HP in RQG

[DreadDomain]

15 hours ago, Jeff said:

Actually, this was a recommendation from Greg which I agreed wholehearted with. In RQ3, large monsters had an insurmountable number of hit points. Giants and dragons - creatures with a ton of armor and deadly attacks, gained too many hit points. The conclusion was that the total hit points per monsters made more sense in RQ2 and better reflected Greg and Sandy's vision of those monsters, than in RQ3.

For what it's worth, flattening the HP curve was a good decision (IMHO). However, you cannot rescale (flatten) HP without scaling (flattening) damage and not get weird results. The problem is not with the vision, the problem is that vision could have been better executed from a game design perspective.

[Julian Lord]

7 hours ago, styopa said:

Personally I'd say a "good" system of mechanics for 'fantasy gaming' should scale?  It's a facet where RQ3 absolutely had a more rigorous approach (in HP, anyway).  

Likewise my previously mentioned issues with the SR system: it doesn't scale up at all.

Don't get me wrong, RQ2/RQG has a sweet spot and in that sweet spot (humans, with stats in a moderate range) everything does work perfectly.  If someone's whole game is about traipsing after lost/stolen cattle and breathless negotiations over the price of wheat, I agree, my 'edge case' issues totally don't matter. 

What I found in my own game, which was rather SuperRuneQuesty ( 😜 ), is that opposite issues could emerge both with creatures larger than average and those smaller than average -- and in the latter case, those could easily involve player characters if people wanted to play a duck or a value trollkin or etc. -- and that was on a RQ3 rules base.

But the counter-intuitive extra vulnerability of creatures larger than average also affected my ability to let players run say a dark troll or a morokanth ; while conversely the extra damage that they did from their extra SIZ+STR was also imbalancing.

And I came to the conclusion that BRP/d100 works well where every player character is human size or equivalent, without exceptions, but the ability in a Gloranthan or some other fantasy or science fiction setting etc to play a character a lot smaller or larger than a human leads to having to deal with these things in one's gaming sessions. (it worked really well in the Stormbringer game)

It's something that I never quite succeeded in finding a completely balanced and easily applicable solution for, though I did manage to come up with some design principles that seemed to help with some of the basic problems, that could even be viewed as rules bugs.

1) Shift all base human base stats up to 2D6+6 -- and then scale around average stats = 13 instead of 10-11

This one involved a LOT of detail work that I never came close to completing, as it means you need to re-stat every creature in the Bestiary ; but I was doing it piecemeal and as needed for my immediate game needs

And this change is mainly to make the ability to create characters smaller than average a bit easier, by increasing their potential range of stats into something more workable ; it also potentially opened the possibility of such things as timinit player characters and so on -- the knock-on effect on creatures larger than average actually worked out to be rather minor, because of the way RQ scaling works

2) Change all STR+SIZ damage bonuses to positive values, instead of having negative values for creatures smaller and weaker

This is easy in principle to implement, BUT the knock-on effects into the combat system are extensive -- because you end up un-balancing basically everything in it

Again, I never quite managed to re-balance this, except when it only involved creatures of average human size ; but accepting that as a compromise clearly would have ended up defeating the entire purpose of my house rules changes, so it wasn't good enough

It created secondary issues of what STR+SIZ tiers to use in the damage bonus table and what level of granularity and which general scale & rate of increase, but playtesting would eventually have solved them, so they weren't systemic

3) Balancing headaches & cans of worms

I *did* manage to work out as a principle of (** cough !! **) "realism" that the larger a creature is compared to a SIZ 1-3 base line, it should have a correspondingly larger kinetic/inertia resistance to being damaged, which balance should dictate as being cancelled out in relative terms between creatures in the same SIZ bracket, but then that opened another can of worms, as everything also needed to be balanced towards a human average stat of 13 ; trying to get both of those goals to work seamlessly and in conjunction is something I never quite achieved -- including because you can only really see if something works by playtesting it, and it required a LOT more playtesting than I ended up being able to manage

