Wrack can be quite time consuming in a game. Cast on, say, 5 targets, that means that every action the player is rolling 5 damage dice and 5 location dice, and I have to keep a track of all the damage taken per location on all 5 targets. Bear this in mind, if any of your players or characters have Wrack. Also, make sure the player makes a note of the spell casting roll (and attack roll for combat), several times over the week-end the player had forgotten what the roll was before I got to rolling Resilience for the wound that had been inflicted. This is not so bad for physical attacks, but the Wrack damage can be dealt 6 or 7 Combat Actions after the actual spell cast.
Wracking annoying
- Thread starter PhilHibbs
- Start date
Deleriad
Mongoose
SJE said:
That's pretty much what I would do. As for Resilience, I would treat it the same as falling; i.e. you make an unadjusted Resilience test. After all the idea in combat is that the skill of the attacker relates to the effectiveness of the damage but not to how much damage is done. E.g. a 90% rapier wielder does the same amount of damage as a novice (1D8) but any wound is usually more 'painful.' With Wrack the amount of damage is already related to the skill of the sorcerer. (If you wanted more complexity you could say that if the spell was a critical then any resilience roll to resist pain also needs to be a critical).
I tried that, but the player rolled 1 damage twice in a row, so all five targets took minimum damage to a leg, twice. The chances of rolling minimum damage ten times in a row is pretty vanishing, and she's always complaining about her bad luck with dice rolls so this just makes it seem worse. You're much more likely to take someone down by rolling all the rolls. *Update* I just ran the numbers, and with rolling all the dice, she has an 80% chance of getting a decent damage roll on a vital location on at least one of them. Rolling twice she has a 27% chance. But when that 27% chance comes up, they all go down. That's practically the definition of "unbalanced".SJE said:
That makes Wrack damage a lot less effective than physical combat damage. If the enemy has, say, 50% resilience then that would give them a 50-50 chance of withstanding the pain, but opposed against her successful spell cast at 89%, they have only a 17% chance, so I don't like that idea. *Update2*: My mistake, it's a 15.5% chance against her skill of 79%. I got her skill wrong, and I got the spreadsheet formula wrong.Deleriad said:
Deleriad
Mongoose
PhilHibbs said:
Except Wrack damage is proportional to skill already. Wrack 45% does less damage than Wrack 90%.
Compare rapier 45% vs 90%. The wielder of the rapier does the same damage regardless of how skilled they are. However the resilience roll to resist pain is opposed by the attack roll.
Wrack 45% vs Wrack 90%. The person with Wrack 90% does more damage than the 45%er but the resilience roll to resist pain is not opposed by the original attack roll.
That seems a reasonable balance to me.
What do you do when a falling rock lands on someone's head and there's no attack roll involved?
That's not RuneQuest. That's some kind of shoot-'em-up game in cheat mode, and neither I nor my players have any interest in playing it. At least, not when we're trying to play RuneQuest. There's a time and a place for over-the-top, easy games but we want to play RQ when we're playing RQ.SJE said:
Deleriad
Mongoose
PhilHibbs said:
I don't think that Wrack is overpowered. I'm pointing out that it is perfectly reasonable not to have to write down the original spell casting roll and preserve it for future potential resilience rolls. Instead, if someone suffers a serious or major wound due to damage caused by Wrack, I believe it's reasonable to treat it the same way as you would if you fell off a cliff or got burned in a fire etc. However if you wish to retain the number of dice rolls then that's up to you.
On the second general point. The underling rules in RQII (which clearly you can ignore if you wish) are a way of speeding up mass combats. They are engineered by observing that in general taking more than (CON+SIZ)/5 in damage to a location is likely to be a serious wound. More often than not, someone taking a serious wound fails the resilience test and is either knocked unconscious or has a limb disabled. Either way, their ability to continue fighting is compromised. RQ has always recognised that most people don't fight to the death in a murderous fury most of the time regardless of the injuries they have suffered. Therefore the underling rules provide a rough approximation saying that "once someone has taken X much damage they are likely to be either incapable of or unwilling to fight any longer."
