Difficulty with parry skills over 100%

[Nokaion]

I'm designing a BRP-/OpenQuest/Mythras-Hack where a main mechanic is instead of numerical penalties and bonuses I use an advantage/disadvantage system like CoC 7th edition and Dragonbane, but I've run into a point where my system breaks.

In my hack parries and dodges are free actions that don't cost a reaction or an action point, instead every following parry or dodge after the first one gets a cumulative disadvantage. I thought this was rather elegant, but the breaking point would be a character who has 100+ in Dodge or Parry, which leads to the point that the character can only be hit if they roll a fumble, which is a 00 which has a 1% chance.

I've made a Surrounded/Flanked rule, which means that if you get surrounded by an amount of enemies equal to your fighting skill/5 (rounded up) all your rolls to parry or dodge are hard (half value). But this rule would penalize people with less than 100% or 80% in fighting even more. (Creatures with double or triple the size of their enemies are exempt from this rule).

How would you solve this?

Thx in advance!

[Mugen]

21 minutes ago, Nokaion said:

How would you solve this?

I wouldn't use an advantage/disadvantage system for difficulties. But if I understand you correctly, I think it's not an option. 🙂

[Saki]

1st Parry - roll normally

2nd Parry - roll with disadvantage

3rd Parry - Only a Critical/Special succeeds

4th+ Parry - roll with disadvantage, and only a Critical/Special succeeds

[Atgxtg]

My advice would be to: Use/adapt one of the older Attack/Parry Matrices. In old RQ (RQ1-3) a it was much easier to break weapons due to how the A?P Matrix worked and how parrying weapons took damage. This made the success level of the parry very important bot only for stopping an attack but for protecting the defending weapon (and possibly damaging the attacking weapon).  This would discourage highly skilled character from attacking groups as they could get their weapon damaged with that many parries. Likeiwse in the older versions a Dodge had to be of the same success level as the attack to succeed. That would keep the 100%+ dodges in check. 

 

Another option would be to continually increase the difficulty of the next prry/dodge. Either per attempt in a round, or by success level of the current defense. say the difficulty goesd up unless they get a special success of better. Then the guy with 100% still won't want to fight twenty guys at once.

58 minutes ago, Nokaion said:

I've made a Surrounded/Flanked rule, which means that if you get surrounded by an amount of enemies equal to your fighting skill/5 (rounded up) all your rolls to parry or dodge are hard (half value). But this rule would penalize people with less than 100% or 80% in fighting even more. (Creatures with double or triple the size of their enemies are exempt from this rule).

Fighting skill/5?

• First off that many people probably can't even attack one person at the same time. Not with most melee weapons. Try to get ten swordmen to attack the same guy and see how it work out. THey will mostly be in in others way, because 90% of the bodies out there belong to one of their allies.
• Secondly, how would anyone know what that magic number of opponents would be? For instance say you got 20 opponents ganging up on one guy, but the guy has 105% skill, so the gang up doesn't work at all.

I thin you'd be better served here by giving the gang modifier based entirely the size of the gang, not the skill of the defender (otherwise it just exacerbates your problem with high skilled characters). Personally I'd go with two foes is difficult, four is very difficult.  Of course I cut my teeth on RQ, where was for highly skilled warriors (RuneLords) not to taken on multiple foes as that negated most of their skill advantages. Runelords had retinues so that they could take the enemy apart one on one, not have "a fair chance" taking on a group by themselves. 

 

[Nokaion]

Quote

Fighting skill/5?

This was a typo. The formula is Fighting skill/20 (rounded up).

[Atgxtg]

3 hours ago, Nokaion said:

This was a typo. The formula is Fighting skill/20 (rounded up).

That's much better. Still, I think a flat modifier for number of opponents is better. Either that or you should factor in the skill of the opponents. After all wouldn't two  90% foes be at least as difficulty as nine 20% foes?

[conajofa]

I mean, how the Evade/Parry vs Attack works?

In the sense that, is it by Level of Success [a la classic BRP]? In that case this only becomes a problem with very high skills, because the disadvantage will make them Crit and Special less while their opponents can grab specials and crits. I personally increased Special to Half the Skill instead of Skill/5.