And the working temporary rules that I had to emulate that kinetic/inertia resistance to being damaged idea were very clunky -- I was starting to realise that it needed to be integrated into hit points and armour points instead of being an extra and new layer of protection, but to what ratio and with which values I never managed to work out before permanently leaving Paris and sadly no longer being able to play RQ ; I was also starting to realise that I would have needed to revise the damage values of all weapons (I don't think I needed to touch the values of pieces of armour, they were self-balancing from their RQ3 ENC & weight numbers)

If I'd had access to MRQ at the time, I would almost certainly have adapted the rules principles for HP from that game, as they do make many of the scaling issues of RQ2/RQ3 and now RQG that much easier to house rule -- just getting rid of the general HP stat as MRQ did helps get rid of a lot of the imbalances that can exist in very small and very large creatures, between general HP, hit location HP, and incoming weapon damage

Another general problem that I had was in trying to make sure I wasn't designing a completely different game to RuneQuest -- which again, would have defeated the purpose. These were substantial and massive changes to basics in the game design, so I always had to keep myself reigning things back towards the RQ "zone". or at least towards a BRP/d100 HeroQuest one.

It was and to an extent still is frustrating to me that I never managed to iron out all the kinks in that house rule design ... it was particularly difficult to get the damage bonus / weapons damage / AP / HP fully balanced but still fun and recognisably RuneQuest at every possible scale in my game ; but the design that I had probably never surpassed 65% - 75% project completion

Edited July 2, 2019 by Julian Lord

[Mugen]

2 hours ago, DreadDomain said:

For what it's worth, flattening the HP curve was a good decision (IMHO). However, you cannot rescale (flatten) HP without scaling (flattening) damage and not get weird results. The problem is not with the vision, the problem is that vision could have been better executed from a game design perspective.

Yes, something along the lines of Pendragon stats for monsters.

[Austin]

19 hours ago, Jeff said:

If the primary purpose of the rules for you is to model fights BETWEEN giant squids and whales, then I can't help you.

I think it's still relevant, as someone who one day, if I ever get to sit in a player's chair again, wants to go rampaging with a pet dinosaur. Maran Gor's got Command Dinosaur for a reason!

[Atgxtg]

9 hours ago, Joerg said:

K-strategy vs. r-strategy? Small creatures tend to have high reproductive rates and great losses to predators, which makes death a different proposal compared to a species that has a two year pregnancy followed by a two year period of lactation before the next fertile period (as elephants or mammoths have).

That's a great point. Plus smaller creatures ten to have shorter lifespans to begin with, so the loss of one individual isn't as great. 

 

9 hours ago, Joerg said:

Carnivores (behavioral, not the mammal clade) fighting carnivores is rare - there is one viral video showing an inconclusive three-way fight between a cape buffalo, a small pride of lions, and a huge crocodile, but that's about all the material I can think of besides mating or territorial fights between bears.

Yes, most prediators try for a quick easy skill. Getting hunt by the prey animal is very dangerous to the predator and can even be life threatening, if the predator sustains either a serious wound, or even a minor one that prevents it from being able to feed itself properly for a time.

9 hours ago, Joerg said:

But then, tieing hit points directly to life energy is a rules mechanism that needn't be optimal. Before I started playing RQ, I used to play a similar skill-based, damage-reducing armor system that had two kinds of hit points - life points that were lost only on un-defended hits (or falls, or...) and endurance points which were lost on successful defenses (and which doubled as magic points). A system like that makes the fight and retreat scenario more likely. In the end, there are other places in the rules that may create a better simulation, and RQ and related systems don't cover all those options.

Sounds like DragonQuest, which used Fatigue Points and Endurance Points.

IMO, the problems with large creature in RQ is that their damage goes up in big jumps (increments of d6) while nothing else in the game (sort of tank guns and heavy artillery) does, and that damage increase happens at a much faster rate than the ability to soak damage (hit points and armor points). 

 

One approach that might work is to do what was done with FUDGE/The Princess Bride RPG. In that game damage bonus from a great Body (STR and SIZ) stat cancel out, and it is only a difference in Body that matters. The idea being that larger tougher people (and animals) have more muscle, hide and fat to soak up the damage. If damage bonus dice canceled out in RQ, then larger animals wouldn't need a lot of hit points or lots of armor. Something like two lions or two bears would just be rolling normal claw and bite damage and I think the results would be more realistic.

