Combat clarification


#1

Hi everyone,
I have taken a little while after reading V2 of ICRPG to actually start DMing a game for my kids, based on Lankhmar. I have also watched all of Hanks videos which are a great help in conjunction with the book.

Now for the question. I understand that my players roll against the room Target to hit a monster. But what about the monsters? Do they roll against the room Target or roll against the payers armour? Also I see that ICRPG is more a guide than a rule set, so if I wanted to give the kids a bit more survivability, especially being only two of them, is it fair to say that an amour of +1 would stop the first point of damage they receive each attack?

Also I love Hanks idea of using plain speech, of easy and hard. It works great with the kids. They are now asking questions like “Would it be easy to do this?”, or “If I tried to do this would that make it hard?”

I love this DMing philosophy especially as I am DMing for the first time.

Cheers


#2

The monster attack roll is compared to a character’s armor. As to armor as damage reduction, that’s entirely up to you. There is a rule for damage reduction in Blood & Snow, so it wouldn’t be far fetched for you to come up with your own ruling for such. You would just need to work out if it’s armor is strictly damage reducing, or if it’d provide Armor in addition to damage reduction.

My personal solution, since I tend to run a solo game with a single character, is to use Black Streams: Solo Heroes (which will work with two players as well). It provides an alternate method of damage rolls vs Hit Dice (Hearts) for monsters and hit points for player characters.


#3

Hey TONECHILLER, we’ve seen a lot of different custom rules here in the last few years…
1: have monsters roll against player armor to attack
2: when monsters attack, have players roll their armor against the target
3: Use armor as ‘damage soak’ that functions like hit points
4: use armor as ‘damage resist’ which ignores that amount of incoming damage each attack


#4

My suggestion — give the kids an extra heart (10 hp), or lower monster damage to BASIC unless it is a boss, and lower non boss monsters to 1 hp.

Again this is for KIDS playing with you. They will feel like heroes. Encourage them to not fight; let them use CHA to make the monsters run away or the environment to take out mass numbers of enemies. That is how my kids handle most fights and I actually had to switch back to the original rules to compensate for their play styles.

Give them the option of taking a healing potion or some other way of healing as starter loot OR make them more available in the session.

As they get more accustomed to how to play and you get more familiar with the system, stick with the system.

TN (target number) for everything BUT to hit a player - then it is the player’s AC.

What are you using for your lankmahr setting?


#5

I have some old modules of Lankhmar from when I played 2nd Ed, the rest I grabbed from The Trove. So using these resources mostly for names and maps. This started off as the daughter wanted her character to be a thief and join a thieves guild.

The son wanted to have his character have the back story that he was a medic in the Army, so using that as a way to make medkits.

Both kids wanted to dual wield, daggers on the rogue and swords on the fighter. So I allowed this to up the damage output.

I got the solo heroes as mentioned above and squished it to fit. So damage incoming to the kids is 1-3 on a d6 is 1 point and 4-6 on a d6 is 2 points of damage. It seemed to work on the weekend quite well with a 2v1 and 2v2 fight.

Very interesting as they used the knock on the door and run technique for a room with bad guys in it.