Subsequent Parries

[Chromatism]

Hey everyone!

I've just been refreshing myself on the rules, doing a complete read through. My question arises on the topic of subsequent parries - and I promise I've looked through the Runequest Q&A! I couldn't find an answer, so here we are.

To quote the text in question on page 200:

"An adventurer may make a subsequent parry with a weapon they have already parried with. Any subsequent parry is at a cumulative -20% penalty..."

 

My interpretation is then, assuming armaments are both a sword & shield, that my adventurer could make one sword parry, one shield parry, and would then start toting up the subsequent parry penalties on his/her weapons.

Seems like a decent bonus for using a shield, but I don't know whether I'm overthinking it and right... or overthinking it and wrong! 😁

Edited February 24, 2022 by Chromatism

[PhilHibbs]

1 hour ago, Chromatism said:

My interpretation is then, assuming armaments are both a sword & shield, that my adventurer could make one sword parry, one shield parry, and would then start toting up the subsequent parry penalties on his/her weapons.

This has been clarified that you can't avoid the penalty on a second parry by having a separate weapon. And it should generalize to cover dodge, so if you dodge then parry you are at -20% on the parry.

It's here:

https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/home/catalogue/publishers/chaosium/runequest-roleplaying-in-glorantha-players-book-print/cha4028-runequest-roleplaying-in-glorantha-qa-by-chapter/cha4028-runequest-roleplaying-in-glorantha-chapter-08-combat-qa-part-2/#ib-toc-anchor-40

Scroll down about two pages,

Quote

Rune Fixes 2 addresses two-weapon fighting in some detail and hopefully addresses your questions adequately. 

But ultimately you still take a cumulative -20% penalty to multiple parries after the first, even if using two weapons. 

 

Edited February 24, 2022 by PhilHibbs

[Chromatism]

1 hour ago, PhilHibbs said:

This has been clarified that you can't avoid the penalty on a second parry by having a separate weapon. And it should generalize to cover dodge, so if you dodge then parry you are at -20% on the parry.

I missed Rune Fixes 2. Much obliged!

[SevenSistersOfVinga]

3 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

 And it should generalize to cover dodge, so if you dodge then parry you are at -20% on the parry.

I have a related question, how does this interact with skills over 100%? 

If someone with 120% to shield, matches 3 enemies wirh 80% to Spear attack. 

Is it correct to parry 100/80/60 and take 20% from the first one? Maybe 100/80/60 and take 20% from all of them? or even 120/100/80. 

I get the rules independently but I get confused when they interact.

[JustAnotherVingan]

26 minutes ago, SevenSistersOfVinga said:

I have a related question, how does this interact with skills over 100%? 

If someone with 120% to shield, matches 3 enemies wirh 80% to Spear attack. 

Is it correct to parry 100/80/60 and take 20% from the first one? Maybe 100/80/60 and take 20% from all of them? or even 120/100/80. 

I get the rules independently but I get confused when they interact.

Me too. Could take 20 off the attack of 1 or divide the -20 between them, not -20 to all of them.

Think in this case parry starts at 100.

Multiple weak opponents are dangerous in Runequest unlike D&D.

[PhilHibbs]

2 hours ago, SevenSistersOfVinga said:

I have a related question, how does this interact with skills over 100%? 

There is no carry-over from the first attack to the second apart from the -20%.

Start with your full skill for your first parry. Adjust for skills over 100%.

Your second parry starts at your full skill minus 20%. Adjust again for over 100%.

Third parry at full skill minus 40%, adjust for over 100%.

So with 120% skill, against three 80% spearmen, it's 60% vs 100%, then 80% vs 100%, then 80% vs 80%.

I think the starter set contradicts this, but I don't know if that is a deliberate change/clarification rather than a mistake in an attempt to simplify. The starter set contradicts quite a few things, particularly in combat. I think the thing to do is, give it a go and figure out what works for you and your group.

Edited February 24, 2022 by PhilHibbs

[Akhôrahil]

5 hours ago, SevenSistersOfVinga said:

I have a related question, how does this interact with skills over 100%? 

If someone with 120% to shield, matches 3 enemies wirh 80% to Spear attack. 

Is it correct to parry 100/80/60 and take 20% from the first one? Maybe 100/80/60 and take 20% from all of them? or even 120/100/80. 

I get the rules independently but I get confused when they interact.

These attacks will arrive and get resolved one at a time, so adjust them per attack. The first attack gets -20, but for the second and third attacks, you’re already down to 100% or lower with the parry, so those attacks don’t get modified. So the exchanges become (in order) 60/100, 80/100, 80/80.

Edited February 25, 2022 by Akhôrahil

[Rodney Dangerduck]

The PC should have some control over the choice, not just the random SR ordering   If one opponent is a trollkin, another a Great Troll, I'd save my "best parry" for the Great Troll.

[SevenSistersOfVinga]

11 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

There is no carry-over from the first attack to the second apart from the -20%.

