radmonger

8 minutes ago, Joerg said:

It it was just the short-lived yellow elf males, I wouldn't be worried, but there are dryads and a great tree that might have noticed things like Flamal killed or the sun going AWOL before Time.

Yelmalio is both the sun who didn't (quite) die, and also in some undefined sense an elf god. Are there yellow elves in Teshnos?

45 minutes ago, JRE said:

In the other versions barring very powerful magic, three skilled opponents would always beat a weapon master with the same equipment, because you could not reasonably defend against three foes. Now you can, and they will have a penalty to their to hit number and to their parry, so combat will be also much shorter.

The question of who wins is different from how deadly things are. What i am talking about is the chance that combat is ongoing, one side rolls well and the other gets cut in half. Fighting more opponents only makes that more likely, even if most of the time you would win.

fighting 3 opponents, even with no flanking the third  parry is at -40%, so has a sizeable chance of failing. With heavy armour and normal opponents, death will come solely from criticals. Assuming a beefy pc with 5 hp in the abdomen/head, that requires 15 damage in a single attack.

RQ;G's+1D4 damage that the average human has (due to the use of the RQ3 SIZ stat range) does makes that far more likely. Albeit not as likely as with the RQ3 impale rules.

Personally i find that case fine; combat against the odds should have a risk.

The core issue is one of those things that i suspect 99% of RQ gm's know to ignore. HP are taken directly from CON with only minor adjustments for other characteristics. And, rules as written, CON is rolled in a 3d6. Not 4d6 drop one, not roll 6 sets of dice and allocate scores, not create several characters and pick one you like.

So a sizable percentage of RAW PCs will have 8 or less total hp, and 3 hp in critical locations.  Which means they are basically statistically guaranteed  to die in one of the first few fights they get into. 

+4 is for a crushing blow, which is a 1 in 5 chance. You need a crit if they are wearing a helmet, which few people do for a fist-fight. d3 + d4 =4 is average 8.5, so 50% chance of an instant death with no healing possible.

In rq2, instant death would have required 2*3 +  6 = 12 hp damage, which requires exceptional strength and size to do in a single punch. Even many criticals with an arrow would be survivable with healing. 2d8 + 2 has an average roll of 10. So 33% chance of death under RQ2, 55% under RQ:G.

RQ2 was intentionally a deadly system. I think the degree to which RQ:Q is more so is a clear mistake. Which does make it easily fixable.

I think the implication is that the Doraddi, like many ancient tribal societies, do have that kind of slavery.  This may or may not be magically backed. If it was, there would be something like a variant of the Oath spell that enforced a year's servitude.

My reading is that post-Vadeli  Fonrit has two distinct but related practices:

- tapping slavery, where the master sorcerously breaks the will of the slave

- Ompalam slavery, where the slave dedicates their own will and energy into being a better slave.

The second form is why Fonrit is so rich. The threat of the first is why slaves commonly tolerate it.

Cults are like cities.

Almost everyone in Sartar knows what all the major cities of Sartar are. Only the very drunk will argue about  'does boldhome _really_ exist?', or 'is jonstown just another name for wilmskirk?'. There is a less definitive take on distant lands. There may well be sizable cities, not connected to the major worldwide trade routes, that noone in Sartar has ever heard of.

New cities  can be founded,but there are material and magical constraints on how, where and why.   Some hypothetical cities would break those constraints.  This would play out in any attempt to found such a city failing.

Some of those failures would be easily predictable, others less so.

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In a Peninsular War campaign, Wellington might argue:
"I shall fortify the town, and I am able to do this because:

• I have a ready source of trained manpower,
• I have an experienced Engineer in command, and
• the British Government has recently sent me the money with which to pay for the work".

The matrix stuff is interesting; it sounds like it was very influential in the design of the original Hero Wars. In particular, the 'three reasons' system sounds a lot like the original approach to Hero Wars augments.

