Mass Warfare Rules

[Inspector Zero]

Has anyone been using these (MRQ Legendary Heroes)?

It's all fine as far as I can see apart from the mechanic which calculates the hits. The rules (which I don't have in front of me) say something like the number of hits scored is the difference between the attacker's roll and the defender's roll divided by five.

In a situation where the attacker has, say, 90% chance to hit and the defender has a parry of 40% the attacker rolls a 87 and scores a good success and the defender fails their parry with a roll of 87 also. With the way it's written this will cause 1 hit (always 1 hit minimum) but in reality the attacker has completely nailed it and the defender has fluffed it. This seems to row against the overall mechanic of the higher opposed roll doing well (which got some getting used to).

A better outcome might be the attacker scores a number of hits based on the difference between their roll and their attack percentage. The problem with this is it has more of a RQ2/3 feel about it (where rolling lower was generally better) than MRQ where the opposite is the case.

Any other working solutions?

 

[aelius]

I just ran my first battles with the mass combat rules last weekend. I read that as using the difference if they both make it. I the defender misses their roll, then I used the total roll divided by 5. With the roll of 87 that would be 17 hits. Also you roll the normal damage for the units weapons for each hit, so the total can be impressive.
Don't know if that's how it's supposed to work, but it made the most sense to me.

 

[Lakritsploppen]

Was it hard to prepare?? the Battle, i mean.
In my next campagin will i probably need to use the masscombat rules a lot, so do you think they are hard to prepare??

It would be intressting to hear more comments about the system..

 

[aelius]

It takes about a minute or two to create the unit control sheets from scratch, and the battle mechanics flow pretty quickly. It is also not hard to integrate individual scale combat into the mass melee.
The only quirk is integrating spellcasters into the battle. I decided to treat area spells the same as an attack by a unit, and others as individual scale and use my judgement for how they affect the overall battle.
Overall I rate the battle system quite highly with mechanics that are complete enough to support the illusion, but easy enough to not slow down play.

 

[Inspector Zero]

Thanks for the comment Aelius. I really like the battle rules overall so this one issue is easy to house-rule away. From your comments it looks like it's not me just misinterpreting this one rule but more that it ain't quite right as written.

I'm happy to stick with my house rule for now until something better comes along.

Was it hard to prepare?? the Battle, i mean.

I didn't think so. It's pretty easy and very flexible and based so much on the normal rules that you can create a lot of variety without endless rule and tables checking. Look out for them thar missile weapons though. They is deadly.

 

[Toomuch]

try using the rules in the back of griffin mountain

 

[FNG]

try using the rules in the back of griffin mountain

can't see anything in the box set for this?

FNG

 

[ealdstan]

I wouldn't call 87 out of 90 a good success. That's almost a fail. So I don't think its unreasonable that it worked out to only one hit.

 

[Inspector Zero]

I wouldn't call 87 out of 90 a good success. That's almost a fail.

I'd agree with you if this was any previous version of RQ but the new mechanic for opposed rolls and successes in general is that a high roll is better than a low one...excpet where a critical is concerned. Or an Impale. According to the mechanic, my 87% should be a great result.

I believe the thought behind this is that if your skill is higher (90%) than someone else (50%) then your 87% roll trumps their 47% roll.

It's not wholly consistent I grant you but that's how the game has been designed. The point I was making was that with this odd mechanic a supposedly "good" result translates into a rather pathetic amount of damage to the enemy.

I'm not a fan of the Opposed Roll mechanic. I see nothing wrong with simply rolling to see whether you've done something or not. If you make it; great, if not; too bad. Where skills need to be pitted against each other like overcoming someone with a spell then the good ol' Resistance Table worked a treat.

 

[duncan_disorderly]

I wouldn't call 87 out of 90 a good success. That's almost a fail.

I'd agree with you if this was any previous version of RQ but the new mechanic for opposed rolls and successes in general is that a high roll is better than a low one...excpet where a critical is concerned. Or an Impale.

I didn't think there were Impales in MRQ.

It is an incredibly simple & straightforward mechanic, and I still don'r understand why people seem to struggle so much with it.

Any Critical beats (any impale beats) any normal success beats any failure beats any fumble.

If this resolves the contest then you don't need to worry any further.
If there is a tie, because both contestants got a Critical or a Success then whoever has the highest number on the dice beats the lower number.

I believe the thought behind this is that if your skill is higher (90%) than someone else (50%) then your 87% roll trumps their 47% roll.

Exactly so.
on a 90% chance v a 50% chance you are guaranteed to win if you roll a 6-9 (since they can't get a higher critical), and will win unless they get a critical on a 51-90. If you roll between 10 and 50 they can beat you by either rolling a critcal (1-5) or a success that is higher than yours.

It's not wholly consistent I grant you but that's how the game has been designed.

It is wholly consistent. The highest level of success wins, and the highest dice wins within any level. You could use the "amount you make your roll by" instead of the number on the dice, but then you'd need to
carry out an additonal stage in the process for every dice rolled. I imagine there are very few people playing RQ who can not look at two numbers between 01 and 100 and unfailingly point at the larger number. Mistakes will start to creep in when you add in subtraction

The point I was making was that with this odd mechanic a supposedly "good" result translates into a rather pathetic amount of damage to the enemy.

