I was looking at the rules in Cannon Companion regarding two-weapon melee combat, and I noticed that since the off-hand weapon has no effect on reach or damage, but merely the number of dice you roll, it doesn't really matter what weapon you use in your off-hand, as long as you have a good skill rating for it. It makes no difference whether you use a short monosword or a dull bread knife; either way you get to add half your skill rating and use the reach and damage of the other weapon. Anyone else think that this monumentally blows?

Sort of. I tend to see the off-hand weapon as playing a zoning/parrying weapon rather than something you try to deal serious damage with. Factoring in other considerations just makes it insanely complicated pretty quickly; in addition to things like reach and damage, there are special effects (stun batons, etc) to consider. If someone can come up with a good system for handling it, I'd be interested, but I think it's worth living with the simple version.

Monumentally? No. It's not a great solution, but it works, it's simple, and most people, for stylistic reasons if nothing else, will take comparable weapons in each hand.

~J

The current version makes a kind of sense. Really, you're not going to see a reach difference of more than 1 unless you're using two handed weapons one handed (and you would be taking penalties anyway which would counteract the reach bonus).

What's really weird is that you can never get as many dice fighting unarmed as a person fighting with two weapons if you were to both be ambidexterious.

Unarmed fighting factors in using both limbs in the first place. If you go to a land of one-armed people, I'd give you the skill*1.5 bonus even without ambidexterity.

~J

I'm making an ambidextrous character right now, with the primary weapon being a sword. I was going to make the secondary a monowhip, but then I realized that there is just no point in doing so, so I'm going with a dikoted cougar instead.

How about this: You can use whichever weapon's reach is longest. Even if you use the weapon with the longer reach only for feints and suchlike, and don't hit with it, you still have an advantage. You may also use the secondary weapon's damage rating instead of the primary, but if you do, subtract one from the power if you are ambidextrous, or three if you have to use an off-hand weapon skill. Alternatively, you could just flip a coin to see which weapon hits, and use it's damage rating.

Actually, there is a point to it. Since you're ambidextrous, you can switch which hand is your off-hand without penalty. For instance, you could have a low damage level, high Power weapon in your left hand to hit that Troll Cyberzombie with, and a lower Power, high Damage Level weapon in your right hand to geek the mage quickly with.

~J

Wrong. The book says you must designate one as the primary and one as the secondary, and some weapons can't be primary weapons, no matter how ambidextrous you are. In my case, I couldn't use the Ares monosword as a secondary.

In our house rules, we just let the combatant gain the best of both worlds. Whichever weapon has the superior Reach, that's the Reach the combatant gets. Whichever weapon has the superior Damage Code, that's the one used to do damage. There are no primary or secondary weapons; any one-handed weapon can be used in either hand.

'Course we don't use the bonus dice for the attack test, either, preferring instead to give bonus dice on Counterattack tests and treat the second weapon as an extra "opponent" for puposes of target number modifiers. Unarmed combatants automatically gain bonus Counterattack dice (allowing them to hold their own against armed combatants if sufficiently skilled), but none of the other advantages.

And then we have the whole set of house rules about limited number of Counterattacks each phase, too... so it's pretty diferent from the canon rules all around.

What a remarkably stupid rule. I can see not letting non-ambi people use a sword as an off-hand weapon but not people who don't have a dominant hand in the first place. And for balance reasons you should really let anybody with the off-hand skill go anyway.

Hmm, suppose you have off-hand clubs 6 and edged weapons 6, and you drop your sword. Could you use your rattan stick and roll 6 die for it, having no main weapon at all?

Sure, but you get the +2 defaulting penalty for defaulting to the standard skill (apparently due to the awkwardness of using it on its own, which you weren't trained for; else you'd have Clubs instead/too).

Ahh.. reach.... I'd say that if someone is out of one of your weapons reach you don't get the x1.5 since you don't actually use it on them.

e.g. I slash at you with a knife and a sword except you're too far for the knife to get you. The sword does the job though... does the knife really affect anything? Umm... no.

As for the primary weapon thing.... ambidex means ambidex. I say each combat round (not init pass but round) you can change which weapon is the primary as long as you have ambidex. Otherwise.... just take an init pass to switch which hand holds what.

However if you want damage for each weapon... well thats a bit easy actually. You roll the normal amount of dice for the primary then roll the dice you would get as a bonus for the secondary. The target makes a damage resistance tests for each weapon. This can easily gimp two weapon fighting by alot or make it crazy powerful (see also a troll adept dual weilding weapon focus claymores).

Xenith
"Its too bad about your friend. You wish to be reunited?"

I've been considering a house rule such that if you win the melee contest only because of successes on dice from your off-hand weapon skill, you do off-hand weapon damage instead of primary weapon damage. Haven't play-tested it to see how well it works yet, though. I have a suspicion that it'll fail to the two-weapon fighter always doing off-hand weapon damage, but the randomness might be enough to offset that. I need to play with it for a while, get a feel for the relative frequencies. (Got some changes to Reach that I need to play with a bit, too...)

Differently-coloured off-hand dice?

~J

Off-hand post.

~J

Why not just use a straight random roll to see which weapon strikes?

Roll 1d6. 1-2, secondary weapon hits. 3-6, primary weapon hits. Simple, sensical (1/3 of the dice people rolled are generally from the off-hand bonus, so why not a 1/3 chance?), and best of all, quick.

The way I see it, any hits against your target are done by your primary weapon, per canon.
The secondary weapon is used to more to defend against your opponent's attacks, thus allowing you to land more hits with your primary weapon.
Sort of like using a sword and a parrying dagger.

Our house rule does away with off-hand skills. Basically we assume that every style teaches some degree of using two weapons. Instead of giving extra dice, the advantage of an extra hand is +1 point of reach. So a sword and dagger is a reach of 2. 2 swords is a reach of 3. The character uses the lower of whatever weapon skills are applicable (if you are using a club and a knife and you have an edged weapons skill of 1, why are you using the knife?). To determine which weapon hits, take the result of your highest rolling die and:

if odds the primary weapon hit

if evens the secondary weapon hit.

Remember that 6's are always 7's.