Or just with any success you obtain full reduction?

Maybe your problem comes more in how the attack hits by itself. And so, you should modify attack and defense interaction, more than the defense skills.

[Nokaion]

Quote

I mean, how the Evade/Parry vs Attack works?

It works very much like CoC 7th edition and Rivers of London where there are success levels (Regular, Hard, Extreme, Critical) and the one with the higher success level succeed. If it comes to a draw, the defender wins.

[RosenMcStern]

1 hour ago, Nokaion said:

It works very much like CoC 7th edition and Rivers of London where there are success levels (Regular, Hard, Extreme, Critical) and the one with the higher success level succeed. If it comes to a draw, the defender wins.

Then the issue is not there, as conajofa pointed out. If the roll is differential, a 100% defendant is by no means invulnerable, just hard to hit. It will become increasingly hard to roll better than regular for him, while the attacker has still his full chance of rolling criticals.

[Atgxtg]

3 hours ago, Nokaion said:

It works very much like CoC 7th edition and Rivers of London where there are success levels (Regular, Hard, Extreme, Critical) and the one with the higher success level succeed. If it comes to a draw, the defender wins.

That's incorrect. Per the Attack/Parry Matrix on page 127 UGE it's possible to partial parries and dodges on a defender success, even against a critical or special attack. It just downgrades the attackers SL by one. And I think that's your problem, right there. The 100% defender is always going to be able to downgrade the attack a success level. And since penalty dice aren't so much of a penalty at high skill levels they can literally do this all day long, as many times a round as they want.

So high skill + penalty dice +UGE combat matrix = almost perpetual defense. 

In RQ3 the defender needed to match the success level of the attack to dodge an attack (so specials were hard to sidestep). Also in RQ and some other  BRP  games, a parry only stopped so much damage so an attack that did a lot of damage could get through. There were all sort of advantages for beating the opponent's success level, so there penalty dice would be a big deal. But in UGE equal success levels levels let a parry stop all of the damage, you method of giving the defender multiple parries really favors the defense, as any attack needs to be at least a special to have a chance of hurting the defender. 

Another BRP game that had parries stopp all the damage was Stormbringer, but it had a Parry/Riposte rule; you could make successive parries, each at a cumulative -20%, and  the Riposte rule let a master (90%+skill) turn a successful parry into a riposte attack (also at a cumulative -20%). But penalty dice wouldn't work all that great there either.- you need the skill drop.

So I think you either need to use an alternate Attack/Defense Matrix, or drop the penalty die idea.

 

What if instead of giving the defender penalty dice you gave the attacker(s) advantage dice? I mean giving a guy with 100% a penalty die isn't going to reduce their chance of parrying much, but giving an advantage die to their 50%  opponent certainly would up the ante. 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 30 by Atgxtg

[Mugen]

The last draft of Mongoose's RuneQuest rules had an interesting idea concerning parries.

When both opponents rolled the same success level, damage was reduced by the parrying weapon's Armour (a number between 4 to 6, IIRC), or twice that number if the defender's roll was superior to the attacker's.

I loved that idea.

It was written by Kenneth Hyte, IIRC, then edited by Mongoose team to become the carastrophic 2 rolls system that was in the published version...

I don't remember how dodge worked, but it was certainly more binary. It seems to me the defender avoided the blow if his roll was superior, but lost some actions.

Edited May 1 by Mugen

[smiorgan]

On 5/1/2024 at 1:24 PM, Mugen said:

The last draft of Mongoose's RuneQuest rules had an interesting idea concerning parries.

It was written by Kenneth Hyte, IIRC, then edited by Mongoose team to become the carastrophic 2 rolls system that was in the published version...

😂 The history of Mongoose RQ is largely the story of how a publisher tried hard and largely succeeded in ruining often very good or at least decent gaming content produced by the writers, with arbitrary edits, faulty bindings, bad art, horrendous character sheets.

I remember very well the initial MRQ playtest: it was completely bizarre. 

