Topic: Large & Gigantic attacks

[markc]

I have not walked into any shop and called a game designer a whining sissy.

 IMO you have not lived a full life unless you have done the above and have the black and blues to prove it.
MDC

[Thom @ ICE]

Zedul,
I appreciate your comments, and certainly agree that a game that takes realistic roleplaying to such a high degree in skill development and resolution, combat and weapon/armor considerations should consider maintaining that all of the way up to those uber-monsters who would be a plot device in almost any situation other than when the characters themselves are also that extreme.

Is there any way you could take one uber-monster and set the abilities/stats to the level you would find to be more appropriate?  I would be interested in seeing where the shortfalls are specifically.

Your games sound like the must be incredible experiences - too bad you can't broadcast them on youtube or something.....

[Marc R]

I'll re-iterate that I find your goal laudable, but in my opinion your means strike me as being "off", not because you're wrong, but because you're offering a single stand alone change to play, which is neither simple, nor stand alone.

Heroic, or Epic fantasy is great. . .and the prime rule, before even rule 0 "The GM is always right" is "The players will leave if the game is no fun".

Everyone agrees on that point, I suspect.

The counter opinions in this thread you are getting are "I've not found it necessary to us +600 or +2000 OBs to form opponents into challenges for my players, I've used other tricks to get to the same end."

To which you keep harping on a point that RMSS is an example of stifling the high end of epic play. . .to which I offer this point based on my experiences:

"If you use the heavier mechanical elements like super OB/DB and immunities to jack up the higher end, you tend to need to push the PCs up to that end also, then suddenly 1st level enemies are no longer threats at all."

Which might be the dividing line between "Standard" and "Epic". . . .in one, Goliath is a dumb ass for not being worried that kid with the sling will kill him, in the other, Goliath won't be hit by the sling stone, and even if it does, it'll bounce off without serious injury.

This is an implicit problem with OB inflation. . . .in that due to the fact OB parry DB only affects one target, OBs in ranges as high as those bandied about here blow through any passive DB the RAW allows for, so you run up on sledghammer-eggshell complications where anytime you're attacked by someone you didn't parry, you die. . .so you jack up the passive DBs to compensate (I've been down the super high end game road before). . .when you get a DB like 200 or 400. . ..David goes from a viable threat to a one in a million fluke.

This changes the tone of RAW RM, which is an environment where 20th level paladins need to worry about being killed by obnoxious drunks who pick fights in taverns, not because said drunks are likely to win in a stand up fight, but because the odds of them getting a nasty single attack in are high. . .especially if they attack the pally 2 or 3 vs 1.

The primary reason why is because passive DB is low, and thus a drunk with a 20 OB with Dagger can kill you at 20th level. . .if you have a 200 passive DB there's no need to draw your sword, you can slap the three drunks into submission. (Which is what many other games feel like to me).

Of course, in that game, Goliath guts David, unless we assume David had a 500 OB with his sling. (He did have God's blessing, so perhaps).

There's nothing wrong with going out on that Epic end of the spectrum. . .I've had loads of fun out there, but you're not advocating a broad spectrum answer here on how to make large creatures work in RM, you're advocating a narrow answer of how to make high level monsters that happen to be large work in an epic flavor RM game. The 500 OB is not "How to make large monsters work." I suspect, having been out to the end of play you're playing at, that man sized and small monsters have very high OBs and DBs also, in order to be challenging.

I'm not saying your way is wrong, I tried to walk away with the YMMV above, but what you're selling doesn't match the label of this thread. . .. I'm 100% behind you offering advice on high end epic games, you likely have more experience on that aspect than any other poster in this thread. . .but if a GM looking to tune up his monsters a bit reads this thread and jacks up that Hill Giant to 600 OB. . .it'll be a disaster, because just making that one change as a stand alone won't make that GMs game Epic in scale, it'll just make that one monster a holy terror all out of scale with the rest of what's going on.

I'm down with Epic, I'd even be happy to see published material intended for Epic, but Epic is a holistic thing, requiring a bunch of changes, tweaks and adjustments, and what you do to make your game work is neither simple nor easy, and I'm guessing it took a lot of work over a lot of years to get the mix right.

