Green Ronin ASOIAF roleplaying game House rules?

[Typewriter]

I've played a game in this system once before and really enjoyed it aside from a few minor hiccups. I'm thinking about running the system at some point soon and was curious as to whether anybody had any thoughts on two things I considered to be fairly major problems and ways to potentially fix them. Both revolve around players damage mitigation.

1. Armor reduced the damage you take. If you pair this with a moderately decent CD you'll never take any damage. The DM can send things that hit more accurately to get bigger multipliers on their damage but then they're going to be making mince out of people who don't have high armor.

1a. I was thinking about instituting a rule that says that a 'hit' always deals at least one point of damage. A player focused on defense would still be highly survivable but would be in danger from tons of weaker enemies and couldn't just outlive everything forever.

2. CD can get absurdly high. At one point I had a backup character made that was able to have a normal combat defense of 28 or something like that - plus it could get up to something like 34ish with the use of a single minor action, meaning I could still attack. This is the same problem as above except even harder to overcome. In order to have someone that can hit a player with high enough CD you'd be obliterating those who don't.

2a. I was thinking about some sort of hard or soft cap for CD. Doesn't go over 20 or maybe that if an attack hits at least 20 but still misses it deals 1 point of damage.

I know that players who are strong in combat can be defeated in other ways but I don't want every combat to be pointless - and high defense builds in this system sort of do that. I'm also leaning towards maybe not worrying about it until players start gravitating towards some options that are highly broken and then working on fixing them then but I want to have some plans in place. Or is there some way to deal with these things that I'm not thinking of?

Thanks for any inputs :)

[Duff]

I ran a campaign of this and by the end had a small book of house rules...

I'm inclined to say the game is *very* hard on a character who is over-matched by their opponent. I'd almost go so far as to say if you aren't willing to live with this, play another game.

One house rule i introduced to give at least a slim chance of hitting the absurd defenses was to allow dice to explode very slightly.

If you fail a task (hit, climb, talk - whatever), take any dice which rolled a 6 and roll again. If they roll a 6, add 1 to your score and roll again. Any 6 adds 1, any other number removes the dice.

Also, the use of crits means wearing armour against a significantly skilled opponent becomes a disadvantage