From: owner-rq-rules-digest To: rq-rules-digest@hops.wharton.upenn.edu Subject: RQ Rules Digest: V1 #163 Reply-To: rq-rules Errors-To: owner-rq-rules-digest Precedence: bulk Content-Return: Prohibited Return-Path: owner-rq-rules-digest RQ Rules Digest: Wednesday, 22 March 1995 Volume 01 : Number 163 RULES OF THE ROAD 1. Do not include large sections of a message in your reply. Especially not to say "Yeah, I agree." Those who do will be lynched. 2. Use an appropriate Subject line. 3. Do not engage in a point-by-point analysis or rebuttal of another person's message. It is too confusing for others to follow, qualifies as nit-picking, and it usually leads to flame wars. 4. There is no number 4. TABLE OF CONTENTS Nils Weinander criticals Graeme Lindsell Thoughts on criticals for archery and else Marc Philips Why criticals and fumbles add drama Marc Philips Criticals Colin Watson Smaug (was Criticals) Photography AVC Criticals and many against one Photography AVC Smaug (was Criticals) boris Criticals ANDOVER@delphi.com Heroism and Criticals Hugh Foster Aliens in A.I.? David Dunham via RadioMail 2nd action SR ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: niwe@ppvku.ericsson.se (Nils Weinander) Date: Wed, 22 Mar 95 08:52:52 +0100 Subject: Re: criticals Steve Perrin: >After Nils sets up an interesting table, he says: > >>With standard RQ rules normal hits are in cell 1, impales in cell 3 and >criticals in cell 4. I would like to see the two axis taken account for >separately, so that you can have hits in all four cells.< > >But all four cases are taken care of in the normal course of play, because >each situation arises and is dealt with. Do we need another table? Most certainly not! But all four cases are _not_ taken care of. Given the rule that criticals ignore armour and specials increase damage, since a critical is always also a special, an armour-defeating hit is always also a hit with increased damage. There is no possibility to do an armour- defeating hit with normal damage. This stacking of effects is what I'm preaching against since I feel that hit quality in form of added damage and hit quality in form of bypassing armour should be orthogonal. /Nils W ------------------------------ From: gal502@anu.edu.au (Graeme Lindsell) Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 19:44:57 +0300 Subject: Thoughts on criticals for archery and elsewhere... Graeme Lindsell replying to Joerg Baumgartner replying to one Graeme Lindsell: >Well, you lost your ammo. Doesn't sound that bad? Then try and get >yourself new shafts in the plains of Prax. Go and get them in Sartar, covered in forests! (Sorry, I know that Prax is the most common area to campaign in, but I'm getting very sick of bloody animal nomads. Gloranthan RQ really needs to develop some other areas for campaigning beyond Prax and the River of Cradles - I'd like to see a lot more published scenarios about Sartar and the Holy Country) An arrow shot >in earnest is an arrow 50% to 95% lost, even if it hits - the shaft is >likely to break off with hits, and with misses it takes ages to find >a shaft mostly buried below grass, dust etc. The official rules state 50% loss as I recall, but our current GM hasn't been bothering about applying them very often, a mistake IMO. Of course, your players would argue they could use Repair to fix any broken arrows over a few days, and they'd probably invest in Detect Arrow. >Multimissile is the most useless spell I've encountered so far. The >additional missiles usually just go ping, unless you catch an opponent >with his trousers down. With a self bow, From this and other comments you've made I think we've been playing in campaigns at different power levels. The party I'm in started at the high (70%+ major weapon skills) initiate levels and after three years of play are all at Rune Level (except for one apostate who fell foul of Monrogh, but that's another story). We're all using elf or composite bows, doing 1d8+1 damage, with bow skills in the 100+ range for all the archers in the party: specials and criticals are pretty common, and Multimissile 4 gives you a 20%+ chance of getting at least one critical out of the bunch of attacks, and even the 9 point criticals of the multimissiled shots will take out a location. >Chances of criticals aren't realistic - IMO they crop up way too often. >Chance of impaling is way too low, but I don't mean that an impaling >arrow needs to do double damage - IMO an arrow impales or does little >more than a scratch. This can said to be true of a lot of other weapons, spears or military picks for