[Atgxtg]

On 6/4/2024 at 6:57 PM, smiorgan said:

😂 The history of Mongoose RQ is largely the story of how a publisher tried hard and largely succeeded in ruining often very good or at least decent gaming content produced by the writers, with arbitrary edits, faulty bindings, bad art, horrendous character sheets.

I remember very well the initial MRQ playtest: it was completely bizarre. 

I think it comes down to different paradigms. A lot of the changes made in MRQ made sense if you were someone coming at the game with a lot of D&D experience, but not much actual RQ experience. Didn't someone high up in Mongoose accuse Steve Perrin of not knowing how to write an RPG? I mean it takes a certain mindset to do that when working on the fifth (??) edition of an RPG already written by said person. That's a major disconnect.

The problems with the cults illustrates the disconnect. Coming at it from a D&D alignment system, then Orlanth as a storm god, would be chaotic. But looking at as a RQer, Orlanth can't be chaotic. Chaotic means something entirely different in the two systems. 

 

Oh, and all due credit to the Mythras team. I was looking over the latest edition the other day, and it is so much better than MRQ.

Edited June 7 by Atgxtg

[Mugen]

2 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

I think it comes down to different paradigms. A lot of the changes made in MRQ made sense if you were someone coming at the game with a lot of D&D experience, but not much actual RQ experience. 

Well, the first playtest draft had terrible ideas like a roll-over system for combat and roll-under in other situations.

Even for someone with only experience in d20, it was not good.

[Atgxtg]

2 hours ago, Mugen said:

Well, the first playtest draft had terrible ideas like a roll-over system for combat and roll-under in other situations.

But again that fits with D&D game mechanics.

In AD&D you wanted to roll over to hit, and roll under when making skill proficiency checks.

 

2 hours ago, Mugen said:

Even for someone with only experience in d20, it was not good.

I didn't mean to imply that it was good, only that it makes sense when viewed from D&D mechanics.

Here's another example: In D&D magical weapons do full damage to beings that are invulnerable to normal weapons (shapeshifters, for instance). In RQ such weapons only do their magical component. Against a werewolf, a sword temporarily enchanted to +2 in D&D would do 1D8+2 plus any other bonuses the player had from strength, feats, etc.. A similar sword with Bladesharp 2 on it in RQ (or similar BRP game) would only do 2 points to the werewolf.

Guess how MRQ handled that? If you are thinking "Like in D&D" you're right. 

The thing is, someone who is very familiar with D&D,m, but who isn't familiar with RQ/BRP  is going to do that, and not notice they are doing it wrong, nor understand that they are when it get's pointed out to them. And that seemed to be the history of MRQ. Mongoose making "minor improvements" to the game mechanics and experienced RQers pointing out the "butterfly effect" of said changes Like when they came up with the idea of doubling the weapon damages to deal with complaints about the game no longer being very lethal, not realizing that, unlike in D&D, damage and armor are intertwined.. 

 

I used to see a lot of that sort of thinking from D&D players new to RQ, BRP, or whatever not-D&D game we were playing. Right up to two players in RQ,  with Healing 6, complaining about the lack of healing potions. 

 

 

[Mugen]

13 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

But again that fits with D&D game mechanics.

In AD&D you wanted to roll over to hit, and roll under when making skill proficiency checks.

Not in any official edition published in this century. 🙂

Unifying most of the mechanisms under one single "roll 1d20+bonus over a difficulty threshold" was a major improvement brought to the game by 3rd edition, even though you can still see OSR products that work differently.

And Mongoose is famous for publishing material for that edition, not AD&D.

[Atgxtg]

2 hours ago, Mugen said:

Not in any official edition published in this century. 🙂

No, but AD&D had worked that way for a couple of decades, so players were aware of it. D&D 3e came out at the beginning of this century and MRQ came outaroun d 2008. SO AD&D hadn't been "gone" so long that people forgot about it.

2 hours ago, Mugen said:

Unifying most of the mechanisms under one single "roll 1d20+bonus over a difficulty threshold" was a major improvement brought to the game by 3rd edition, even though you can still see OSR products that work differently.

Yes, Jonathan Tweet noted that the design team for 3e took a lot of inspiration from RQ, although mechanically 3e was probably closer to Rolemaster.

