Zornhau Forums

I'm really curious about your "big creature" rules.

As we are playing a more "fantasy"-tone campaign in a world of vikings with a mix of TROS and Blade and our own modifications currently, I made a set of rules for those situations myself.

They are oriented on film-scenes like the iconic fight between the fellowship of the ring and the cave troll in "The Fellowship of the Ring". To simulate the struggle between the single warrior that is in the focus of the monster itself on one hand and the quick and unpredictable movements of the huge creature that threaten the other involved fighters on the other, I made up roughly the following:

1. The fight between the monster and one warrior is done with the usual rules, considering that parrying a tree-trunk is nigh-impossible and the creature can deside to switch focus to another enemy at the beginning of every following turn.

2. The rest of the fighers against the same creature, has to care for not being hit by the mighty battle movements (TM) of the beast and still trying to hurt it. For this process, the creature gets an "unpredictable movement side-pool" that depends on its sheer mass and waywardness.
Each attacking fighter now has to divide his/her combat pool in an defensive and an offensive part, then rolling both for successes while the GM rolls the creatures' side pool.
Now, the defensive successes of each fighter get reduced by one for each of the creatures' side pool successes. If no defensive successes are left, the offensive successes get reduced by two (or three, I'm not finished with that) for each of the creatures' side pool successes. If any creature-successes are left after reducing the offensive pool of a character to zero, the rest is used to calculate a hit against a randomly chosen body part of the PC.

In my opinion, this shows best the dangers of fighting against a troll-kind of creature and can easily be scaled up or down for fighting against smaller/bigger creatures like giant men or dragons.

Very nice! It's funny you mention that, as it's not too far off what we actually decided to do. We've actually been ironing the kinks out of that the last couple days, so I won't get into much detail yet just in case we have some drastic change, but we may have a teaser out on it once we settle down.

The cave troll scene was the exact scene that inspired our conversation on it, and where we started when trying to figure out how to model such a thing. We basically decided that dealing with a big monster - whether a troll or a charging mammoth - basically boils down into two kinds of danger: being the thing the monster wants to attack, and being the thing that accidentally gets too close/in the way.

What I will say is that as it stands now, we have actually changed the way CP works for large beasts and we mechanically differentiate the Primary threat (the thing it's trying to actively fight) from the Secondary Threat (all the other characters in danger of getting smashed by getting in the way), and that taking out such a creature is very much intended to be a group effort. Big monsters like that will be crazy dangerous -- as they should be, really.

What abot krakenlike creatures that seem to be attacking multiple enemies at the same time?

To go a bit offtopic how would you handle attacks on kraken or other large creatures whose limbs are as large or larger than normal humans?

Marras wrote:What abot krakenlike creatures that seem to be attacking multiple enemies at the same time?

The only thing I can say fore sure is that we're definitely NOT modelling eight different attacks for each of the kraken's limbs. If anything, it'll be covered by being "dangerously close" to it.

Marras wrote:To go a bit offtopic how would you handle attacks on kraken or other large creatures whose limbs are as large or larger than normal humans?

We cover this, but... as Brooks said, we may find a flaw in the design and change it, so I guess you'll see it in beta

Whatever your solutions will be, I am relieved to see that these things are thought out at this stage.

With very detailed combat systems like Bastards lies a danger of how to apply it to non-human opponents. I have seen a similar problem even in Cyberpunk 2020 and it was even more evident in Millennium's End. Granted, ME was a technothriller game where most of the opposition came in a form of humans but for example dogs were still possible opposition.

So, yet another reason to sit tight and wait for the beta

We had a surprisingly thorough list of "things a complete game has to cover" and started from there as a check-list of sorts. We don't really want to be in a position where we release a core-book, and then ten supplements just to cover the whole functional game so that kind of thing has been in mind as a necessity from the beginning.

That said, we may still have to release supplements or web-supplements or something down the road, depending on time, money, and space in the original book, but we're trying to make sure all of the rules themselves mesh from as early on as possible.