Critical Table I Whipped Up
- Thread starter Rurik
- Start date
telsor said:
Well, that is if you give your big bad foes hero points (usually throwing foes at characters with skills in the 350 range is good enough to keep them busy).
As far as killing players goes, they can blow their hero points ("I've been saving for the 15 hero points for my Mega Yoga Fu legendary ability for ages, and now I have it, mwuh-ha-ha." "That's nice. Take a critical to the head." "I spend a hero point... oh crap") - though killing players was not my goal.
One of the strengths of RQ combat was it always modelled the real world principle that one blow can kill. In real life if I were to swing a one handed mace at your unarmored head as hard as I can and land a direct blow your your skill would cave in and you would die. No amount of conditioning would save you. If you are a 20th level D&D fighter I would have to bash away at your head for hours (being a 1st level scrawney geek and all). Obviously you want some survivability in a game, but RQ always managed to be a very popular system while sticking to the principle that one blow can kill anyone.
I'd like to put some of that lethality back into the system. A high resilience can make a character almost invincible (assuming he there is a decent healer near by, but I figure people who survive long enough to get to a resilience of 100+ have already figured out the importance of hanging around with good healers
).Mind you I am not against resilience being a skill. I know professional fighters go through brutal conditioning. A kickboxer can condition himself so the can kick a post hard with his leg and and not bruise where he strikes it. So the idea of 'training' your toughness works for me. What that kickboxer cannot do is train his skull not to cave in when hit solidly with a mace. Likewise with persistance, I like that a ancient Brithrini sorcerer is going to own a 16 year old apprentice in an opposed spell contest, even if the sorcerer has spent his gazillion MP down to 10 and the apprentice still has 15.
Wow. This was supposed to be a quick answer. I better lay off the Sodium Pentothal so early in the morning.
Utgardloki
Mongoose
Flying creatures who are knocked back can be ruled to lose altitude equal to the amount they are knocked back by, in addition to being knocked back the normal amount in the direction they were hit. (I'm assuming that stunning a normal flyer, like a bird, will cause it to lose altitude as the wings stop beating for a few moments :shock: ) If this causes the creature to intersect with the ground, then falling damage applies.
I would rule that swimming creatures can not be knocked back, or else are only knocked by 1/10th the amount of a creature on land. Water provides resistance so knocking things around in the water is a little more problematical. Perhaps creatures on the surface can be knocked back the normal amount because they are essentially being knocked through the air, with the water just being the surface.
Rurik said:
It took us three sessions to roll up Aftermath characters, then a session of playing it to realise just how overly complex it was. Never again.
We always took calculators with us to play RQ at Uni, most of it was done in our heads, but after three or four pints, the head slows down a bit.
But, yes, surely somebody in the group must be able to work out 20%/10%/5% of a skill and add two numbers up. We had some Engineers and Classics Students in our group and even they could manage the maths
