Nightshade

We kind of prefer to have a fairly hard-numbers approach here, at least when it comes to thresholds. Huh. I'd forgotten that RQ3 didn't have a movement penalty for encumbrance. Too many games over the years I guess.

I'd vaguely remembered it being such back then, but as you note, the cultural weapons categories were usually used as the base there, so the individual weapon bases relatively rarely came up. But the individual weapons seem the only ones listed here, so we're not quite sure what to do.

Is it just me, or is the section on Encumbrance on page 180 missing something? It tells you what constitutes encumbrance, but doesn't actually tell you what it does, or what the value is. Part of it may be in the Fatigue section, but it seems like something is still missing, in terms of the reference to excess encumbrance slowing you (which doesn't seem to be explained anywhere). Given this seems like its derived from the RQ3 version, I can probably just go back and look at what it did there, but I'm trying to make sure I haven't just missed something.

I'm now about to play in a campaign based on the new BRP version, and we've run into a problem; I couldn't find anything about this with searc, though I have trouble believing it hasn't come up before. Discussion of the Weapon Skills in the books seems to usually assume the skills will be clumped by category (and the example opposition is written up this way); yet the skill bases for the weapons are all individual (for example the bases on the polearms range from 5 to 15%). As such, if you're using the category skills rather than individual skills, there's nothing to use as a base. Has Jason said anything about this?

To the best of my knowledge, Nicolai (Niall) and his wife Kay have pretty much slid out of at least the pencil and paper RPG hobby a long time ago, so I doubt he's thought of it much in a long time.

Eclipse Phase is one of those games that looks at least fascinating on paper (though as someone noted there's an in-play issue involving how their transportation methods are used; you spend a lot of time building to a default body that if you're travelling around a lot, you probably won't have most of the time).

And thus why my statement was "that different" rather than "at all different". It just can't annoy me the way a couple publishers do who charge the same price for .pdfs as they do for the deadtree edition.

Eh. Doesn't seem that different from a number of companies that offer both .pdf and deadtree versions, but don't bundle them.

That all largely fits my experience. A sorcerer who doesn't pursue spirit binding may never be a problem this way; but once his skills have reached the requisite levels, it doesn't need many Power Spirits (I'd forgotten the Familiar can take over the spell holding property of Intellect Spirits) for it to be an issue. Unless, of course, he simply doesn't do it, but one can't make the assumption that'll be the case.

The only reason its not possible with a starting sorcerer who's rolled well is he won't have the spirit bindings to support it yet. Other than that, he has to have rolled well on two die rolls; his Intelligence and his starting age. And of course started as a sorcerer itself. You're correct that a more mediocre sorcerer can take some time, but I have little evidence it'll take as long as the levels of divine magic accrued you seem to find normal.

I do have to say that if your experiences have features divine mages who could feel good about tying up significant points of divine magic per character just to have something analogous to a Bladesharp 4 on them at all times, they have, indeed, been vastly different than mine.

I have to point out core RQ3 had no discussion of "associated cults" in the Gloranthan sense at all; you're correct that it assumes pantheons, but the only method of accessing the magic of other gods within a pantheon was to become members of each of them, with the associated overhead involved. Even under those circumstances, there was no guarentee you'd have the range of potential spirit spells that a shamanistic type would. The sad part was that in other ways sorcery was very unattractive; PCs that weren't specialists but had sorcery as their magic type often found it next to useless between the low casting chance and the penalties from encumberance.

Well, spirit mages have no equivelent to the long term spells, and I'd argue that there's more overhead on the divine equivelent; to get something approximating Damage Boost 4 you're probably talking about one of those Divine spells that acted like pumped up Bladesharps (usually did 10% and +1d4 damage per point as I recall) at 2 points, plus whatever amount of extension is required for an approximate four week duration (which as I recall was a pretty fair bit). Do that for a whole party and that's quite a bit of divine magic, and its divine magic which, in the end, isn't doing anything else. On the other hand, with the sorcerer, its essentially at the price of a spell, and maybe a sorcery matrix to give some extra duration and the necessary spirits (which do double duty for him in other ways). A divine mage can certainly produce this result, but he has to be somewhat of a specialist to do it (this turns to some extent on how much divine magic you're used to priests having, but since this operating procedure requires about 13 points of divine magic per character just to match what one sorcery spell will do, I'd say you're not going to see too many divine mages who are really going to match it) to say the least, where a sorcerer can do it without otherwise impairing his functionality. That's why I say its rather worse. A priest won't do this sort of thing because it ties up too much resource; the only part of a sorcerer's resource this is really tying up (i.e. that doesn't serve multiple functions for him anyway) is maybe a matrix.

Well, one of the reasons I've tried to stay out of Glorantha on this topic is it muddies a lot of issues, even moreso when you have to dealw ith some of the exotic magic variants that appeared in Gods of Glorantha like the Lunar Magic. In core RQ3, cults had access to very limited spirit magic, usually just 3-4 types of spirit spell, and that was considerably more limiting to them, especially at the priestly level (dabblers could sometimes fish in both the ones available to their cult and ones acquired elsewhere, but then they got into the whole spotty availability of spells from purely spirit magic sources (aka shamen). The only downside to the Lunar Magic was its duration didn't ramp up as fast, which meant the longterm buffs weren't as painful as I recall. But I don't think I ever saw it in use, so...

