Runequest like CoC 7th Edition?

[JPierson71]

Hey all, quick question here. So I am fairly new to Call of Cthulhu (coming in with 7th edition) and love the mechanics of that game. Namely, the combat in melee. I'm curious if this new version of Runequest uses those same mechanics? The part I enjoy most is that when a "fighting" roll is made, the opponent also gets to make a fighting roll. Is that the same in this edition or is it just simply using "dodge"? Thanks all!

[jajagappa]

11 minutes ago, JPierson71 said:

I'm curious if this new version of Runequest uses those same mechanics?

No, RQG is a "grittier" level of combat (plus a lot more hand-to-hand combat weapons), though not dissimilar in concept. One makes an attack roll, the opponent chooses whether to parry with their weapon or dodge.

[g33k]

3 hours ago, JPierson71 said:

Hey all, quick question here. So I am fairly new to Call of Cthulhu (coming in with 7th edition) and love the mechanics of that game. Namely, the combat in melee. I'm curious if this new version of Runequest uses those same mechanics? The part I enjoy most is that when a "fighting" roll is made, the opponent also gets to make a fighting roll. Is that the same in this edition or is it just simply using "dodge"? Thanks all!

It's not the "same" mechanics; but it has the "same" feature of attacker rolling their attack and defender rolling to defend.  Dodge is one of the options, but so is a "Parry" which might done by a weapon, or a shield.

In any of the 3 cases (weapon parry, shield parry, or Dodge) the defender is rolling a skill in a way that parallels the attcker's skill roll.

Edited April 9, 2019 by g33k
Mobile keyboard SUX0RZ

[JPierson71]

Quote

On 4/8/2019 at 9:06 PM, g33k said:

It's not the "same" mechanics; but it has the "same" feature of attacker rolling their attack and defender rolling to defend.  Dodge is one of the options, but so is a "Parry" which might done by a weapon, or a shield.

In any of the 3 cases (weapon parry, shield parry, or Dodge) the defender is rolling a skill in a way that parallels the attcker's skill roll.

 

With me not knowing, would "Parry" stand a chance at all to harm the attacker? I think that's the best part of melee in CoC. That way you REALLY think twice about getting into melee with someone. 

[DerKrieger]

6 minutes ago, JPierson71 said:

With me not knowing, would "Parry" stand a chance at all to harm the attacker? I think that's the best part of melee in CoC. That way you REALLY think twice about getting into melee with someone. 

It can but usually all it will do is block an attack. An extremely well done parry vs a normal attack can end up with your parry damaging the attackers weapon even going so far as to break it. You still think twice about getting into a melee though as all it takes is one good hit and you are injured and possibly unable to defend yourself. Also you could be the best warrior in all of Glorantha but if 4 enemies are swinging at you it gets harder and harder to block so at least one of those attacks is going to get through.

[JPierson71]

Oh man that sounds good. I really enjoy the less "heroic" side of things. Where choices can be deadly

[Atgxtg]

2 minutes ago, JPierson71 said:

Oh man that sounds good. I really enjoy the less "heroic" side of things. Where choices can be deadly

You might like Pendragon even more then. In Pendragon they don't have attack and parries and instead melee combat is handled with an opposed roll. The winner inflicts damage on the loser.  It does make you think twice because if the other guy is a lot better than you you'll take damage and he probably won't. 

[g33k]

2 hours ago, JPierson71 said:

Oh man that sounds good. I really enjoy the less "heroic" side of things. Where choices can be deadly

RQ combat is VERY deadly.

It is crunchy & simulationist, and still quick.  40 years on and I still consider it a top-tier exemplar of rules.  Hit+locations and HP/location (and armor/location) are integral parts of RQ combat and indeed the setting itself.  I don't recall if CoC7e has this as standard, or optional, or not at all, though the basic core d100 roll-under is of course BRP.

I'm going to presume it doesn't, to clarify RQG combat.  I suggest you d/l the (free) character-sheet from Chaosium, to help make sense of the following...

In RQ, hit-points are derived mostly from CON, so mostly peak at 18 (though lucky rolls and minmax design might theoretically get you well up into the 20's).  More critically, you have 7 hit-locations with much-lower hit-points in each location.  The attacker rolls a d20 for location alongside the d100 attacking skill, to see where the hit lands.

Armor subtracts from damage, and armor is ALSO per-hit-location.  Some gods may inflict geasa upon a follower to, e.g. "wear no armor on the left leg," etc (as I said above, the setting influences things).

The character sheet has a "Man Rune" prominently showing, with hit-locations & HP & armor in each location.  This makes for a VERY quick & easy-to-use visual interface, so having 7 different HP tracks doesn't actually slow down combat at all, in my experience.

Indeed, RQ combat is quick, often frighteningly quick if you care about your PC...