2 hours ago, Mugen said:

And Mongoose is famous for publishing material for that edition, not AD&D.

More like infamous. THe owner of my local gaming store tried to warn me off of preordering/buying MRQ because of this history of making bad D&D supplements. And the Mongoose forums were full of people asking if the game would be playable or need to be fixed in a second edition, like their other games. Mongoose philosophy was to follow the "80/20 rule", which Matt Sprange explained as people only play about 20% of the RPG products they buy with the other 80% sitting on their shelf. But from a business standpoint it doesn't matter if you are in the 20% or the 80% since you make the same money from the sale either way. So Mongoose mostly targeted that 80%. They presented their games so that people would buy them, but not necessarily play them. So quantity over quality. 

And they are still in business so they must have a point.

[smiorgan]

5 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Mongoose philosophy was to follow the "80/20 rule", which Matt Sprange explained as people only play about 20% of the RPG products they buy with the other 80% sitting on their shelf. But from a business standpoint it doesn't matter if you are in the 20% or the 80% since you make the same money from the sale either way. So Mongoose mostly targeted that 80%. They presented their games so that people would buy them, but not necessarily play them. So quantity over quality. 

And they are still in business so they must have a point.

They were right with me. I guess. I bought a lot of MRQ books, but the game got very little play. I think I ran a grand total of one session of MRQ Lankhmar - using the two-rolls parry rule! The MRQ Elric books were quite good and saw a little more use, but only because I cannibalized the parts that I liked for Elric games that used a different engine (RQ6 in one case and the venerable and beloved Stormbringer in another).

The lowest point was the Glorantha cult books. The one with the shamanism / spirit cults stuff was completely unplayable. The more mechanical sections, which were supposed to explain how shamanism worked read like the ramblings of a madman. But that wasn't the norm. Most Mongoose RuneQuest stuff wasn't bad at its core. It was *just* horribly edited. The MRQ Elric books were the best and, generally, the quality improved enormously when @lawrence.whitaker became their lead writer.   

    

[g33k]

Someone from the MD crew (after the Chaosium merger) said the sales-trends at Mongoose were just devastating.
Each book sold roughly 1/2 of the prior book.
RQ was absolutely tanking under Mongoose.

So glad that Loz&Pete left to found TDM!

I suspect it was a learning experience for MongooseMatt, as well:  Traveller is thriving over there, and it seems to have none of the QC and "don't get it" conceptual issues that the RQ line had.
 

[Atgxtg]

2 hours ago, smiorgan said:

They were right with me. I guess. I bought a lot of MRQ books, but the game got very little play. I think I ran a grand total of one session of MRQ Lankhmar - using the two-rolls parry rule! The MRQ Elric books were quite good and saw a little more use, but only because I cannibalized the parts that I liked for Elric games that used a different engine (RQ6 in one case and the venerable and beloved Stormbringer in another).

Yeah the 80/20 rule appears to be a real thing. Also the fact that companies make money when people buy the game, not when they play the game (and that is probably why WotC is trying turn turn D&D into a computer RPG) is an inherent problem with RPGs. I had a friend who loved Pendragon, but very little on it (bought the GM a couple of KAP5 supplments as a surprise gift). 

So if a company can get people to buy their games it doesn't matter if those games are any good or even playable. 

Now I think there is a problem with the strategy long term, but that only matters if you need repeat customers. Traveller seems to have gotten much better treatment.

2 hours ago, smiorgan said:

The lowest point was the Glorantha cult books. The one with the shamanism / spirit cults stuff was completely unplayable. The more mechanical sections, which were supposed to explain how shamanism worked read like the ramblings of a madman. But that wasn't the norm. Most Mongoose RuneQuest stuff wasn't bad at its core. It was *just* horribly edited. The MRQ Elric books were the best and, generally, the quality improved enormously when @lawrence.whitaker became their lead writer.   

    

Yeah, Loz did wonders for MRQ. But I think what might have helped more was the realization that they couldn't just do what they wanted with RQ, especially not with Glorantha. All that RQ stuff had a history, and backstory, and cosmology worked out decades before Mongoose got a hold of the rights. So trying to reinvent the wheel wasn't going to end well. 

