Parry states:
Knockout states:A Warrior may spend a life point to reduce the damage delivered from any single frontal melee attack that has a number in the call to 0. This includes knockout, crush, vorpal, poison, etc. In addition, they may also parry disarm attacks.
So if you parry a 3 vorpal knockout it becomes a 0 vorpal knockout, since it's vorpal you don't count your armor, so for all the purpose of the call you have 0 armor. 0 armor is not enough to stop 0 knockout.When you are hit with a knockout your current armor including combat reflexes and enhancements needs to be greater than the number called to resist being knocked unconscious for 5 minutes. If your character’s current armor total is equal to or less than the number called then the character is knocked out. This call is delivered by a number followed by the word "knockout".
For the 3 vorpal poison knockout I don't see why you'd be poisoned by this since it's not effecting your LP. That said I don't like the way knockout works either. With the current way knockout works you can build a character that can swing a 10 knockout with just a 5 count and the kicker is you don't need to be a rogue to do it. A Valkyn’Vi has a 2 knockout for a 5 count. As a sage add 1 to this, level 4 brawler adds 5 to this and 2 levels of monk adds 2 more since you have 2 levels of brawler already. That seems a little unbalanced to me, especially when compared to a rogues knockout.
I'd like to see knockout work more like poison and disease, where it needs to affect your LP but still does damage, hitting someone in the head with a heavy object still hurts even if it doesn't knock them out. With this idea you can lower the numbers and standardize the count times. Change the Valkyn’Vi boon to 1. Rogue gets 1 at basic, 2 more at advanced and another 3 at master, for a total of 6 KO. Sages stay at 1 at advanced and sage buff is changed to 1. Doubling up on Iron Fists(second level of brawler and monk) gives 1 knockout and Knockout Blow(fourth level of Brawler) gives 3. I'd say keep saps at 2, since they require a commodity to upkeep. Just like the current system you can stack all of these. The charge time can then be done one of three ways. You can have a flat time you think is right for the skill, based off the nastiest possible call, with the above numbers is about 13 KO. This is very simple but then encourages people to build specific ways to maximize their KO. The next idea is to have it based off the number of knockout you intend to call, say a 5 count per point of KO. This is still fairly simple but might make 1 KO faster than intended for taking out unarmored people. The third way is most complex but I think the fairest. 1 KO would take a base count, say 10, plus an additional count for each additional point of KO, say 3. So a 5 KO would take a 22 count(10+3+3+3+3).
As far as resists/immunities go, I think they're fine negating the whole call. As an NPC at WH I've used a longer call knowing that it's more likely to be resisted. It makes more people with those resists/immunities feel useful. As a PC, knowing what to include in your calls and what not too is part of the challenge. Should you swing magic at this thing or is it going to be immune? I would say that the whole poisoned assassin weapon thing is sort of strange. If they're knocking someone out with their weapon it's probably not with the poisoned part.
Finally, my thoughts on Kandium. I can't say too much because I haven't been around long enough to really see it's effect but it sounds a little unbalanced. I guess what I really need to know is does a Vorpal call reduce Kandiun armor before Combat Reflexes? If it does the I guess it's fine the way it is, people just need to know how it works. If it still takes from Combat Reflexes first like normal damage then I'd say it's broken. In this game it's easy to have more Combat Reflexes then armor meaning you could keep that 9 points of Kandium a while.
