Official ICE Forums
Systems & Settings => Rolemaster => Topic started by: Hurin on October 14, 2013, 09:10:16 PM
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So, I just got into a discussion with someone on the DnD boards, and he claims (without any evidence, mind you) that ICE was not the inventor of the critical hit, and that the critical hit was in DnD 'since before Rolemaster existed'.
Can anyone give some hard evidence on this either way? Just wondering.
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Critical Hit was introduced by Iron Crown Enterprises in the first Arms Law (1980).
At that time D&D had just released AD&D 1st edition which had no reference to Critical Hits.
D&D introduced critical hits in Player's Option: Combat & Tactics (1995).
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Wikipedia says the first game with critical hits was Empire of the Petal Throne in 1975. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_hit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_hit) Assuming that's true, it would predate Rolemaster. I don't know what the mechanic was.
It certainly wasn't a rule in 1st edition AD&D or earlier versions of D&D. However, I stumbled upon this link http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2012/07/critical-hits.html (http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2012/07/critical-hits.html) which shows there was an article with a critical hit table in Dragon magazine #39 (July, 1980). Not sure if that was the first, but it doesn't mention anything earlier. It's also noted that Gygax opposed critical hits, so even though it was printed by TSR, I don't think it's accurate to say D&D had them. Arms Law came out in 1980 as well, I don't know if it was before or after July.
The Player's Option books were AD&D 2nd edition.
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Thanks for the digging. I don't personally consider the double damage result from a roll of 20 to be a critical hit.... but in that case Empire of the Petal Throne did beat out Arms Law - though it wasn't D&D.
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The Dragon magazine article is actually not half bad. But while one article may have been written at about the same time, the D&D rules set did not pick up that concept in the official rule books as jdale noted.
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There were certainly "house rule" criticals around before RM, but those tended to be "max. damage", "double damage", or other simple rules... and typically on a natural 20, with no connection to skill. An integrated and detailed set of criticals, such as RM uses, is a different beast altogether.
Technically, AD&D 1e did have critical hits... but they were limited to a handful of magical weapons that did their special critical damage on specified high die rolls. I expect one could find something that could reasonably be called a "critical hit" rule in some war game that predates D&D if you looked for it.
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Yeah, double damage for rolling a 20 doesn't really count as a true "Critical Hit" mechanic. Same name to the concept, but the result is very different between them and RM.
We actually went with rolling a 20 was x2 damage and rolling another 20 after that was insta-kill. Then we found the first Arms (Claw) and Spell Law books (and integrated parts/concepts from RM into D&D at that point).
I think the D&D we played (2nd Ed) was a good system, it just became too simplistic for us... which many people LIKE, so I'm not knocking it, it just wasn't out cup of tea. As I always said to people: Wouldn't you like that Fireball your 15th level Wizard just cast to, instead of merely cause 10d6 damage, do 42 points of damage, set your foes shield on fire, and cause them to be stunned for a round?
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Is it true that the first RM was a supplement for DnD as fighting mechanics?
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I think it'd be more accurate to say it was a supplement for whatever system you decided to put it with, and D&D so dominated the market that "for D&D" was pretty much assumed.
Of course, that also depends on how you define "the first RM." IIRC, the first ICE product was Arms Law, which I think was meant to be a supplement. By the time Spell Law and Character Law were out and the bundle being offered as "Rolemaster," I think the idea was that you could use parts as supplements for other games, use the bundle as a stand-alone game, or combine elements as you saw fit.
I've gotten the impression throughout the history of ICE that the idea behind RM has always remained the same: To give the GM control of his game, so that he can play the game he and his players want, not just the game that the designers were willing and able to put together.
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Is it true that the first RM was a supplement for DnD as fighting mechanics?
Read GOF's post above.
In fact, I found the very first Arms Law publication at a local hobby store during leave from the Navy in June 1980. I immediately used it as a supplement for DnD for critical hits and fumbles. I thought it was great someone was willing to show that pummeling each other until someone hits 0 hits is not true combat. It was those critical injuries that killed in combat such as a complete impaling with a sword, twist the sword, then wrench it out sideways. The decapitation. The severance of a leg without means to stop the bleeding. The complete crushing of the chest cavity due to a maul hit.