[TheEnclave]

Late to the thread, but you could do what CoC does and use success levels. A character with 100 in a skill could still lose an opposed test if their enemy gets a hard success while the character only gets a normal success. This is how CoC's default setup balances certain monsters so they can be dangerous and have high skills, but not be completely guaranteed to land or block hits.

[Mugen]

6 hours ago, TheEnclave said:

Late to the thread, but you could do what CoC does and use success levels. A character with 100 in a skill could still lose an opposed test if their enemy gets a hard success while the character only gets a normal success. This is how CoC's default setup balances certain monsters so they can be dangerous and have high skills, but not be completely guaranteed to land or block hits.

Unless I'm mistaken, CoC 7th edition gives victory to he highest skill if they have the same success level.

That's a problem, as even a 1% difference in skill gives the highest skill a huge chance of success.

[TheEnclave]

20 hours ago, Mugen said:

Unless I'm mistaken, CoC 7th edition gives victory to he highest skill if they have the same success level.

That's a problem, as even a 1% difference in skill gives the highest skill a huge chance of success.

It does, but success levels in CoC 7th are based on fractions of your skill. A character with a 150% skill could roll a 94 to attack, which would be a normal success, while a character with a 25% in a skill could roll a 5 to attack, which would be an extreme success - 1/5th or less of his skill - therefore winning the roll.

In any d100 system single percentages give a higher chance of success, but it's not that dramatic in BRP. A percent is a percent. It's a little more impactful if using CoC's success levels though, because every % also increases the chances of higher success levels. However, those success levels themselves mean that having higher skills is better, but it never guarantees you're going to win every roll. As far as I know not even the strongest statted CoC enemies get much more than 100 in their combat skills, and it'd take a very long time and extremely lucky rolls for a player to get meaningfully higher than 100 either, so even if you're somehow dealing with skills in the hundreds, success levels can balance it out.

Edited July 3 by TheEnclave

[Atgxtg]

1 hour ago, TheEnclave said:

It does, but success levels in CoC 7th are based on fractions of your skill.

They are in BRP too. 

Critical is 5% of your skill, Special is 20% of your skill and so on.All that originated in RuneQuest, and was why people with over 100% in combat skills were so nasty. Not only with attacks but when they parried too, as differences in success levels could lead to weapon damage and breakage.

1 hour ago, TheEnclave said:

A character with a 150% skill could roll a 94 to attack, which would be a normal success, while a character with a 25% in a skill could roll a 5 to attack, which would be an extreme success - 1/5th or less of his skill - therefore winning the roll.

The same as in BRP. What CoC does have that BRP lacks is another success level at 1/2 skill.

1 hour ago, TheEnclave said:

In any d100 system single percentages give a higher chance of success, but it's not that dramatic in BRP. A percent is a percent. It's a little more impactful if using CoC's success levels though, because every % also increases the chances of higher success levels.

It's the same in BRP, except for the 1/2 skill band. That does help with opposed rolls and I wish BRP had it.

1 hour ago, TheEnclave said:

However, those success levels themselves mean that having higher skills is better, but it never guarantees you're going to win every roll. As far as I know not even the strongest statted CoC enemies get much more than 100 in their combat skills, and it'd take a very long time and extremely lucky rolls for a player to get meaningfully higher than 100 either, so even if you're somehow dealing with skills in the hundreds, success levels can balance it out.

Can but probably won't. Someone with a significantly higher skill level will have a significant advantage, which is as it should be. But that why you double and triple team them if you can. 

Plus in COC you're usually not sweating the skill levels of the Mythos nasties but their horrific stats, powers and invulnerability to the PCs weapons. 

[Mugen]

1 hour ago, TheEnclave said:

A percent is a percent. 

But still, when a character with skill 50 and another with skill 49 are matched, don't you think their chances of success should be roughly the same, with a slight advantage for the 50% skill ?

I don't have time to do the maths right now, but with CoC mechanism, the 50% skill has a far better chance to win the opposition than the 49%.