Secondary skills

From: flynnkd2 <flynnkd_at_...>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 02:46:19 -0000

My players are concentrating mainly on improving their combat skills, and consequently letting other skills lapse. This results in CC skill around 10w2 whilst most over skills lag back at 17-5w. In an encounter with some scorpian men I used similar CC skills to that of the party, but added poison to their sting attacks. The strength of the pioson was 5w to start and got to 15w with the queens bodyguards. My players of course still had 17 Resist Poison or 20 Tough etc... they managed to survive by avoiding getting hit by the stings mostly, but one person did get hit and suffered badly due to his weakness to resisting poison. They all then complained that the poison was too strong for the party to handle...

Which raises the question, as a mastery difference is so big in HW, I tend to rate my monsters vs the ratings of my players. But if the trend continues the players will get to 5w3 CC and still be at 20 Tough... so my monsters with poison will be around 5w3 in CC but their poison in comparison will be really low to allow the players to survive...

I have pointed out to my players that this is their own fault, because of the way they have developed their characters, one response was that by concentrating on CC he would kill his opponents first or never get hit... he tends to go for big AP bids and tries to knock out enemies with one or two big hits.

I was just looking for opinions on this, mainly to assauge my guilt at wanting to kill them all with poison just to prove my point that they should have spread their HPs around a bit more...