Atlantean

1 hour ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

First, surprise is a judgment call by the GM.  It involves evaluation of state of mind of the party to be surprised.

Second, surprise does not require that the attacker have invisibility until the first blow is struck.  Instead surprise occurs when the defender has insufficient time to be totally ready before the attacker makes contact (or shoots, depending on the situation).  So if the defenders are mostly asleep in tents with their armor off, they can know the attacker is coming for a few melee rounds (the sentry yells or blows a horn)  but they don't have time to get up, put on their armor, and get armed and form up in a shieldwall.  Maybe they have time to get up and pick up their shields and spears.

If you are writing about the surprise strike rank modifiers on p.193 of RQiG, "within 3 meters" and "within 4-9 meters",  then they still involve a judgment call by the GM as to whether surprise exists.  But that table seems to be oriented to situations in which the surprised characters are armed and nearly ready to fight, since the table doesn't include a modifier of x melee rounds per piece of armor put on, or even the 5 strike rank modifier for readying a weapon or shield  which you can reference on the next page. 

Regarding encounter distance,

-it depends on visibility:  Terrain, light conditions, fog all affect this.  It may also depend on whether there are sentries, and on hide and scan rolls.

-If using an encounter table, the most detailed I have seen is in "Close encounters of the Sartar Kind", available from Jonstown compendium, which includes die rolls that  resolve to three distance bands.  https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/357562/Close-Encounters-of-the-Sartar-Kind

 

Thank you so much for the in depth reply! Yes, the nature of the surprise state is well understood. The mechanics for determining it in RuneQuest is not well defined. ACKS, BX, 5e all settle on a D6 random approach. RQG (maybe I should use RQW for my game?) it seems in general an opposed roll of moving undetected and detection. Is anyone factoring in an opposed Luck roll?

How are folks handling determining surprise and encounter distance in any given interaction?

Excellent post! I have been developing a Bronze Age Wales RuneQuest game and love snippets like this! Going live on Roll20 in a few weeks.