Why do equipment profiles differ?

Having received this question a few times now I thought it would be a useful exercise to write a post explaining why equipment profiles differ across The Barons’ War warrior profiles.

At the core of the army lists, we have a human profile. This profile comes in four varieties relating to levels of experience, Green, Irregular, Regular and Veteran. This is the same no matter which warrior profile we are looking at, as humans are humans. Without gear and training, a knight is, when we get down to it in-game terms, no different to a peasant.

Abilities and Equipment are where we diversify the warrior types adding character. Abilities are what reflects the different warrior training, as well as natural talent in some cases. For example, a Knight is chivalrous and has trained with a sword from a young age, so they naturally have the abilities 'Chivalry' and 'Live by the sword'. An archer shoots their bow at every opportunity so has the ‘Every bloody Sunday’ ability to represent this hard-earned skill. The peasants or Levy haven’t had much training in anything but have lived a life following the orders of their superiors, so we represent this social difference with the 'Sorry m'Lord' ability.

The next thing we use to differentiate warrior types is equipment. Each warrior comes ready to fight with basic equipment which can modify our human statline shown above. For example, a knight is equipped with a sword. This weapon has a -1 attack modifier which changes a Veteran Humans attack stat from 5+ to 4+.

A good example where weapon profiles differ is a two-handed weapon in the Knight warrior profile showing a modifier of -1 whereas in other entries such as Militant Monks it has a modifier of -2. This is because you must take into account any modifier of the weapon it will be replacing. A Knight’s sword already grants him -1 to his attack value. What we are essentially doing is removing the Sword (and its -1 modifier) and equipping with a Two-handed weapon (which has a standard -2 modifier) making the Knight’s attack value 3+.

The difference in modifiers and points cost across the different warrior profiles is to save the player the task of removing any modifiers from existing equipment before applying new ones. Just pay the points as shown and apply the modifiers to the stat line as printed.

I hope this has helped clarify why the points and modifiers vary across the different warrior types (of course there may be some minor 'under the hood' variances that were added during playtesting to allow for balance).