Gollum

Right. But I prefer the Knockout Attack rules. Indeed, in reality, it is very hard to knockout someone without wounding him. So, having a quite high chance to inflict real damage is important for realistic games like mines: Call of Cthulhu adventures, but with a lot of Basic Roleplaying rules that I find much more interesting... I don't like Call of Cthulhu's barehanded combat damage, for instance. In my humble opinion, 1D6 for a kick is too much: a character with a damage bonus of +1D4 systematically kills an average guy with two or three kicks.

Thus, if I understand you well, you would use the 1D8+db, exactly as written in the rules, but always with the Knockout Attack rules (page 226). That makes much more sense, indeed. Thank you very much.

Yes... I made a little more research... Successful, this time... First, it is not just a typo. I opened an old Call of Cthulhu book and noticed that the Blackjack had exactly the same damage in the past. 1D8+db. Second, the Totschläger looks very dangerous, indeed, but doesn't correspond to the weapon description in the BRP book (page 249): “A small sewn leather sack full of heavy substance like lead shot [...] Other terms for these are sap or cosh.” After a glance to some Totschläger photos on the web, I'd rather consider it as an heavy club. Having said that, thank you very much for your so rapid answers...

Hello everybody! I don't know if it has been asked before, tried a little research in these forums, but obviously did miss my research roll... ;-) So, here is my question. Is the Blackjack damage just a typo or is there any good reason for such a destroying power? To explain what I mean... – Blackjack: 1d8+db – Flail: 1d6+db – Warhammer: 1d6+db – Longsword: 1d8+db – Heavy club: 1d8+db Medieval knight would better use a blackjack than their usual weapons! Here is another argument: Average d8 result: 4.5 If the character is a bit strong: +1d4 (average result: 2.5) Average blackjack damage for this very common kind of character: 7 Which means just two hits and almost every healthy man is dead. So, there is a problem with blackjack damage, isn't it?

Yes. You are perfectly right. I wrote my reply too quickly.

Pages 173 to 175, as written in my previous reply. This is not explicitly written but the terms used ("chance of failure", "target") don't let any doubt. The chance of failure is the chance of failure of the specific action, not in general, and the target number is the number under what you roll, i.e. the modified skill, not the base skill. The problem comes from the critical and fumble table (page 172), which says "Base Chance" rather than "Modified Chance". In my humble opinion, it is just a typo.

I can't be absolutely sure (I'm french and I sometimes misunderstand English texts) but rules sounds to answer clearly to your questions... Page 173: "The chance of fumbling an action roll equals 5% (1/20th) of the chance of failure." So, it is obviously after every bonuses, penalties and skill modifications have been done... Page 175: "Special Success (roll < or equal to 20% of target) / Critical Success (roll < or equal to 5% of target)". The target number is the modified skill, not the skill as written on the character sheet. Page 177: "Circumstantial modifiers should be applied after the base chance has already been adjusted based upon action difficulty, as described above." So, to my mind, the answers are always (a) in your examples above. Note that, here again, the rules are made to simplify things: "As a rule of thumb, if circumstantial modifiers would modify a base chance up or down by more than 30%, shift the difficulty of the roll up or down one level instead." Which means that an easy action with + 30 and + 20 bonuses just becomes an automatic action and that a difficult action with + 30 and + 20 bonuses just becomes an average action without bonus. Which gives exactly the same result than those given by the calculation, actually.