Where i suspect that went wrong is  using character abilities for augments, and resolving things purely numerically. This lead to the 'augment hunt' approach were you went over you character sheet line by line and said '+3 for fighting for my clan, + 3 for hating the lunars, +2 for being able to track them down, ...'.

in the current QW  SRD, this is vestigial, as only a single augment is allowed. This is essentially false choice, as 'do you, or someone nearby, you have an ability that could be argued to help?' is a question that is only ever going to have one answer. So personally i would get rid of that totally.

The key point of the matrix system is that going forward, wellington can use 'the town is fortified' as an established fact.

So you can use something like this to incrementally resolve climactic contests. What you do is establish new facts about the situation, one by one.

For example, by the time of Luke's trench run, we have established:

• the death star can be destroyed by a single hit on the exhaust port
• the turbolaser batteries covering the trench have been destroyed
• the tie fighter garrison is engaged dogfighting with rebel X-wings
• Darth Vader  has spun out of the combat
• the rebels have taken heavy losses
• Biggs Darklighter is dead
• R2D2 is out of action
• the rebel targeting system cannot hit the exhaust port
• the Death Star has a clear shot on the rebel base
• the Death Star's main gun has powered up

This first of these facts was established by many Bothans dying offscreen. The rest had to be rolled for. Establishing a fact about an extended contest requires a simple contest. High levels of success, or failure establish more definitive and permanent facts.

Luke turns off his targeting system and fires his plasma cannon.  What is his target number?

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Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.

The key thing is you don't just mathematically sum the facts, but think things through. The empire has established  a lot of facts, but none of them matter to what Luke is trying to do.

So he does an opposed roll against campaign standard difficulty level, succeeds, and flies home to pick up his medal.

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C-3PO : Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1. 

Han Solo : Never tell me the odds.

scrud  is basically a complicated way of rolling dice where virtually noone is going to be able work out the percentage of success on the fly. However, it still exists, and could be calculated by a computer (as i did for the QW SRD here).

This  works for a wargame, as once you put dudes on a map you create a sufficiently complicated dynamic for that to be interesting in it's pwn right. So 'they will lose, but if they can hold out a bit longer, the reinforcements can reach them, unless...'. For this, subjective ideas of 'can probably win' seem to work better than  '67%'

more on matrix games later.

.

The default system generates average 21 year olds who have yet failed to meet any of their societies expectations. They are initiates, so have not failed their initiation ordeal, which some people do. They are  not crippled by health issues or injuries, which some people are. They did not drop out of training for their occupation, which some of their peers did.. Ultimately, they are alive, which some of their peers are not

So, at the start of play, they will be some of the most promising people of their generation in their clan or city district. At the end of play, if the campaign goes on for long enough, they will be dead.

The question is what happens in between.

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

But — and forgive me: it has been a long time since I saw Star Wars, so I may get details wrong — should we be looking to turn QW into a wargame (a conflict simulation) in which — with the right tactics — Skywalker can plausibly take down the Death Star?

That is a very good question. Certainly Fantasy Flight already have half a dozen star wars-based wargames out, and it makes little sense to produce a 7th.

The thing is, there is a line of movie dialog:

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• Commander #1 : We've analyzed their attack, sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your ship standing by?

  Grand Moff Tarkin : Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.

This comes half way through the battle, and provides a moment of characterization for Tarkin; he is arrogant, not cowardly. Maybe Peter Cushing could rolled the dice to decide that?

If you strip QW down to it's essentials, deleting chapter 5, everything works. There is no sense in which it matters remotely that 'in reality' the rebels would have a 15% chance of winning, whereas 'in game' there is say 45%.

But what you lose is the ability to do that kind of roleplaying mid-combat, where things are going well or badly, and you want to react to that. You can do that in rq and Pendragon, d&d and pathfinder[1]. So people keep trying, and so far failing, to write non-degenerate[2] rules for contest sequences.

[1] perhaps not cthulhu, because if combat is going badly you are already dead.

