[DF][Combat Rules] Informal Poll/Advice: who uses "mook" rules?

[Maz]

Originally Posted by apoc527

1. Who uses the "1 point of damage is enough to bring down any mook" rule from DF2, pg 27?

I do!


I'm with Langy, and several others on this one. The point of the mook rule isn't so much "drops at 1 HP" but "avoid bookkeeping when using huge groups of NPC's".

I use the 1-HP dead, and have taken it a step further in abstraction level to further speed up the game.
The mooks in my games do not roll active defenses instead they give a default-penalty to the PC's to hit (equal to defense-6. With no modifiers ever to their active defense and they cant' be targeted by telegraphic atk.). This way the knight can make his 6 Flurry of Blow attacks without having to have me make 6 defenses to see if they are hit or not. It also means I can simply tell the players "these mooks gives a -3 penalty" and then the players can all start rolling a once, without waiting for the defenses from me. I can then focus on what the actual worthy foes are doing.

A thing to remember about the mook rule is also that it do still require 1 HP of injury. A mook could easily be armoured dwarf guards with armour + natural DR = DR:5. These mooks die after taking 1 HP of damage, but that still require you to do 6 points of damage to get there (or use "targeting chinks in armour, or maybe set people on fire as that ignores DR).



Combining these two above things means I can have "easy to hit but hard to kill"-mooks and "hard to hit but easy to kill" mooks, and variations of this. If combined my mooks can actually be quite dangerous especially as they always comes in huge groups 10-40 for instance. And that's without having to do any bookkeeping or dierolls at all! .. well except attacks.
But I have before simply rolled many d10's instead of 3d6. Say the mooks have skill:11, that's a hit on a 5+ on d10. Then I can roll a handfull to-hits instead of having to roll multiple 3d6. It's especially effective when having a large group of mook-archers.


- I also use Normal monsters who always fail HT/Will and so go down on a major wound or when reaching 0... but who DO make active defenses, including retreats and acrobatics is fitting. However the normals never suffer from reduced move/dodge for reaching "below 1/3 HP" again, for bookkeeping reasons. In addition Normals with HPT or Berserk are given double HP, to represent "the brutes".

- And then Elites who use all the normal rules, stay concious, stay alive and so on, all the book keeping and are usually highly skilled NPc's. And in addition they also use Extra Effort in combat.

- Finally we have bosses who are like the Elites but get double HP simply to make them last longer, usually have very high DR and skills and cheats by using special tricks, including always having at least Luck 1.

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

I've been using a variation - non-important NPCs fail HT rolls to stay conscious or to stay alive.

Who is important varies by the situation. Generally if I pick out that NPC as something special, name it, give it a special weapon or special job ("This goblin will try to ring the warning gong") it doesn't follow that rule. I might rule on the fly, too. If that NPC does something awesome during combat (scores a good crit, etc.), I might decide then and there it's not a "mook." How can it be? It just scored an awesome crit on a PC, he must be tough.

So if you're giving orcs HT 12 and Fit, you're basically saying they aren't mooks.

[Athanbeli]

I don't play true DF (very few monsters and sparse magics). Nonetheless, just like so many other players, I find the series so useful for so many guidelines.

This point is a little hazy to me. Take DF Monsters (I dig it enthusiastically!): a few creatures are noted for having high HT and/or berzerk, consequently being able to succeed in lots - if not all - of HT rolls.
This seems to imply that many monsters SHOULD roll HT rolls, only to fail, but only eventually. I find this confusing.
So, who are the mooks and who are the worthies, given an average 250 pts party? It seems a steep passage from the wand tap (1 damage point) to having to inflict some 90/100 damage points.

So I made up my own damage thresholds (no 1 point tap).

[Bruno]

As mentioned, I don't make high HT, High Pain Threshold, Hard to Kill, Berserk creatures into mooks. That's perverse, unless your players are off at a point level where they can one or two shot even those guys - at which point even THEY are probably best handled as minions, while the players take seriously the titans and godlings and eldrich horrors and whatever (worthies and bosses) .