They may be able to get the most out of certain enchantments, but they still don't need as much sacrificed power as divine casters, and its debateable whether spirit mages are actually less needing of enchantments than sorcerers; in any case, the "primary" spirit mages (shamen) tend to still get a lot of their power out of power sacrifices in the form of inflating their fetch. Neither divine mages nor spirit mages get that much out of training, however; their primary coin of the realm is power or spirit spell learning (the latter of which is much more haphazard than simply increasing a spell or spell alteration skill)

Not really. The sorcerer needs far less enchantments to produce that, and can start out suprisingly close to being able to do it as a starting character otherwise just by having good attributes and getting a high starting age roll. Basically its a consequence of a fundamental difference in the three magics: 1. The biggest part of a divine mage's capability comes from power sacrificed; 2. The biggest part of a spirit mage's power comes from spirits available and spells learned. 3. The biggest part of a sorcerer's ability comes from skill. Only one of those inflates all that noticeably from good initial rolls, and only one elevates much from training time.

But it wasn't. What I mean by that is that in the case you mention, every person who did this had to have his own spirit, and used up its magic points at the time. In the case of the sorcery spell, the magic points were expended weeks ago, and the spirit long since recharged. As such, in the equivelent situation you'd have no need of the second power spirit at all, or (as we discussed earlier) do both. Or alternatively, have the character with the Bladesharp spent his power on something else (armor enchantment, say). But then, the Extension spells tie up sacrifice power, too, and to do so to the whole party requires quite a bit of divine magic there--sacrifice power that could again have been used for other things. I meant pushing hard on the sorcery system specifically. My only real point is that a Gloranthan campaign will have some built in constraints on sorcerers (because of the hostility to them present in the common Dragon Pass/Prax-centric Gloranthan campaign) that isn't present automatically--or even by expectation--outside of Glorantha. Runequestement votre, Kloster

That's the issue, though; once you get this sort of process going, to say that's less likely to be successful is an understatement.

That's only workable as long as the PCs are normative, however; its not a given that every single set of opponents will have a sorcerer of their particular configuration available to them (or even a sorcerer at all; after all, if you're fighting opponents who are from the barbarian, nomad or primitive groups, sorcerers are thin on the ground). Nor does it help with nonintelligent opponents.

That's what happens when you're trying to talk about a game you haven't run for more than a decade; the details get fuzzy. That said, it doesn't address the problem of needing a lot of opponents with at least moderate Dispels, and having them take the time to do them to every PC. And of course the fact that there's no promise that you've really got easy to deal with PCs even after all that. After all, this whole process has tied up resources on only one of the PCs; the rest are just as capable as they'd have been if the sorcerer wasn't a member of the party.

The problem was you'd need to have a pretty huge one, and do it multiple times. Example in point: You have someone who's got Damage Boost 4's with a 4 week duration up on everyone (likely through a combination of keeping most of his Int Free by using Intellect Spirits, and having the actual spell on a Matrix, but it isn't impossible by any means to simply have the full Free Int with most of your spells fobbed off on Int Spirits) totalling out to a 16 point spell. There are three ways this can be Dispelled: 1. Dispel Magic (spirit magic): Almost no one is going to have a Dispel Magic 16; its just massively huge and expensive, assuming you can even find it. 2. Dismiss Magic (divine magic): More doable, but still requires 8 points of divine magic for each target you want to dispel it off of. Not likely to even have that many, and you're sure not going to have enough to do it on a whole 4-6 player group. 3. Nullify Magic (sorcery): The most practical, because of the way Intensity works and the fact its a resistance value roll, but to have a significant chance you still have to crank it up to 12 or more, and that's time consuming and doesn't have some of the tricks you can play with the long duration buffs because you have to do it in combat. One of the side effects of these long durations is that these spells are very hard to knock down. The problem is, that's a massive "if".

It didn't have to be a huge Intensity to be a problem. And the cheap way to end run Free Int was to stash the majority of your spells in Intellect Spirits; yeah, that did have a little overhead on it, but nothing close to what a decent sized spell matrix did, and you only neeeded one person to have those, as compared to the whole party. And what I meant by the magic point cost was that you'd have to have that on the Bladesharp every time it went up, not the one day a month the sorcerer actually spent putting up buffs. Not all RQ3 games were run in Glorantha, you know. In fact, none of the local ones were. At least that required someone to have divine magic, and of the right religion. I'd politely suggest that's because no one pushed on it quite as hard in yours, and you may well have (if you were running Glorantha) some social constraints on process that aren't in the rules and aren't universal.

Yeah, actually it was, for two reasons: 1. It was painless. Enchantments require investment of Power, and were expensive to produce at higher levels; in standard RQ there really wasn't much way to have them not have a magic point cost associated with them, too. So they were self-limiting in how frequent they could be used. The long duration Damage Boost was in every fight. 2. It was pandemic; you could end up doing it to the whole party. So it was much less of an issue to get it on everyone. That doesn't even get into the issue that in standard RQ3, there was nothing stopping it from _stacking_ with the above Bladesharp. Really, the situations weren't terribly comparable.

Well, honestly, the "locking up" business doesn't really fit with much else in the game, and only is consistent if it "locks up" the capacity of the apprentice and the storage device too. But as you note, once you have enough of that, it only slows the process down.

This is actually a variant on what the old system Superhero 2044 did, except it called them ubermensch, toolmasters and uniques. The problem is that its easy to have characters that land twixt and tween. Blue Beetle is an acrobat/inventor, as is Batman to at least some degree; Spider-Man (at least the usual comics version) is an inventor/superhuman. Iron Fist is an acrobat/superhuman. The reason most superhero games avoid anything resembling character classes is that superheroes resist any sort of tight pidgeonholing even more than most fictional characters.