One solid hit is often enough to take a location to zero (or below), incapacitating that location:  a leg won't bear weight, an arm will drop anything held, a head will go unconscious, etc. ( I am a bit more generous on this point than some, house-ruling that a 0-hp leg still allows a DEX roll to prevent falling, a 0-hp abdomen allows a CON roll to prevent dropping in agony from the ruptured organs, etc.  But that's a roll each round, getting harder each round, and harder/impossible if you try anything "hard"; and negative HP's in a location is still insta-drop.  OTOH, I am also nastier, sometimes inflicting e.g. a DEX roll (not required under RAW) on an injured limb, in order for it not to fail under an exceptional effort, etc... ) .  Specials and Criticals do things like maximize damage, slip through the cracks to ignore armor, or leave pointy things stuck in the victims.

This gives combat an "emergent narrative" quality, where crunchy simulation leads naturally to dramatic stories... THIS character looses their sword, and backs away desperately parrying with a little buckler; THAT one took a dizzying head-shot, and only has 2hp left in the location, THOSE two dropped their foes in one hit, and look around for better challenges...

It is entirely possible for a character to be dropped with the first hit, in the first round; even a hero-level character.

Experienced RQ players look for opportunities to attack with surprise, or from ambush, to volley ranged attacks, to attack with numerical advantage; and often, to retreat if the foes have such advantages!  In the world of Glorantha, surrender and ransom figure prominently.

[klecser]

2 hours ago, g33k said:

It is crunchy & simulationist, and still quick.  40 years on and I still consider it a top-tier exemplar of rules.  Hit+locations and HP/location (and armor/location) are integral parts of RQ combat and indeed the setting itself.  I don't recall if CoC7e has this as standard, or optional, or not at all, though the basic core d100 roll-under is of course BRP.

CoC does not have hit+locations nor armor for separate locations, and as far as I know not even optional. As someone very experienced with CoC and a veteran role-player for quite some time, the elegance of Runequest's utilization of BRP was immediately interesting to me. I've never seen a game do so much with so little. And I mean that in a complementary way.

I don't think RQ and CoC combat can be fairly compared. CoC is, by its nature, a very anti-combat game and the mechanics reflect that in their hyper-simplicity. I do think that the TC should pick up the RQ quickstart because it sounds to me that they will like RQ combat based upon the bits they like about CoC combat.

Edited April 11, 2019 by klecser

[trystero]

I do wish that RQG was a bit more like 7th-edition CoC, myself. I'd love to see "fight back" as a third defense option (in addition to "dodge" and "parry"), and would similarly love to have percentile characteristics that can be directly opposed to each other or to skills, ditching the Resistance Table.

That said, they're not so different; you can definitely blend the bits you like in each game. It's just a bit more work.

[drablak]

44 minutes ago, klecser said:

CoC does not have hit+locations nor armor for separate locations, and as far as I know not even optional.

Armor p.108 and hit location table p.127. Armor is not often used, and normally you roll LUCK to see if the armor is hit, but there is an optional rule to roll 1d20 for hit location.

[Christoph Kohring]

48 minutes ago, JPierson71 said:

Oh man that sounds good. I really enjoy the less "heroic" side of things. Where choices can be deadly

You might like [HeroQuest] even more then. In [HeroQuest you] don't have attack and parries and instead melee combat is handled with an opposed roll. The winner inflicts damage on the loser. It does make you think twice because if the other guy is a lot better than you you'll take damage and he probably won't. 

(Sorry, I couldn't resist... )

[klecser]

8 hours ago, drablak said:

Armor p.108 and hit location table p.127. Armor is not often used, and normally you roll LUCK to see if the armor is hit, but there is an optional rule to roll 1d20 for hit location.

Thanks for the correction on the hit location table. I didn't mean to say that there isn't armor at all in CoC. I can see how what I typed doesn't match what was in my head. What I meant is that you don't regularly track armor and hit points for individual body locations as a regular part of CoC like in RQ. A CoC investigator doesn't gear up with a head piece, vambraces, leg pieces, etc. That may exist as a variant rule in Dark Ages. As you say, someone might be wearing a vest, and you check to see if the vest is hit. But it doesn't alter the fact that your hit point total is what would be reduced, not a chest region hit point value. TC clearly wants to know if they are similar and I think it is fair to say that they are not.

Edited April 11, 2019 by klecser

[drablak]

2 hours ago, klecser said:

Thanks for the correction on the hit location table. I didn't mean to say that there isn't armor at all in CoC. I can see how what I typed doesn't match what was in my head. What I meant is that you don't regularly track armor and hit points for individual body locations as a regular part of CoC like in RQ. A CoC investigator doesn't gear up with a head piece, vambraces, leg pieces, etc. That may exist as a variant rule in Dark Ages. As you say, someone might be wearing a vest, and you check to see if the vest is hit. But it doesn't alter the fact that your hit point total is what would be reduced, not a chest region hit point value. TC clearly wants to know if they are similar and I think it is fair to say that they are not.