[styopa]

17 hours ago, Joerg said:

But then, tieing hit points directly to life energy is a rules mechanism that needn't be optimal. Before I started playing RQ, I used to play a similar skill-based, damage-reducing armor system that had two kinds of hit points - life points that were lost only on un-defended hits (or falls, or...) and endurance points which were lost on successful defenses (and which doubled as magic points). A system like that makes the fight and retreat scenario more likely. In the end, there are other places in the rules that may create a better simulation, and RQ and related systems don't cover all those options.

Terrific point, actually.

I never played it but Harnmaster had a system that I thought was quite clever.  Rather than the reductionist and rather simplistic "hit point" model that pretty nearly every game relies on, their s was a 'resist the wound' model where damage was a certain number of points...iirc (this was a long time ago, so I may be mangling it badly), those points were compared vs the target's size basically, to determine if that was a light, medium, serious or critical wound.  Could be more likely to be at that upper end in sensitive hit locations, I think?  Anyway, then the wound-level was resisted by the characters CON with an array of possible results.  Whatever the result, light wounds cumulatively added like +1, med +2, serious +4, and crit +8 to the roll against your CON so it was never really mathematically simple to know how close you were to being incapacitated, you would just know like a normal person that "I'm getting pretty beat up and am going to fail one of these checks pretty soon".

Not to mention, such a model made it easy in that game to apply debuffs based on injury level, so unlike other games where people are prancing around at 1hp without any consequence, by the time you'd lost half your hp you were struggling.  That had massive impacts on (for example) the choice of weapon was critical as were the ability to hit FIRST (as injury was like real life a negative spiral). 

[styopa]

doublepost

Edited July 2, 2019 by styopa

[DreadDomain]

11 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

IMO, the problems with large creature in RQ is that their damage goes up in big jumps (increments of d6) while nothing else in the game (sort of tank guns and heavy artillery) does, and that damage increase happens at a much faster rate than the ability to soak damage (hit points and armor points). 

Exactly it. Just by curiosity, I looked at how damage versus HP scaled in other BRP games, I discovered that the flatter HP progression was RQG, with RQ3 and Mythras being very similar and the steepest was KAP (but damage also works differently). The game with the better HP to damage scaling was Mythras, followed by KAP and then RQ3. RQG is the worst by far.

[Atgxtg]

6 hours ago, styopa said:

.  Rather than the reductionist and rather simplistic "hit point" model that pretty nearly every game relies on, their s was a 'resist the wound' model where damage was a certain number of points...iirc (this was a long time ago, so I may be mangling it badly), those points were compared vs the target's size basically, to determine if that was a light, medium, serious or critical wound.  Could be more likely to be at that upper end in sensitive hit locations, I think?

BRTC's Timelords and related RPGs did something similar. It would compare the damage taken to the Body Point total of the target to determine the sevirty of the injury. So a 10 point injury to a character with 20 Body Points would be the same severity as a 6 point injury to an animal with 12 body points, or a 25 point injury to a being with 50 Body Points, or a 250 point injury to a creature with 500 Body Points. It scaled beautifully.

[Ochoa]

On 7/1/2019 at 1:16 PM, Joerg said:

RQG has the Battle skill, too, and maybe that is good enough for a spectator battle between two kaiju-sized opponents.

Is exactly how I would handle it.

[Mugen]

I don't own RQG, but I was surprised to see a 15m high Giant in RQ2 has 39 HP and 6 natural AP and has an attack that deals 12d6+2d8 with 110% attack chance (thanks to the fact there's , no upper limit to the impact of STR on attack skill). That's mostly due to ,the fact STR and SIZ grow with height, whereas CON remains the same.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that for a group powerful enough to resist his attacks, killing it would be quite easy, given the imbalance between offence and resistance.

Giants in RQ3 have CON that scales with height, and as such are very difficult to kill...

Edited July 5, 2019 by Mugen

[PhilHibbs]

1 hour ago, Mugen said:

Giants in RQ3 have CON that scales with height, and as such are very difficult to kill...

That's what Sever Spirit is for.

[Bill the barbarian]

1 hour ago, PhilHibbs said:

That's what Sever Spirit is for.

Alright Phil, yer outa yer corner, back to Egregious Munchkinerry fer you!

