raymond_turney

Hi,

I never ran a test to confirm my suspicion that rolling D20 is faster than rolling 2D10. On the other hand, I remember enough arguments over whether or not players were consistent in reading their D10's with the dark color high, and cases where one of the two dice rolled off the table {twice as likely with two dice}, etc, to convince me that rolling D20 caused slightly fewer hassles. Also, it just seems to me that it is obvious that rolling two dice, reading them, and putting what you see together to make 87 or whatever will take longer than rolling one die and reading 17.

You could play F&S using D100. What dice you roll is probably less important than other aspects of a systems.

Ray,

Hi,

It recently came to my attention that Fire and Sword nowhere says that a miss in combat does not do anything, nor is a fumble table provided. These defects will be corrected in 3rd edition. The current version of the Fumble Table follows:

Roll Result

1-2 Off Balance Cannot attack next round

3-5 Off Balance – Can neither attack nor parry next round

6 Lose weapon – weapon cannot retrieved for rest of fight

7 Vision obstructed – Attacks and parries -10 till one round out of combat

can be spent to remove obstruction

8 Hit self – rolled attack to see if special or critical, if not do normal weapon damage to self. If this happens while parrying, drop parrying weapon or shield.

9 Hit ally, as hit self except nearest friend is hit. If no friend within reach, hit self.

10 Expose yourself – all enemy attacks increase one level, thus enemy misses become hits, hits become specials, specials critical successes, and critical successes cinematic.

Good luck,

Ray,

Hi,

In Fire and Sword, my follow on to RuneQuest, I went with a D20 mechanic. Specials happen when a character has skill > 20. In that case you roll D20 for base skill {if you roll a one you fumble, unless you make the special die}. You also roll a D20 to see if you make less than (skill-20) and special. Crits are rolls exactly equal to skill, on either oridnary dice or special dice, and a than a success on another D20 roll. Been doing it for about 10 years, works pretty well.

The advantage of D20 is you roll fewer dice per skill test. For one skill test, this is insignificant. But a large fight might involve 300 attacks and parries, so the amount of extra time taken by rolling D100 becomes significant. Our fights can get pretty big, so D20 was the way to go for us.

The disadvantage of D20 is that there really are more than 20 different levels of skill in doing anything. So a system with D20 will annoy people used to D100 for a while, because it gives a somewhat more abstract feel.

I was a co-designer of RQ ! & II back in the Dark Ages. If you're curious about Fire and Sword, or want more on the advantages of each type of dice, go to the Fire and Sword Download page on this site. Fire and Sword, a Designer's commentary {that addresses the dice issue}, the second iteration of a setting description, and character sheets are available as a free download under an open source license. For obvious reasons, I recommend it:).

Good luck, and feel free to use my refinement of Pendragon's mechanics in your game,

Ray,

Hi,

Just uploaded the second edition of the City of Tishrei setting description. It is about twice the length of the first iteration, and includes everthing in the first iteration plust information on how the city fits into the world, foundation myths, three noble houses, a couple of other new institutions, etc.

There is a pdf version, for people who intend to use the description as is, and an rtf version for those who want to customize it.

Ray,

Hi,

Don't underestimate the cost of learning a new system. Most players were basically butt-kicking or powergaming; D&D is good for that and there was nothing that was clearly better for that until World of Warcraft came along.

Also, it is harder to create a character for BRP {{any form} than for D&D. I know, I've done it a lot of times in both systems.

So you have to learn a new system, learn to GM a new system, etc. At the end of the process, you have a game that, if you are interested in butt kicking or powergaming, is not actually more fun than D&D. So BRP was pretty likely to end up taking over only those parts of the market that were interested in storytelling, wargaming, or method acting. This is a fairly small portion of the market, which BRP had to share with other competitors.

Hi,

The Third Edition is mostly a bug fix edition.

It is currently slated to have one major new feature. I am trying to generalize the options available for players of high level fighters, by including a number of "Combat Exploits" to provide additional options for players of high level.

