Humakt Gift+True Sword

[Tywyll]

One of Humakt's Gifts allows a weapon to do double damage.

True Sword allows a weapon to do double damage.

Do these things stack?

[womble]

They do IMG. But 2 double damages isn't quadruple damage. I consider 'double damage' as "+100% damage", so one application is doubling, a second will triple, and so on. So your example would do triple damage, IMG.

Where such multipliers are directly additive is when they are applied separately because of some condition. So if a power gave you "double damage that gets through armour" on top of your above example, you'd have 3d8+3 for a Broadsword to get past armour, and all the damage that got through would then be doubled. If you had two such double-through-armour powers, they'd add in the same way the outside-armour multipliers do, to make the damage that gets through tripled.

[HreshtIronBorne]

In our Glorantha they all stack and interact fully with impale and slash. So My Humakti uses a greatswords, with Truesword he hits for 4d8 and specials for 8d8. The blessing Double Damage (Once armor is penetrated) would fully double whatever damage got through armor, like hitting an Uz or an Aldryami with Iron, so would any of the locational or species specific doubling past armor. 

Edited December 4, 2018 by HreshtIronBorne
I cannot spell, apparently.

[soltakss]

On 12/4/2018 at 8:23 PM, Tywyll said:

One of Humakt's Gifts allows a weapon to do double damage.

True Sword allows a weapon to do double damage.

Do these things stack?

In my games, yes they stack. Other people don't allow them to stack.

Iron also does double penetrating damage to Trolls and Aldryami, so an iron sword with Truesword and double damage doubles, doubles again, subtracts armour and doubles again. Happy days.

[PhilHibbs]

On 12/4/2018 at 8:43 PM, womble said:

Where such multipliers are directly additive is when they are applied separately because of some condition. So if a power gave you "double damage that gets through armour" on top of your above example, you'd have 3d8+3 for a Broadsword to get past armour, and all the damage that got through would then be doubled. If you had two such double-through-armour powers, they'd add in the same way the outside-armour multipliers do, to make the damage that gets through tripled.

Seems to me that you're saying they don't stack just because you can, because it is mathematically possible. But when there's a reason you can't, you have to allow it.

[womble]

3 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Seems to me that you're saying they don't stack just because you can, because it is mathematically possible. But when there's a reason you can't, you have to allow it.

Then you're not reading what I wrote because 'not stacking' means you only get the one multiplier: "Two applicable damage multipliers? Sorry bud, only one counts" That's 'not stacking'.

Like anyone needs quadruple damage. Or it should be easy to get.

[PhilHibbs]

20 hours ago, womble said:

Then you're not reading what I wrote because 'not stacking' means you only get the one multiplier: "Two applicable damage multipliers? Sorry bud, only one counts" That's 'not stacking'.

So Truesword doubles damage before armour, then iron doubles it after, which do you apply vs a heavily armoured troll?

[womble]

Er, both. Like logic would dictate? And like I said in the post you're trying to pick holes in. One doubles the damage before armour, the other doubles what's left after the armour's taken off that first double damage. So the (2 doubled to) 4d8 greatsword rolls (or it rolls 9 and you double it to) 18, add the d4 damage bonus for 3 more, makes 21. Minus a notional 12 points of armour and other protections on the location struck, and you get 9 through, doubled to 18 HP of damage. Easy. And probably dropping the troll.

If your Humakti had 'double damage' as their Geas, that initial hit would be 6d8 (not 8d8) or 2d8 tripled (not quadrupled), under my scheme. So 30 hitting the armour, and 18 gets through doubled to 36 damage to the troll.

[PhilHibbs]

On 12/8/2018 at 11:03 PM, womble said:

Er, both. Like logic would dictate? And like I said in the post you're trying to pick holes in. One doubles the damage before armour, the other doubles what's left after the armour's taken off that first double damage. So the (2 doubled to) 4d8 greatsword rolls (or it rolls 9 and you double it to) 18, add the d4 damage bonus for 3 more, makes 21. Minus a notional 12 points of armour and other protections on the location struck, and you get 9 through, doubled to 18 HP of damage. Easy. And probably dropping the troll.

If your Humakti had 'double damage' as their Geas, that initial hit would be 6d8 (not 8d8) or 2d8 tripled (not quadrupled), under my scheme. So 30 hitting the armour, and 18 gets through doubled to 36 damage to the troll.

So doubles before armour do not stack (adding up multipliers, rather than just multiplying). Doubles after armour do not stack (iron + Humakt gift = x3 not x4). But doubling before and doubling after do stack. That's the disparity that I take issue with, the selective application of multiplicative and additive stacking. Why stack a before-armour and an after-armour, but not two befores, or two afters?

Edited December 10, 2018 by PhilHibbs

[womble]

Because they occur at different times in the damage resolution process. Still, you're saying different bonuses don't stack, which simply isn't true. They stack, just not geometrically: they don't work on each other. They do all work on the original damage value. "Not stacking" means you would only get the benefit of one.

Frankly, if your pre-armour doubles are ruled to combine geometrically, how you treat post-armour damage is going to matter pretty much never.

