Quote:
Originally Posted by frogspawner
Some variation on Dodge/Defence seems to me to be the way to go. It can always be ascribed to 'luck', even if 'gods' don't exist in the genre.
I currently use a skill (called 'Defence', but not working quite like the old RQ2) which is a percentage chance to avoid any damage from melee/missile/magic (or at least 10hp worth of it). And the 'skill' increases only via ticks for role-playing, so that's how PCs can get better at it than the NPCs. Obviously it's chancy and unreliable below 100%, so I'm not sure about it. But maybe that's a good thing. Any better ideas?
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THe difficult lies in the "Batman scenario" I mentioned earlier. Left strictly to the dice, a hero will get overwhelmed by numbers. That is pretty much the way BRP was meant to work. That's why Rune Lords were told to bring a retinue and avoid double teams.
A Luck/Fate echanic seems to fix this for heroic characters, provided that the points are limited. Too many and the PCs get delusions of godhood. Ideally they should have just enough to do what they need to do, even slightly more, but feel like they don't quite have enough.
Sort of like gambling. The points have to be common enough to be on hand, yet rare enough so that the players will hate spending them.
There are three or four options in the book. I've got a couple of "blind" suggestions:
1) The PC needs to make a luck roll and then can mark off damage against his Magic/Luck/Power Points. If a PC is out of points, he is out of Luck. This gives character some immunity but is very limited.
2) Give players points for criticals and/or special successes. Then they can spend those point later to bump or downgrade rolls by 1 success level. So in the "Batman scenario" if "Bats" has a couple of points in the bank, he could turn the odd lucky hit into a miss, or change a critical that would kill him to a normal hit.