Was having a bit of a chat with some old gaming buddies yesterday on the swashbuckler - namely which system does this sort of character 'the best'?
At the core of this are the questions:
>What's the 'feel' of a swashbuckler, why play one?
>Which mechanics are best suited to getting across that feeling while still being effective in game?
Personally I played one in 3.5 and that's it, so I was wondering if some of you who've used the class / archetype / subclass can weigh in on which system does it the most justice and why.
Also, general swashbuckler thread --)-------

>>95815886 (OP)
Not OP, but I'll latch on with a request for a skirmish miniature game with the same style/feel.

>>95815921
I have heard good things about Carnevale (pic related), and I can confirm Blood & Plunder is extremely good.

>>95815941
Blood & Plunder, for the uninitiated:
https://firelockgames.com/collections/blood-plunder

>>95815886 (OP)
>What's the feel of a swashbuckler?
They do not live only to fight, but they are good at fighting and might be someone who must fight to live.
They're not always elegant, but they appreciate elegance.
They appreciate honour (or something like it) enough to know when one must either throw it away, or die for it.
They practise a form of unarmoured fighting where you need to be good at not getting hit, and you need to know that one good hit usually means the end.

These elements together mean you get some nice reasons for a one on one fight with meaning behind it, drawn out, with room for both participants to do some kind of "why are YOU fighting?" question and answer session with swordplay punctuating the dialogue, or dialogue punctuating the swordplay.

tl;dr cinematic shit feels good man.
it's the kind of thing where I'd consider a dirty narrative system because the why is as important as the fight. I remember a oneshot swashbucking game using PDQ# once where someone was mechanically being kept alive only by his hatred of the french; in that system all damage removes dice from your character sheet.

>>95815886 (OP)
d4 roll between:
Honor + Intrigue
All for One: Regime Diablique
Wild Fields 1e
7th Sea 2e

Or make it d3, removing 7th Sea

We had this thread two weeks ago. I'm 90% certain you've made it back then, too

>>95815886 (OP)
The system Honor + Intrigue literally exists for running pulp swashbuckling games. It's also a good system.

>>95815886 (OP)
A swashbuckler is a troll. He's a good fighter, but most importantly is his ability to confound his enemy by showing greater style, panache, and wit, to provoke his enemy into rash and reckless behavior.

>>95816433
Came here to say this

>>95815886 (OP)
GURPS literally has a Swashbucklers book (also covering pirates and musketeers), as well as a Scarlet Pimpernel book.

>>95816400
>>95816433
I've wanted to try out Honor + Intrigue, but my group would rather do Dicey Tales. Just like OP, I have a swashbuckler itch I've been needing to scratch.

>>95815886 (OP)
I did one in Pathfinder once using the aptly named Swashbuckler class. I specialized him in tripping and dirty trick combat maneuvers and just made a fool out of every single enemy I could. That's more of a old movie Swashbuckler where everyone in the combat is throwing things at each other, as much about comedy as it is action.

>>95820100
I ran one of these in PF too. Good times!
>>95819235
This is an often undervalued part.
Ultimately there's a few different social flavors:
>Fun and Wisecracking
>Cocky but talented enough to back it up
>Deceptively Dangerous Wise Old Man
>Mysterious & Intriguing
>Brooding Edgelord

>>95815886 (OP)
It, like many concepts, can't be held down by a singular class.

>>95820185
Women can't be swashbucklers, they're not funny enough. They can, however, be wannabee swashbucklers who are routinely humiliated by the actual swashbuckler as comic relief (usually ending in them being stripped naked).

>>95815886 (OP)
Savage worlds Pirates of the Spanish Main

>>95820226
Unless they are Oscar François de Jarjayes

Dex fighter battlemaster, DnD 5e.

>>95820226
Shit tier fetish

>>95821060
You're a retard.
>>95820226
Ending up as ravagement bait as the actual swashbucklers, hot sweaty manly men with muscles duke out, to the victor goes the despoiling of the fool wenches.