Totally agree with you here, I thought you meant something else, sorry.

[jps]

Both are basically BRP derivatives so highly compatible. If you want to insert CoC chase rules into RQG for instance, you easily can. Still, as everybody underlined, you'll have many rules' adaptations (no Luck points but Runes and Passions, a dangerous combat system but healing magic, etc.)

[DreadDomain]

22 hours ago, trystero said:

I do wish that RQG was a bit more like 7th-edition CoC, myself. I'd love to see "fight back" as a third defense option (in addition to "dodge" and "parry"), and would similarly love to have percentile characteristics that can be directly opposed to each other or to skills, ditching the Resistance Table.

That said, they're not so different; you can definitely blend the bits you like in each game. It's just a bit more work.

I am with you with the Fight Back option, it would have been great. However I haven't thought deeply about the implications.

I would also have preferred the Resistance Table to dissapear but I just don't like CoC percentile attributes. Not that there is anything wrong with them but they just clash with my BRP paradigm. On top of it when attributes for critters get above 100, it is just ugly.

All in all, compared to RQG, CoC combat is simple and streamlined. It has an elegance that RQG lacks. I have a feeling the focus for RQG was too much around making it as close to RQ2 as possible. It left RQG combat in an awkward space where it is crunchy but not quite simulationist, nor highly tactical and certainly not streamlined.

[Bill the barbarian]

On 4/10/2019 at 2:50 PM, Atgxtg said:

On 4/10/2019 at 2:45 PM, JPierson71 said:

Oh man that sounds good. I really enjoy the less "heroic" side of things. Where choices can be deadly

 

I think you might well mean more heroic . It is not very heroic if you are nor afraid of gearing hurt. When choices can get deadly the true hero steps forward.

[Bill the barbarian]

12 hours ago, jps said:

Both are basically BRP derivatives so highly compatible. If you want to insert CoC chase rules into RQG for instance, you easily can. Still, as everybody underlined, you'll have many rules' adaptations (no Luck points but Runes and Passions, a dangerous combat system but healing magic, etc.)

When Dorastor - Land of Doom came out SAN rules were offered as an optional set of rules to go with the madness of this chaos blasted region. The only question was how much SAN loss would a ghoul cause a battle hardened war vet.

[Atgxtg]

On 4/10/2019 at 10:06 PM, trystero said:

I do wish that RQG was a bit more like 7th-edition CoC, myself. I'd love to see "fight back" as a third defense option (in addition to "dodge" and "parry"), and would similarly love to have percentile characteristics that can be directly opposed to each other or to skills, ditching the Resistance Table.

I've been working on something along those lines. Everything is rated on % scale, and it uses opposed rolls. I've been fiddling with it, and currently it uses the ones die to determine success level. In RQ terms a roll under skill that is 0-7 would be a success, 8-9 a special, and if the tens die is even then rolls that in in a 9 are a critical (09, 29, 49, 69, 89).  So there is no need for a resistance table or a success level table.

 

[Jeff]

5 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

When Dorastor - Land of Doom came out SAN rules were offered as an optional set of rules to go with the madness of this chaos blasted region. The only question was how much SAN loss would a ghoul cause a battle hardened war vet.

Hah - we have gone around and around on this. I did NOT include SAN rules in RQ for the simple reason that by CoC standards, ALL RQ characters are already at 0 SAN.

[Joerg]

1 hour ago, Jeff said:

Hah - we have gone around and around on this. I did NOT include SAN rules in RQ for the simple reason that by CoC standards, ALL RQ characters are already at 0 SAN.

Still, the SAN loss consequence rules are probably a good start for handling the exposure to the Kabalt liberating bolt attacks, once we get around to deal with Eastern Gloranthan mysticism.

[PhilHibbs]

SAN loss occurs when a modern, rational, scientific mind is confronted with the impossible. In Glorantha most people can believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Edited April 12, 2019 by PhilHibbs

[g33k]

Yes, but only the truly hardened (or those utterly broken & unshackled by any SAN whatsoever) ask about Gloranthan stirrups.

[Bill the barbarian]

3 hours ago, g33k said:

Yes, but only the truly hardened (or those utterly broken & unshackled by any SAN whatsoever) ask about Gloranthan stirrups.

Or dare to enter the thread called "Prax and the thousand questions about the place."and ask about the lost LongNose Tribe... SAN rolls for the table!

No,,, the horror, the horror...

[Joerg]

Now now, such threads show the true value of illumination or other ways to enlightenment (which are btw other such threads). You don't become any more stable, but you learn to compartmentalize.

Mystics learn from austerity. The Glorantha tribe (aka its fandom) member goes where these questions are to experience similar conditions for their meditations.