That being the point I'm trying to make, that it's not that simple, and that the mid-high three digit OBs are not a simple plug and play solution for a GM looking to upscale large monsters, and that the "Epic Solution" is a bit more involved than just OB tweaking, and that if you want to open a thread to give the whole picture of Epic and all the Tweaks needed to make it work I'm 100% behind it, but jacking large monsters to Epic in a non Epic game would create more problems than fun.

Being the party pooper and pointing that out is necessary, only because a lot of people come here looking for game tweaking advice. . .and just jumping that hill giant to 600 OB without the rest of the bag of Epic scale tweaks and changes is more likely to result in a TPK than any other possible result IMO.

I've loved your posts lately, but I feel like I need to point out that context problem, because your Great advice for GMs looking for an Epic game might be really bad advice to a GM just looking to make a single stand alone fix to a non Epic scale game.

Does that make sense?

[Thom @ ICE]

The reason why David vs Goliath is so well-known in our culture is because it is such an upset. Goliath had absolutely no reason to fear David and did fully expect that the sling stone would do nothing significant to him.  Goliath was not a new warrior to the battlefield, he was a hero of his people and a giant among them.  David's slingstone even with a major open-ended roll would almost never have done what it did.... the key was that he was blessed by God to make that killing strike.

If a gigantic dragon strike can hit a 20'x20' area and he is focused on a target in that area, then unless the individual can clear out from that space they should be hit - and hit hard.  I believe the aspect that Zedul is portraying (and I could be wrong) is that someone trying to fight a dragon head on should not have a chance at all and the monster stats need to support that. That paladin needs to find ways to use other attacks to beat the dragon.

In your example about the drunks and the paladin... make it one drunk against an armored paladin with a sword in an open field.  The drunk is dead unless he is also a master of some form of martial art or gets a lucky open ended roll.  There is a difference between making all combat somewhat risky, and being realistic.

[Marc R]

The issue ties to passive DB. . .make it two drunks in an empty field, and the pally still needs to pay at least minimal attention to avoid gutting drunk 1 while being stabbed in the back by drunk 2. . .because passive DB for the 20th level paladin is so much smaller than their parry DB that the drunk you don't parry is about 20x more dangerous than the one you do.

If Combatant A for any reason has a 600 OB, and attacks you, if you attacked (and thus declared parry) on Combatant B. . .you are screwed. . .the die roll doesn't matter unless they roll low enough to fumble, because even a 50% attack for 300 OB is going to step on your passive DB and still bang out a 150+ attack. (It'd be worse in HARP where the crit is combined in, you'd literally die every time it happened and the attack maxed out).

Unless you go further and then start to tamper further with the system to raise passive DBs, then every combat resolves not on choices or die rolls, but that every time you guess wrong and fail to parry the person attacking you, you die. . .every time you get attacked by 2 or more opponents, you can't parry both, and you die. . .

Hence my point that to make OBs in that range work, you need to fiddle with the system more than just that one change, and based on the posts in the other thread, it's not just large monsters, it's all the high level monsters, and the PCs in Zedul's game that are sporting high 3 figure OBs. . .so his proposed tweak is not a "large monster" tweak, it's a bunch of "Epic scale combat" tweaks that in combination work.

I'd actually be interested to see that whole, but this isn't a simple plug-and-play stand alone tweak a GM can slot into play and not expect a disaster to result if the PCs don't flee combat successfully.

[Thom @ ICE]

If the guy has a 600 OB I wouldn't want to ever fight him without many allies, and full knowledge that some of my allies will die.  Isn't that the point?  Taking on a dragon in direct combat is suicide (99.99% of the time).  I leave that minimal chance for the extreme open ended roll which gets beyond the parry on the first strike.

As for the 2-1 paladin v drunks... Your statement is true. So be smart and either never let one get your back, or strike with no parry to kill the 1st drunk so you only risk yourself against the 2nd for 1 round.

