Author Topic: HARP’s power curve for players  (Read 1235 times)

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Offline Mourglin

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HARP’s power curve for players
« on: December 06, 2020, 10:08:54 AM »
I’m reading HARP for the first time, yes I’m behind the times.  ;) I’ve ran RM since 1st Edition and have tinkered and house ruled it over years and have known that system so well that I never bothered looking to replace it. Well after a recent 3 year long campaign my players wanted me to return back to Middle Earth and run a new one after a long break. I feel as if I’ve beaten RM to death for 30 years and it’s time to put that old horse away.  ;D 

So... I decided to leave the ICE cannon and look elsewhere for a system. I checked out One Ring and after reading through how that system works combat wise, I shelved it. Then I considered Fantasy Hero but it’s a lot of work making NPC’s and Monsters etc.. and it’s very crunchy. Then I started reading my Burning Wheel books and got about 80-100 pages in and picked up HARP to page through it. Originally I had dismissed it as some new form of RM, ala companion I-VII rules all stuffed in there with bloat and bad balance etc.. but I was pleasantly  surprised.

HARP seems very balance, clean, elegant even and I applaud that. The v2 rules seem to handle all the situations RM didn’t really clarify well in combat. Character generation is very creative and flexible. So I’ve decided to run HARP in Middle Earth.

So to my point, sorry for being long winded but I wanted to preface my concerns. After talking to one of my players about his HARP campaign he runs with some of the other players who will be playing in my ME game, I had some questions about the power curve. It seems to me the skill rank costs 2 and 4 and the fact you can buy 3 per level puts the PC’s on the bleeding edge of skill far above and beyond what a matching NPC antagonist would look like in RM terms. Also developing resistances as skills seems too much but I’ve not seen these mechanics in action just yet.

Do any of you veteran HARPER’s feel this way about the above aspects? My jaw dropped when one of the players told me his resistance to magic is 120 at 6th level. For me 120 at any level seems insane. I know its all about opposing rolls and comparing numbers instead of having penalties to resistance based on spell effects rolls in RM but still.

I’m also sifting through magic and tailoring it to better fit Middle Earth. I’m chopping out most things that defy physics, and healing is limited and costs are doubled. I’m also debating whether to customize the generic races in HARP to fit into the cultural and race diversity in Middle Earth. I’ve seen some of the threads on that and found some sites via google that deal with this (Ambar Quinta google pages) but what I have found seems way out of balance with the generic race stat bonuses in HARP, ex. Noldo with +17 in stat bonuses.

Any feedback would be appreciated,

Regards,

Mourglin

Offline RandalThor

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Re: HARP’s power curve for players
« Reply #1 on: December 06, 2020, 08:37:01 PM »
Unfortunately I have only played HARP here-and-there and never for a long campaign, so I don't know how it works over the long haul. But, from what experience I do have, that 120 RR to Magic must have come at a cost to other things (i.e. min-maxing) because you have only so many points to spend - unless they play with really high stats. I do agree that HARP will come across as "more powerful" than RM, but that is because RM is more granular, concerned with smaller incremental growth.

Instead of getting rid of magic that "defies physics" (as all magic is basically that  ;D), you could take a cue from MERP RPG and have the flashier stuff have a greater chance of attracting the attention of the forces of Sauron. I would suggest looking to that game for how much and what happens.

Not to throw you off of an ICE game, but have you looked at the Lord of the Rings RPG from Decipher. I found it works great, though I preferred the optional stuff that was put out where the characters started off at a slightly reduced power-level. In the regular rules, they are supposed to be powerful enough to be part of the Fellowship of the Ring. (Yeah, there was a wide range of PL there, I mean Merry, Pippin.... and Gandalf... there's level disparity for you.) It gives the PCs room to grow, and allows the GM to challenge them without having to go overboard.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Scratch that. Power attracts the corruptible.

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Offline Radimon

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Re: HARP’s power curve for players
« Reply #2 on: December 07, 2020, 06:48:18 AM »
Well, I see what you mean about level disparity, especially Gandalf... but in his case, you have to remember that Gandalf is literally the avatar of a god, so you can't really hold him to mortal standards.

