Immunity To Trollkin "feature" - any comments

[WildHealer]

Hi all,

My group tried playing (playtesting?) the Rainbow Mounds with the MRQ rules a couple of days ago and came up against a "feature" with combat. Maybe I'm missing something in the rules - but here goes:

Any character with 5AP or more (chainmail or better, or protection magic) is completely immune to all attacks from trollkin. Even on a critical (3% chance) you get no more than 4 or 5 damage, and armour counts, and generally a trollkin does 2-3 damage. The entire scenario suddenly felt a bit pointless and embarrassing - basically trashing hordes of trollkin with no chance of injury, unless you limit the PCs to little or no armour.

As an "in-game" solution, my group decided we were going to house rule the criticals immediately - we ignored armour on crits, but with crits happening more often than before (10% of the skill rather than 5%) this felt a bit reckless & combat suddenly felt very random.

This "feature" is going to happen throughout the game - basically, as characters progress they're going to become totally immune to attacks by some monsters.

Am I missing something? Are we just meant to have trollkin doing bypass armour attacks with a 1% chance of success? Or is it simply that no one is supposed to be able to afford decent armour? Or are PCs gradually supposed to become totally invulnerable?

 

[Sigtrygg]

Have the trolkin swarm a character, if three or four pin him down then a couple of others will have a much easier time with their precise attacks...

 

[jadrax]

Is there other tactics the Trollkin can use?

Theoretically Conan has this issue, get around 11 points of armour, and Picts with there puny spears cant hurt you.

Howver, they can grapple you, drag you off away from your mates and then stick the boot in ;o)

 

[Enpeze]

Is there other tactics the Trollkin can use?

Theoretically Conan has this issue, get around 11 points of armour, and Picts with there puny spears cant hurt you.

Howver, they can grapple you, drag you off away from your mates and then stick the boot in ;o)

Of course. Nobody is invulnerable. No problem to kill armored players at all. Especially in RQ.

 

[burdock]

Any character with 5AP or more (chainmail or better, or protection magic)

What were beginning characters doing with chainmail armour!!? If a character has progressed enough to posses such armour then the Trolkin in the Rainbow Mounds are not likely to pose a threat. The scenario you were using was inappropriate for such PCs. Send them into Snakepipe Hollow! :twisted:

 

[Turloigh]

How about giving them bigger weapons?

(A pity that criticals don't double damage anymore...)

 

[burdock]

Were the Trolkin using their Speed Dart, Disruption and vigour? Are we to interpret the 2H spears as long (1d10) or short (1d8) spears? If they are short spears then 3 points of damage will still get through the (incredible) 5 AP. Then as a result of the Impale up to a further 8 points of damage could be done. This is a total of 11 points of damage penetrating armour to a single hit location which should easily leave a beginning character unconscious or dead.

 

[TRose]

Unless the Trollkins are unarmed, they should still pose a threat, evenif its a small one. A club does 1d6 which means its max damge is 1 point more then 5 pt Chainmail.Grant the average damage mod for a trollikin is-1d2, but Warrior trollikin if Present should be better that that as they are picked for size and strenght.IWarrior Trollkin should most the time in my opinion have a size and strenght of at least 21 so no minus to damage mod. And if one trollkin knows bludgeon or Bladesharp, you can have him cast it on his friends. Just have one Trollkin with a power of 12 who knows bludgeon 2 and then he cast it one 5 of his friends.

 

[Archer]

I think it is almost critical (no pun intended) to change the critical hit rules so that a hit deals x2 damage, not maximum damage. This means a critical hit by a wasword would roll 2d8 for damage, which gives it quite a lot more potential for punching through armour.

 

[Vadrus]

Were the Trolkin using their Speed Dart, Disruption and vigour?

This brings up the question how many runes should be floating around in NPC's hands, after all the PC's are generally going to kill and loot most opposition and will potentially very rapidly build up a large collection.

Once they've burnt as much POW as they can afford to attune a few, the rest can be sold making the players potentially very wealth as well.

An example would be a group of 8 Broo (fairly typical opposition), in previous editions most would have known one or two spirit magic spells (MRQ's rune magic) making 8 to 16 runes that could be looted after the fight. Average PC party size is 4 so they all receive 2 runes minimum, 4 maximum after just one fight!

I can see the current rune system causing economic problems for many campaigns if people try to recreate the level of magic availability from previous editions of RQ.

How have those running MRQ games got round this problem in their campaigns so far?


Vadrus

 

[burdock]

change the critical hit rules so that a hit deals x2 damage

Good idea.......never-the-less the Trolkin as described in R Mounds would still pose a threat with the present critical rules. I suspect that the players forgot to use the Impale rules.

 

[JohnLokiBeard]

Yep, double damage on a crit is how I'm playing. Whomp the little creeps with a big weapon and Knockback!

I'm just waiting for Rurik to give us his suggestions... :lol: :twisted: :lol:

 

[WildHealer]

never-the-less the Trolkin as described in R Mounds would still pose a threat with the present critical rules. I suspect that the players forgot to use the Impale rules.

Not exactly. I'm having a bit of trouble working this one out - if the initial critical hit with an impaling weapon, frex, doesn't do any damage, ie doesn't get through the armour, then is it stuck in the character's armour rather than the character? If so, how does pulling it out do any damage?