The reason for trying this is to get some of the flavor of D&D 4th edition combat in at high levels, so a highly skilled fighter can act like Errol Flynn, while avoiding additional complexity for lower level characters while people are still learning the game.

Otherwise, miscellaneous rules and monsters mentioned on the blog supporting the rules will become an integral part of third edition. Currently I hope to have 3rd edition out at the end of the year.

Good luck, and may you not need it,

Ray,

Hi,

Greg Stafford asked for some notes on the development of RuneQuest, and I provided them. They can be found on his website at:

Ray Turney RQ

They are part of a larger series, including similar pieces from Greg and Steve at:

RuneQuest Page

My current project, Fire and Sword, can be found at:

BRP Central - Downloads

Hope you find them interesting,

Ray,

Hi,

The current short term plans for Fire and Sword involve:

A second iteration of The Tishrei setting, doubled in length of forty pages with a map of where of its place in the world, three noble houses added and maybe some new temples and other institutions. I'm writing page 31 now.

A second iteration of the second edition, with a few new minor rules {fame points as script immunity/heroic effort points, Pow requirements to sacrifice for divine spells, etc), characer sheets added as an appendix to the rules, etc.

A start on game mastering Fire and Sword at conventions, notably Dundracon in the Bay Area, to increase awareness of the rules and the numer of people who know how to play.

Is there anyone out there who would like to GM Fire and Sword at a convention?

Comments, anyone?

A book version of the rules is under consideration, using print on demand technology

Thanks for your interest in Fire and Sword,

Ray,

Hi,

Have added a 12 page "Deginer's Comentary" on Fire and Sword, in the Fire and Sword download section. It discussing the major design decisions and why they were made the way they were. This is unlikely to be useful to a new player of Fire and Sword, but may be of interest to game master's adapting Fire and Sword to their own purposes, game designers, people iinterested in role plaing game design, etc.

Enjoy,

Ray,

Have replaced the Sorana temple with a few institutions and individuals found in the City of Tishrei. It is offered in pdf {easier to read and search on a computer} and rtf {easier to edit with a text editor} versions.

The description for the rtf version of this file:

This is the first iteration of the City of Tishrei setting description. It is intended both for use as a model for your own work, and to provide institutions and characters that are mostly already built to provide.

This version has eight institutions. Two, the Sorana temple and the Vijeta temple have appeared before. Where they conflict, the version in description is preferable to the earlier versions.

Hope you find them useful.

Ray,

Hi,

Have uploaded character sheets for an urban thief and a sorcerer, in Fire and Sword.

Use the PDF version to print out and the RTF to modify and customize.

Hope F&S players find them useful.

Ray,

Have uploaded a sample healing temple {Sorana} and a fairly close to beginning healer willing to adventure attached to it, in the Setting Ad-Ons part of the downloads page.

This serves as another example institution description, an institution that can be dropped into a larger campaign, and finally offers healing support to a group of characters starting a Fire and Sword Campaign.

Both pdf and rtf versions exist, the pdf should print out better while the rtf is easier to modify to fit the needs of your own campaign.

Hi,

Have uploaded character sheets for fighters with a rural background, using bow OR javelin and shield OR long thrusting spear, in both rtf and pdf versions. The rtf should be easier to modify with your text editor, and the pdf will probably look prettier when printed off.

These are under Download -> Game Aids on this site.

Have fun.

Ray,

On a more abstract level that has nothing to do with programming, it seems to me that the central issue is whether RPGs have improved over time or whether that is inherently impossible.

This depends on whether RPG rules are primarily works of art or documents describing techniques. It's clear that they are both. As writing, RQ II still has a fair amount of appeal to people {you can tell this because it is still discussed on boards like this one}. On the other hand, a lot of ideas in game design have been tried since then, and some of the game design ideas that have been tried since are more effective than the ideas in RQ II. I'd say either BRP or Mongoose RQ have some rules techniques that are better for most purposes than some of the ones in RQ II, but I'm not sure either of them are better written. I know for a fact that the techniques described in Fire and Sword {my system, available under downloads} are better for the type of game I want to play than the techniques in RQ II. I'm not at all sure that Fire and Sword is better written than RQ II.