>>95815886 (OP)
Why do you post this thread every month or so?

all the games that were recommended in a thread last year, some already mentioned
D&D/Pathfinder
7th Sea
Honor+intrigue
Swashbucklers of the 7 skies
Miseries and Misfortunes
RoleMaster.
- At Rapier's Point
- Pirates
- And a 10' Pole
17th Century Minimalist
Zweihänder
Renaissance d100
GURPS
- Martial Arts
- Low-Tech
- Magic
- Swashbuckling
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
All for One: Regime Diabolique
The Dee Sanction
Gran Meccanismo
War of Wolves
Midderlands
Privateers and Gentlemen
Maelstrom
Fallen RPG
savage worlds
- Pirates of the Spanish Main
- 50 Fathoms
Flashing Blades
- High Seas
Sword & Musket
Lace and Steel

>>95815921
en garde from osprey

>>95820003
I mean if they've played Dicey Tales they 90% know how to play Honor + Intrigue already.

>>95819235
>>95820100
This is one of the things I really liked about H+I, there are entire mechanics and fighting styles built around improvised weapons, showoff tricks, and making the other guy seethe into incompetence.

>>95821120
>hot sweaty manly men with muscles
Imagine fantasizing about hot sweaty manly men with muscles.

>>95815886 (OP)
When I fantasise about my perfect OC, it usually turns out to be something like a mid 1600's cavalry man. Brest plate and one arm armored for a modest defence thats not over encomburing. a secrete helmet under a hat for day to day protection (secretes should be more common I love the idea of concealed helmets) and to look dashing. a full lobster helmet, maybe with a bevor for when things go full combat. A buff coat under the breastplat to protect the upper arms and down to the kness from lighter blows. A sword, a carbine and/or pistol. And a lance and/or small sheild.

thats my autism fantasy.

>>95823058
Why would I have to imagine doing what I'm already doing?

>>95821396
OP here.
I've literally never posted a thread about character classes nor seen any monthly swashbuckler threads.
Go play some games and you might not feel like you have to try so hard.
Thanks to everyone else. I was going to stoop to running a LOTFP module my buddy was shilling to get my fix of this genre but now I see there are a lot more options than I previously considered.

I'm already running a pirate börg game but that group has been wearing my patience thin lately.

>>95820003
Your groups are retards, as addressed in the previous thread when you mentioned that.
Dicey Tales is awful game, people who stick to it are mentally ill, and there is no way around this.
Give them H+I and if they insist afterwards to still use Dicey Tales, unironically look for a different group. And I'm 100% serious.

>>95821519
Ask me how I know you've actually copied certain reddit post, WITHOUT knowing more than half of the games you've suggested
I mean seriously, how fucking clueless one needs to be to post Zweihander and LotFP as swashbucklers?

>>95822936
>making the other guy seethe into incompetence.

>>95825936
Alternatively, cut off his moustache.

>>95825772
Ultimately, just as it's ok for players to quit a bad GM, it's ok for a GM to quit bad players or players they don't jive with.

>>95820226
Disagree. REH himself had a couple of woman swashbucklers in Dark Agnes and Red Sonya. They can work.

>>95821120
>You're a retard.
Says the guy who has humiliation (and most likely also rape) fetish

>>95826724
I honestly don't understand people who stick with GMs/group/specific player(s) they don't gel with. Why would anyone do that? You are supposed to have fun together, and it's clearly not working out, so why bother
>inb4 friends
Nigga please. The whole "stick with your friends to have games" is one of the most retarded things imaginable. You can have friends you don't play TTRPGs with, if you aren't on the same wave length with said TTRPGs. You can play with other people, too.
I just don't get people who have Stockholm syndrome as their fetish, I guess.

>>95815941
What the fuck is that bridge on the left? What a clusterfuck. It looks like the layout an image-generating AI would come up with.

>>95821120
That's fucking gay. I want my buff, rough-around-the-edges swashbuckler OC to beat and then ravage a pampered, foppish fencing femboy Twink.

>>95815921
>>95821519
+1 for En Garde ! It's not just great for Swashbuckling, it's also one of the best wargame for swordfight skirmish, period.
The combat system is just amazing

>>95816433
>>95819269

I like 90% of Honor + Intrigue, with one crucial exception that will make or break the game for a lot of people: challenge does not exist in H+I. At this point, I don't think it really can.
By which I mean, I've been running a campaign in this system for nearly a year now, and the players have never failed at anything. Oh, they have failed *individual rolls*, they have missed ATTACKS, but they have never once been in any danger of losing of a fight. They have never failed a chase. Every goal in front of them has always been effortless, and usually without cost. In that entire year of gaming, I can tell you every single one of the THREE times that a party member has been hit and taken damage.