[Kloster]

4 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

That's what Sever Spirit is for.

Or smother (or steal breath with RQG). One of those CON Roll will be missed, and the damages will be every rounds.

Edited July 5, 2019 by Kloster

[PhilHibbs]

18 hours ago, Kloster said:

Or smother (or steal breath with RQG). One of those CON Roll will be missed, and the damages will be every rounds.

It seems a little odd to me that you can just as easily Smother or Steal Breath against a giant as against a human. They have much bigger, more powerful lungs. Oh well, it doesn't bother me that much.

[Mugen]

On 7/5/2019 at 11:32 PM, Kloster said:

Or smother (or steal breath with RQG). One of those CON Roll will be missed, and the damages will be every rounds.

 

On 7/6/2019 at 6:13 PM, PhilHibbs said:

It seems a little odd to me that you can just as easily Smother or Steal Breath against a giant as against a human. They have much bigger, more powerful lungs. Oh well, it doesn't bother me that much.

Well, if we're speaking of 16m high RQ3 Giants (as I was), it's not really easy to suffocate them as they have average CON around 94.

On the other hand, Sever Spirit works perfectly fine.

Edited July 8, 2019 by Mugen

[PhilHibbs]

55 minutes ago, Mugen said:

Well, if we're speaking of 16m high RQ3 Giants (as I was), it's not really easy to suffocate them as they have average CON around 94.

For RQ3, wher CON scaled with height, yes. That's why the sorceror in my game would throw multispelled 1-point Venoms at giants as each 1 point spell was 1 point of damage if it overcame MP. In RQG, CON is static. STR and SIZ scales, CON does not.

It is odd that giants have such low CON compared to other similar sized creatures like dinosaurs. I think that's a mistake - maybe it should not scale as steeply as STR and SIZ, since most big monsters have SIZ that is half again their CON and STR that is two to three times, but it should scale.

[Kloster]

1 hour ago, Mugen said:

Well, if we're speaking of 16m high RQ3 Giants (as I was), it's not really easy to suffocate them as they have average CON around 94.

Oh, it's easy. You just have to wait longer. The problem is staying alive while the giant is suffocating.

5 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

That's why the sorceror in my game would throw multispelled 1-point Venoms at giants as each 1 point spell was 1 point of damage if it overcame MP.

Yes, very efficient. Sadly, my character didn't knew Venom.

[Mugen]

10 minutes ago, Kloster said:

Oh, it's easy. You just have to wait longer. The problem is staying alive while the giant is suffocating.

On average, you'll need to wait for 20 rolls before they start taking damage (but it can also happen on turn 1, or after the duration of your spell, of course).

It's a good thing that the Giant only has ~40% attack skill, even though one hit will be sufficient to miserably end your life....

[Kloster]

4 minutes ago, Mugen said:

On average, you'll need to wait for 20 rolls before they start taking damage (but it can also happen on turn 1, or after the duration of your spell, of course).

It's a good thing that the Giant only has ~40% attack skill, even though one hit will be sufficient to miserably end your life....

Right. Better be prepared to run once you've cast the spell.

[Shiningbrow]

10 hours ago, Kloster said:

Right. Better be prepared to run once you've cast the spell.

That's what the Range manipulation is for.

[Kloster]

On 7/9/2019 at 4:11 AM, Shiningbrow said:

That's what the Range manipulation is for.

Yes, of course.

[soltakss]

On 6/29/2019 at 11:40 PM, galafrone said:

Hi there

i just wanted to know how the community feels about the HP being basically just a measure of CON with some little adjustments and not more the average of CON and SIZ

Actually with this system ducks have an average hp total of 12 and the dark trolls 13.. and if the latters are unlucky the can easily being worse than ducks.

So, fellow gamers, you are playing with the HP total as it is or ... not ?

This goes back to the RQ2 system, where HPs are based on CON, with a bit from SIZ and a bit from POW.

RQ3 had a simpler half of SIZ+CON, which was easy to calculate nut had big creatures with lots of hit points.

I suppose it all depends on what you want out of the game.

Do you want to be able to fell a giant with a sling shot? If so, then RQG Hit Points would work.

Do you think that a giant should be really hard to kill and should soak up damage? If so, then RQ3 Hit Points would work.