It is also worth noting that the whole RPG genre has diversified over time. When RQ II came out the role-play playing gaming population, in Robin's Laws terms was about 95-98% power gamers and butt kickers. To a considerable extent, RQ I and RQ II were attempts to write an RPG that would allow wargamers or SCAers to maintain suspension of disbelief. Nowadays, we have games like HeroQuest, which try to do things we did not even imagine back in 1978. Whether or not they represent progress probably depends on whether or not your game shares their objectives.

Hi

The Fire and Sword Combat Procedure and tables have been extracted from the main 2nd Edition rules, and uploaded to the rules section, here.

The idea is that it is much easier to print off 3 pages of tables than the entire rules set. So you can have several copies of the combat tables on hand when playing, and if you're like us, not be able to find any of them:-).

Ray,

Hi,

The 2nd edition of the Fire and Sword rules has been released. It can be found at this site, here

It features bug fixes, rules clarifications, additions to cover situations not dealt with in the first edition, a complete rewrite of the Spirit and Shamanism rules, new spells and monsters, etc.

If you liked the idea of Fire and Sword, but found it had too many problems, or didn't cover enough, you might want to look at it again.

If you're using Fire and Sword, the new version is much better than the old, so you should consider downloading the 2nd Edition and switching to it.

Ray

Hi,

I can see several situations where personality trait rules might be useful.

a) For semi-PC's. Our campaign has several characters who have names and may be developing personalities who are not full player characters. Personality rules provide a rough and ready way for the GM to prevent these characters from being sacrificed to benefit primary PC's.

As a way to determine the award of reputation points. In Fire and Sword, a character's standing in an institution is determined by what he or she has done for the institution, and the extent to which a characters exemplifies the virtues of the instituion. A character can obtain influence with the church by paying for a new temple, or by saintly behavior. Since political influence can be traded in for training, the chance to read scrolls, etc, all the way up to being granted a title or office, characters can benefit from acting virtuously.

c) To provide the GM with a way to veto actions that are totally out of character.

d) as a way to determine a charactr's qualification for titles like old style RQ rune lords {or Fire and Sword champions}. Since whether or not a character qualifies for run lord should depend on exhibiting virtues valued by the cult, and is important enough to create possible disputes between the GM and the players, a means of tracking virtuous action may be important.

The downsides are that some players really hate to be told that their characters wouldn't act the way they are playing, and that this adds complexity.

Oddly, the people most likely to object are the players Robin Laws calls "method actors", who find the idea that the GM has a better idea of what their characters would do than they do insulting to their abilities as role players; and the players Robin Laws refers to as tacticians, who tend to think that their characters have a goal, and would use the best tactics available to achieve that goal Tacticians tend to feel that rules to enforce character traits are a cowardly response by the GM, to ban their tactics rather than fighting fairly.

There is also the fact that personality rules add complexity Do the players and the GM get anything for mastering the additional rules?

In the case of Fire and Sword, I decided against personality trait rules.

The players in our group rarely sacrifice the interests of supporting characters to those of leading characters without justification, and when they do they are willing to accept a GM ruling that the supporting character would not so sacrifice his interests If it is remotely plausible, we usually just call for a leadership skill roll by the leading character. If the leading character can actually lead, he gets what he wants, if not, he does not.

The other GM in my campaign and I usually just award reputation points directly, for organizations that the character cares about, if the player asks for them. We don't bother to have special rules determing when to roll, what trait to roll against, etc.