As far as I can remember, DnD 3e still did not have true critical hits (I finally sold the DnD 3e set I had). They still had the "double max damage" of whatever weapon you were using. For example, a long sword did d8 damage on a hit. On a critical hit (20 on a d20), the damage was automatically 16 hits. If the foe still has 30 hits left, then he is still alive and can possibly return the favor. NOT a critical hit.
In RM, with a long sword vs AT4, you might end up with something like: 17DS; "Sever foe's weapon arm and bury your sword into foe's side. Foe falls prone. Foe is in shock for 12 rounds, then dies." Now, THAT is a critical hit.
rmfr
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DnD 3ed had a crit range and damage multipliers. So a 19-20 crit range and x3 damage on hit I think was long sword. Which while you didn't have the beauty of a RM crit, you did get a large potential damage. 1/2 orc raging barbarian at 1st level could throw out 24-45 hits on a crit quite easily.
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I think we're safe in saying that as far as separate tables with specific, re-rolled results for all damage and weapon types, RM was the first. Like others, I don't consider a mechanic for additional damage based on a high initial damage roll (WHFRP had this as well) to be a "real" critical hit system. Vorpal blades certainly delivered critical hits, but that was a magical effect and limited to that specific type of weapon.
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I cited the Dragon article because it's unclear whether one of these was the first presentation of critical tables (and if so which one it was). Fumble charts too. But since the article is not a game, I think it's clear RM was the first game to have them.
Given the time it takes to get things into print (which was longer in 1980 than it is now), there's a good chance the article and Arms Law were written in complete ignorance of each other. Still curious what month Arms Law was released in, though....
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RuneQuest, now BRP.
20% chance special hit; impale, slash or crush. There were even rules for pulling out an impaled weapon, failure resulting spend another trying to pull it free or let it go/break weapon trying.
5% chance to crit, which ignored armor.
RuneQuest remains a great game too.
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I used the Dragon #39 crit system a lot in my old D&D days and we even created our own charts based on the idea.
MDC
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I cited the Dragon article because it's unclear whether one of these was the first presentation of critical tables (and if so which one it was). Fumble charts too. But since the article is not a game, I think it's clear RM was the first game to have them.
Given the time it takes to get things into print (which was longer in 1980 than it is now), there's a good chance the article and Arms Law were written in complete ignorance of each other. Still curious what month Arms Law was released in, though....
I had a couple of things come out in Dragon in the mid-1980s, and their turn time from acceptance to publication then was on the order of months. That makes it reasonably likely that the two were produced in relative ignorance of each other.
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I checked out the system of the Petal Throne and it doesn't even remotely have criticals in the sense that we think about them: they had special hits that ignored armor.
What they DID have is a very short hand fumble table: even per weapon type!
Also added Rolemaster and its crit system to the wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_hit#Types (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_hit#Types) (it is my first amendment btw)
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Arduin Grimoire (1977) had critical hit/fumble tables.
I think they were already a common HR, hard to tell who first came out with the idea.
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There's quite a bit more I recognize from RM in Arduin... albeit that they had but one critical table and one fumble table for normal cases and an additional table fro shapeless critters and for brawling. Also armor types; with respect to covering: quite the same as RM.
Here the link to the free download for Arduin Grimoire
http://empcho.bizhosting.com/ca_download.html (http://empcho.bizhosting.com/ca_download.html)
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Vlad, in the Wiki entry you might want to not that Rolemaster criticals can result in instant death. I know you noted that they can result in lost limbs and internal organs destroyed, which we might assume would cause death, but you might want to make it more clear that even instant death is a possibility. That's what to me really separates the RM critical hit from the others.
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in the 1st Edition DMG page 61, Gygax discusses the idea of heroic combat versus realistic simulation combat:
"Combat is divided into 1 minute period melee rounds, or simply rounds, in
order to have reasonably manageable combat. "Manageable" applies
both to the actions of the combatants and to the actual refereeing of such
melees. It would be no great task to devise an elaborate set of rules for
highly complex individual combats with rounds of but a few seconds
length. It is not in the best interests of an adventure game, however, to
delve too deeply into cut and thrust, parry and riposte. The location of a hit
or wound, the sort of damage done, sprains, breaks, and dislocations are
not the stuff of heroic fantasy. The reasons for this are manifold.
