On Chainmail's Man-to-Man Tables

On and off I've been working on Láncvért, a supplement for Kazamaták és Kompániák that integrates most subsystems found in Chainmail into the KéK framework in a much less confusing way than the original (at least that's my hope).

One of the many interesting bits in Chainmail is the man-to-man combat system (the one that was supposed to be used with OD&D according to the rulebook, although apparently even the designers disagreed). It's a fairly simple 2d6 table where you check the attacker's weapon and the defender's armour to see your target number; if you meet or exceed your target, the defender is killed (or dealt one die of damage in D&D terms).

Below you can check the table (colour-coded for our convenience); I also added averages (and rounded averages) for each weapon and armour category as well:

The bell curve can be a little counter-intuitive, so I also included a handy chart with percentages. Don't be confused by the colours; I decided to swap them so that red means "hard to kill" instead of "meagre defence" here:

We can already see some interesting things here. For some reason, the spear seems to be the worst weapon in terms of stopping power. Two-handed swords vastly outperform all other weapons (including the mounted lance!), followed by the flail and the morning star.

Leather armour is virtually the same as no armour (it only makes a difference against a dagger or a sword). Shields, however, are really good. In fact, if you have to choose between picking up mail armour or a shield, you should go with the latter.

I also made some more detailed comparisons between various armour types:

Curiously, mail armour makes you more susceptible to being killed against a number of weapons (possibly because the manoeuvrability you sacrifice is greater than the protection of the extra armour that the weapons in particular can bash through — at least that's my theory).

Shields, if we look at them closely, always improve protection, except in one case: against a halberd and paired with leather armour.

There are more rules that go into this subsystem, of course, but this is the main engine. I quite like the extra differentiation between weapons, but I'm not convinced about the specifics. Further testing needs to be conducted until I find a happy middle ground.