[2] meaning rules that involve multiple dice rolls, but whose result isn't 99.9% determined by either the first or last roll.

i  don;t recognise this  as matching any of the sequence types from the SRD - is it a new one?

12 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Need is a bit hard to quanify here. Each number serves a purpose. HW/QW roll all those numbers into one which serves two purposes, skill and hit points. What you generally an't do in QW is mimic the effects of armor, or variable damage (HW increases the stakes allowed for increased damage at the cost of increased risk).

my point is that the QW SRD does actually have a second type of number, a resource. It's just currently not integrated with the rest of the rules.

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Unlike character abilities, each use of community resources temporarily depletes it. Regardless of outcome a resource takes a penalty of -5 when used. Effectively, this reduces the bonus by 5.

it needs very little  tweaking to apply to star wars. Leia uses her high relationship with her community, the rebel alliance, to access the military resources that keep  Luke in the fight before R2D2, Han and Obi wan can all help him to victory. The exhaust port, being a weak point, is hard to hit (high opposition) but low resource value (can't mitigate the consequences of defeat). So the tactically smart move is to score some relatively easy successes dogfighting, and taking down the turbo lasers, and then use those successes in the final  decisive roll that ends the contest.

On 7/15/2023 at 7:18 AM, Atgxtg said:

Come to think of it, the battle system in Pendragon is tailored to doing this sort of thing.

Not quite sure what you mean there. The current Pendragon battle system is layered on top of the melee combat system; it is used to pick which opponents you fight, and for how long. 

Pendragon melee has at least 4 key numbers (weapon skill, damage, armour,. hitpoints). So Saxon huscarls are meaningfully different from elite knights who are different from beserkers So when the players roll well enough on their battle skill to choose their opponents, that is not a false choice, but one with consequences

i am not sure you need all 4 numbers for that, but you do need more than 1. A fundamental principle of mathematics is that numbers have a strict total ordering, but vectors do not.

jar-Eel is a fearsome opponent (high skill), but the lunars only have one of her (low resource value). A sable lancer is a lot less likely to kill you (low skill), but defeating them also matters little to the empire (high resource value). If which you engage is supposed to be a choice, then that choice should matter.

54 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

becuase the simplicy of HQ no longer applies

The thing is, HQ/QW as written really isn't that simple.. About half the page count is dedicated to listing a bewildering array of ways of  handling extended contests/sequences. None of which, at least in my opinion, mechanically work.

That stuff could be deleted, or replaced with something that is mechanically sound. Until  it is, i don't think QW qualifies as a simple game. 

27 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

That's one way to run it. I'm not sure if it is the best way. Remeber no PCs die at the battle, only NPCs so for a hero-based RPG like HW/QW it looks more like the lost pilots and fighters are augments. 

biggs darklighter was probably a pc,  R2D2 definitely was, though the latter got resurrected after the battle.. The others were, in QW  terms, resources. They don't roll for themselves, they tank the damage when the PCs roll badly.

As a heroic pc, you may be able to teleport to the back of the crimson bat and kill the lunars controlling it. But while you are doing this, your army is going to be  eaten up.

34 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Why 5:1? That seems arbitrary Why not 1:1?.

To keep resource abilities on the same scale as skill abilities, so you use the same character generation rules for both.

37 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Abstracting things to two numbers may or may not be an improvement

The goal is not to realistically simulate the blueprints of the Death star, but capture the way that fictional info is presented in the move, and so by extension would be at a game table. And there i do think it is clear one number is not enough to capture those dynamics. wheras it is not obvious two isn't.

if you have just 'rebel fleet 14' and 'death star 21', then they is a given percentage of the rebels winning, which C3PO would not doubt tell you. Any complicated sequence of permutations of dice rolls that takes only those inputs will just give you a somewhat different percentage. And any other single pair of opposed ability numbers will either have a greater or lower difference, and so either be a strictly superior or strictly  inferior choice, with no room for trade-offs.