Any time that the players have not gotten exactly what they wanted and have experienced a failure of any kind, it was either because they made the wrong choice at a narrative crossroads, or because I forced it upon them by railroading. Nothing that actually involves the rules of the game.

As far as I can tell, the only way that people in this game could ever lose a fight except on purpose would be to Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid them, where they walk into an ambush with 50 guys all pointing guns at them and just vaporize them will mass gun fire. And *even then*, if they have their Fortune capped out only one of them is in any danger of actually getting hit on the first turn, one of the players literally can't be hit at all under those circumstances for at least a round.

Its a great system for making the players feel cool and skilled, but its an extremely frustrating system for a GM if you want to have any enemy, even a major villain, be anything other than a doormat.

>>95829748
I mean, usually the villain in swashbuckling fiction isn't a challenge because they are physically powerful, it's usually social pressures and soft power that makes them a worthy foe.

>>95829748
>I like 90% of Honor + Intrigue, with one crucial exception that will make or break the game for a lot of people: challenge does not exist in H+I.
>It's this fag again
>He is too autistic to grasp this concept
>He has to go on and on and on about it
>For two fucking years now

>>95832356
Disagree. The swashbucking swordfights that define the genre DEPEND on your villain or rival being a dangerous threat when the swords come out. The hero has to lose an early fight so that a later fight can have stakes, or has to get captured so they can break out of prison, or so on. Even in the 1 on 1 duel that the hero wins, the back and forth of the fight is protracted and the hero gets cut on the arm or nearly forced off the edge of the cliff or whatever.

And that just doesn't seem to be how H+I actually plays out. You can make a character that stands perfectly still and never draws their weapon and still probably be in no danger of being harmed for 2-3 rounds in a pitched battle against an enemy trying to kill them. The amount of focused fire it takes to create a situation where a PC could even *theoretically* be in danger of taking damage requires you to so absurdly stack the deck against them that you might as well have just made it a cutscene int he first place. You can't even wear down the PCs with a bunch of little fights before they fight the big bad to try and wear them out, because with the right fighting style it costs them absolutely nothing to wipe out groups of 10 guys at a time. Like, one of the fighting style abilities is just "if you knock out a pawn, you roll against the next nearest pawn and continue until you fail with no penalty". Pawns only have 1 health, so unless you botch a roll you can literally just speedblitz through as many people as you want in one round. Unless the battlefield is set up so they physically cannot be reached, bap bap bap bap bap bap bap bap bap bap fight over before any of the other players even get a turn.

>>95832475
Nta, but here is my solution:
Start taking your medication again.
You are fucking unbearable without it, you dense motherfucker

>>95832499
You can respond to my next ten posts with whining that I am posting at all, or you can make an argument.

>>95832538
Yeah, I tried that once.
Then I realised you are genuinely incapable of grasping such concept as a "genre convention". Not pretending, not being too stupid, just unable to get it. At fucking all.
And ever since I saw this whole 'it has no challenge", then followed with a wall of text, it's always you.
My solutions are as follow, from the most advised to less sound options:
1) Kill yourself, because autism isn't actually curable or manageable, so just end it
2) Stop using game that is clearly beyond your mental capability, and you are baffled by its content yourself
3) Seek fucking professional help, but not from psychologist or therapist (since, again, you aren't treateable), but from a literature professor or similar, who will then be able to properly and accurately explain to you the concept of a genre and its convention, along with plot bits
4) Start visiting amateur script writer seminars, they explain that stuff there too, in dummy-friendly terms and easy-to-compartmentise-and-then-re-use context
5) Consider self-harm. It's really good at easing edge of autistic behaviour of any kind, and gives the sort of stimuli nothing else provides, making it just great distraction

>>95832565
Ignoring the worthless ad-hominems, your position is based on a falsehood. Swashbuckling adventure stories do not have 'the heroes are incapable of losing even in small ways' as a genre convention. They are obviously very skilled, but so are their worst enemies. There couldn't BE a duel if the villain wasn't on the same level as the hero, the hero would just effortlessly knock their blade aside in the first exchange.
Swashbuckling fights necessitate a back and forth. Not just forth and forth and forth.