If it's something with only a few HP in the first place, it immediately gets demoted to mook. After that, I go through a quick evaluation: If it's something that will generally be reduced to 0 HP in one or two hits, taking into account DR and etc, then it usually gets demoted to Mook simply so I can use 20 or 50 in an extended assault and not worry about one statistical outlier critically succeeding in all of his defences and such.

As someone upthread noted, I try not to have all-mook encounters as my "typical" mook-encounter plan; they get a few big Worthy pets, or leaders, or enforcers, or whatever. Or they're thrown in to pad out and complicate a Boss encounter. Or they become the reason why an otherwise not-terribly hard hazard/barrier becomes important enough to game out - Sure, the PCs can have the barbarian folks across that wide river by one, but if you're being chased by dozens and dozens of goblins you don't have time and everyone's going to have to test their Swimming defaults. At which point the river is a "worthy" that the mooks are reinforcing.

When players develop a well-polished procedure for handling traps and barriers, its time to send disposable mooks at them at the same time to kick things up a little bit, and give the combat characters something to do while technical specialists do their schtick.

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

Well . . .

Given the relative fragility of mooks (of any species) having them run away ASAP when hit makes sense.

Remember the great scene in Terminator I.

Terminator who has just entered truck, to the driver: "Leave."

Driver: [No words, but a zoom! out the door.]

Hey, it worked.

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by Maz

The mooks in my games do not roll active defenses instead they give a default-penalty to the PC's to hit (equal to defense-6. With no modifiers ever to their active defense and they cant' be targeted by telegraphic atk.). This way the knight can make his 6 Flurry of Blow attacks without having to have me make 6 defenses to see if they are hit or not. It also means I can simply tell the players "these mooks gives a -3 penalty" and then the players can all start rolling a once, without waiting for the defenses from me. I can then focus on what the actual worthy foes are doing.

I really like this option, and will have to try it out in the future. Something else I've contemplated but never implemented is to replace all of a mook's 3d skill and attributes rolls with 1d, with 1=6, 2=8, 3=10, 4=11, 5=13, 6=15. It gives similar probabilities to a 3d6 roll, but reduces the number of dice (so you could roll, say, 6 attacks at once with 6d) and also removes the chance of critical fail / success (which may be a good or a bad thing, depending on GM preference). It remains to be seen whether it would actually be faster in play, which mostly hinges on the ability of the GM to remember what the 1d values are.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Bruno

As mentioned, I don't make high HT, High Pain Threshold, Hard to Kill, Berserk creatures into mooks.

Where is Luther when you need him? This is a clear case for the Cult of Stat Normalization: most folks should have very average stats. If you don't need the stat to be better than racial average, then don't make it so.

[Athanbeli]

Originally Posted by Bruno

As mentioned, I don't make high HT, High Pain Threshold, Hard to Kill, Berserk creatures into mooks.

I just don't get it. So, the only ones who should roll HT are those that will almost never fail the roll itself?

[Rasputin]

And then one day you find
Ten rangers got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun.

(Sorry, Roger.)

Why not just have some mooks run? Much of this discussion can be solved by having morale rules for Dungeon Fantasy instead. Yes, it gets away from the murdering hoboes, since your statted gang of serial killers aren't killing everyone, but wouldn't this help?

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Athanbeli

I just don't get it. So, the only ones who should roll HT are those that will almost never fail the roll itself?

The short answer? Yes.

More to the point, why are you bothering to roll HT? To keep a foe in the fight. If the foe is boring and can't do much more than swing and maybe draw a little blood, it isn't worth the rolling. GURPS already makes it hard for a character at 0 HP to do much in the fight unless he has a high HT, so these guys are going to go down fast anyways. If they try to whack someone, they need to make an HT roll to do so, one which they're going to fail eventually, and their Dodges are halved, so they're going to take more damage all the time.