Hero Wars did recognise that if you want to have more that one roll in the same contest, you need something with more texture than a single number. So it had edges and bids and so on. Sadly, few people ever got that to work to their satisfaction.

i do think the current QW SRD is somewhere between a few house rules or an updated draft away from being a very good system. if not, well there are other game systems available.

On 7/15/2023 at 7:18 AM, Atgxtg said:

I'd use the old HW ability to raise the stakes and wager more ability points here.

i agree that the old HW ap-bid system can do this, which is the thing that is lost in its simpler replacements.

The simplest approach is to apply a variant of the  costly victory rules. If a PC doesn't want to accept the result of a decisive roll, they have to take 1 wound level for each success the opposition has scored. Doing this resets the contest.

You can see the rebel pilots doing this; some spin out, some explode.

On 7/15/2023 at 7:18 AM, Atgxtg said:

It's also a reason why I'm not fond of all abilties working the same way.

The core issue with the old hw system is the initial AP value of an extended contest is set to the skill level. So every ability of 17 is mechanically identical.

A minimum change is to use two numbers. So the death star has say:

- a ludicrously powerful (80) but slow (10) main cannon

- a strong (40) and resilient (30) anticapital shield,

-numerous (45), but fast and unshielded (15) tie fighter garrisons

- Darth Vader is an ace pilot (25), with two wingmen (10)

- a lightly shielded (10) but tiny (30) exhaust port

So in HW you would use one number to roll against and one to set the ap value.

Using the decisive-roll approach, you would use the second number as a  'resource' value. This can be spent after a decisive roll, at a 5;1 rate, as an alternative to taking wounds.

Note the qw for some reason only has resources as a community-level thing, wheras it makes perfect sense for them to also be things that characters have. So an Issaries merchant has both 'good at bargaining'  and 'full purse of coins'. Trying to trade without the latter is a risky endeavor, which could lead to them permanently getting a untrustworthy reputation.

An orlanthi clansmen who has a personal herd will be able to pay their own ransom when they get spotted in a cattle rad, rather than losing standing with their clan.

Yeah, that's what i mean. The sequence of opposed dogfighting rolls was ended by Luke taking a decisive action. You can spot that point with your eyes closed by listening to the score.

Most of the current extended contest/sequence variants have the issue that they end at a time that is mechanically driven (e.g. must score a certain number of resolution points). Which is sometimes narratively the right time, but commonly isn't. You don't want Luke to blow up the death star and still have half a squadron of tie fighters left to kill.

there's slightly more to a system that could to that scene justice; you ideally want the empire to be mechanically advantaged without simply being individually better pilots. So you need some system of resources where they can take losses and you can;t.

As I understand it, dual initiation is common in Sartarite cities. Typically, one initiation represents your kin ( e..g. clan or city), and the other your profession (e.g. a guild or regiment). So a blacksmith initiate of Gustbran is very likely to be also an Orlanth initiate of whatever clan.

This does, as the rules specify, take twice as much time, money and energy as being an initiate  of one cult. So it is also common for one or the other allegiances to drop down to lay member. Sometimes almost everyone does this, and the guild, or indeed clan, withers to being just a secular organisation providing no Rune magic.

Of course, even in cities, most men are farmers; for them the Orlanth cult is effectively both clan and guild. 

Yinkin and Odayla are mostly clan-based cults, often filling the niche of an alternate route to status for those who don't do well in their adulthood initiation ordeal. There may also be worshiped by what are in effect a 'hunters guild' for specialist hunters, trackers and scouts.

Babeestor Gor can be a kin-based cult, for those who are brought up in one of the great earth temple complexes. it is also, especially in Esrolia, affiliated with the mercenaries guild, and patron of several regiments.

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Or — inkeeping (more-or-less) with “modern elves are humans who think they are plants”

For Aldryami, i think i prefer the  take that they are trees who dream that they are human. 