If the issue is that a huge OB can give you a huge DB because of parry, then perhaps that is where the error in the system is.  For combat perhaps there needs to be a post-hit damage adjustment which effectively can not be used to parry for DB, but can still increase OB significantly in the appropriate situations.

[Cormac Doyle]

NB - This is purely SPITBALLING ...

Perhaps for "damage Adjustment" purposes (typically due to a size adjustment - a tiny creature hitting a normal sized one: Pixie vs Human; or a normal one hitting a huge one: Human vs Dragon), we should implement the attack normally, with normal OB and DB, but implement a damage adjustment to the hits, and/or the crit AFTERWARDS.

This means that the OB and DB can scale normally, without having to resort to game-distorting OB/DB modifiers, but the larger/smaller target will still suffer a comensurably larger or smaller amount of damage than they would if being hit by a foe the same size they are.

This the "requirement" for OBs or DBs that scale past the "normal" upper limits of 125-175 is dramatically reduced ...

In game terms, this might turn out as: sure, you hit the dragon head on (net roll of 100 against AT 19), but after applying the damage mod, no critical is accorded, and the dragon suffers 1 hit of damage ...

Thus your dragon only needs 150 hits, and an OB of 175, DB 45 and is still very scary ... because the type of blow that might do
"25 E slash" to another human suddenly gets converted to "5 A slash"

Meanwhile, another dragon attacking the same foe would do his 25 E Slash normally with his raking claw attack.

no need for "special" critical tables
no need for scale-distorting bonuses that break the normal OB/DB assumptions
no need for "Wrapping the chart" because the final roll was 726 (due to a 650 OB)

Surely such a system makes more sense?

Of course, we then need to look at all of the "+50 Sword of Justice" ... and change it to a "+15 Sword of Justice which does size+1 crit damage"

Maybe it looks complicated at first ... but implemented CONSISTENTLY it would greatly simplify the system and make it much easier to scale any creature or encounter up or down ...

[Marc R]

Thom, the problem lies in this, I saw the OBs demonstrated for PCs in the other thread, and at super high levels, this creeps up. . .the diminishing returns logic can only do so much, and if the game allows high bonus items or special abilities. . ..

You, me and Cormac all have 400 OBs.

We encounter our evil twins, and engage in a fight.

Being good, we don't want to attack our mirror-mirror selves, so Thom attacks Evil Cormac, Cormac attacks Evil Marc, and Marc attacks Evil Thom.

We execute 200/200 OB/DB attacks.

Unfortunately, our evil twins declare attacks on their good twins, also at 50/50 splits of 200/200 OB/DB.

Result is that nobody is parrying anyone, because none of these combatants declared attacks on the person attacking them. (This happens, especially if the GM pre-declares the NPCs before the PCs declare, rather than just shading all the NPCs to auto attack the person who engages them.)

This is bad enough at 60/60 or 90/90 OB/DB splits, since likely the three of us have passive DBs in the 30-40 range, you're eating attacks like +20 or +60 net. . .with OB inflation in place, you're eating a +140 net attack.

i.e. unless you tamper with the parry rules to allow multiple parry, or inflate passive DB, then this kind of OB inflation becomes Stratego, where death occurs in initiative order, and the attack roll is essentially meaningless.

[Kristen Mork]

Having witnessed exactly the phenomenon Marc describes, for years I've allowed characters to use their parries against any attacker.  In RMSS, I actually make a half parry 15% activity.  You can parry two different attacks and still make an attack, or parry bunches of attacks while waiting for help to arrive.

I realize this makes my game less realistic (i.e., less deadly), but we like keeping the PCs around longer.  It also really highlights the difference between a PC (smart enough to parry) and a brainless undead (that never parries).  After all, as long as your OB is at least +30, then a penalty of -15 to get OB/2 added to your DB is usually a good idea (unless you know you don't need to defend yourself).