I don't see the disparity. And I have game prep to do, so I'm not going to wrack my brain about how to explain it. Our Gloranthas will evidently vary. Note that there are very few geometric progressions in the rules.

[PhilHibbs]

28 minutes ago, womble said:

Still, you're saying different bonuses don't stack, which simply isn't true. They stack, just not geometrically: they don't work on each other... "Not stacking" means you would only get the benefit of one.

Well, the OP simply asked "do they stack", and I think it's clear what he meant in the context. I can't imagine anyone ruling that only one of them applies.

28 minutes ago, womble said:

Note that there are very few geometric progressions in the rules.

The only other instance of points doubling that I can think of is MP cost for sorcery with secondary runes and techniques, and that explicitly does go up geometrically.

It does say that magical damage is not doubled for specials and criticals. I'd be ok with that meaning that a Truesword special isn't 4x, i.e only 3d8+3 rather than 4d8+4. The Spirit Combat chapter is clear that half of the Truesword damage is magical. I still think that after-armour doubles should stack geometrically, so 1 point getting past armour on a troll with iron and a Humakti gift means 4 points.

I can see some justification for not wanting magical damage to get the doubling of iron, but I can't see a god way of doing that. The mechanics would be really ugly and confusing. You could just say that non-magical damage is blocked by armour first, and if only the magical part gets through, then it is not doubled. I can imagine the player saying "Er, dunno, I just rolled 2D8, and they're both the same colour".

I'm fine agreeing to disagree, though, I wouldn't feel aggrieved or refuse to play in a game over it!

[Gallowglass]

Resurrecting this thread because I basically have the same question as the OP, and I still don't quite get how the damage multipliers work. Sorry, this has probably been covered elsewhere. I've been digging around, but I still can't find an explanation that makes sense to me. 

Let's say I'm playing a Humakti with a greatsword (2d8 base damage), and I have the Gift that doubles damage after armor is penetrated. First I'm assuming that I should roll damage for everything else, then factor in the Gift as the last step.

So I cast Truesword, doubling my damage to 4d8. Then I attack my enemy, and roll a special success. Do I double 4d8 to 8d8? Or just double the base damage and add another 2d8, making 6d8 total? I'm leaning toward the latter option, because I thought that magical effects don't get multiplied on a special or critical. 

Anyway, now let's say that I penetrate my opponent's armor, and multiply my damage again. It should be either 12d8, or 16d8, depending on your interpretation of the rules, correct? Just trying to understand how it works. The special/critical question is the important one for me. 12d8 is a LOT of damage, but 16d8 is enough to chop the Crimson Bat in half! I exaggerate, but only slightly. 

[HreshtIronBorne]

In our Glorantha my Hunakti with Truesword swings normally for 4d8 + DB, specials for 8d8 + DB, and crits for 64 + DB. His weapon is iron so a troll/elf would take double damage from whatever rolled damage happened to get past armor. With the Gift that doubles All damage that gets past armor we would double all rolled damage that got past armor, ya know after accounting for parries and magic and everything. 

 

An example:

Our PC rolls 51 on 153% skill, not a special crit or anything whether or not you reduce skills over 100. 

Rolls 4d8 + 1d6 gets 25, an excellent roll!

D20 is a 1, the left leg

The opponent parries with a regular bronze broadsword absorbing 12 points of damage, his protection 4 absorbs another 4 points, and his bronze greaves absorb 6 points, leaving 3 damage past armor. These 3 points would double to 6 damage to the Left Leg, in Our Glorantha. If it were a troll the damage would double again to 12 because iron. 

 

In our Glorantha these Gifts can be taken multiple times and are not exclusive with each other. A humakti would have a Gifted sword that double All damage past armor, All damage past armor To The Head, and All damage past armor to Broo. If you hit a broo in the head with the same stats as the earlier example the 3 points of final damage earlier would be double to 6, double to 12, then double to 24. Or 8x damage. 

[jajagappa]

So you start with your Greatsword and cast Truesword. Your roll will be for 4d8 damage. 

You make your attack roll and get a special. As a slashing weapon: The slashing weapon’s damage should be rolled normally twice and both results added together.

Effectively your slash damage will be 8d8. If you roll a 5, let's say, on each die, you're doing 40 points of damage to a given hit location.

The result now depends on whether your opponent parries. Let's assume they missed. 

Now it depends on their armor in the hit location.  Let's say they are wearing iron plate everywhere, so 9 pts, plus they know you're a Humakti with a glowing sword, so have Shield 3 up, which provides 6 points of magical armor. You hit their left leg.

40 points of damage - 15 points of armor = 25 points getting through the armor. Now your gift applies and doubles the penetrating damage, so 50 points against the leg. It's readily separated from the body at that point.

A bit extreme for a human opponent, but it's a Truesword!

If instead you're fighting a Dragonsnail with its normally 8 point shell which happened to get the chaos feature adding +12 armor twice, then your foe has 32 points of armor.

