Ok, can someone explain the "mook rule"

[Nifft]

Well it really depends on level. At 10th level you really do walk through townsfolk like chaffe. Even a 10th level wizard is a match for most guardsmen in melee combat. A naked epic character armed with a sizeable stick can take out dozens of typical guardsmen.

IMC, townfolk average around 9th level or so. Sure, some of these levels are in Expert or Aristocrat, but they're not pushovers.

Why do I do this?

Because I want Epic levels to actually mean something, and to fit into the world that exists. I want all 20 levels to be playable, and above that to make some kind of sense. Also, because anything as weak & tasty as a Commoner was eaten by the 1,000 year Demon-Plague.

Furthermore, a band of non-Epic guys saving a town of these people from something that is a credible threat is actually heroic.

I start my PCs off at 3rd level -- just out of apprentice-hood. Several have survived to become Journeymen. Let's hope some make it to Mastery.

-- N

 

[CCamfield]

The point of mooks in, say, Feng Shui, is generally not to be a real challenge to the player but to serve as a showcase for the players. The challenge they'll face is the other "named" characters.

Another aspect of "mook rules" is that they simplify things for the GM. Generally speaking (thinking of Feng Shui mooks or 7th Sea brutes) they're either "up" or "down". In Feng Shui, you must beat their lousy defense score by a margin of 5 to take one down; in 7th Sea, basically hitting them is enough (but they travel in groups of up to 6!). The GM does't have to track hit points for them, which makes large battles easy to run. Compare that with throwing a horde of low-level creatures against PCs. If the GM chooses to track hit points, there could be a lot of logistics involved: which ones take damage, where they move to, etc...

In the last game of Feng Shui I played in, I had a "heroic bandit" character who could recruit bandits to his aid. It did make it pretty easy to track losses, although it did involve a lot of die rolling - it's not really a mass combat mechanic.

Mook rules are most appropriate when the players are supposed to be among the best at what they do. Aside from HK martial arts films and HK gun films, I think some westerns might be appropriate - think of the men that Clint Eastwood's character guns down in A Fistful of Dollars or For A Few Dollars More.

edited P.S. If the PCs in the post-apocalyptic game mentioned were not good in combat, then I really could see the disjoint between the players' perception of their PCs abilities, and how they fared. If the PCs aren't supposed to be good, it's better to lower the numbers of the opposition in a game like that - in my opinion of course.

 

[Sir Whiskers]

I had never heard of mook rules prior to this thread, but I can say I've run a campaign where the villains were mostly mooks. I based it on the books Blackcollar and The Backlash Mission by Timothy Zahn. Basically, Earth and its colonies were at war with an alien race which is physically superior to homo sapiens. A relatively small number of human soldiers were modified to be faster, stronger, etc. and given intensive training in martial arts and small unit tactics. The war is lost, the human planets are occupied, and the few remaining blackcollars go into retirement. Many years later they start a guerilla war with the aliens, trying to free their people.

The interesting thing about the campaign was that the pc's won every single battle (even the ones I thought they would surely lose), but had a great deal of difficulty advancing their aims. The whole point was that it didn't matter how many mooks (humans working with the aliens) they took out - they had to figure out how to break the aliens' hold on the conquered planets. The campaign stopped due to busy schedules, but not before the players finally started thinking like a resistance movement and acted accordingly.

This is one way to challenge players in a mook-centered campaign. Winning battles isn't the way to win. Learning which battles to fight and win is.

 

[demiurge1138]

I remember a player of mine calling this sort of encounter a "goblin fight", presumably because goblins are fairly weak. I do try to avoid these kind of scenarios, as they don't really challenge the players and are tougher to run than they're worth.

Demiurge out.

 

[Bagpuss]

Personally I would never use Mook fights in a game that focuses on miniature based combat. First you have to move lots of figures around and then the whole tactical board game aspect becomes the focus so the discriptive aspect gets lost.

Mook fights are better suited to descriptive combat, and that's where they give the players a chance to shine, if its a case of move here, hit that, it dies, next, as a mass of miniatures is going to be then mook fights become more about numbers and dice rolling than colourful discriptions of your character's Fu-powers.