Cult precedes not merely culture, but biology. Worshipping in a particular way means using the life force of your magic to shape your body in a particular way.. Which then changes the nature of what results when you reproduce. So by worshiping anthropomorphic deities like Aldrya, trees become able to speak, move and act with agency.

Similarly, Mostali are obviously rogue AIs whose programming drifted due to lack of downtime for sentience-prevention maintenance

Trolls are darkness demons who, expelled to the surface by Yelm, needed to rapidly adapt to survive in such a harsh environment.

There are various other water, fire and celestial demons in the same boat.

Even those usually called humans are in fact just animals who once dreamt of walking on two legs.

The only actual human, Grandfather Mortal,  died before time, and has no surviving descendants.

In the current srd draft,  i think tiebreaks  are not used in group contests, presumably as it is not clear which roll would be used. I think they are used in some types of sequences though.

Personally i think the whole mess of 6+ different contests types and 4 or more sequences needs massively simplifying into at absolute most two types of roll:

- opposed roll; adds successes to one or more sides of an ongoing contest.

- decisive roll. as above, but if the end result is a tie, highest roll wins.

it should not matter if there are one, two or seven sides involved, whether it is a combat or a debate. an augment or an assist,  or even you are  playing in narrative or simulationist style. All you need to know is:

- is this roll going to decide the result?

- is there an opposing force, or other circumstances that can lead to bad mechanical consequences?

- if so, how strong is it?

Most of those time, a single decisive roll works. In the others, you do a sequence of opposed rolls, and then either choose, or are required  to, make a decisive roll.

As a _character_ concept, you could have a hunter who decided that the standard Orlanthi punishment of exile didn't work all that well on other skilled deep hunters. So now they go out into the wilds, sometimes for seasons at a time, to hunt down the guilty.

As a _campaign_ concept, an Avenging Daughter comes to say Jonstown, pursing a bad guy. As a condition for her operating in the city, the Rex tasks a misfit group, led by an apprentice scribe, with the job of stopping her from killing anyone who doesn't need it.

We know that one of the forbidden god learner secrets was something called the 'runequest sight'. Commonly thought to be reasonably approximated by giving whoever used it the RQ statistics of the thing it is used on.

So there is certainly precedence for a spell being logically possible, but not widely known because of the bad things that happen to anyone who tries to cast it.

There is a worldview that runes are knowable physical things, that, for example, the forging an iron sword causes some objectively measurable death rune quantity to increase.  This is implicit in a lot of fan and published material, rq2, rq3, hq and/or hw, 

The current RQ:G approach[1] seems to be that the runes are strictly the _metaphysical_ component of Glorantha. You could take a broo, grind it down to the finest powder, sieve it through the finest sieve, and you would not find one atom of chaos[1].

So the ambiguity to be addressed in play  is not 'bob is chaotic, but does that mean he is  evil?' but simply 'is bob chaotic?'

[1]this is contrary to what i posted above about Mostali, although maybe what they consider trivial is still impossible to anyone else.

[2] reference links to a shelf in the Nochet great library that was sequentially sunk, burnt and exploded on one day several centuries back. It is kept in it's devastated state by the Lhankor Mhy cult, and used as a backdrop when the chief librarian makes his regular lecture to apprentices on the importance of wisdom as a guide to the pursuit of knowledge.

The way i look at it, all heroquesting is ritual magic; performing deeds for their magical consequences. Some such rituals work better if they take place on a certain date, or at night. Some work better on the top of a mountain, generally the higher the better.

And some work best, or will only work at all, when the are performed on the moon, in the inaccessible depths of the sea, or in the underworld. 

s all heroquesting involves crossing over to interact with the God World/God Time, it's just that sometime you have to go to Hell first.

11 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Not to mention Wakboth as the moral evil of the world: is W’s connection to chaos supposed to be accidental?

Perhaps the Mostali perspective would help?.

Chaos is annihilation, meaning there is no statistical correlation between the properties of the annihilated object and anything that may subsequently reform from the primal plasma. Limited exposure to chaos plasma may lead to partial annihilation, where only some properties of the exposed object are lost, but others remain. So a gorp may lose its form, but retain its mass and location. A vampire becomes immortal by annihilating their mortality. The two cases are the same.

