More HOWs Rules

Some more tweaks to Heroes & Other Worlds.

Weapons and Armor

Per the original Melee/TFT rules, summarized here.  I just like it better, and I know it will be hard for me to get used to Broadswords doing 2d6+3 instead of 2d6.

Wizards may wear any armor, but DX penalties are also applied to IQ for the purpose of casting spells.

Experience

Only being able to raise your skills and not your attributes is an interesting design choice, and makes it a lot more like D&D, but… I think a TFT-like needs a way of raising attributes.   For one thing, the min IQ on the most powerful spells is prohibitive if characters can never raise their attributes above their initial allotment. On the other hand, balancing the cost of attributes vs. the cost of skills is hard.  So my compromise position is

Every  time you improve or buy skills related to a specific attribute, you get a tick-mark of XP towards raising that attribute.  When you’ve collected tick marks equal to the attribute+1, the attribute goes up by 1. (The initial 5 points at the start do count towards this.)  You may also improve your attribute by directly training it at the cost of 100 XP per tick.

So it takes 10 tick marks from DX-based skills to raise DX from 9 to 10, then 11 to raise it from 10 to 11, etc.  This does allow for more advancement than standard Heroes & Other Worlds (though you could always adjust awarding XP downward a skosh or the costs upward if it worries you), but eliminates any trade-off between increasing your attributes and increasing your skills.  It may encourage people to specialize a little more, but that’s arguably a benefit.  Letting the initial skill allocation count toward raising attributes means there’s no funny business about remembering which were your initial skills and which you bought later: you can always look at a character and count how many points of skills it has for a particular attribute and so how much it’s raised over the base.  Improving the attribute directly is really only worthwhile if you’ve maxed out your skills, unless you’re desperate to improve it and are saving IQ slots for later.