 

8 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

These attacks will arrive and get resolved one at a time, so adjust them per attack. 

I see logic, not like we were doing it but It has simplicity and consistency, thank you, we are doing this from now on. 

[PhilHibbs]

7 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

The PC should have some control over the choice, not just the random SR ordering   If one opponent is a trollkin, another a Great Troll, I'd save my "best parry" for the Great Troll.

Maybe. They'd have to take on the risk that they might not get to use their best parry if the troll dies early. I'd rather just take it as it comes, part of the chaos of battle.

Edited February 25, 2022 by PhilHibbs

[French Desperate WindChild]

2 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Maybe. They'd have to take on the risk that they might not get to use their best parry if the troll dies early. I'd rather just take it as it comes, part of the chaos of battle.

same for me, I would prefer the decision to not parry a trollkin attack to keep my stat high enough to block the "real" ennemy

[JustAnotherVingan]

2 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

same for me, I would prefer the decision to not parry a trollkin attack to keep my stat high enough to block the "real" ennemy

Not parrying is a choice, but if you do choose to parry twice the penalty is due to the difficulty of manouvering your weapon or shield to deal with multiple attacks and seems appropriate. I'd let the player apply the -20 from their 120 skill to the foe of their choice but I wouldn't ally them to decide their parry was going to be 80/120/100 or whatever instead of 120/100/80.

[PhilHibbs]

3 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

same for me, I would prefer the decision to not parry a trollkin attack to keep my stat high enough to block the "real" ennemy

Tell that to Rurik!

[Akhôrahil]

13 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

The PC should have some control over the choice, not just the random SR ordering   If one opponent is a trollkin, another a Great Troll, I'd save my "best parry" for the Great Troll.

You can always skip parries. In some situations, this can be sensible.

[Rodney Dangerduck]

I am not saying that the PC must completely skip a parry.  A reasonable GM would allow them to use their best parry vs. the Great Troll, and all the trollkin parries then take a -20%, -40%, etc...

[Lordabdul]

I personally wouldn't let players "reorder" their parries, if that's what you mean. That is, if SRs dictacte that the attacks come in the order of Trollkin 1, Trollkin 2, Great Troll, then either the player parries both trollkins and suffer -40% for the Great Troll, ignore one trollkin and get -20% for the Great Troll, or let both trollkin hit "for free" to be at full skill against the Great Troll.

Some GMs might let the player decide on parrying or not only after seeing if the trollkin hit, so that you don't "waste" your parry for nothing. Other more severe GMs might want their players to declare whether they're defending against an attack before they know if the attack is successful.

Edited February 25, 2022 by lordabdul

[Arcadiagt5]

I generally require declarations as each attack is coming in. I have had players opt not to parry some attacks to preserve skill for the more important attacks. e.g. an adventurer fighting multiple ghouls may well opt to ignore the claws (which aren’t poisoned) in favour of only parrying the bites (which are). 

EDIT: In cases where multiple attacks are landing on the same SR, I do allow players to pick the parry order. To extend the previous ghoul example, I would allow the adventurer to parry the bite at the highest skill and then the claws if they wished to do so. 

Agree with the earlier interpretation of 120% parry vs 3 80% spearmen: the resulting combos are 60/100, 80/100, 80/80. 

Edited February 25, 2022 by Arcadiagt5

[Rodney Dangerduck]

2 hours ago, lordabdul said:

I personally wouldn't let players "reorder" their parries, if that's what you mean. That is, if SRs dictacte that the attacks come in the order of Trollkin 1, Trollkin 2, Great Troll, then either the player parries both trollkins and suffer -40% for the Great Troll, ignore one trollkin and get -20% for the Great Troll, or let both trollkin hit "for free" to be at full skill against the Great Troll.

Some GMs might let the player decide on parrying or not only after seeing if the trollkin hit, so that you don't "waste" your parry for nothing. Other more severe GMs might want their players to declare whether they're defending against an attack before they know if the attack is successful.

So your Great Troll should deliberately delay their attack until SR 11, and let the trollkin "use up" the better parries?  That seems like GM munch-kinnery.

[JustAnotherVingan]

22 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

So your Great Troll should deliberately delay their attack until SR 11, and let the trollkin "use up" the better parries?  That seems like GM munch-kinnery.

The answer to which is the GM doesn't engage in such munchkinnery it won't be necessary for the players to do so either. Still. doing so runs the risk the great troll will be dead before they make their attack.

[Lordabdul]

1 hour ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

So your Great Troll should deliberately delay their attack until SR 11, and let the trollkin "use up" the better parries?  That seems like GM munch-kinnery.

Funny how it didn't even occur to me to do that until you mentioned it 😄  Like @JustAnotherVingan says, it's a quid-pro-quo kinda thing. Maybe it would have occurred to me to do it after the players did it to one of the boss monsters. Who knows.

