Anyway, with your current stats, you weren't so specialized as you may think. if you had one point less in both pool and speed, you could put them into dexterity, effectively making a good use of your +1 in strength. That +1 in strength actually makes 1 out of 3 attacks from you to apply the maximum penalty (for flesh). You already hit hard, but you didn't have the opportunity to do so because you missed.
What kind of knight is dextrous?
And I wanted to not suck too hard if I survived long enough for magic to be scienced into superiority.
A knight not using armor. Because to move
normally in armor, you have to be dexterous out of it.
Magic is not scienced into superiority, and, really, I made magic as dangerous in this game to give physical characters a longer edge during the start of the game. Remember, physical characters can't hurt themselves by trying to hit other people. Wizards can.
What I think that I will do at some point is change the targeted pain/bleeding system for something more general. It would, in theory, allow soemone to bleed out from a thousand papercuts and pass out from another thousand of little hits, but it will hopefully make things more interesting (namely, by getting more people killed). Either that or making even a 1 do damage in the strength roll, and thus making both fives and sixes apply the maximmum penalty.
Meanwhile: Get weapons! They are deadly, and they are the main incentive to don't use unarmed combat.
Consider this: if the DK gets hit with a 6, the worst outcome that he could have is not being able to use a limb. How bad is that? A -1, maybe. If he gets hit with a
[Blunt weapon], he is going to lose a limb, or die if he gets hit in the head or the chest. Same applied for other weapons, but with consequences that are more deadly.
(I used the example of the DK because he has a +1 to endurance, just because of that)