>>95832613

>>95832761
This reminds me of a dude that comes into any traveller thread that gets over 50 replies and posts about how he is going to totally redo the trade rules because they don't work. Every time, people tell him that he is using the system wrong, but he refuses to believe that and insists that it *must* be the system that is broken, there isn't any way he is doing anything wrong, and we're all wrong for telling him otherwise. People just get a weird mental block sometimes.

>>95832899
Just how wrong is challenge autist? I find it hard to believe that his example in >>95829748 holds water but the other guy didn't exactly refute him with mechanics.

>>95832466
>>95832499
>>95832565
NTA but I'm not hearing any arguments there.
Heroes from swashbuckler stories are larger than life, but they aren't supposed to be completely invincible either.

>>95823353
It's a good fantasy. Personally while off-topic to the thread at hand I like the idea of Pavise + Crossbow mixed with a chitty-chitty bang-bang tricked out war waggon.
>>95832356
Which is why you have an enforcer dude to provide violent menace only to be socially outclassed by their "feeble" master. Or not; genre conventions are a mix and match sorta thing.

>"Swashbuckler" this
>"Swashbuckler" that
>Images of "swashbucklers"
>No bucklers to be seen

Fucking casuals

>>95826836
>Why would anyone do that?
They don't like confrontation of any kind. Or they feel obligated due to friends/family. Or they figure any game is better than being a PS3.

>>95833240
Gotchu bro

>>95833165
>It is totally me, the different anon
And they are only invincinble in your autistic narrative.
Read.
The.
Fucking.
Rules.
They cover for this.
You just refuse to accept how the game handles its own content, and keep sperging about it for nearly two years. I actually checked. You threw your first bitch-fit about it mid-July '23. Was too stupid and absurd to be bait, so everyone joined the fry

>>95832899
>People just get a weird mental block sometimes.
Yeah, that's called autism

>>95832948
Because refuting him is utterly pointless. We've been over this in the past. Countless of times. The end result is always the same: a wall of autistic screeching about how anon can't wrap his head around the concept of facing pawns and what's even the goal of playing swashbucklers, but also refusing to use in-game scaling, because otherwise he would have nothing to bitch about.
How many times do you try to negotiate with a wall? Once? Twice?
This dude is doing this shit for two fucking years. I am sick and tired of this motherfucker's mere presence, because nu-modern /tg/ is such a small place, you can spot him the second he starts yapping about his autistic take on rather simple set of scaling rules.

> come back after 2 hours
> anon is accusing other people of being me

I wasn't going to bring this up before because it seemed needlessly pedantic at the time, but I hadn't even heard of H+I this time last year. Anon, if you genuinely think you've been arguing with me specifically for 2 years, you are conflating me with other people. At least one, perhaps more.

>>95820226
>They can, however, be wannabee swashbucklers who are routinely humiliated by the actual swashbuckler as comic relief (usually ending in them being stripped naked).
I don't agree with you, but the stripped-with-a-sword thing is a good trope.

>>95833624
I know this topic has definitely come up before, and lack of lethality IS a known challenge in the system that it basically inherits from Barbarians of Lemuria.

Pawns aren't really meant to be a challenge, just a thing to get in the way and deplete resources in an encounter. But you can make 'em more of a problem by armoring them and giving them guns. This is houserule turf, but I'll also give 'em up to 3 lifeblood to avoid the 'one poke chump' phenomenon. And don't stand them in one big cluster.

Retainers are meant to be more of a problem, and at least one of BASHMAN's difficulty suggestions (actually outright printed in the ToIO) is to eventually or immediately replace pawns with retainers.

>>95834371
This sort of thing is essential. Tone lives or dies at the table more than it does in any general rulebook.