We occasionally do have players make decisions that are totally out of character. This is rare, though, because players whose characters have a fixed essential nature usually stick to that essence; and the occasional undefined character {most often played by me} does not disrupt the ability to suspend disbelief, because other people do not have firm views about what she would not do

By introducing a wide variety of offices other than rune lord, we have reduced the significance of the rune lord problem. Most characters who don't fit as rune lords have something else to aim for, and they usually aim for that something else. Fitness for rune lordship can be traced in the record of fame and reputation points.

So, basically for our group personality rules didn''t make the cut. Rules resolve disputes, and structure game reality. We just don't have enough disputes over how characters are played to justify rules to resolve them. Also, the decisions made by players about what their characters would do rarely threaten the ability of the other players to suspend disbelief.

If there is a use in your game for personality, I encourage you to experiment with them. i'm interested in how they work, and if our group had a different mix of players, we might have found them necessary.

Ray,

Hi,

The issue here is, how detailed should your combat system model be?

I figure characters pretty much always use all of the combat tricks they know, so it is reasonable to just factor them in to skill levels

On the other hand, I can see coming up with a limited list of combat tricks and using the results of tricks picked to modify relative skills. Something like Empires in Arms combat, where if you pick echelon and the enemy picks ... by picking the right trick you get a big edge on the combat chart

The big reason I did not go for that in designing Fire and Sword is that I wanted combat resolution to be quick. Players stopping to think about their tactical options would slow the game down a lot. Also, there is an upper limit to the amount of rules complexity you can expect players to remember; neither my players nor I always remembered all of the existing F&S rules so it struck me that adding something like this would push the rules over the complexity limit.

If I were to add anything to Fire and Sword combat, it would probably be something like a -3 or -5 modifier to skill every time a character had to roll to resist incapacitation. This would cover the effects of getting tired, blood loss that did not incapacitate a character, etc. As it stands, Fire and Sword assumes that RQ is correct in having characters mostly go down in one blow, and pushes that to an extreme. I know this simplification is expensive in simulation quality, but it seemed worth it to reduce what we had to keep track of.

Also, there is an overall upper limit to the complexity of the rules, and I did not want combat to take up almost all of the complexity available.

In general, you should only add a rule if not having it significantly reduces player enjoyment of the game.

Ray,

Hi,

Does anyone know how gaming is doing in India?

As India liberalizes and becomes more prosperous, there should be more people with time to game. They are not yet as rich, on the average, as we in the US and Great Britain are. So everyone might not have signed up for World of Warcraft. Many Indians {about 200 million, I think} are literate in English. There is no obvious reason to assume that the percentage of Indians literate in English who might take an interest in RPG's if exposed to them is any lower than the percentage of US citizens or British subjects who have taken an interest in RPG's. So for all I know, gaming might actually be expanding there, and I'm just unaware of it because I don't happen to know any Indian gamers.

Ray,

As a guy who remembers that he was not too happy in the late 1970's and early 1980's, it is hard for me to get into the frame of mind to appreciate this thread.

Yes, the old way of doing things is dying, but a more dispersed system based mostly on PDF's is not exactly a disaster. PDF's are cheaper. If a game becomes popular enough, low cost print on demand makes small print runs attractive as a sideline business, so someone will print copies on demand. From a strictly consumer viewpoint, it is hard to bemoan the replacement of TSR and Gary Gygax by a combination of WoW and a lot of internet based independent gaming outfits.

While we are nostalgic for the old days when we were first discovering RuneQuest, the reality is that there was a lot of ill considered divination to the Great God Gygax in the old days. RQ I was impressive for its day, but it is now apparent that it was not that good.

WoW is a pretty good substitute for hack and slash D&D or Runequest. The graphics are good, and if the social interaction is not impressive, that's not a big change from the old days. MMORG's may yet evolve to offer a richer experience.

Let's not kid ourselves. As the Buddha taught, everything is impermanent. It is easy to remember the old days as better than they were. We were in good physical shape, experiencing less back and foot pain than we do now. If we went to an all night game at a convention, we would recover by Monday. We were making exciting new mistakes {at least they were new to us} instead of boring old mistakes. But we've learned something, the games are better, and things are slowly getting better.

