[Runequest] Advice Sought re Damage & HP

[Gary Sturgess]

2008/5/27 Lev Lafayette <lev at rpgreview.net>:

> In terms of situation and probably opponents Call of Cthulhu is probably
> much more dangerous and Stormbringer/Elric not far behind. Mongoose RQ
> is possibly a little less dangerous although the reason is the reverse;
> they dropped general hit points, not locations (something which I've
> been using in RQ3 just to speed things up a little).

My point was more or less that because Stormbringer/Elric got rid of
hit locations you were less likely to have a "1-hit-incapacitation";
you can achieve that, in RQ, with an average blow from a sword in many
cases. Most RQ combats tend to involve a lot of "sticking your leg
back on" at low levels, in my experience. Indeed, there was a classic
case from a game I ran a few years ago.

The situation: it's a tense battle against some sort of beastie (might
have been a troll or broo, I don't recall). One of my players is
considering whether to attack the opponent, or heal his comrade who
had just taken a nasty blow to the arm. To make his decision, he asks:

"What's your arm currently on?"

to which the response was, "It's on the GROUND!" :)

You can get by without a cleric in D&D, but you'd be nuts to adventure
without healing in RQ. That's not a flaw of the system, and I agree
with the posters who have corrected me for implying it is. Rather, I
think what I should have said is that it would be nice if the rules
were written to convey this "RQ combat is very dangerous" impression
more strongly - it's very easy to completely miss this as a newbie GM,
especially if you run one of Avalon Hill's starting adventures and
wonder why everyone ends up maimed or dead by one duck with a
crossbow.

> Oh, now there's a difference. One says low-level games is "broken" and
> the other says high-level.

I'd argue that there's no real contradiction here. Low level games
have the "problem" (it may, indeed, be a feature - I concede the
point) that characters are extremely brittle. The reason that it's a
problem - if indeed it is - is because if it takes a couple of hours
to create a character (which is not an unreasonable estimate for a new
player of say RQ3) then you have a reasonable expectation that it will
last more than the first 5 minutes of session 1.

High level games have the "swing and parry" issue, which tends to mean
that the first person to miss a parry against a critical hit loses.
Given that we're usually talking about something like a 5% chance for
a critical against a 5% chance to miss a parry, that's basically
coming down to a 1/400 chance that any given round results in a loss,
and you need to be quite a bit better than your opponent to
significantly change that percentage (150% vs 100%, for example,
doesn't make you particularly favoured).

> Personally, I think "broken" is more than a little harsh. A "broken"
> game is where the system gives results which are game-wreckers. This is
> not the case with RQ at low or high levels.

Conceded; "flawed", perhaps, would be a better word.

> At a low level RuneQuest combat is, imo, extremely dangerous and at a
> high level has the problem of epic combats taking an epic period of time
> (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, vis-a-vis the famous battle
> between Sir Percivale and Sir Ector.

It's not that it takes a long time so much as the fact that it comes
down to luck more than skill - the inferior opponent can quite often
snag a victory just by chance. That's obviously true at all levels of
play in any game, of course, but the degree to which it is true in RQ
at Rune Levels could be considered to be "not working as intended".
-- 
GAZZA