example. I'd be inclined to just include this as part of the base damage of the weapon and leave it as that. Another way to handle it would be to give all impaling weapons a damage beyond which they impale ie if an arrow does more than 4 points after armour then it's stuck in the wound, rather than the current scheme. While I agree about fumbles any "realistic" system has to include a system where lethal weapons can kill with a single hit. Perhaps a fixed chance of critical of 01, rising to 02 for characters with skills of 100+ might be enough, and the reverse of the AiG fumble rules. I rather like the idea suggested recently of criticals and specials being lumped into one effect, with a chance of skill/10. I'd use an old suggestion from the RQ4 list and give the character who rolled the special the choice of what it does: +10 damage OR no (prehaps halved) armour OR require a special parry to stop the attack OR attempt to disarm etc. (I think this was how the special combat options were meant to function in AiG, but I haven't got those rules). Maybe more about this tomorrow. Graeme Lindsell a.k.a Graeme.Lindsell@anu.edu.au Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University "I was 17 miles from Greybridge before I was caught by the school leopard" - Ripping Yarns ------------------------------ From: Marc Philips Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 11:24:40 MET Subject: Re: Why criticals and fumbles add drama > >Our craziest critical and craziest fumble > > Mine was with my favorite character, after I had been playing him about a > (real time) month - maybe 5 sessions. > We were in the Hellpits of Nightfang - anyone else remember that module? > 5 had gone in - very underpowered, but we were stupid. We ended up with > something like a dozen wolves at our backs, some 10 or so skeletons? > zombies? in front of us, and the vampire & his girlfriend laughingly coming > toward us. My boy, a Humakti initiate, saw his chance, pitched a javelin, > and critcalled her head, dropping her dead on the spot. The vampire, really > pissed, said, "try that again, boy". And I did - critical to HIS head. > Hehehe. One of the party still had to DI to get us out alive, but we all > felt it was just Humakt giving us a break, after that kinda performance, > even he might be impressed. This one reminds me of another story with a Vampire : the party is about to discover a Vampire RL in the "big hole" they visit and the de-facto leader is isolated from the rest of the group for a couple of minutes. The Vampire sends his allied spirit fight the character : the character is possessed. Because the player is an excellent roleplayer I let him continue playing the possessed character and tell him to act normally until the Vampire tells him to attack his own party. A bit later the party walks a narrow corridor and gets dangerously close to a shrine the Vampire doesn't want them to get to. He appears in front of the party; the possessed character is at the rear. First melee round : the first character in the line scores a 01 on the Vampire and hit the head killing him, the last character in the line also score a 01 on the possessed character also killing him. There's no secound round. - -- Marc PHILIPS Eurocontrol - Central Flow Management Unit marc@cfmu.eurocontrol.be Rue de la Fusee 96 Tel: +32 2 729 96 92 B-1130 BRUXELLES Fax: +32 2 729 90 22 Belgium ------------------------------ From: Marc Philips Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 11:52:47 MET Subject: Re: Criticals > Ok, it looks like our opinions are going to differ concerning the merits > of criticals. But *if* you want to implement them and you don't want to > have to calculate skill/20 and such then here's how: > If you roll 01-05% then roll again. If you succeed it's a crit. > If you roll 06-20% then roll again. If you succeed it's a special. > If you roll 95-00% then roll again. If you fail it's a fumble. > Low roll good. High roll bad. > > Save your brain, let the dice do the arithmetic. I like it, simple and quick, and no tables needed. Unfortunately it doesn't work for skill higher than 100% : Rurik Grosbill with 150% attack would special 19% (01-20 and then roll 01-95) of the time rather than 30%. - -- Marc PHILIPS Eurocontrol - Central Flow Management Unit marc@cfmu.eurocontrol.be Rue de la Fusee 96 Tel: +32 2 729 96 92 B-1130 BRUXELLES Fax: +32 2 729 90 22 Belgium ------------------------------ From: Colin Watson Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 12:35:30 GMT Subject: Re: Smaug (was re: Criticals) _________________ Graeme A Lindsell: > Heroic vs mundane is the argument I suppose. Yes. I'm glad someone here is on the same wavelength 'cos there seem to be a helluva lot of people missing the point. In world where crits are as common and deadly as they are in RQ Smaug has no place. He wouldn't live to be centuries old because he would be dead after the first dozen or hundred combats. Sure, if I was betting on *one* combat between PC and dragon my money would be on the dragon. But after several hundred combats vs several hundred PCs? You don't have to be a hero to kill Smaug. You don't even have to be skilled. Smaug's death is inevitable. He'll die young and it'll likely be at the hands of a coupla poxy hobbits who've never even used a sling before. Cities don't have to fear dragons. The citizens just all stand on their rooftops and chuck the nearest sharp object at the beastie. (Ok, now I'm being facetious.) Any predator which regularly gets into combat will die young. No scope for centuries-old dragons I'm afraid. Is this the kind of mundane realism people want? And what goes for dragons above goes for humans tenfold. ___ CW. ------------------------------ From: "Photography AVC" Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 13:18:44 GMT0BST Subject: Re: Criticals and many against one ANDOVER@delphi.com said: > I have always considered it an ADVANTAGE that many weak characters in > RQ have a hance of taking out the single tank. Not only is it more > realistic, but it avoids the AD & D problem of the high ranking character's > effective invulnerability against groups of low level characters. Am I correct that some of you WANT to have characters > invulnerable to damage in those situations? Jim Chapin I couldn`t agree more. The fact that in AD&D a twelth level paladin could face several goblins and stand there eating his sandwichs and still have time for a cigar before deciding to hit them. Is justification for RQ (A far Superior Game) to have the critical hits option. Sean at Photography` I remember A character being killed by a bloke called Fat Stanley and his deadly weapon Spoonbringer. So this is another notch in the belt of Critical hits. Email avc.photo@ncl.ac.uk ------------------------------ From: "Photography AVC" Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 13:35:10 GMT0BST Subject: Re: Smaug (was re: Criticals) Wasn`t the arrow magical that was used against Smaug and correct me if I am wrong but didn`t a bird pirch on the archers shoulder and whisper in his ear about the soft part where the scales had dropped off over the years. Only sticking my 2p worth in Sean at photography`I love the troll bite attack ------------------------------ From: mabeyke@batman.b11.ingr.com (boris) Date: Wed, 22 Mar 95 7:48:04 CST Subject: Re: Criticals > > Ok, it looks like our opinions are going to differ concerning the merits > > of criticals. But *if* you want to implement them and you don't want to > > have to calculate skill/20 and such then here's how: > > If you roll 01-05% then roll again. If you succeed it's a crit. > > If you roll 06-20% then roll again. If you succeed it's a special. > > If you roll 95-00% then roll again. If you fail it's a fumble. > > Low roll good. High roll bad. > > > > Save your brain, let the dice do the arithmetic. > > I like it, simple and quick, and no tables needed. Unfortunately it doesn't > work for skill higher than 100% : Rurik Grosbill with 150% attack would > special 19% (01-20 and then roll 01-95) of the time rather than 30%. I think this may have been mentioned before, but there's a way for this to work for skills over 100% as well. Roll once for every 100%, or fraction thereof, of skill. If the base roll (only) is 96-00, roll for fumble; if any of the rolls are in the special/crit range, roll for that fraction of the skill. So Rurik has (20% x 100%) + (20% x 50%) = 30% chance to special (5% x 100%) + (5% x 50%) = 7.5% chance to crit If Gundra has a skill of 280%, she would roll three times, with (20% + 20% + (20% x 80%)) = 56% chance to special (5% + 5% + (5% x 80%)) = 14% chance to crit Fumble chance stays fixed at 0.25% once skill gets to 100% with this, but I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing. Anyway, just a thought. - -- Boris Mikey, aka |"Here the ways of men part: if you wish to Maurice Beyke | strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then mabeyke@batman.b11.ingr.com| believe; if you wish to be a devotee of Intergraph doesn't want | truth, then inquire." my opinions. Nietzsche ------------------------------ From: ANDOVER@delphi.com Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 