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HARP: High Adventure Role Playing Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 7: Combat This chapter begins with a standard disclaimer that because combat can result in permanent death and/or severe injury, the players should not take the decision to fight very lightly, and that if they have to, they should be well-prepared for it. Combat is supposed to be gritty and quite lethal in this system. A single round in HARP is 2 seconds long, although almost every action is only 1 round long with the exception of reloading ranged weapons. Even all the spells take only 1 round to cast. Initiative Everyone declares their actions, then initiative is rolled for everyone, and the actions are executed in sequence of the initiative. Initiative is affected by a character’s Quickness and Insight bonuses, as well as their weapon type - two-handed weapons are slower, as is using a shield or being heavily encumbered. Initiative is also rolled every round, ostensibly to “reset” the order to account for any changes inflicted on the combatants. Offensive Bonus This is essentially the skill roll of a character with their weapon skill: 1d100 + weapon skill bonus + Strength bonus + Agility bonus, plus any other modifiers like a bonus for flanking an opponent or a penalty for being injured. Defensive Bonus This is a flat number composed of Quickness bonus x 2 + Armor bonus + Shield bonus, plus any other modifiers like being behind cover, or using a defensive action like Parry. Basic attack resolution When a character attacks, they roll their Offensive Bonus, subtract the target’s Defensive Bonus from the result, and then they hit if the result is 1 or greater. For example, let’s say Athan has 6 ranks in their Weapon Skill: Long Blades for a +30 skill bonus, then +6 from Strength and +7 from Agility. He’s attacking a Kobold, which according to the game’s bestiary has a Defensive Bonus of 60. He rolls 1d100+30+6+7-60. Let’s say the natural roll is a 21 for a final modified roll of 4. That’s greater than 1, so Athan hits. The next step is to factor in the weapon’s size. A longsword deals “Medium Slash” damage. A Medium sized weapon has a Critical Modifier of 0, so there’s no change to the final result of 4. It also has a Damage Cap of 100, so no effect there either. We then go to the “Slash Criticals” table and cross-reference the final result of 4. It says “You nicked his arm. 5 Hits”. Hits here is the equivalent of your Endurance skill. The Kobold has 70 Hits, so now the Kobold is down to 65/70 Hits. Let’s say Athan rolled a natural 80 instead, for a final result of 63. Again, no change due to damage caps or weapon size, so we go straight to the damage look-up. 63 on the Slash Criticals table reads “The idiot used his arm to parry. For takes 18 Hits, is stunned 1 round, and is at -10” So the Kobold is now down to 47/70 Hits, misses its next round, and has a -10 penalty to everything, including its Defensive Bonus. That means that if Athan rolls another natural 80, the final result is now 73 instead of 63, and the result of 73 gives us “Blow to his elbow. Foe takes 20 Hits, is stunned 1 round, bleeds 1 per round, and is at -15”. The Kobold would miss its turn again, get reduced to 27/70 Hits, lose 1 Hit per round, and takes another -15 penalty. Which means its Defensive Bonus is even lower the next time Athan tries to attack it. Injury and Death Once attacks start reaching the 100+ range, the table lookups start giving you results like “death comes in 6 rounds”, which is actual permanent death unless the character gets healed somehow. The other way to die is if you become unconscious at 0 Hits, and then go into negative Hits greater than your Constitution stat. The bleeding status inflicted by attacks will also cause you to lose Hits over time, producing the same result unless the bleeding is stanched. Natural healing can take a while in this game. Your wounds are either classified as Light, Medium or Severe depending on how many Hits you’ve lost, any bleeding inflicted and/or any specific organ injuries inflicted upon you. A Light injury can take 1-5 days to recover from, Medium injuries can take 3-25 days, and then Severe can range from a week to a month and a half. The percentage or “status” based classification of injuries though avoids that hit point pitfall of a 100 HP Warrior requiring much more bedrest than a 25 HP Wizard in other games. Armor In this game, armor is simply a flat increase to your Defensive Bonus. This might make it seem D&D-esque as far as plate mail awarding you no “damage reduction”, but if you look at the combat example I wrote, the final attack result is also used to determine the amount of damage dealt by the attack, so in a way armor still also does act as damage reduction, because even if the final attack result is positive, if it’s only a 10 then you’re only taking a few Hits anyway. Heavy armors do impose a penalty on Agility and Quickness based skills (mitigated by the Armor skill), while also causing the Power Point cost of spells to increase. Trying to cast a spell while in plate armor adds a whopping 10 Power Points to the base casting cost of any spell. Parrying One possible combat action that the game specifically highlights is the ability of a player to reduce their Offensive Bonus in order to increase their Defensive Bonus by the same amount. The game assumes you’ll be doing this normally as part of your tactical repertoire, and seeing as how combat can quickly cause a “death spiral” where the first meaty hit inflicts enough of a penalty to cause more and more damaging hits to be inflicted in sequence, it seems to make sense. Critical Tables Each weapon inflicts a damage type, and the game provides a different look-up table for each of those: crush, puncture, slash, martial arts, and then even elemental damage; heat, cold, electrical and impact tables. It’s my understanding that in RoleMaster, they have look-up tables down to the individual weapon, and that the tables are much much larger/specific/potentially lethal. These ones though are fairly straightforward, moreso that the “roll to hit” and “roll for damage” are in the same roll. I find the combat fairly easy to understand, and the “wearing down” of an opponent through progressively more damaging hits would seem to prevent the “big bags of HP” problem. Next: Spellcasting
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| ← # ? Aug 17, 2015 13:33 |
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