Such components  are referred to as 'corrupted'. as they are no longer capable of performing their assigned role within the world machine. Other forms of damage may be repaired by moving and shaping, but corruption normally requires the affected components to be discarded.

While some of the younger races do attempt to copy crude forms of our maintenance and repair abilities, most rely on using their embedded social interaction abilities. for those using that approach to magic, runic power complexes are not truly understood; this would be way beyond their limited reasoning abilities. Instead they are treated as people, perhaps worthy of respect, deference, or shunning.

This means that social-interaction-level concepts, such as 'good' and 'evil', can actually, to some extent, be effectively used to approximately describe the underlying material reality.

During the events of the second Great Malfunction, certain runic power complexes associated with central Genertala and the middle air were terminally corrupted by chaos.  For example, the subsystem responsible for recycling defective components had its discriminatory function annihilated. So now disease strikes the young and old alike. Sometimes the functional are pointlessly weakened, while the defective emerge unscathed.

Lightbringer society reacts to this by labeling the corresponding Goddess, Malia, as 'evil'. And it is certainly true that those who dedicate themselves to Her come to share her nature, in  a away that is trivially observable by even the crudest runic analysis functions. 

Some of the experts in this area think this labelling does serve to limit the number who do so. Others say that it merely ensures that those who choose to be bad, as some always do, will end up sharing the corruption of those they emulate.

Further study, and perhaps a controlled experimental intervention, is required.

47 minutes ago, metcalph said:

Its Glowspot is no chaotic feature but results from its ongoing illumination of souls.  That the illuminates can't be contacted afterwards only demonstrates how thorough their illumination was.

Perhaps a more plausible propaganda  line is that the bat eats rebels and traitors, and even demons are what they eat. So all the low-level chaos of rebellion and other criminality gets concentrated into one visibly glowing spot. Luckily, Lunar magicians know the right ritual to expel it from the mundane world, to be gradually healed by the Godess. 

It's unfortunate that the empire's strategic situation sometimes requires it to be deployed before it has fully digested the last batch of enemies. The appropriate solution to this is to improve that strategic situation by [insert plan here].

11 minutes ago, metcalph said:

Slavery isn't chaotic although it is unpleasant.  Ompalam's evil is "degenerative administration, of evil centralization" as per the prosopedia.

Evil centralization of socioeconomic decisions that would otherwise be made by individuals into the hands of one, their owner.

The contrast is with a clan, where the corresponding decisions are made by collective consensus, with the chieftain merely leading that process.

it makes perfect sense for Ompalam to be a Nomad God, under that name or another. Maybe this is a new development since the opening of the trade routes to Fonrit. Maybe it has always been that way. Maybe it hasn't yet happened.  But there will be those who feel their responsibility to lead the  struggle for survival does not allow the luxury of debate or disagreement.

Hard men making the hard choices for their herd. 

Whether the rare khan who follows that path actively detects as chaotic is an open question. Either way, they are not welcome at the Paps, and are well advised to steer clear of the Block. So they usually stick to the deep Wastes.

15 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

I completely agree.  Rare deals in times of crisis, such as 1610 Moonroth, might be rationalized.  The Nomad Gods dogma that Praxians tribes often ally with Broos makes no sense.

Whether or not chaos is metaphysically evil, it is clearly insidious and corrupting. Praxians do keep and take slaves, so the magic of the chaos god of slavery, Ompalam, would be something that is useful to them.

Rules wise, as i understand it a chaos rune rating of over 50% is unambiguously detectable by normal spirit and rune magic, and so will get you kicked out of Waha (unless perhaps you kill everyone who objects). Ratings of less than that are the province of specialist, and unreliable, Storm Bull magic.

So what do the storm bullies do all day if there is no covert chaotic influence on Praxian tribal society?