Empire of the Petal Throne (1975) contains the following section:
This is the first appearance of what would later be called a "critical hit" in the history of roleplaying games. Since the start of my ongoing House of Worms campaign, I've made use of this rule without modification. According to one of the players, there have only been four such "lucky hits" (as Professor Barker called them) in the nearly seven years we've been been playing, all of which affected opponents of the characters – until our most recent session.
During Session 253, the characters were exploring a series of caverns beneath a ruined step pyramid they'd found on a coastal island. There was plenty of reason to suspect the caverns were inhabited, not least of which being that they seem to have been picked clean of anything organic. This worried Kirktá, the apprentice to Keléno, scholar priest of Sárku. For that reason, he volunteered to keep watch on the ledges of a large cave while his comrades explored nearby. His worries proved well founded, as a large insectoid creature began to crawl down one of the ledges, apparently attracted by the echoes of the characters' actions.
Aíthfo and Grujúng rushed to meet the creature, attacking it as it slowly descended the wall of the ledge. They soon realize that its carapace protected it well and that, owing to its size, it would take a great deal of effort to slay it. Initially, the fight went well, with the creature failing to land a blow on any of the characters. However, on the third round of the fight, I rolled for a 20 and then a 19 against Aíthfo, resulting in his instant death. I decided that the creature's mandibles sliced through the unlucky Aíthfo's neck, severing his head from his body.
Needless to say, this shocked everyone. No character had ever suffered an instant death due to the critical hit rule before. Ironically, Aíthfo had failed a saving throw some years ago that had resulted in his death, but he was eventually restored to life by Naqsái magic (which led to some long-ranging consequences). Now, though, the characters were quite far from any means of revivifying Aíthfo and worried that this might indeed be his end. Znayáshu, however, had an idea. After sewing his decapitated head back onto his body – Znayáshu is an accomplished embalmer – he made use of his excellent ruby eye on Aíthfo's remains. This device of the Ancients freezes its target in a moment in time. In this way, the body would be immune to decay or corruption until Znayáshu used the eye on it again. The body was then submerged in the water of an underground river to keep it safe.
The characters continue to explore the caverns. Once done, they plan to seek out some means of revivifying Aíthfo and will return to the caverns to do so. How or when this will occur is still unknown. Given the way this campaign unfolds, it could well be many, many more sessions before it comes to pass, assuming it ever does. But that's the nature of this campaign: it's unpredictable. In the meantime, Aíthfo's player has taken up the role of Lára hiKhánuma, a sorceress of Ksárul and a relative of Aíthfo's new wife (or should I say widow?). It will be fascinating to see what happens next.
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| Aíthfo in happier times |
Odd that the rule says the player has the "opportunity" to make a second roll. That implies there would be some choice in the matter, which, if there is no downside, makes no sense. It might be interesting to incorporate this uncertainty into game play, and make it a meaningful decision. I.e., choose to (a) take the double damage, or (b) roll again for the automatic kill, but you don't get BOTH. It's one or the other.
ReplyDeleteHi Norwegian Blue. I've been enjoying your posts here. I don't think "opportunity" implies choice. Opportunity means "chance." As written, rolling a natural 20 grants you the chance to try for an instant kill by rolling again and getting a 19 or 20 on that second roll.
DeleteThis is a great rule. And James, this is a great way to do a House of Worms session report.
There's certainly a drawback to going for the instant kill. If you succeed, the target's dead. No chance to call for its surrender after the already savage double damage hit, no chance to interrogate them, or ransom them back to their friends, and what if you were fighting a friend who's under some kind of temporary mind control? It's optional for a reason.
DeleteHaving said that, look at the text of the rules. It specifically calls out "player" under the instant kill bit. Not NPCs, not giant bug monsters, players. There's good reason for that in terms of design philosophy. Monsters and NPCs are ultimately expendable and expected to have short lifespans in a game. PCs are not.
Monsters getting killed outright this way only seems vanishingly rare, it's going to happen one attack in 200 assuming the PCs take advantage of every natural 20 to try for it. And if the NPC/monsters can do it back to the PCs, well, pause to think carefully about how many attacks a character takes in an average-length combat, divide 200 by that number, and that's how many fights they can expect to live through before a vital organ crit kills them. Then reduce that lifespan based on how often you think they'll face a save-or-die effect, which have an even higher rate of instant death at least 5%, likely much higher.
Not a huge fan of "plot armor" rules for PCs, but with a D&D-like combat system where a player might easily get attacked five times in an average fight, they need a break if they expect to last long enough to get past the first few levels.
That makes sense as a house rule, but just to argue out the point, I don't think that "opportunity" necessarily implies meaningful choice. I could say "I'll give you a pat on the head if you want one"; you don't get actually get anything in exchange if you say "no" but it does constitute an opportunity to get a pat on the head.