Clearly if you as a GM want to track every wound to every location of every NPC and your players also enjoy this happening then that's up to you. Personally I have more important things to do with my limited head space, time and pencil lead. I mix and match full stat blocks and underling stat blocks depending on the situation.
If the target of a Wrack spell goes out of range, clearly the spell drops. That's something I'm going to have to make more use of in future, usually she's just using 1 point of Range, that's 26m. As it's Concentration as well, maybe I should impose line-of-sight as well, if she can't see one of the targets then she can't hurt them. Well, that hasn't made my job any easier, in fact it's more to keep track of, but that's ok.
Deleriad
Mongoose
PhilHibbs said:
That depends on the amount of spell skill and the amount of spell skill has already affected a) the likelihood of success in the first place and b) the average amount of damage inflicted per CA. So that's fine by me.
FWIW what I do for damage without attack rolls is:
serious wound, non-vital location: no modifier.
serious wound to vital location: -20% Resilience.
major wound to non-vital location: -20% Resilience.
Major wound to vital location: -40% resilience.
Sure, that was based on an example from my game - if the target has 80% Resilience and the attacker only had 40% skill, then it's only slightly more then doubled their chance of shrugging off the wound, which your modifier then sometimes reduces back down again.Deleriad said:
I think the intention behind the opposed test is that resisting the effect of wounds should not generally go up as fast as your Resilience goes up - 100% Resilience shouldn't make you totally immune to the affects of all (well, 95% of) Serious Wounds. Since it is opposed, as your enemies' skills go up, so your chance of succumbing to their damage keeps pace. The idea that a high-skill sorceror against a tough warrior gets no effect from Wrack until a vital location is taken down to minus its normal level isn't right to me. When the enemy's head, chest, or abdomen is taken to negative hit points, he should be likely to go down. With your house rule, Wrack is the only form of player-inflicted damage to which that does not apply, and that makes no sense. World damage is another - I did ask about it a few months ago but I don't think there's a satisfactory rule for it, my house rule becomes irrelevant at very high skill levels, but that's ok I suppose. Actually, if I treat the world's skill as always 100% even after Opposed Test modifiers have been applied - i.e. once your Resilience is over 100, it's always 100% vs 100% - then that's ok.
*Update*: Hm. Opposed tests, where one side has already been rolled (e.g. Resilience 120% vs an already-rolled attack on a skill of 80%), how do you apply the "over 100%" rule? You could alter the rolled dice number, but I'm not sure about that. I'll have to think about it. And make a huge spreadsheet. :wink:
Deleriad
Mongoose
PhilHibbs said:
That issue has come up before and there is no satisfactory answer.
There are plenty of things that may be inflicted by or on PCs that don't have suitable attack rolls. Smother, damage from heat if you push someone into it, ongoing effects of acid.
The world hits at 100% idea was one of the first things I tried. I didn't like it. For example, if a peasant kicks a rock off a ledge with 30% unarmed skill and it lands on someone's head causing a serious wound then it is less likely to knock someone out then if the same rock had simply fallen off the ledge while the peasant was eating a potato nearby.
What the world attacks at 100% means, when you boil it down, is that your resilience has a random negative modifier which has nothing to do with anything and adds an extra dice roll. I'm not a fan of extra dice rolls.
As for warriors pushing on through a wrack. Well if someone is Wracking Conan with his 100% plus Resilience I fully expect Conan to keep pushing forwards until his head falls off. There's a reason for Range after all.
Finally if someone has bought their Resilience up to 100% then each IR spent wasn't spent on something else. I think that 100% Resilience should be every bit as impressive as 100% Greatsword. So yes Conan gets burnt, stabbed, bombed and wracked and keeps going through wounds that would stop a lesser man.
Deleriad
Mongoose
PhilHibbs said:
I run Resilience tests by the book. As there is nothing about what happens when there is no attack roll, I roll those resilience tests as unopposed.
