Goodman Games

I'm playing a hafling burglar from Crawl fanzine #10. Haflings are able to use two weapon fighting and as a burglar he has backstab. Should the character get to use both attacks from two weapon fighting for a backstab?

IMO, the Backstab is a single attack. Thieves eventually get two Action Dice, but the way the Backstab ability is phrased, it sounds like there's only one attack at a time that's a Backstab. With dual weapon fighting, I'd ask the player to declare which die or which roll includes the Backstab bonus before the rolls were made.

I can see allowing them both to be a Backstab, in terms of logic -- two daggers sinking in at once, for example. But again the way it's phrased, it feels very "you get one shot at this" per set-up or per round (depending on circumstances).

But the Halfling Burglar is a strange case, too, just in and of itself. It's everything the core rules' Halfling is, plus they get ALL the Thieving abilities...! I feel like something is off about that... I mean, if there was a new "Mystic Warrior" Class which said you have all the abilities of the Warrior Class, plus you get spells like an Elf, I think we'd probably see a problem with that.

I would run it that you can Backstab with two weapons. Rolling a d16 as an attack puts you at a pretty big disadvantage as the average roll is 9, which is under most ACs. It can obviously be juiced up with Luck easily enough but that's a lot of resources going into a single attack: a round to get into the shadows and luck on the attack. I would expect the most common outcome to be a single backstab goes off.

Vanguard wrote: ↑Sat Jul 25, 2020 5:30 am I would run it that you can Backstab with two weapons. Rolling a d16 as an attack puts you at a pretty big disadvantage as the average roll is 9, which is under most ACs. It can obviously be juiced up with Luck easily enough but that's a lot of resources going into a single attack: a round to get into the shadows and luck on the attack. I would expect the most common outcome to be a single backstab goes off.

Be aware that there is a significant bonus to backstab attacks. For even a 1st level Thief, this runs from +0 to +3, and by 3rd level, a Thief following the Path of the Assassin will have a +7. With the Luck Die only being used for higher rolls that miss, a clever Thief will not have to expend much in the way of resources in order to hit an automatically crit. For powerful foes, using the Luck Die to increase critical results can be devastating.

Raven_Crowking wrote: ↑Sat Jul 25, 2020 7:49 am

Vanguard wrote: ↑Sat Jul 25, 2020 5:30 am I would run it that you can Backstab with two weapons. Rolling a d16 as an attack puts you at a pretty big disadvantage as the average roll is 9, which is under most ACs. It can obviously be juiced up with Luck easily enough but that's a lot of resources going into a single attack: a round to get into the shadows and luck on the attack. I would expect the most common outcome to be a single backstab goes off.

Be aware that there is a significant bonus to backstab attacks. For even a 1st level Thief, this runs from +0 to +3, and by 3rd level, a Thief following the Path of the Assassin will have a +7. With the Luck Die only being used for higher rolls that miss, a clever Thief will not have to expend much in the way of resources in order to hit an automatically crit. For powerful foes, using the Luck Die to increase critical results can be devastating.

Now that I think about it, this situation has come up and the way I ran it is that you can only roll 1 crit die, even if both attacks hit. The weapon damage bonus if using an appropriate weapon still applies, but that felt like a good middle ground. If the Thief was higher level and had 2 action die and used all of them to make backstabs (4 in total!), I would let them roll 2 crit die, 1 for each action die.

Vanguard wrote: ↑Sat Jul 25, 2020 9:12 amNow that I think about it, this situation has come up and the way I ran it is that you can only roll 1 crit die, even if both attacks hit. The weapon damage bonus if using an appropriate weapon still applies, but that felt like a good middle ground. If the Thief was higher level and had 2 action die and used all of them to make backstabs (4 in total!), I would let them roll 2 crit die, 1 for each action die.

Reasonable.

shaggi13 wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 3:33 pm I'm playing a hafling burglar from Crawl fanzine #10. Haflings are able to use two weapon fighting and as a burglar he has backstab. Should the character get to use both attacks from two weapon fighting for a backstab?

Yeah ... just checked out that Halfling Burglar - seems a bit much for my table. I would limit the Thief abilities to Sneak Silently, Hide in Shadows, Pick Pocket, Pick Lock, Find Trap, Disable Trap, and Read Languages.