DeleteI can imagine a situation where two people are fighting but A doesn't really want to kill B, only show that he's serious (let's say B started it and A wants him to back down). B might yield if A deals a telling blow, but when A gets a 20 he might not roll for the instant kill in that admittedly rare case. Just a thought.
Great comments guys. Appreciate the different takes,
Delete@Dick McGee, the double-damage rule also specifically calls out “player”, but then uses a “4th-level being” in the example, so I’m not positive your reading of it being restricted to PCs is what was intended, despite making design sense.
Delete@norwegian blue that's how I understood the rule, but I agree it's not clear.
ReplyDeleteWow, I sure picked the wrong session to miss.
ReplyDeleteNebússa couldn't have done anything to stop it.
DeleteProbably ...
Our group hit a roadblock with dnd inre to the realism debate back in the late 80’s. One of our number interned with the art institute and found all the weights were wrong inre to the armor and weapons. The AC and Hp debates were a headache and some other gamers we played with could do the maths and abuse the system.
ReplyDeleteWe found the Harn rules; and plugged them into our existing campaign. It worked for the past 20+years. The armor and injury aspects work terrifically and have satisfied our players as we now have 20+ years military, medical, real life etc experience
My question to you Jim, is have u ever tried the Harn ruleset and plugged it into an existing campaign?
Best regards and thank u so much for all your posts over the years
I’ve never looked at the Hârn rules. Could you give any more details about what works so well and how easy it would be to integrate with D&D?
DeleteA critical hit: only one more among many iconic events in the Life and Deaths of Aithfo hiZnayu.
ReplyDeleteI always wondered where the "natural 20" thing had its origin. Back in the day everyone knew the rule, but no one could say where it came from.
ReplyDeleteNice to see another House of Worms post.
ReplyDeleteBut something seems off with the arithmetic. If House of Worms has only seen 4 lucky hits in 7 years that implies only a little over 100 rolls per year or 2 per weekly session. Have there really been so few combats? Or is the rule not being consistently applied?
There are two things to consider:
Delete1. The report of only four lucky hits was made by a player. I have not been keeping track. It's possible his recollection is wrong.
2. Combat was much more common in the first couple of years of play. Since then, the game has become much more political/social in nature, so we don't roll dice nearly as much.
Regardless, it's the first time a player character has suffered because of the rule in this campaign. In my other, now-defunct EPT campaign (Dust of Gold), multiple PCs died because of it over the course of two years.
Most likely a memory failure, but you'd also lose a few opportunities to missed sessions, sessions with little or no combat, and to instances where the double damage alone would kill the target outright, since I assume they wouldn't bother rolling for that 19+ confirmation on something with a just a handful of HP left.
DeleteThe last is a good point which I hadn’t considered and makes the statistics harder to figure.
Delete> since I assume they wouldn't bother rolling for that 19+ confirmation on something with a just a handful of HP left.
DeleteOh no, we never know how many hit points an opponent has left, and we don't roll damage until the critical is resolved. As soon as a 20 comes up in the dice roller, we all huddle up to the screen to await the next result. A bit macabre really.
I’d be curious to read what the governor’s death has on the political situation in the campaign. Though, admittedly, we’ve missed out on a lot since the party left Tsolyánu.
ReplyDeleteThat is a complicated story.
DeleteThe short of it is that, by the time the PCs returned to Linyaró, they discovered another person had been installed as governor in Aíthfo's absence, seemingly with the approval of Prince Mridóbu, their own patron. The PCs deferred resolving this matter for the time being, deciding instead to join forces with the "new" governor on a matter of mutual interest. (A decision aided by the fact that most people in the colony already believe Aíthfo and his former administration abandoned their posts, since they had no way of knowing what had actually happened.)
High drama indeed. I think everyone who has ever played RM or MERP can tell many stories of hilarious critical hits. I like it a lot.
ReplyDeleteI don't know where my original group's house rule came from, but in our interpretation of "double damage," a natural 20 meant we rolled damage normally, included the bonuses, and multiplied it by 2.
ReplyDeleteThat's how we've always done it, and continue to do it.
DeleteMaybe because it was never a written rule for us and that's how we interpreted the spoken words, "double damage." Or maybe because it's just easier and faster to do it this way.
All the "double damage on crit" rules I've seen outside of EPT doubled all the bonuses as well. Some explicitly multiplied the damage by two, a few called for rolling twice as many dice, most didn't bother to say one way or the other. Rolling once and doubling produces more swingy results than rolling multiple times and adding, of course. So which you use depends on how much you want to lean into the already-swingy nature of crit mechanics.
DeleteWhen I was much younger, playing 1e, my players wanted to use this rule in the game. As the DM, I was reluctant but they insisted... double damage and instant kills! But their enthusiasm dipped a bit when I pointed out that they generally rolled 5 attacks a rounds, but their enemies (at this stage goblins, orcs, hobgoblins) outnumbered them in most fights, so I had way better odds of getting crits on them...
