Bregales said:
Reminds me of ICE's Middle Earth Role-Playing game, another d100 game where anyone (players and/or GM) could and often did, roll a result of something like "Arrow pierces eye, you die immediately" or "You trip on a toenail, fall on a rock which cracks your skull and you die of brain trauma"
Well, if that ain't what every character yearns for, I dunno what is. 8)
Maybe some day I'll pick this up, just to try to kill every duck I can find, but for the next few years I'll happily skip it.
Yep. MERP was ugly combat, but a quite elegant system. My favorite critical off that huuuuuge table was one for a massive, blunt weapon crit wher eit descibed it roughly as "driving the foe's jaw upward into the base of his skull and penetrating his brain, killing him instantly."
The flip side was that the same "jaw in brain" hit could happen to a PC too, and that was always just a wee bit too deadly for most players... :shock:
Here is a link to a PDF of the Hârnmaster combat sheet. It's really all you need to understand the system. I'm not advocating everyone drop what they're doing and run out and track down Hârnmaster (lol) but, hey...it's my favorite, and since we're all tossing out what system we think is best/better/worse than D20 Conan I might as well get in step. Hârnmaster is entirely percentile, and characters will have a 00 score for individual weapons as well as rope use or whatever.
See, you roll percentile versus your opponent's percentile and consult the chart. Anythin rolled ending in a "00" or "05" is a "Critical", whether it is below your percentile stat for the weapon/weapon group (success) or above it (failure). Thus CS = Critical Succes, MS = Minor Success, MF = Minor Failure and CF = Critical Failure.
We'll stick to the first box for a moment. I choose to ATTACK and my opponent chooses to BLOCK. We both roll percentile. If I get a MS and he gets a MF, I succeed at my strike and my opponent takes 1 die of damage (A*1 = Attacker advantage, 1die impact). Now, this game doesn't use Hit Points, it uses "Impact", so I now consult the location table, roll percentile depending on where I want to swing (which I usually made people decide before they rolled anything), and then the "Impact" die (d6) is rolled to determine the extent of the actual damage.
Say I aimed high, roll that 1d6 impact result above and generate a 32 off the location chart for 4 Impact. That's a blow to the neck (!) but it's not yet in the "5+" collumn, so my opponent suffers a Minor Wound.
The actual wound system is just as logical, but I don't want to go through an entire essay on Hârnmaster here. Suffice to say that Wound Points deplete sort of like HP, but it also factors in fatigue, and both Wounds and Fatigue adversely affect every physical skill you have. The number there after S and G indicate direct END damage, and, yes, when it's gone, you are dead, but also each time that happens you have to save to not be knocked out or stunned or whatever.
It's super easy, but super brutal.