Had a great DM that used a swashbuckler against us for awhile that vastly outlevelled us and would constantly taunt us before getting away, it was infuriating and very entertaining

>>95834371
It's a swashbucklers. If pawns are a challenge, you are unironically playing it wrong
Let me use an example from a different game that supposedly shares the same issue of invincible PCs and fodder chaff to fight with: Broken Compass / Outgunned (which is BC 2e in everything, but name) and takes it to even bigger extremes than people failing to grasp H + I combat loop and purpose
By game rules, you die when facing your nemesis, effectively a codified BBG or his top enforcer, James Bond flicks-style. Everything else not as much as is non-lethal, but shouldn't be able to harm you in the first place. And the game has no HP, instead it has just your "luck" that's depleted by ALL kinds of failures, not just combat. On top of that, vast majority of fights isn't about wiping the floor with everyone in the room, but to escape the room while being under fire. And the rules are VERY fucking explicit about it
But about every tenth group decides that "this is not lethal enough" (never mind they are playing game designed to evoke being invincible and facing crazy odds, while disposing them in even more unrealistic ways, where Outgunned outright invoked John Wick movies as its direct inspiration) and so what they do?
They make fodder enemies "stronger". Meaning they stop being fodder, but are still used as one.
Then they fight against near-invincible enemies that are supposed to be chaff, in a game that isn't designed for combat any more than "I shoot the nearest group" and then killing 1-3 dudes in a single attack (and having just attack roll, no damage). The end result is grindfest of abstract theatre of the mind combat in a game designed to be pulp, and people dying mid-session from a random bunch of hoodlums
The exact same problem this autismo has with H + I: pawns aren't lethal, because they aren't supposed to be. Making them lethal stops them from being pawns. Rocket science, right?

So tell me
Bad game design or idiots trying to fix something that isn't broken?

>>95833885
Congrats then, you are as guilty as the faggot who started "muh local lord" shitposting, because he was bored during summer '17. He stopped after a week, but we are dealing with the damage ever since.

>>95836380
>It's a swashbucklers. If pawns are a challenge, you are unironically playing it wrong
It's not about making them a challenge per se, but making them more useful for designing interesting encounters for the players that engage their minds and excite them.

>>95835674
I did this with an Estalian bounty hunter in WFRP 2e, but the dice hated his guts so he'd always screw up. The players ended up liking him anyway because of his gobshite antics and tendency to show up when it would be irritating. He briefly set his bounty aside to help them deal with something much worse (a Khaine cult).

>>95834347
This scene from Mask of Zorro lives rent free in my brain since childhood.

>>95826745
Le Scorpion is based.

>>95837119
Oh, but I can't recommend the English translation, which is mediocre in quality and, vastly worse, censors some of the art for no apparent reason.

>>95837174
Why can't we have nice things

>>95816433
>solomon kane depicted in poorly drawn 17th century garb instead of the elizabethan englishman he actually is written to be
Why the fuck do they keep doing this

>>95836380
IMO the problem isn't that pawns are not 'lethal', its that it mostly feels pointless to include them in the scene at all. Not a waste of the character's time, but the groups.

>>95836626
They. Are. Pawns.
They are there to spice the scene and then the PCs leave. They are not there to duel them in extensive, elaborate way.
They are not there to do anything else than be a window dressing.
How fucking hard it is to get?

And more importantly: from what background did you came to H + I? As in: what game(s) you've played extensively before? Because there is an off-chance you are still trying to play that game, despite using completely different ruleset designed for completely different thing

>mfw AI spam is allowed and unlimited, but 4 MB is still the limit on video outside /wsg/ to preserve server space

>>95837592
I'm going to co-op you here, but your post will come in few more minutes, since I need to move

>>95837878
Fuck, forgot the image

>>95836626
And as for your non-argument
>It's not about making them a challenge per se, but making them more useful for designing interesting encounters for the players that engage their minds and excite them.
None of this requires from pawns to be anything else than they are right now. It all boils down to GM's incompetence, inability to utilise game rules and, worst of it all, not getting the fucking point of a swashbuckler. And then inevitably bitching that the game isn't what their (twisted and fucked up) vision of attempt at swashbuckler devolves into.
It's the same shit with people who complain that CoC isn't scary, but then you learn their GM was just running a DnD-esque dungeon crawler and the highlight of the game was combat encounter with the whole cult.
While playing CoC, for fuck's sake.