As has been detailed, hit points are not actually o measure of physical
damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as
well) are concerned. Therefore, the location of hits and the type of
damage caused are not germane to them. While this is not true with
respect to most monsters, it is neither necessary nor particularly useful. Lest
some purist immediately object, consider the many charts and tables
necessary to handle this sort of detail, and then think about how area
effect spells would work. In like manner, consider all of the nasty things
which face adventurers as the rules stand. Are crippling disabilities and
yet more ways to meet instant death desirable in an open-ended, episodic
game where participants seek to identify with lovingly detailed and
developed player-character personae? Not likely! Certain death is as undesirable
as a give-away campaign. Combat is a common pursuit in the
vast majority of adventures, and the participants in the campaign deserve
a chance to exercise intelligent choice during such confrontations. As hit
points dwindle they can opt to break off the encounter and attempt to flee.
With complex combat systems which stress so-called realism and feature
hit location, special damage, and so on, either this option is severely
limited or the rules are highly slanted towards favoring the player
characters at the expense of their opponents. (Such rules as double
damage and critical hits must cut both ways ~ in which case the life
expectancy of player characters will be shortened considerably - or the
monsters are being grossly misrepresented and unfairly treated by the
system. I am certain you can think of many other such rules.)"
Gygax, G. (1979). Dungeon Masters Guide. Random House, Inc.: New York, NY
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Exactly why I use Fate Points. Random, meaningless deaths are no fun... but I still want some danger in the fight.
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Certain death is as undesirable as a give-away campaign.
Sure. But crits hardly make it certain, they just make the boundary conditions of the combat more likely to change drastically in any given combat round. In other words, instead of "the fighter is down, we need to be out of here within a few rounds or we'll lose him, and maybe be in danger of losing our own lives as well," it becomes "the fighter is SNP, we need to bug out RIGHT NOW."
A lucky man is a man who knows what can safely be left to chance.
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in the 1st Edition DMG page 61, Gygax discusses the idea of heroic combat versus realistic simulation combat:
"It would be no great task to devise an elaborate set of rules for
highly complex individual combats with rounds of but a few seconds
length."
I love you Gary, but you are wrong here.
"In like manner, consider all of the nasty things
which face adventurers as the rules stand. Are crippling disabilities and
yet more ways to meet instant death desirable in an open-ended, episodic
game where participants seek to identify with lovingly detailed and
developed player-character personae? Not likely! Certain death is as undesirable
as a give-away campaign. Combat is a common pursuit in the
vast majority of adventures, and the participants in the campaign deserve
a chance to exercise intelligent choice during such confrontations. As hit
points dwindle they can opt to break off the encounter and attempt to flee.
With complex combat systems which stress so-called realism and feature
hit location, special damage, and so on, either this option is severely
limited or the rules are highly slanted towards favoring the player
characters at the expense of their opponents. (Such rules as double
damage and critical hits must cut both ways ~ in which case the life
expectancy of player characters will be shortened considerably - or the
monsters are being grossly misrepresented and unfairly treated by the
system. I am certain you can think of many other such rules.)"
Gygax, G. (1979). Dungeon Masters Guide. Random House, Inc.: New York, NY
I find this funny, as Gary was known as a killer GM, from what I have heard anyway. You would think he would be all for systems that included more and faster ways in which PCs could be dispatched.
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Vlad, in the Wiki entry you might want to not that Rolemaster criticals can result in instant death. I know you noted that they can result in lost limbs and internal organs destroyed, which we might assume would cause death, but you might want to make it more clear that even instant death is a possibility. That's what to me really separates the RM critical hit from the others.
The beauty of wiki's is that you might change the entry to your liking and after many changes the entry will be general consensus of what is right. Please, be my guest and add that part in your own words. I gave it my definition, you add yours!
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Found these on G+. I don't know what game thay are for, but I would assume D&D.
http://okumarts.tumblr.com/post/61365822947/critical-hit-charts-have-long-been-a-staple-in?utm_content=buffer6f6e3&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=Buffer (http://okumarts.tumblr.com/post/61365822947/critical-hit-charts-have-long-been-a-staple-in?utm_content=buffer6f6e3&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=Buffer)
Presumably from 1982, but I have no way to verify that.
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Very likely, I will compare them with the ones from Dragon magazine to see if they line up. From just a quick look, they do seem similar.