13:54:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: Heroism and Criticals Re Smaug: The majority of dragons DON'T live as long as Smaug. And judging by the text of The Hobbit, Smaug did not make a regular practice of attacking towns! As to the problem of dying in a pointless way: it is a fairly common thing in real world hero types: reference Pyrrhus of Epirus being killed by a stone from an old lady, and Richard the Lion-Hearted dying from a minor wound inflicted by an old man in a pointless siege. There are at least half-a-dozensimilar deaths in history for heroes, and even a few in the Sagas! The reason that heroes are heroes is that they face death, even pointless death, with courage. And for every one that becomes Arkat or Argrath, there are thousands that never make it past the unlucky stroke by a trollkin! So, the rules-related point: RQ is a the most dangerous system for your players to fight in: that's the charm! Don't lose the feature! And, the play-related point: Sometimes the players are fighting Smaug, and they need the criticals. When we were fighting the ZZ Rune character in Hut of Darkness, even with 6 good characters and criticals, it was a damn close-run thing: one character was left conscious at the end. Jim Chapin ------------------------------ From: Hugh Foster <100326.446@compuserve.com> Date: 22 Mar 95 16:01:59 EST Subject: Aliens in A.I.? >> I think it has to do with the time taken to build a character up, only to see him die a meaningless death << But life's _like_ that... Take Mike Tyson, Rannulph Feinnes and Mad Mike Hoare. Now give Rick Moranis a small bow. Normally, he'd probably get creamed. BUT if we assume hits in the right eye each time [ie a crit], they _will_ die, no matter how tragic and uneven it is. A 12" arrow with a 2" broad head in the brain is usually fatal, no matter how heroic you are. And however unlikely the chance, it _could_ happen. That's part of what I like about RQ. Unlike Delve and Dire, whoever you are, if you fight other people you _can_ be hurt and slain. There is always a danger in combat. - ----------------------------------------------------------------- | Hugh Foster [100326,446] | | | | He's a fool that makes his doctor his heir. (Benjamin | | Franklin) | - ----------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ From: David Dunham (via RadioMail) Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 15:43:07 -0800 Subject: Re: 2nd action SR Nigel Smith replied to me >>But it doesn't make sense that I stand around dazed for 3 SR before I can >>spend the SR (DEX SR + MP) to cast another spell. It's also inconsistent in >>that casting a spell and attacking doesn't incur such a penalty, and >>because casting the first spell in a round incurs no penalty. You can cast >>8-point spells (assuming DEX SR 2) every round, there's no 3 SR penalty >>there. >> >>I propose that the "3 SR between spells" rule be dropped. > >And I propose that it be kept, if only to limit spell barages! What spell barrages? RQ:AiG adopted the sensible 2 actions per round rule. You'd get at most 2 spells off (assuming you had SR for both). "SR for both" should be calculated by adding up the two spells. Period. >As a more developed line of reasoning, it could be that casting a second, >different spell requires 3SR to 'realign' to that spell, change foci, etc. >So why is it not the same for the 1st spell in a MR? For the same reason >that you don't need a 3SR gap before your first attack (whatever that >reason is...). That's right, makes no sense does it. Second attack taking 3 SR is INSTEAD of its normal SR. Spells taking +3 SR is inconsistent with this. To be consistent, the second spell should take 3 SR, no matter how large. Or the 2nd physical attack should take place at the first attack SR + 3 + attack SR. >As oppossed to 5 Disrupts/MR using your method. Implied was the RQ:AiG 2 actions rule, sorry this wasn't clear. ------------------------------ End of RQ Rules Digest: V1 #163 ******************************* This is the bottom of the RuneQuest Rules Digest. RuneQuest is a trademark of Avalon Hill, and Glorantha is a trademark of Chaosium. With the exception of previously copyrighted material, unless specified otherwise all text in this digest is copyright by the author or authors, with rights granted to copy for personal use, to excerpt in reviews and replies, and to archive unchanged for electronic retrieval. Send electronic mail to Majordomo@hops.wharton.upenn.edu with "help" in the body of the message for subscription information on this and other mailing lists.