I have a bit of a "reality problem" with the impale rule in general - if a shortsword gets through 5AP with a critical, doing 1 point of damage, we're then supposed to believe that this extremely minor wound (1 point of damage) is somehow the "trigger" that causes an an additional 1d6 when the weapon is "yanked" free? I dunno, the whole rule feels weird...

Incidentally - I didn't run Rainbow Mounds with the original RQ2 / RQ3 stats. I based them off the MRQ trollkin, seeing as how the characters were created with the MRQ rules - it seemed extremely unbalanced otherwise. The characters got no Rune Magic to start with, so I figured I should cut back on the trollkin's magic also: none of the MRQ monsters apart from dragons have any magic, so I assume that's how it's meant to be. I also wanted to avoid having dozens of high-value runes floating around in the game as of day one - otherwise everyone would very quickly have plate armour, let alone chainmail! :shock:

BTW - how much is a "Rune" worth? p63 says "very high price" - how much is that? I can't find it in the rules at the mo.

change the critical hit rules so that a hit deals x2 damage, not maximum damage

I'm getting the feeling something needs to be done here. Combat is feeling mighty slow otherwise, unless everyone uses bypass armour.

 

[duncan_disorderly]

How have those running MRQ games got round this problem in their campaigns so far?


Vadrus

One way is not to let all the integrated runes be immediately recoverable on the death of the former owner. They may take some time to "un-integrate" themselves (If a Chalana Arroy priestess resurrects a dead character, would their runes still be integrated?) and may not necessarily reappear in the original item (maybe it reappears where it was originally found rather than where the original holder dies)

 

[Vadrus]

How have those running MRQ games got round this problem in their campaigns so far?


Vadrus

One way is not to let all the integrated runes be immediately recoverable on the death of the former owner. They may take some time to "un-integrate" themselves (If a Chalana Arroy priestess resurrects a dead character, would their runes still be integrated?) and may not necessarily reappear in the original item (maybe it reappears where it was originally found rather than where the original holder dies)

That doesn't get rid of the problem, only delays it a few days. The players would still have the excess of runes even if they we're stored waiting for a cooldown period.


Vadrus

 

[Archer]

This is probably wrong (in fact I know it is wrong, but nonetheless).
But when I first heard the word "integrate" a rune into a character, I took that quite litteraly. The rune becomes a part of your body, and would not be recoverable.
Basically they would be "when used they are expended" items.

That would solve a lot of issues with getting too many runes.

 

[duncan_disorderly]

That doesn't get rid of the problem, only delays it a few days. The players would still have the excess of runes even if they we're stored waiting for a cooldown period.


Vadrus

depends on where and how it works.
If they need to be in the presence of both the original rune item and the dead body then it could be quite inconvenient - extremely so if (a) it is in a "traditional fantasy" dungeon and other creatures might also be interested in driving them away or (b) it is in a town and they don't want to be identified as the killer

If the Rune reappears in it's original location then they may not even know where to look, and even if they do, they still have to get there

 

[simonh]

On immunity to Trollkin, if the little sods stick to precise Atacks to get past armour, and have around the 50% to 60% skill range that's 10% to 20% chance of doing damage on each attack. That's enough to make them a potential annoyance at least, and en masse a considerable threat.

In fact so long as their ability is a moderate margin over 40% they may even be more of a threat to well armoured characters than they were in previous editions of RQ. In RQ3 a trollkin with 60% skill was only realy a treat to a character with heavy armour on a critical (ignore armour) or impale (double damage), with a chance of 12% of one or the other. In MRQ the Trollkin just Precise Attacks to bypass armour, and has a 20% chance of doing so.

Precise attacks are realy useful for characters with decent skill levels too. It even ignores magical armour. This means a character with 120% skill using a precise attack has an 80% of hitting, doing damage that totaly ignores all armour, even magical armour.

This is all a huge chage to the dynamics of the game over previous editions of RQ and makes armour and armour-type magic essentialy useless at high levels of ability. In RQ3 a character wearing very good armour (which was seriously expensive) and a bit of protection magic was a truly formidable foe. In MRQ it would seem they're relatively speaking a mild annoyance.

In all, I'd consider changing the rules to disalow precise attacks to ignore armour, and allow a critical hit can either ignore armour or do max damage at the player's option. This makes it much more likely to come up than in RQ2 or 3, but at the moment it looks a heck of a lot better than the current situation.


Simon Hibbs

 

[mthomason]

BTW - how much is a "Rune" worth? p63 says "very high price" - how much is that? I can't find it in the rules at the mo.

I reckon it would be campaign dependent. I would assume the Glorantha books will have information on Glorantha pricing, including hopefully that of runes.

Then again, one could assume that "very high" just means people will pay a lot for them, and it's up to you to negotiate a price with any would-be purchaser. It would be nice to see a guideline of what a typical fair Gloranthan price is, though.

 

[burdock]

Not exactly. I'm having a bit of trouble working this one out - if the initial critical hit with an impaling weapon, frex, doesn't do any damage, ie doesn't get through the armour, then is it stuck in the character's armour rather than the character? If so, how does pulling it out do any damage?

8 points of damage DOES get through 5 points of armour.

I can imagine being able to do a lot of damage once I had a spear stuck into someone by pushing, pulling and churning it around as I extracted it.

If a crit didnt do damage I don't think I would let it do impale damage either.