>>95837592
>>95837878
As promised, your reply

The goal of having pawns and pawn-like fights in a swashbuckler is simple: it's the eye Candy.
>b-but we are playing a tabletop game
So?
You are still facing pawns, who's goal is to force you into a specific set of actions and eventual decision if you (as a player) want to stick around, or do you flee the scene to not be inconvenient by them. That's literally all there is to it.
Do they waste your time? Yes and no.
Yes, because they force you to act in specific way.
No, because so does any other activity and challenge and saying this one specific thing - duelling without facing a real challenge - wastes your time more than any other part of the game is just dumb.

My go-to example of fight that is part of the game, yet isn't essential is always Eat the Reich. Meme status aside, I think everyone should play that game at least once to see how different the gameplay loop can be in TTRPGs.
You can fight the German garrison of Paris and individual squads possess no challene (to the point you face them as squads, rather than individual soldiers). But there are 3-5 of you, and there is entire garrison that's going to just keep sending reinforcements. Fighting them exists to create specific situations and advance current scene, even if by itself, you can't "win" and take over the city.

>>95837921
>>95837968

Anon, your clip would be all but impossible in H+I. What you show is a pitched battle where being outnumbered forces the players to flee because its all they can do just to hold their ground and they can't do that forever.
In H+I those pawns would be dropping like flies fast enough that the protagonists never feel like this is a fight beyond them, and just just stick around to take out the rest of the guys and have an unambiguous victory.

>You are still facing pawns, who's goal is to force you into a specific set of actions and eventual decision if you (as a player) want to stick around, or do you flee the scene to not be inconvenient by them. That's literally all there is to it.

Okay, but why would you ever flee? Unless you are just randomly ambushed and have no goal in the scene of your own, you are where you are for a reason. If the pawns present no threat, you'd just stand your ground and beat them if for no other reason than to rough some of them up after and ask who sent them. And thats assuming you don't have a goal of your own your are advancing.
The specific series of actions that you argue the pawns exist to force on the player is incongruous with how the fights actually play out.

>>95838062
Part of me wonders if you could develop a lose condition around overwhelming odds, kind of like a clock in Blades in the Dark or an average game of Marvel Zombies.
Like the pawns themselves aren't threats, but if you stand there swinging your sword around long enough to let them overwhelm you then have fun in the dungeons.
That organically provoke players to make the dashing sort of escapes you see in Zorro or any number of swashbuckler movies...because the minigame isn't 'beat up all these pawns' it's 'get out of that situation without shackles on your wrists'.
Unless, of course, your group is retarded. Then I can see them just getting mad at the GM.

How long do Sessions usually last with your groups? How many encounters do you get?

>>95838131
That could work if taking out pawns took any significant amount of time, but it really doesn't. You can really just make whole groups of them fall down in a single player turn unless you are engaging them in the dumbest ways possible, multiple fighting styles make deleting groups of pawns quick and easy short of bad luck.

The dilemma of "Fight these eight guys or go after the macguffin" isn't a dilemma if there are three of you and it only takes one of you a single round to delete six of those eight guys. That just means splitting the party, and not even for very long.
You can do what you describe with retainers, though. A retainer can be quickly debuffed into the ground such that ever hitting a player again becomes a statistical improbability, but they can still stretch out the fight for multiple rounds afterward such that an accomplish carrying the important documents or whatever makes a reasonable escape.

>>95837921
Nothing I suggested isn't something the system itself puts forward, or something done by one of its sibling systems. Please try to moderate your hysterical tone, you're not on /v/ and it's not productive.

>>95837472
Because he isn't really written like what he ostensibly is, anyway. To Howard's credit, he realized that with the characterization and made him Puritan almost in name only.

>>95837371
Fuck if I know. I guess the publisher was scared of a kid seeing a tit. Considering how fucking fat everyone is any more, it shouldn't be too surprising to see.

>>95837921
>It's the same shit with people who complain that CoC isn't scary, but then you learn their GM was just running a DnD-esque dungeon crawler and the highlight of the game was combat encounter with the whole cult.
Honestly, I find the problem is more often that the things premades or new GMs expect to be scary just make you feel helpless in a bad way (you're being fiat'd along to some gay you lose aren't I clever ending) or think anyone in current year is afraid of inbred fishmen or the same set of elder gods who have been so overused and overdescribed at this point that they may as well be Pokemon.

