LN#8 is excellent as always. I'm in the midst of prepping for my game (I'm the GM) when I visit my family this summer, so I've been making up characters, studying the rules, playing some mock battles etc.
I wanted to chime in on combat styles, as I feel this is the single hairiest bit of the ruleset at this point. Part of it is that it feels like a bit of terminology overload, with too many similar words used for things which are different things - combat skills, combat styles, combat moves. For me, the rules would stick to my aging brain better if they had names like 'weapon skills', 'combat styles', and 'maneuvers' or something like that. There's lots of options obviously and I see that the higher level abstraction of 'combat skills' encompassing both styles and regular weapon (group) skills is useful in character generation ("pick any 3 combat skills as favored", etc). I also really like the style abilities, and feel like they're necessary to make combat styles desirable for a player (from an optimization standpoint, which they're going to do...at least my crowd).
That said, I'm pretty much perplexed by the Sword & Board style ability in LN#8. It seems to be more or less a repeat of Shield Bash, I'm not clear on the AP cost to use it, and I'm also not clear if this is supposed to be an extra move that the player can use in the same round as making a normal attack or instead of a normal attack.
As Novus is so incredibly hackable, I'm considering making the S&B style ability simply that a character with this style doesn't lose their shield DEF bonus on any round that they use a combat move that normally includes that as a consequence -- Shield Bash, Shield Parry, Shield Ram. I'm not sure if that's overpowered or not, but it's simple and it does still require that the CPs spent on the combat moves to be useful, which seems appropriate.
I've not tested this tweak at all, so any thoughts on that would be greatly appreciated.