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Just putting in my 2 cents, as I was in Pete Fenlon's Middle-earth campaign starting in 1976, he and Kurt Fischer and Coleman Charlton had been developing the attack and critical tables starting around then. The first criticals were very basic, just a few options typed out, but soon they grew into what eventually came out in Arms Law. As far as I know, they came up with the idea completely on their own, because the idea of wearing someone down with hit points was too dull. But then of course, we had to develop a whole new system for healing all those messy criticals...
(And as another point of trivia, those attack tables were computer generated on UVa computers using punch-cards! Oh, technology.)
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As far as I know, they came up with the idea completely on their own
Intelligent people working within the same general topic will often come up with similar results, so I have no doubt it was an idea that grew out of their own and while I've never seen a critical hit system even approaching RM's from pre-80's I don't doubt others came up with the same idea. Heck, our group was using a 20 result critical table with D&D before we started implementing early RM Critical hit tables.
because the idea of wearing someone down with hit points was too dull.
That is one of the primary reasons we moved from D&D to RM as a full system eventually.
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I agree with Cory about ideas, but those are some heavy 2 cents, Terry. Good that some of the old guard still wander these boards.
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Very likely, I will compare them with the ones from Dragon magazine to see if they line up. From just a quick look, they do seem similar.
Looking at them a little closer makes it obvious that they are very similar, so likely they have a similar origin - like one is the 'revised' version of the other, or something like that.
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I agree with Cory about ideas, but those are some heavy 2 cents, Terry. Good that some of the old guard still wander these boards.
Hah well thanks, it's fun to remember back then... and how the campaign was sort of an ongoing playtest environment. And the first Fumble tables (also typed) featuring the 'unseen imaginary deceased turtle.' Good times.
And I guess it's also important to consider that back then communication was not like it is today. As some have mentioned, publishing took months, and of course there was nothing like the internet, so indeed people could have developed ideas independently; much more likely than getting ideas from others.
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... and how the campaign was sort of an ongoing playtest environment.
For myself, I tend to like those the best.
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... and how the campaign was sort of an ongoing playtest environment.
For myself, I tend to like those the best.
I remember when we were testing Spell Law, and Pete was first testing spells with Arms Law like attacks and criticals, and there was a spell called an Air Bolt, used by an NPC enemy. There was much death and destruction, and I think we actually had to replay that scenario because it was so overpowered compared to other attacks.
But of course, with the Arms Law weapons becoming so powerful, casting an old school D&D fireball with a few hit dice just didn't stack up, so Spell Law Spells were developed fairly soon afterwards. Hehe I just dug out my 2nd edition Spell Law that has all the criticals still hand-written by Pete, and the attack tables we typed out on a correcting Selectric® typewriter. I wonder if I still have the old three books somewhere. Good times...
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Hehe I just dug out my 2nd edition Spell Law that has all the criticals still hand-written by Pete, and the attack tables we typed out on a correcting Selectric® typewriter. I wonder if I still have the old three books somewhere. Good times...
That is some awesome gaming memorabilia. If you are ever really strapped for cash, I imagine you could sell those for a pretty penny (or even 2).
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Hehe I just dug out my 2nd edition Spell Law that has all the criticals still hand-written by Pete, and the attack tables we typed out on a correcting Selectric® typewriter. I wonder if I still have the old three books somewhere. Good times...
That is some awesome gaming memorabilia. If you are ever really strapped for cash, I imagine you could sell those for a pretty penny (or even 2).
It so happens that I could use some cash (money is tight here at Eidolon Studio), so I really should go through all my old books. Though I sold a Court of Ardor for over $400 a few years ago and only got $100 for my last spare one recently, so maybe the collector market is soft. I am pretty sure I have the Spell Law books and maybe the charts somewhere, but that box is long gone (I thought that art was ugly, not like Gail's for the 2nd Ed book, I have, which seems to be just all the books bound together).
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The market is fickle.
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i started playing D&D around 1983. We added "Critical hits" (and fumbles) into our games. I do remember seeing a Dragon magazine article about critical hits, though i think we added them before seeing that article. it may be that the individual who claimed that D&D added critical hits before Rolemaster existed may have been thinking of the prevalence of gaming groups in the early days of D&D that HOUSE RULED crits into their games.
it wasn't until 1989 that i encountered Rolemaster (I grew up in a very small town, with no game or comic book store. All of my games i acquired were through mail order) when i finally did encounter Rolemaster, I dropped D&D like a bad habit and never looked back...