ReplyDeleteThat's why modern game designers generally don't go with instant death crits any more. Just looking at (in this case) EPT, the XP needed to increase in level makes it highly improbable that anyone can get very far in their adventuring career without dying to that 1-in-200 instant death chance that every single attack roll equates to. No matter how careful and clever a PC is, it's nigh impossible to completely avoid ever being attacked, and (unlike save-or-die effects, an even more common career ender) your odds of living through crits don't improve as you level up.
DeleteThat's one of the things I liked about Cold Iron, a college friend's home brew game in the 1980s. The system uses a clever dice mechanism to implement the standard normal distribution to produce a modifier that is added to (or subtracted from) your OCV and compared to your opponents DCV. OCV and DCV improve with level, as do hit points. A crit happens if your OCV + modifier is enough larger than your opponents DCV (and since the normal distribution is open ended, so are crits). It allows for those dramatic one shot kills while making them rare enough that PCs rarely are one shot killed (and even then, the system has a robust negative hit point system that makes true death pretty rare for PCs as long as they hold the field). If you're outnumbered, your opponents are probably enough weaker than you to make the one shot kill a one in a million (or worse) kind of thing. On the other hand, I've had a PC + GMPC group one shot kill a dragon after some serious buffing... (sadly it was the GMPC who scored the crit - I don't do GMPCs anymore...).
DeleteThat said, it sounds like Tekumel has enough options to make the instant kill crit not a game ender. Cool!
“Just looking at (in this case) EPT, the XP needed to increase in level makes it highly improbable that anyone can get very far in their adventuring career without dying to that 1-in-200 instant death chance that every single attack roll equates to.”
DeleteDoesn’t House of Worms serve as a counterexample? I would be curious to learn what the levels are of the PCs in it.
Most of the PCs are 5th or 6th level.
DeleteWhat is the highest level that’s been achieved (if you don’t mind answering)? And what was/is Aíthfo’s? That would help illuminate just how lethal EPT is.
DeleteThe highest level achieved by any character without magical aid is 6th level. Aíthfo was among those at that level.
DeleteWhat's that come to in terms of XP, around 35,000? And how many XP to reach 7th? 8th? I'm rusty on the system but I dimly recall it following roughly the same doubling pattern OD&D did.
DeleteIn EPT, level 6 is 32K, while level 7 is 64K. Bear in mind, though, that the game includes XP reductions based on level. For example, at levels 4 and 5, XP is acquired at 50% earned; at level 6 and 7, it's 25%, so the amount needed to gain level up is actually much more than the nominal amount I mentioned above.
DeleteWhew, I'd forgotten the XP reduction factor. The D&D Fighter chart (which is the 32K/64K/etc one) is plenty slow already IME. By 6th earning even a level a year with a weekly game must be an amazing accomplishment, and it'll just slow down from there.
DeleteReally goes to show what utter BS people's stories about really high level D&D characters back in the early 80s were, doesn't it? No way did anyone reach the high teens or even higher legitimately in any reasonable time frame.
Depends on what you mean by “legitimately”. In the December ‘77 issue of the Dragon (#11), M.A.R. Barker answered a question about the XP reduction factor, in which he states, “I have played in D-and-D campaigns in which we all shot right up to 27th level wizards or whatever”, and that this was the motivation for the reduction, mid-level characters being ideal in his view.
DeleteIn this context, the human encounter tables in EPT make less sense, with plenty of high-level NPCs to run into. They are also strange in that fighter level directly correlates with military rank.
Note also our host’s caveat of “without magical aid”. The magic books in EPT provide a shortcut to advancement, if the GM makes them available.
DeleteIn that answer, Barker also acknowledges the lethality of EPT, suggesting that low-level characters have need of patrons to loan them magic items and provide cannon fodder. I’m not sure how that helps as it lowers the risk but also the reward (both from sharing of treasure and the fact that only the character who deals the killing blow gets the XP - and using an Eye halves the XP from the kill).
DeleteA magical book – a wedding gift from Prince Eselné – is responsible for Nebússa's gaining of a level.
DeleteWow, that’s a nice gift.
DeleteIndeed it was, but Eselné is an imperial prince, after all, and Nebússa's wife comes from the hereditary aristocracy of Méku. It was the first time I think I've ever given a PC a magic item like that, so I did it partially as an experiment to see how it'd affect the campaign. So far, I can't say it's mattered much.
DeleteIt’s still early days, no? Maybe at some point this would make for a House of Worms post.
DeleteIn EPT, damage can be split over multiple opponents. How is the lucky hit rule employed in that case? Maybe you can only hit a single opponent if you opt to try for instant death? (The rule does say “the opponent”.) That would provide another reason for it to be optional.
ReplyDelete