05-28-2013, 10:23 AM
Havard Wrote:I'm not a big fan of hit location rules in general, but both RuneQuest (Pre Mongoose) and Warhammer has them. Could the Hp from Blackmoor be "fixed"?The early Runequest rules are a pretty close match to the rules in Blackmoor. The extra charts for rear/top/bottom attacks as well as the height vs height table were replaced in Runequest with DM judgement (the player rolled different types of dice when dealing with larger or smaller opponents forex). I really don't see how it could be simplified more without scrapping it entirely.
One of the main advantages of a hit location system is the easy ability to add partial armor coverage. However, with D&D to hit vs AC, you'd have to roll the hit location before rolling to hit which would be fairly tedious. It would work better with a hit + save system ala Dragons at Dawn or Adventures in Fantasy.
Finally, I can't see how Dave was forced to include these rules as he uses some aspects of it in his Adventures in Fantasy. I suspect (based solely on tales of Dave's play) that Dave just used common sense when actually running the game but when he tried to write down his thoughts it ended up the mess we see in Supplement 2. I get the same feeling from AiF; either he didn't use the rules as they were written or he was an absolute genius at doing math in his head.