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I’ve noticed what appears to me an inconsistency. In the Codex Martialis rules, gothic harness has a bypass value of 9. In the Road to Monsterberg books, it has a bypass value of 6 for the NPCs that have it. Is this an error, or is there another factor affecting the bypass value that I missed?
Also, some PCs and NPCs have multiple forms of armour, such as the platendienst/aketon pairing, with two different values. Do you resolve bypass separately, or layered? For example, say someone attacks a halberdier with the platendienst/aketon, having a bypass value of 5/8. The attacker hits with 19 vs 10. If resolved separately, he would bypass both armour, since 19-5 & 19-8 both beat 10. Or does he only bypass one of them, say the platendienst with its higher DR, going to 14, which is taken below 10 by the aketon’s bypass value, and thus is not bypassed.
The Bypass for Gothic Harness is 9, I believe some of those NPCs are meant to be wearing Gothic Half Armor which has the lower Bypass value (no leg protection, basically). I’ll double check and make sure those stats are updated. Thanks for pointing it out.
Where there are two stats for armor, it works as follows:
In a ‘normal’ attack, meaning no Bypass is declared, the assumption is that they have attacked the heavier armor. So for example, if you attacked a Mounted Crossbowman as seen in Monsterberg I, if you do a ‘no bypass’ attack you are assumed to be hitting the Brigandine (or the helmet).
If you decide to Bypass, you can try to bypass ALL the armor (Bypass 7) or just the Brigandine and Helmet (Bypass 5).
It’s a lot easier to punch through the Aketon (DR is only 2-4) so that may be the better option in some cases.
The way Bypass always works is to assume that unless you make a special effort, you always hit the armor (or the heaviest armor, in this case). This is to cut down on the amount of die-rolls and steps needed to resolve combat.
If Codex was a computer game, there would still be a random chance of bypassing the armor regardless, and we would want to delve into hit locations and so on. But this would be far too many die rolls in a tabletop RPG.
By making player choice the determining factor, we allow for a bit more nuance in the combat as an OPTION, without bogging it down too much by default.
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