The problem with the rule as you describe it is that it makes no account of whether or not the defender succeeds in their roll. As an immediate fix for this problem I'd rule that a failure always counts as rolling a total of 0, and any critical counts as rolling 100+ the number on the dice. This way your roll of 87 (success) vs their 87 (failure) will yield 17 hits (87/5).
If you had rolled an 8 (critical) and they rolled a 24 (success) you would score 16 hits (108-24/0)

 

[Inspector Zero]

This is a great explanation of the opposed roll mechanic however I still don't see it is better than rolling for a success or failure individually rather than on an opposed basis. If you hit me on your roll I might parry on my roll. Both are successes. My shield takes a beating but that is what its for.

The fact that your attack chance might be higher than my parry and therefore you are more likely to hit is besides the point. A success is a success is a success. The benefit in the higher skill value should simply be that it makes success more likely - and makes critical successes more likely. I don't see why a normal success with on a 80% skill should negatively influence a normal success with a 40% skill.

Another way of looking at the previous example of a roll of 87% againist 90% and a roll of 47% against 50% is that actually both just scraped it and could perhaps be considered to be slightly fortuitous which is the point I think Ealdstan was making.

The inconsistency is apparent in the way that criticals, which are very low numbers, are good but normal successes are seen to be more successful when they are very high numbers.

You are right. There are no impales in MRQ.

Anyway - my original post was not about the opposed mechanic - each to their own I guess - but about the Mass Warfare rules. Your suggested fix is helpful but underlines the point that the rules as written don't quite work.

 

[duncan_disorderly]

Your suggested fix is helpful but underlines the point that the rules as written don't quite work.

Of course not - it's MRQ! - specifically it's one of the early MRQ books, and we saw in the core rules that there was insufficient care taken in the playtesting, editing and proofreading stages. Gods of Glorantha revealed a second (related) problem in that authors had been working from versions of the rules that were subsequently changed...

This is a great explanation of the opposed roll mechanic however I still don't see it is better than rolling for a success or failure individually rather than on an opposed basis. If you hit me on your roll I might parry on my roll. Both are successes. My shield takes a beating but that is what its for.

This works fine for combat. If I hit and you parry then my damage has to get through your AP's
It gets slightly trickier with the "All or nothing" situation of a Dodge though. If I sucessfully hit and you succesfully dodge, do I stand any chance of hitting - What if I got a Critical - does your dodge downgrade it to a normal hit, or negate it all together?
What about a non-combat situation? Sneaking past a sentry for instance?

One way would be to use the old RQ2 resistance table. This is good in some ways and situations, but a bit clunky in others, and needs you to either look up on the table, or do the (admittedly fairly simple) maths to work out the chance. It also has a couple of drawbacks - firstly it is a single roll, so who gets to make it - say the contest is two suitors singing a love song to the princess to win her favours, both are PC's - wouldn't you want to roll the dice if one of them was you?
The other drawback is what if there are more than two people in the contest? All the PC's are trying to win the ladies favours. A "best success" allows you to rank all the contestants with a single roll from each.

The fact that your attack chance might be higher than my parry and therefore you are more likely to hit is besides the point.

Surely it is exactly the point? However we resolve the contest, if my attack is higher than your parry then I should have an advantage.

A success is a success is a success. The benefit in the higher skill value should simply be that it makes success more likely - and makes critical successes more likely.

I agree. I don't see that an opposed roll mechanic makes this any less true.

I don't see why a normal success with on a 80% skill should negatively influence a normal success with a 40% skill.

It doesn't. If the higher skill succeeds, then it doesn't alter the lower skill's chance of success at all. It will still be 40%. However, if we are in a contest where we need to determine a winner then we need a way of deciding which contestant got the "better" success - we don't want to have to keep rolling until one contestant succeeds and the other fails - especially if they are closely matched.

Another way of looking at the previous example of a roll of 87% againist 90% and a roll of 47% against 50% is that actually both just scraped it and could perhaps be considered to be slightly fortuitous which is the point I think Ealdstan was making.

That's not a good way of looking at it under MRQ rules though. a roll of 87 against a skill of 90 is a good solid success, not "just scraping it". It's succeeding in a manner that someone with a mere 50% skill would only be able to beat if they achieved a critical success.

The inconsistency is apparent in the way that criticals, which are very low numbers, are good but normal successes are seen to be more successful when they are very high numbers.

No, it's perfectly consistant. A high critcal is better than a low one, and a high success is better than a low one. If I have an 80% skill and you have a 40% chance my critical on a 02 will lose to your critical of 04. My critical of 07 will beat your success of 33, not because my low roll is better than your high roll, but because my critical is better than your success. The numbers only matter when the levels of success are the same.
(if, rather than a d100 we had 100 tiddlywinks, 1 black one labelled "Fumble", 9 blue ones labelled Fail 1 to Fail 9, 9 gold ones labelled Critical 1 to Critical 9 and 81 white ones labelled success 1 to success 81 would you see any discrepancy in saying "Critical 3 beats success 24 beats success 72 beats fail 2 beats fumble"?

 

[ealdstan]

I was re-reading legendary heroes again and I found myself thinking about this thread. You originally presented a hypothetical situation in which an attacker with 90% attacks a defender with 40%. Why roll this fight at all. With such a disparity in skill, for the sake of story flow, I would normally rule an easy victory by the attacker. If the 90% attacker is an actual player character shouldn't he be facing enemies in his class. A squad of house carls should always be able to run off a bunch of angry farmers unless they are greatly outnumbered so unless the player characters are the farmers and you're wanting them to get trounced this situation shouldn't come up but then for the sake of the dramatic element the player characters farmers should have a chance to win.

If the parties were of more equal footing then the rolls you listed would have resulted in a more sensible result.

 

[durulz]

Whatever happened to Warhamster..?