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Why I liked Terry's comment so much is because Pete Fenlon apparently added crits to D&D as early as 1976: that is WAY before any articles came out in Dragon. The idea probably sprouted in people's minds at the same time, as is often the case (printing press in Western world, Telegraph, Telephone), but I think Pete and his group were certainly the first to implement and make commercially available their system, they have been play-testing for such a long time (5-6 years at that time).
If ICE can indeed support such a claim, it would be great marketing material for RMU.
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Just to clarify (or obfuscate), I started playing in 1976, and I was a starry-eyed teenager (also overwhelmed with being a first-year college student), and a lot of things were going on with the game. I had never heard of D&D before (but of course I had read Tolkien), and when a fellow first year friend told me about it, I thought it sounded kind of lame. But she got me to go, and they let me roll up a character (my friend and I were easily the youngest of this group) and it did not take long before I was sucked in. However I was not privy to all the details right away.
My first character was Agonar, and in 1976, we were mostly playing D&D, though Pete and Kurt had developed the Vog Mur adventure, and I am pretty sure the advanced attack/crit tables were in the works. One thing we ran into was the idea that when you went over your hits, you died, which they corrected with something called a 'Baileyize' named after a previous DM, Richard Bailey. If you went over, you could make a saving throw (old-school terminology!) and not die but just be at max hits. Somewhere along the line came the idea of hits=unconscious, then hits+CO being head from concussion, because the Arms Law weapons were delivering so many hits. In our first meeting with Shards, Agonar Baileyized 4x. Ouch.
I'm not sure how much the current ICE folks would care to pursue such a claim but of course I'm still on friendly terms with Pete and Coleman and I could ask for clarification.
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I'd leave that up to Colin, John or Nicholas to decide if that is prudent. It would be nice to stir up some the glorious past when finally bringing out RMU, but that is just my take on it.
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I just dug out my 'Third Printing' of Arms Law
http://www.icewebring.com/ICE_Products/Product_Page.php?product_id=190%20Arms%20Law (http://www.icewebring.com/ICE_Products/Product_Page.php?product_id=190%20Arms%20Law)
Which is probably the earliest version I still have. Wow, the parchment and the perforation; I can't believe we made any money on this thing! That kind of stuff now would be so expensive. And all the screens were done by hand with rubylith overlays. Oh, the olden days...
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Just a bit more random old ICE founders trivia, the first game I played in was Pete's 'Crown Quest' which was to destroy the Iron Crown of Morgoth (hence the eventual name of the company). I joined one year into the quest, so my character Agonar was several levels lower than the older gamers; there were two tiers of players. We played in classrooms of the UVa Engineering school (lots of big rooms, machines and passages with iron-grate floors; could have made great movie-sets), sometimes all night on weekends, which lent a wonderful eerie quality to the games. I found out years later that Pete originally thought that I had lied about my last name, thinking that it was too ridiculous to be real (Amthor is very rare, and is, of course an anagram for Amroth, as in the Prince of Dol Amroth in Tolkien), but he came around. This was the 1976-77 academic year when the new Arms Law tables were firs being tested, this went on through my undergraduate years (and Pete moving on to law school), and then the founding of ICE in 1980. Questions?
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Of course, I'll ask the obvious one: did you destroy the iron crown?!?!?!
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Of course, I'll ask the obvious one: did you destroy the iron crown?!?!?!
LOL, yes we did, though this was right before the Silmarillion came out, so Pete had nothing to go on as far as the Silmarils or what Tolkien had written as the Crown's fate. In the quest, Morgoth was a super powerful lich in an underwater citadel. The main attack group was led by a paladin with a holy sword (so Morgoth's spells were ineffective in the sword radius); Agonar was part of a diversionary team.
I do remember a humorous side story. When the paladin character (who had been apparently playing as a true virtuous paladin for years) finally got his holy sword (which had a very interesting history), and the other players realized what a boon it was, there was a rush of everyone wanting to declare their 'paladinhood,' right down to one player jokingly saying his bird familiar declared his paladinhood and wanted a 'holy feather.' Needless to say, no one else got Paladin powers or swords (or feathers). Ah, good times. But the eastern Middle-earth campaigns were even more fun.