Avatars aside, in the Fellowship of the Ring, you have starting adventurers (the hobbits) alongside high-leveled party members (everybody else). While a couple of them have some minor magic (Aragorn, the party's official ranger, and Legolas, who's either a ranger or fighter, depending on who you ask), they're mostly nonmagical. The hobbits are mostly commoners (use rogue stats, if you don't have Folkways available), other  than Frodo, probably all level 1, with the debatable exception of Merry (who might be level 2, owing to his position in the community).

Boromir is a human fighter, probably somewhere around level 5-6.

Gimli's a stereotypical dwarf fighter. In fact, you could make a strong argument that Gimli is what created the stereotype in the first place, including the distrust of magic that no other dwarf of Middle Earth displays so openly. I'd place his level somewhere around 8-10, depending on how much action you think he's seen (conflicting clues in all three novels).

Legolas is an elf, either a fighter or a ranger (but not a Ranger!), and based on certain statements he makes in The Two Towers, he's at least 1200 years old. By HARP standards, this means his level could be anything up to low triple digits, but let's conservatively say he's level 20.

Aragorn is something like 90 years old in the novels, and thereafter lives to be more than twice that. He's obviously a ranger. He's also a Ranger (i.e.: Dunedain). This means, ultimately, he's a Numenorean, a High Man, and thus a human with elvish blood which still flows strongly through his veins. In a HARP game, I would use greater elf blood talent to represent this, including the option that gives the bonus to stat mods and increases the lifespan. This helps explain why he's so high-spec. I would say he's probably level 12+ as a ranger.

So yeah, that's some pretty big differences in ability levels there. But then again, that's what happens when you have reluctant heroes mixed in with career badasses.

And just so we're clear, 120 magic resist at level 6 is pretty high, but not unbeatable, nor too far outside the realm of what you might reasonably run into. Resistances for max ranks at level 6 gives 71 points, racial bonuses could be anywhere from 0 to 20, and that's before you add in stats or talents or equipment. 120 is totally doable.

Plus, keep in mind that anyone tossing spells at such a character gets to add their own spell's bonuses to the mix, so a villain of a similar level could easily have similar numbers, especially if it's the bad guy's favorite spell. On top of that, spells are skills too, and thus it gets an open-ended roll. Hit that sweet spot at the top of the scale, and suddenly that high magic resistance is all but meaningless. Trust me, I've been on the receiving end of that more than once.
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Offline RandalThor

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Re: HARP’s power curve for players
« Reply #3 on: December 07, 2020, 10:33:02 PM »
Well, I see what you mean about level disparity, especially Gandalf... but in his case, you have to remember that Gandalf is literally the avatar of a god, so you can't really hold him to mortal standards.
<BIG SNIP>
So yeah, that's some pretty big differences in ability levels there. But then again, that's what happens when you have reluctant heroes mixed in with career badasses.
Yup, I know all that. I was just saying, I prefer the players to have more room to grow. Using HARP as the example, if I was to start them off at something other than 1st (which I do all the time in games, not a fan of "1st level"), I would start them off around 5th. That way, they have some capability, but also have room to grow. If I started them off at 20th, they wouldn't have much to grow into.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Scratch that. Power attracts the corruptible.

Rules should not replace the brain and thinking.

Offline Ylissa

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Re: HARP’s power curve for players
« Reply #4 on: December 16, 2020, 04:25:42 PM »
Firstly, welcome to HARP!  :)

Secondly - the rapid skill development that is possible in HARP is a change from RM (especially RM2/RMC). I would personally say a L6 HARP character would be equivalent to a L9 RM2 character - and as someone else mentioned, 120 resistance Magic at L6 is a huge commitment of DP, so they have probably left large gaps elsewhere. A caster could well have +110 with their favoured spell at L6 (say 20 ranks, Focused Eloquence, stat) which on an average roll of 50 would result in a RR of 160 - so even with a maxed our Resistance, that still gives a 40% chance of resisting.

My experience is that non-caster generally have the DP to do this type of specialisation, but spell users will find it difficult (as they are expending DP on spells and PPD). This improves the lot for non-spellcasters which (IMO) is no bad thing.

I have not seen it myself, but I have heard that at higher levels players start to expand their breadth - so typically multiclassing and developing lower ranked skills.

As for homebrew - races typically get +60  to split between PPD and Endurance, +30 to split between the 3 resistance skills and for stats typically +9 to +11 (easiest is looking at existing races; so +17 is really out of kilter).