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Nightshade

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Posts posted by Nightshade

  1. Years ago Chaosium stated that the reason for the similar discrepancy between RQ and the Gloranthan board games was that RQ magic was individual spells, while the magic in the board games was a collective effort of several casters.

    In theory, you could reflect this in RQ by allowing for some sort of community/rtiaual effect to amplify battle magic. For example, if a 100 man unit could boost thier leader's bladesharp to bladesharp 100, or give each man a 1 point bladesharp spell, you start to get HQ level effects.

    Off the top of my head, if you took the RQ3 ceremony chart, replaced time with worshippers/followers, required a ceremony roll and charged each participant 1 MP, you could use it to calculate the "group bonus".

    Two things:

    1. That doesn't always work; sometimes high magic units in the board games were individuals.

    2. That wouldn't mean anything for the matter at hand, since it _is_ individual power.

    As to comments others have said; for the most part, it doesn't matter what you _can_ do with the system; of course there's nothing intrinsic in a BRP style approach that prevents a high-magic setting. What matters is what's there already. People tend to forget that most people aren't major league game mechanics; they don't want to have to do system work, and to the degree they will, they don't want to do much. And the _majority_ of BRP magic systems people will have been exposed to aren't high magic, and as such won't have attracted them to it.

  2. There's a difference though. On a PC level, runequest magic tends to be in the veins of bladesharp 3 and heal 2. Fairly minor and unintrusive stuff.

    Correct. You see some very high magic things on a heroquest type level, but the actual RQ rules don't support that; even higher end sorcery and rune magic wasn't particularly spiff compared to even moderate level D&D spells.

  3. Got just one big question for you at this time, as its been a bit of a sore point in adapting BRP based games to more general use in the past. How did you end up setting up character generation? Some simple build/roll attributes mode and a skill point distribution system? Or something else?

  4. I suspect a combination of issues (including just the lack of broad support from Chaosium) are involved;

    1. First off, its fishing in a different pool than D&D; you can view this in a negative light if you want, but D&D players want a particular sort of high magic, generally over the top fantasy, and BRP and its kin have not, generally, supported that very well; its roots in the relatively realistic RQ have pretty much made that true in any version of it I'm familiar with.

    2. While the system as a whole is relatively flexible (as in, easy to add and remove modules for) individual games approaches have often been very paroquial with character generation and subsystems designed to support their particular setting and not easily converted to anything not particularly close.

    3. Simply presence of undesireable features for some, or lack of desireable features for others. Once you get into people who want advantage/disadvantage system, bell curve resolution, seperate tracks for lethal and nonlethal damage and other properties that either aren't supported by current versions of BRP or would require actively changing the core structures to support, you exclude more people. I'm not getting into an argument about whether the game should, but those _are_ features some demand, and if you don't have them, you've lost those players.

    Individually, most of this wouldn't screen that many people out, but in combination, its not suprising that by the time its done, the market doesn't have a lot of love for BRP. If it gets proper exposure, the new version could help with some of these, but its not going to do much about the issues in #3, and I suspect it can only do so much about #1.

  5. There are a lot of optional rules to tweak to your taste. Unfortunately, I've only read RQII and RQIII so I may not be the best authority on the subject.

    We need Jason Durall on these boards to answer all the questions.

    I believe Jason was who said you could get pretty close to RQ with the right options.

  6. I seem to remember in a post at rpg.net that someone said it resembles Elric! and Stormbringer 5 more than most other forms of BRP. That may be pure speculation, though.

    That seemed to be the way it defaults, but apparently if you toggle some of the optional rules it gets awfully close to RQ (I don't know whether that's RQ2 or RQ3, though).

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