>>95838167
Longest series of encounters I've managed to squeeze into a session was a raid on a noble estate that had been sacked and turned into a hideout for ex-revolutionaries turned to crime, which the players were tasked with clearing out and reclaiming by any means necessary so long as the property was not ruined in the process.

> fight a room full of pawns in the entrance hall who were caught unprepared and were easily dispatched
> a followup battle in the same room with better armed reinforcement pawns and a retainer running around the upper level tossing down grenades over the balcony
> hallway fight with some pawns aiming a cannon down the hallway, forcing the players to dive for cover and then rush forward to take them out before they could reload
> fight against a mad bastard pugilist focused on parries and ripostes to make a bunch of attacks each round

The only fight among them that was anything but effortless was the grenade guy, just because grenades are scary and the players had never encountered them in the system before so they got a bit of the shock when the rules were explained and played more cautiously than normal.
This was a relatively early session in the campaign, and was largely designed to be a test of how much pressure I could put on the players by throwing waves of guys at them, and was when it became clear to us that pawns really just didn't matter and even 'strong' retainers/villains couldn't keep up with multiple players focusing on them. The retainers were more of a challenge, but even so in all of those fights in a row not a single player took damage. Not once.

>>95838351
I'm not sure how your players are never getting hit by Pawns. Gang-up rules alone should get the occasional hit or wasted Fortune point. I'm also not sure how they're wiping out everyone quickly unless they're all in one giant glob.

But I agree with the irascible fellow that that sounds mostly like pawns fighting as intended and you needed more retainers in the fight if you wanted it to be dangerous on top of exciting.

>>95838264
>Because he isn't really written like what he ostensibly is, anyway. To Howard's credit, he realized that with the characterization and made him Puritan almost in name only.
He is literally written as a 16th/early 17th century ex-sea rover who sailed with francis drake, fights with a spanish rapier and likes to wear somber clothing
But for some reason hack artists like to dress him up as a mid/late 17th century puritan witch hunter. They also tend to have him wear a red sash instead of the green sash he is described as wearing
Solomon kane has more in common with errol flynn's the sea hawk than he does with the witchfinder general

>>95838501
Yeah, I threw in more retainers in sessions after that, mostly in the form of mini-retainers that had only 3 lifeblood. Still easily dispatched, but making it more difficult for players to KO more than a single enemy per player turn made the fights feel more fair. Pawns still showed up, but really as more of a distraction than anything actually intended to be meaningful to combat, or sometimes showing up in cases like an escape scene where the players were running and gunning their way out of an enemy stronghold and couldn't afford to get bogged down in combat. The fact that enemies were converging on their position was enough of a threat after a botched stealth mission and didn't need them to be individually very dangerous because the situation itself was already a danger.

As for the earlier raid I described before, Pawns would succeed on some of the hit rolls but between fortune, defense actions, and cede advantage the hits that happened that session got negated enough that they never resulted in damage. The fights ended too quickly for the consequences to catch up to them because the pawns got wiped out too quickly for attrition to be possible and the retainers got debuffed into being completely pathetic because the players were in a position to focus on them.

>>95838936
>They also tend to have him wear a red sash instead of the green sash he is described as wearing
Color blindness.

>>95838327
Absolutely. Tone is one of those things that makes or breaks games, along with its cousin Pacing. It's what makes an adventure adventurous or a horror dreadful.
And very *very* few modules or adventures are constructed well enough to establish those on their own. The GM needs to do some heavy lifting and the players need to be bought in so they approach things in a helpful mindset.
Easiest way I've seen to get a game to feel like any pulp (whether swashbuckling, noir, horror, punk, or conan / barsoom) has been to have players who actually understand and want to play that out.
Then you don't have to lean so hard on the rules or the adventure document to 'enforce' the feel of the game.

