Friday 18 September 2009

Monsters in the making!

Tomorrow we'll be having another playtest session. I still have to decide what I want Farid and Dick to have a go at.

However, in preparation for that I added the rules for Single Large Monsters - big creatures that are not part of a unit. For a bit of an appetizer I'll post a few bits of text below.

My thoughts and intentions are:
* Monsters should be able to fight regular units, they are big enough for that. They should not be all-powerful, though.
* Monsters should however be vulnerable to enterprizing bands of heroes - even though the heroes would have to take a big chance.
* I do not want to add entirely new combat mechanisms, instead I want to tie them in with the existing ones.


Let me know what you think, does this fit in with what you'd be looking for?

Single Large Monsters

Single Large Monsters are very powerful creatures that are strong (and big) enough to, on their own, stand up to a unit of formed troops. To reflect this, they get a unit strength number as well. They often do not have leadership abilities. Examples would be the dragon Smaug, a major daemon or a huge giant. They are a very exceptional occurrence, and should not constitute a significant part of an army.

Combat with regular troops
Combat between monsters and regular units works the same way as combat between units - with the difference that monsters never get 'shaken' morale, and that instead of suffering strength losses, they roll for wounds instead.

Combat with individuals
The same rules for duels between individuals apply, with the below exceptions:

* Monsters may never refuse a challenge
* Individuals are allowed to invite friendly individuals within 16" to form a part to fight the monster - both when challenging and when being challenged
* All dice of the party members are added together to achieve a result
* In case of a tie or loss by the party, the hits are divided between the party members, with each suffering a minimum of 1 hit

4 comments:

  1. Hi there do you have a link to your Wiki so that I can have a look at your rules.

    Thanks

    Bunny

    bunnycoleman2002@yahoo.co.uk

    ReplyDelete
  2. Warren,

    Sent you the link in e-mail.

    Regards,

    Derk

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  3. Would be interested in seeing that too. dunfalach-AT-yahoo will work.

    Seems like a useful way of doing things, though I wonder one thing about the party damage aspect. Perhaps ranged units, if included in a party, should be diced for or something to determine if they take a hit? Theoretically one attempts to keep the melee characters up front and the casters/archers out of reach.

    One other thing you might want to put some thought in on, now that you've brought in monsters, is whether one could do some simple automation for a non-player-controlled monster. One appearance in some fantasy sagas is the "We were fighting orcs and accidentally disturbed the dragon" aspect, where rather than being on one team or the other a monster that happens to be living where you've chosen to have a battle comes out to protest the disturbance by killing things.

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  4. Thanks, I'll take your comments under consideration.

    My first impression is that I understand the difference you're trying to make, but at the moment I don't foresee going to that level of detail.

    Overall I'm aiming for a mass combat set of rules, where the characters are not the main focus.

    Similarly, the 'not player controlled monster' is very much a scenario item. As such it's something where I'd expect either the referee to handle that, or the players to come up with something.

    ReplyDelete