Plus, unless I don't understand what you're talking about, the alternative seems more complicated to track at the table, and doesn't work in some cases. Imagine the player says they'll keep their "best parry" for the Great Troll (on SR 11), and then their -20% parry for Trollkin 1 (on SR 6), and -40% parry for Trollkin 2 (on SR 4). The -40% parry goes badly and the adventurer gets wounded. But then on SR 5 one of the other adventurers kills Trollkin 1. There's no attack coming on SR 6 anymore. So the first parry against Trollkin 2 shouldn't have been at -40%, and the adventurer maybe shouldn't have been wounded. Unless it's actually fine that we had one parry at -40% and one parry at full skill? I don't know? My head already hurts. And maybe a GM munchkin will now start having multiple trollkin feint attacks and change their SOI mid-round, to fuck with players and only attack against reduced parries. I don't know. I'm not a GM munchkin. I just like combat to flow quickly with cool things happening. RPGs aren't a "GM vs players" affair, I'm not here to kill the PCs (in fact I'm pretty bad at combat with my NPCs), I'm here to have a good time in dragon-elf-fantasy-land.

Edited February 26, 2022 by lordabdul

[JustAnotherVingan]

49 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

Funny how it didn't even occur to me to do that until you mentioned it 😄  Like @JustAnotherVingan says, it's a quid-pro-quo kinda thing. Maybe it would have occurred to me to do it after the players did it to one of the boss monsters. Who knows.

Plus, unless I don't understand what you're talking about, the alternative seems more complicated to track at the table, and doesn't work in some cases. Imagine the player says they'll keep their "best parry" for the Great Troll (on SR 11), and then their -20% parry for Trollkin 1 (on SR 6), and -40% parry for Trollkin 2 (on SR 4). The -40% parry goes badly and the adventurer gets wounded. But then on SR 5 one of the other adventurers kills Trollkin 1. There's no attack coming on SR 6 anymore. So the first parry against Trollkin 2 shouldn't have been at -40%, and the adventurer maybe shouldn't have been wounded. Unless it's actually fine that we had one parry at -40% and one parry at full skill? I don't know? My head already hurts. And maybe a GM munchkin will now start having multiple trollkin feint attacks and change their SOI mid-round, to fuck with players and only attack against reduced parries. I don't know. I'm not a GM munchkin. I just like combat to flow quickly with cool things happening. RPGs aren't a "GM vs players" affair, I'm not here to kill the PCs (in fact I'm pretty bad at combat with my NPCs), I'm here to have a good time in dragon-elf-fantasy-land.

I suppose it depends how tactical the GM and players are about combat.

My group are more storytellers than wargamers. One of the reasons they prefer RQ to Pathfinder or D&D is that a single combat doesn't have to take up half a session.

[Lordabdul]

2 hours ago, JustAnotherVingan said:

I suppose it depends how tactical the GM and players are about combat.

Oh of course 🙂  In fact, while I'm very bad at tactics, half of my players are pretty good at it, so I wasn't joking when I said I generally learn tricks from my own players. And more seriously, having PCs or NPCs organizing their order of attacks sounds like pretty decent tactic to me.

[Rodney Dangerduck]

1 hour ago, lordabdul said:

Oh of course 🙂  In fact, while I'm very bad at tactics, half of my players are pretty good at it, so I wasn't joking when I said I generally learn tricks from my own players. And more seriously, having PCs or NPCs organizing their order of attacks sounds like pretty decent tactic to me.

In real life there are no strike ranks or "rounds".

Edited February 26, 2022 by Rodney Dangerduck
Calmer tone

[Martin Dick]

Seems pretty reasonable to me, the Great Troll sending in the expendable trollkin to wear down the enemy's defences and distract them. That's sort of the point with trollkin in battle (and of course the occasional critical), though maybe the average Great Troll doesn't think that deeply, but a Dark troll would for sure.

[Shiningbrow]

11 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

I am not saying that the PC must completely skip a parry.  A reasonable GM would allow them to use their best parry vs. the Great Troll, and all the trollkin parries then take a -20%, -40%, etc...

No. It's not about 'best parry vs the Great Troll" - they're all equally good on the field. It's the time, effort and changes to attention & focus costs that cause the deductions.

So, you'd first be focussing on the Great Troll - then the first trollkin attacks, and you quickly parry that (having just moved your focus). You then try to focus back to the Great Troll in anticipation - however trollkin #2 attackis, and you swing to avoid that... finally, the Great Troll swings, and you've lost a good chunk of your skill because you now have to re-manouvre yourself to get into position to deflect that blow.

If you want to half-heartedly parry, then you get half your parry %.

8 hours ago, lordabdul said:

Some GMs might let the player decide on parrying or not only after seeing if the trollkin hit, so that you don't "waste" your parry for nothing. Other more severe GMs might want their players to declare whether they're defending against an attack before they know if the attack is successful.

I'm definitely more the latter... unless it's a Fumble, in which case it's usually obvious in the field. Just missing isn't, and so you either risk it or not...