In RM2, we simply allowed a character to use their parry against any opponent, possibly broken into multiple blocks to deal with multiple opponents (e.g., +100 OB could be: +40 attack against goblin 1, and +30 DB against goblins 2 and 3).  For the last 10+ years, we also dropped any declarations.  I.e., you can parry any incoming attack (of which you are aware).  The key limitation stems from multiple attacks: if your opponent attacks you twice, then you need two parries to block both attacks.

[yammahoper]

A new rule that would eliviate many of the crrent inheirent problems: Parry is defined as a state of defense and applies to all frontal attacks.  Mnv'ing in combat to avoid being flanked would become very important indeed.

[markc]

 IMHO the OB/DB inflation problem can be a big one.


 I do like the idea of a specific damage reduction or absorption for creatures. Say Absorb 10 and Reduce Crits -1 for attacks of smaller size then X. You could even reduce it by size level or have different values for size levels.


MDC 

[Marc R]

It's only a problem if you don't bend something else to make it work, like a lot of the ideas here offer some options. . .my comments were mostly just aimed at making sure a GM reading this is aware, and if they choose to go with an OB escalation choice, they look at other potential angles to make it fit, and not just launch a single fix change like "Large = +200 OB, Huge = +400 OB" and not add any other factors or changes beyond that.

As I said, I'd be really interested to See Zedul's full option set, his game sounds like it has a lot of angles to it that sound similar, yet different from my own high end epic game experiences.

[Zedul]

IMHO the OB/DB inflation problem can be a big one.


 I do like the idea of a specific damage reduction or absorption for creatures. Say Absorb 10 and Reduce Crits -1 for attacks of smaller size then X. You could even reduce it by size level or have different values for size levels.


MDC

Epic Super Larger creatures have anywhere from -20 to -120 crit reduction in my campaign.  "Vorpal Weapons" give a standard +20 to all critical rolls.

Alchemical enchantments are all set at standards... each magical material has maximum enchantments and there is a limit to what can be embedded.  I use a pretty complex system but the general rule is that no material can be enchanted over 100% of its inherent bonus and enchanting those things up take away from other abilities.

For example:  Eog is +35, the absolute Maximum an Eog sword can be enchanted is +70, or double its natural bonus.  Alchemists can enchant a +1 bonus for every 3 levels.  Thus it would take a level 105 alchemist to enchant an Eog sword to its maximum.  Furthermore blowing all of the structure of the Eog to bring it to it's maximum potential means that no other spell can be enchanted into it.  A +70 Eog sword has to be plain, it cannot contain any other spells or abilities because it is "loaded out" so to speak.  These are the type of hard rules that set upper limits to epic campaigns.  All my NPC's as well as my PC's must abide by the power constraints I create with "artificial physics".   Spells are limited to x10 dmg by loading... say a fireball is pumped up to x11 the caster must make a roll against causing a reality breach by concentrating too much power in one area.  Reality itself only supports so much power before dimensions are breached and crossed.

Some of these ideas were inspired by the "Earthsea Trilogy" and Amthor's "Shadow World".

I keep a list of the top 10 offensive bonuses ever achieved by player characters in the past 20 years and despite the fact that this party as a whole is now near the highest level any total party has ever achieved, the record has not yet been broken and still belongs to a high warrior monk from 15 years ago. 

I have a gold standard monster that sets the upper limits of my campaign.  We have no power creep.

More later, limited time today.

[Ravenheart]

Old topic, I know. Didn't care to read the whole thread, just posting how I (as a GM) solved this..

Table does not end in 150. It rolls around and around...+600OB - 150 DB results in hit of +450. It's 3x150, all damage added together and criticals too. Crits are rolled once, add the penalties together using common sense (ie. -75 severed leg is not -225).

Natural weapon tables roll only with Huge attack sizes.

I use the Throw Weight rules from Guildcompanion for Large and Super-large creatures. I use considerably higher attack bonuses for all creatures and monsters in the book, adding at least +50 to everyone. These two options result to the fact that the giant with a tree as a weapon, almost always hits and the damage is huge. Dragon's tail sweeps the landscape and heroes go flying unless they are very,very quick & agile. Parrying is of no use because of the attack size difference. That said, maybe some smaller giants facing wall shields found 'em harder to hit.