 

[Will]

The way I see it, mooks provide a bridge between conflict and descriptive type games.

That is, in a conflict game, it's all about chance and tactics.

In a descriptive game, it's all about style and entertaining roleplay.

In a conflict game, you rarely can do flashy and amusing actions, because likely it means you roll badly, slip off the chandelier and break your back.

In a descriptive game, you rarely get the thrill of potential loss and astounding success.

With a mook rule, you can cleanly switch between the two. Mooks allow people to play their tropes and have the freedom to do wacky, freewheeling stuff. Woohoo! Swing on the chandelier, baby! Use one mook to hit three others over the head. Etc.

But then you go up against the non-mooks! Switch to conflict, and the drama is highlit...

I personally think it's a brilliant design, as someone who likes both modes of play. If you find one mode interferes with the other, of course, you'll hate it.

Some people, on the other hand, find the rule irritating beyond belief. Claims have been made that the rule is tantamount to racism, by creating an underclass of non-people who don't count in the world like the PCs. The vehemence puzzles me, but if you are going to use the rule in your game, you might want to find out if it will twist any player's knickers.

One thing I like about D&D is that at a certain level, low level opponents sort of become mooks. Sure, d&d lacks some of the support for descriptive flexibility, but people can resort to it if they want. In any case, a 6th level party facing a bunch of 1st level orcs is probably going to sweep the floor with them.

And people who hate mook rules usually don't mind that sort of 'emergent' mookishness.

Oh, a last point... one thing about mooks that is more of a convenience issue is that it makes NPCs a lot easier to run. If you have 50 NPCs, it's a f-load easier to treat 'any hit drops them' than to detail out what each hit does or track 50 sets of damage. Man.

And hey, in D&D, conscripts in armies already have that rule. They get hit at all, they run.

 

[shilsen]

And here I was thinking that the mook rule meant that one had a lot of weak low-level enemies that the big, bad PC fighter covered in plate from head to toe knows he can mow through with ease. All the way until they trip and/or grapple him to the floor and then pile on top of him, while sticking nice sharp objects through the slits in his helmet. It's good to remind players that while BAB and AC are costly, opposed ability checks and touch attacks are priceless.

 

[Shallown]

I think there is also a balance of realism and reality. Meaning it is realistic to have the 1st & 2nd level warriors as guards in a tonw but is it realistic or pratical to have the 12th characters fight a group of them > save the time and just count them as smacked out and get to the more challenging events/encounters. Mooks in my game are a reality becuase low level poeple live in the characters now high level world. I mean the same encounter when the characters were 2nd-3rd would be pulse pounding might/might not survive. At 12th-14th level its not even a speed bump. I'm not wasting that kind of time to run a fight. Just call them dead and keep going.

But then again thats just me.

later

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

And here I was thinking that the mook rule meant that one had a lot of weak low-level enemies that the big, bad PC fighter covered in plate from head to toe knows he can mow through with ease. All the way until they trip and/or grapple him to the floor and then pile on top of him, while sticking nice sharp objects through the slits in his helmet. It's good to remind players that while BAB and AC are costly, opposed ability checks and touch attacks are priceless.

Try this tactic on a similarly leveled monk with combat reflexes and great cleave.

It adds up to a large number of dead mooks

At least it isn't a wizard with a wall of flame/fly spell/gaseous form and a couple of cloudkills?


I find mooks are fun, especially in huge numbers... they let the players showboat and it makes for a different sort of fight to the usual. Like someone else said, it only works if you don't use a tactical map for those fights, else it turns into a miniature moving fest. Really hammers home how powerful the PCs are.

Just because the combat is easy, doesn't mean it can't be challenging - what do you do if 50 orcs surrender? Is someone going to be annoyed that you butchered 100 of their peasants, so what if they were demon worshiping scum - at least they still paid their taxes?

 

[Numion]

Unfortunately, nobody told Boromir or Faramir.

Ah, but Boromir wasn't killed by a mook. He was killed by the orcs leader, who proved to be a hard match even for Aragorn.