I don't regard Wrack as easier to shrug off for the reasons I gave earlier. For reasons that you have already experienced I find it too much book-keeping to keep track of an attack roll for ongoing damage that might not cause a serious wound until a long time after the initial attack. If the initial Wrack attack causes a serious/major wound I do use the original attack roll. After that I treat it just like any other damage that is caused without an attack. If I was otherwise minded, I would oppose the Resilience test with the sorcerer's grimoire skill. i.e. a contest of Resilience vs Grimoire rather than a contest of Resilience vs original attack roll.
If a sorcerer is Wracking a bunch of inconsequential extras, I assume they fail their Resilience tests.
The more I read these threads, the less convinced I am that Resilience and Persistence skills are a good idea. RuneQuest already had Hit Points and CON for physical toughness and adding yet another toughness variable seems superfluous.
The fact that Resilience is a skill makes it worse because you then need to patch on an opposed roll against attacker's skill rolls to avoid characters with high Resilience shrugging off what otherwise should be mortal injuries. It's one area where MRQ has significantly increased complexity to no obvious benefit.
I'll try and bite back my old guard traditionalist impulses for a moment. Forwards, not backwards and all that.
IMHO if you're going to stick with a Resilience style skill mechanic, Hit Points become superfluous. There's no point measuring the same thing using two different scales all the time. The real measure of how much damage a character takes and how severe it is needs to be on the same scale as Resilience skill. Maybe weapon damage, in fact all damage, should be rolled in a similar way to skill rolls?
This dagger has a Damage Roll of 45%, while this Great Sword has a Damage of 120%.
Simon Hibbs
The fact that Resilience is a skill makes it worse because you then need to patch on an opposed roll against attacker's skill rolls to avoid characters with high Resilience shrugging off what otherwise should be mortal injuries. It's one area where MRQ has significantly increased complexity to no obvious benefit.
I'll try and bite back my old guard traditionalist impulses for a moment. Forwards, not backwards and all that.
IMHO if you're going to stick with a Resilience style skill mechanic, Hit Points become superfluous. There's no point measuring the same thing using two different scales all the time. The real measure of how much damage a character takes and how severe it is needs to be on the same scale as Resilience skill. Maybe weapon damage, in fact all damage, should be rolled in a similar way to skill rolls?
This dagger has a Damage Roll of 45%, while this Great Sword has a Damage of 120%.
Simon Hibbs
Deleriad
Mongoose
simonh said:
I can say that in constant play for 2 years it has never actually been a problem. Resilience and HP work together the same way as combat skills and damage. It also solves a lot of problems with magic. Finally, making Resilience an opposed roll against an actual attack roll makes critical damage properly scary.
There is one marginal issue which is what happens when there isn't an attack roll. The simple answer is that it is an unopposed roll and works just like every skill in the book. GM's could assign a modifier to represent how painful the damage is - just as is normal in the rest of the game. Phil seems to be tying himself in knots over a notion of "fairness" that I can't say I've ever found to be problem. Basically, a resilience test can be either opposed or unopposed, just like every other skill.
I can honestly say that in some 30 odd sessions of MRQ1 and 2 there's never been a time when I've had a problem with Resilience.*
*The caveat to that is that, as with so many things, MRQ1 Resilience was not properly implement. Initially I ran at quite a low level so no one had high levels of Resilience. Eventually I started using roughly the same rule as is used in RQII and having been using it without problem for over a year.
Sure, I might learn to overlook the asymmetry around environmental damage. It doesn't happen very often, after all, but on the other hand I don't begrudge a dice roll if it's instrumental in deciding if a character falls over or not.Deleriad said:
The one thing that the opposed mechanic does change, is I have to have a clearer idea of what an NPCs skill is before I roll the dice. In RQ3, I could just roll the dice and then decide whether that number is likely to be under their skill level or not. Now, the difference between a successful 55% roll and a failed 56% roll is huge, and I don't want to have to make that call post hoc.
Also, scenario writers and proofreaders need to check that every stat block that is likely to be involved in combat or conflict has Resilience (except spirits) and Persistence.
