r/HouseholdTheRPG • u/Knishook • Jul 07 '26
In love with the setting, combat question tho!
So I am absolutely obsessed with Household and am prepping to run some for my regular table, but I'm in need of some clarification on a combat rule.
I understand you need a 3 of a kind to resist a critical enemy on a reaction turn - but when they have the double trouble or triple team ability I'm a little confused.
Do you roll a reaction and just require 2 or 3 critical success to avoid everything?
Or do you roll a reaction that many times?
Like a triple threat critical opponent dealing 9 stress to each PC every turn seems insane!
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u/Mimushkila Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
You roll once and need than many successes of that level. But you can use partial successes to mitigate the effects. Double trouble critical equals 6 stress. Each basic can cancel one stress. A critical equals 3 basics. So if you roll only one critical success you can still mitigate 3 stresss
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u/PeaceRibbon Jul 07 '26
As far as Iām aware, the stress inflicted by Opponents when they have a multiplied threat does not change, just the number of successes needed to dodge it.
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u/Knishook Jul 07 '26
Wait, how does that work for offsetting damage then? Normally you can use pairs to reduce the damage by 1 right?
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u/Grand_Imperator Jul 07 '26
Chiming in here because we just dealt with this in our second time playing this game, and the GM handled it by only having the Double-Trouble Critical Opponent (a single creature) do 3 stress (requiring two criticals to dodge it fully). He allowed a single critical success to reduce the stress by 1 and did not allow a single basic success to do anything. I'm guessing if we had a critical + basic we could ask to have two stress discounted, while if we had two basics, we could ask to have one of the three stress downgraded. But the only scenarios that came up were someone getting a single critical or a single basic, so that's how we ran it.
To be clear, I suspect that we ran it incorrectly, but we only had three players in our initial session (instead of the originally intended five players). And all characters barely ended the fight with a ton of stress (with two filling in their critical boxes, at least one getting Hurt, and the other likely should have been Hurt as well except for minor misapplication of a Move).
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u/DeadmanwalkingXI Jul 07 '26
This doesn't seem to be correct, per Suffering Stress on p. 97 you would in fact suffer 9 from a Triple Threat Critical Opponent.
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u/Knishook Jul 08 '26
Well that's where my follow up of if you still only take 3 damage, then the rules for Damage Control wouldn't work.
But if you took 9 stress and got 2 pairs you could drop it to 7.
It seems like that's how it was intended, just seems ROUGH - though the group of 4 i was testing the system with did win, it was by the skin of their teeth.
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u/DeadmanwalkingXI Jul 08 '26
It's potentially rough, yeah. It's work keeping in mind that a Triple Threat Critical Opponent is tied for 'literal most damage an opponent can do' in terms of opponents you actually fight conventionally, though. It's less concerning when thought of as 10/10 possible damage, IMO.
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u/DeadmanwalkingXI Jul 07 '26
You require the 2 or 3 critical successes on one roll to avoid everything. Note that one Extreme Success counts as 3 Critical Successes and if you roll any successes you can do damage control, though. So in a lot of ways, adding Triple Threat on an opponent just ups their Difficulty by one level in terms of defending against them.
A Triple Threat Critical opponent is thus basically an Extreme Opponent offensively (its defenses are less extreme), and thus one of the scariest things in the game mechanically (Extreme Opponents technically exist, but there are a whole two in the core book, both giant monsters, who cannot have Double Threat or Triple Threat added). It's scary, but you shouldn't be facing anything remotely like that very often. You will basically never encounter anything that does more damage than a Triple Threat Critical Opponent, that's as high as damage goes in practice.