
empty handed: 78
w/0x halb: 98 (20/50) = .40

Character B : 32 weapon ranks, 37 Str bonus, 17 Dex bonus, 30 polearm bonus

Base: 32 + 9 + 4 + 30 = 75 and 95 with a 4x weapon

Def DS:
empty handed: 183
w/0x lance: 255 (72/75) = .96
w/4x lance: 273 (90/95) = .95

Gua DS:
empty handed: 170
w/0x lance: 233 (63/75) = .84
w/4x lance: 249 (79/95) = .84

Neu DS:
empty handed: 157
w/0x lance: 211 (54/75) = .72
w/4x lance: 224 (67/95) = .71

For DS:
empty handed: 144
w/0x lance: 189 (45/75) = .60
w/4x lance: 199 (55/95) = .58

Adv DS:
empty handed: 131
w/0x lance: 167 (36/75) = .48
w/4x lance: 175 (44/95) = .47

Off DS:
empty handed: 118
w/0x lance: 145 (27/75) = .36
w/4x lance: 150 (32/95) = .34

And these are results from two more sets: (.98/.87/.76/.65/.55/.44)(.96/.85/.75/.64/.53/.41)

If you put them in a table you'll see that as the (base value + polearm bonus + enchant bonus) increases, the stance mods decrease.

B+P+E	Off	ADV	FOR	NEU	GUA	DEF
37	.44	.55	.65	.76	.87	.98
44	.41	.53	.64	.75	.85	.96
50	.40	.52	.62	.74	.86	.96
75	.36	.48	.60	.72	.84	.96
95	.34	.47	.58	.71	.84	.95

Mark

Looking more into this, and just to make sure... When you're using 1.05 as your Defensive stance calculation multiplier in your equation, that's because you're assuming the 50% 2H weapons bonus, right?

Gamemaster Konacon
Squares Team

;)

Happy to help.

Gamemaster Konacon
Squares Team

>>Actually, I hadn't read your post, Konacon before I posted the formula but if I had, I'm sure it would have been quite helpful ;)

And here I was feeling all useful and stuff...

Gamemaster Konacon
Squares Team