>>95838244
>The dilemma of "Fight these eight guys or go after the macguffin" isn't a dilemma if there are three of you and it only takes one of you a single round to delete six of those eight guys. That just means splitting the party, and not even for very long.
>You can do what you describe with retainers, though. A retainer can be quickly debuffed into the ground such that ever hitting a player again becomes a statistical improbability, but they can still stretch out the fight for multiple rounds afterward such that an accomplish carrying the important documents or whatever makes a reasonable escape.
I'm now almost certain you read some shorthand of the rules an refused to touch the actual rulebook, or entirely skipped how one-vs-many combat works.

>>95841500
>or entirely skipped how one-vs-many combat works.
NTA but whats the difference? I only looked up this system yesterday but I don't see anything in the TOC that jumps out at me

>>95841643
The difference is that anon is insisting pawns are (a) completely useless cause they (b) possess no challenge and (c) can't do shit in combat while (d) a single PC can disable them all at once
None of those statements are true in actual rules and pawns can (and even should) swarm you

>>95841730
This makes me want to learn and run the system just to find out the truth

>>95815886 (OP)
Shitposting aside, I'd say DCC just because the mighty deeds are so open ended

>>95841823
It's not entirely false. Stunts let you take out entire groups of Pawns (though difficulty increases with group size). Pawns tend to go last in initiative (the exact when depends on their competency rating). There's also a rule that lets you attack another after defeating one with a standard attack, with a penalty, as long as they're reasonably near, until you botch a roll.

Pawns, for their part, can sacrifice their individual actions (which tend to have low odds of success) to act as a unit and increase their odds. The sticky bit is this counts only as a single attack.

>>95837911
>>95837921
>Le Bossu
Obligatory Dexfag clip then

>>95842396
Guess it's a good thing he didn't bother killing her his first dozen opportunities. Leave it to a baddie to draw things out.

>>95842474
He is quite literally toying with her, the plan being to bed her. Him, I mean, since he likes boys.

>>95815886 (OP)
I have the high ground is a pretty fun little rpg for 2.

>>95842474
Besides, if you want "realistic" (quotation marks badly needed) swordfight in swashbuckler, go watch that two-part Three Musketeer abomination from few years ago. The one with Eva Green ad Milady. Literally the only good thing about those movies was fencing, except it was filmed in the most retarded way imaginable, squandering all the potential for a "false single take across chaotic battle" gimmick.

>>95819235
Fucking love this guy. I have the play script in a box somewhere.

>>95825936
>Posting the image
>Not posting the duel
One fucking job
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljExTEPNFnM

>>95842386
That sounds like its actually not that unlikely that a fight against pawns ends before they even get a turn, if the first couple players to go each take out a handful of pawns and then whoever goes last uses a stunt to clean up the remainder. Unless you have the pawns explicitly spaced around the map with feet between them like everyone is concerned with social distancing.

>>95846014
That's possible, but I'll note that 1.) Some guys are probably armed with guns, considering the era and 2.) You can only cram so many people in one tight space.

Practically speaking, you will run up against mathematical implausibility or impossibility in kill chains.

>>95842540
>that two-part Three Musketeer abomination from few years ago. The one with Eva Green ad Milady
I liked that movie! I love how it expanded on the motivations of Richelieu.
What's your golden standard for Three Musketeer movies, anon?

>>95838327
I have read Lovecraft and found all his stories to be scary. What you describe sounds like an issue by hack writers who neither understand or respect his mythos i.e. skill issue.

>>95847323
The 70s one, of course. How's it even a question?
It didn't try to go all modern, it didn't try to be serious and it sure as hell didn't try to reinvent the wheel or insert complete nonsense into set pieces.
The recent two-parter made the cardinal sin of trying to make Three Musketeers grimdark. Even more baffling, because it was made by French. You would expect they wouldn't fuck it up this hard.
If I wanted to watch Alatriste knock-off, I would just go watch Alatriste

>>95848171
Yeah, that's what I said. Did you read the post or just want to suck off Howard?

>>95854675
>b-bump
Let it die already, faggot

>>95854795
I do as I please.

>>95854829
And that's the problem

>>95855196
OP here, thanks for a lovely thread everyone. Good shit.
Now I agree let's let it pass on in peace>>95854795

>>95815886 (OP)
Don't run 7th Sea's system, even if you like the setting. It sucks assholes through a cardboard tube.