Topic: HARP Combat Tables "Math Borked?"

[trechriron]

I want to clear up the rumors, thoughts or misconceptions about the critical tables.

Some people over at theRPGsite believe the "math is borked" based on some comments from the former developer. I guess the story goes like this;

The combat tables were going to follow the design of "MERP" and it was decided to to combine the critical tables into the hit tables (a cool idea btw...), but the math was not "adjusted" to accommodate for the padding in the critical tables? It was suggested it was off by between 20 - 50. So the proposed solution would be to "pad" DB for certain characters like the Heroes, villains, etc. (my idea).

Is this an accurate complaint/revelation?

[Thom @ ICE]

HARP was released in 2003, and revision released in 2004.
Mjolnir continued to manage the product line until the end of 2010. There is no record that I can find of such a comment being made on these forums during those years.  I can't speak to whether or not the comment you are referring to was accurate or not when the original development occurred - but I can say that in my 11 years of gaming in HARP I have not seen that ever to be an issue.


Similar discussion of the topic of armor stacking occurred in this thread, including the current official interpretation. 


http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?topic=13386.msg171816#msg171816

[trechriron]

It wasn't on these forums, it was elsewhere.

But since it came up, and I had the realization that I had originally ran the combat wrong (without parry) it was just a question burning at the back of me nerd mind. :-)

[Thom @ ICE]

You can decide for yourself, but if it wasn't mentioned on these forums for 6 years of active play and development and was never questioned by forum members on the boards with the most active HARP population, then odds are even if there was some kind of error, it likely isn't significant.


We did find much more significant issues with the HARP system, but they were corrected in the 2011 release.

[NicholasHMCaldwell]

Such a comment was also never made to my knowledge during the original playtesting of HARP, nor did it come up in the 2004 revision (when there was an opportunity to make big fixes and there were big changes made) nor was it ever mentioned to me when I was writing College of Magics, HARP SF, HARP SF Xtreme. Nor was it ever mentioned on these forums when Mjolnir still held the licence and no one else ever suggested that the tables might be wrong..

So it may or may not be real but it does not appear to actually matter.

Best wishes,
Nicholas

[trechriron]

Yeah, I think perhaps it was a frustrated former party vs. actual facts. Looking at the game again, I feel that encouraging Parries would lessen the "deadliness" if that's even a problem. :-)