40 points of damage - 32 points of armor = 8 points penetrating. Double that and 16 points penetrate the shell. On average their shell part has 7 hit points, so you still land more than double the hit points in damage. And with a typical Dragonsnail having 15 hit points, that is likely enough to kill it. (And just hope it doesn't also have the chaotic feature of exploding on death!)

 

[Gallowglass]

Thanks for the responses, clearly it is the penetrating armor thing that I wasn’t understanding. That makes it less ridiculous. 

[Qizilbashwoman]

2 hours ago, Gallowglass said:

Thanks for the responses, clearly it is the penetrating armor thing that I wasn’t understanding. That makes it less ridiculous. 

when other people learned to have friends and cook food, humaktis studied death

they're super good at it

on the other hand, they are terrible at a lot of other things. these guys used to ritualistically murder Chalana Arroy healers because they sometimes undid death until the biggest humakti around killed everyone knew how to do the ritual.

it's a clear trade-off for "well, you might starve to death or die of illness alone, and mostly you dress in the clothing you scavenge off of people you kill because you have no kin". but yeah, they do hit really really hard

[g33k]

1 hour ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

when other people learned to have friends and cook food, humaktis studied death

they're super good at it

<heh>

This is very well-put!

Note that this even applies Mythicly -- in the Great Darkness, when everyone was trying to figure out how to feed themselves, and even mighty Orlanth was making allies to do the very first LBQ...

Humakt was studying Death.

[g33k]

52 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

... all missile fire targets them ...

All ranged attacks target them.

Nothing says "well THAT was a waste!" like a Humakti buffed with Sword Trance AND a bunch of Gifts on his sword...

 

... standing there, not merely 'Tranced, but also  Befuddled.

 

[Akhôrahil]

On 12/4/2018 at 9:23 PM, Tywyll said:

One of Humakt's Gifts allows a weapon to do double damage.

True Sword allows a weapon to do double damage.

Do these things stack?

Yes, but to a total of x3, not x4.

[Akhôrahil]

On 12/8/2018 at 10:09 PM, PhilHibbs said:

So Truesword doubles damage before armour, then iron doubles it after, which do you apply vs a heavily armoured troll?

This is a bit of special case, and here you would have to say that damage is doubled first, then you see how much gets past armor, and then you double that.

If you want a logical line of reasoning, it's because there are two different kinds of effects. One doubles the damage roll, the other doubles the damage inflicted.

Edited December 18, 2019 by Akhôrahil

[PhilHibbs]

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

Yes, but to a total of x3, not x4.

I disagree, it's x2 then take away armour then x2 on the remainder. So somewhere in between x2 and x4, maybe more than x3 and maybe less.

We could "agree to disagree" but x3 makes no sense at all. One is before armour, one is after, you can't just say "lets forget about armour and call it x3". Armour happens in between two separate steps, each of which are x2.

Edited December 18, 2019 by PhilHibbs

[Akhôrahil]

9 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

I disagree, it's x2 then take away armour then x2 on the remainder. So somewhere in between x2 and x4, maybe more than x3 and maybe less.

We could "agree to disagree" but x3 makes no sense at all. One is before armour, one is after, you can't just say "lets forget about armour and call it x3". Armour happens in between two separate steps, each of which are x2.

I didn't read it completely, and you're right in this case - because it's two different things that get doubled, they have to be tracked separately. However, if you get two doublings of the same thing, it's 300% - read "double" as "add 100% to base".

[PhilHibbs]

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

I didn't read it completely, and you're right in this case - because it's two different things that get doubled, they have to be tracked separately. However, if you get two doublings of the same thing, it's 300% - read "double" as "add 100% to base".

Naimless has two gifts of double damage - one general, and one to the head.

Adventure Book, page 30:

Quote

* Broadsword does double damage once armor is penetrated; quadruple damage if the location is the head.

It's always been that way in MOB's example of Lottery Swords for instance. I think the rule comes from the Sandy Petersen school of game mecanics.

Edited December 18, 2019 by PhilHibbs

[Brootse]

With the old Lottery Swords if a damage was doubled two times it became quadruple damage.

[gochie]

I believe we calculate "physical" damage (ie. weapon/Str/iron) first, and then multiply the total physical damage with the magical source. 

This will sound complicated but it's actually pretty easy to figure out in person... 

So, physical damage multipliers multiply eachother first, and Magical damage sources multiply the total physical damage at the end. Magical damage sources have no effect on each other. 

So Truesword on a great sword means 2d8 (physical) + 2d8 (magical).

If it's an iron sword, only the "physical" damage is doubled by the iron, so (2d8)*2 (iron)+2d8 (Truesword).

If you add the double damage gift (magical), only the physical damage is doubled, but it multiplies with other physical sources (weapon, STR, iron). So it becomes (2d8)*2(Iron/physical)*2(gift/magical)+2d8(Truesword). 

Add Bladesharp, and you just slap a +1 damage at the end. 

On an impale things get a bit nuts, and since it's physical, you multiply it with the other physical sources, before magical multipliers. So it would be (2d8)*2(impale)*2(iron)*2(gift)+truesword+bladesharp.

I hope this makes sense... Lol.