Soon enough, we will be dead, and some guy will be bemoaning how things were better in the good old days of World of Warcraft. Let's get on with life.

Hi,

Have uploaded a "Fire and Sword: the Short Version" PDF in the Systems section.

It covers the basic things a player should learn first, such as the structure of the game, what dice to roll, etc. The idea is that a player who reads this knows enough to start playing fairly quickly. He or she can learn the details of the system later

It was written by a GM who had to introduce new players to the game.

Ray

Worlds which don't require rights:

a) Three Kingdoms {Chinese classic}

Ramayana {Indian}

Recent F&SF , will require rights

Kylara Vatta series {Elizabeth Moon}

Harry Dresden {Jim Butcher}

Peshawar Lancers {S.M. Stirling}

Ray

Hi,

My condolences Jason.

Authors are going to feel unappreciated and under-compensated. They are going to get a lot of criticism by fans who haven't dealt with putting out a game; misunderstand design objectives; ungratefully insist that the author should have written the game that is in their heads, assume that draft copies of the rules are final, etc.

In short, fans are human beings, and your human being leaves a lot to be desired.

On the other hand, in this load of {expletive deleted} some of the criticism will be useful. Like editing or code review, the process usually improves the product. Remember the George Bernard Shaw line:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to himself. All progress is due to the unreasonable man."

So stay out for a while, but remember that today's passions will be replaced by those of tomorrow, unless you attain enlightenment.

Ray,

Hi,

So Greg was willing to admit that MRQ was to a substantial extent a copyright dodge? He lawyer really should talk to him ...

In any event, Mongoose Rune Quest seems to be a substantially different game from RQ II or RQ III. I suspect that the authors of Mongoose RQ were more ambitious than just wanting to produce the same old RQ in different words.

I don't see Greg licensing Glorantha back to Chaosium. First of all, he is right to claim that BRP {and for that matter RQ} are not particularly good systems for running Greg's vision of Glorantha, to the extent that he has a clear vision of Glorantha. Anyone, now, can look at Jar-Eel, Harrek, etc, and see that a superhero type game is necessary to model Glorantha. This was not so obvious before the first superhero RQ has Strike Ranks and very detailed combat, intended to help SCA'ers and people with similar experience visualize combat. This was, and is, of no interest to Greg. All three RQ magic systems are derived from different interpretations of D&D magic, not from some real world "magical system {Crowley, etc}". The worst is, oddly enough Shamanism, which is actually Greg's key area of interest but which none of the RQ authors cared much about at the time we wrote RQ I.

Don't get me wrong, RQ was a good thing in its time, but a good simulation of Greg's view of Glorantha it was not.

The other issue is that Greg has a small group of people, intensely interested in Glorantha, who tend to look up to him and tell him he is right. In my view, he tends to believe them a little too much. This makes him very difficult to work with. It also makes it hard for him to recognize what those of us who just want a good gaming setting need. But that's my view, and it should be taken with a grain of salt. So my guess is that the Chaosium people are unlikely to do this because they don't want to deal with the problems of working with Greg.

Hi,

The issue of "balance" depends mostly on who your players are and why they play the game. Also, what the characters do.

We are all agreed that it is important that the players have fun. Some players are very competitive and want to be heroes all the time. If a player derives most of his enjoyment from being the center of the game in combat, and having the best optimized character, it is very important that his character be "balanced" relative to the others. It is particularly important if you have two or more competitive players. Other players, oddly enough, actually like weak characters. I felt it was more interesting to try to figure out how to accomplish something with Lyra {a rather new agey weak Nathan} than to do a better job of optimizing my character than one of our game's three wargamers. One of the wargamers is just a much better wargamer than I am, and if my character were theoretically the equal of his in fighting power, he would have twice the impact on the fights that I do.

Which is to say that "balance" is a tool for insuring that players enjoy the game. Some groups have 2-4 competitive players who spend a fair amount of time discussing the comparative effectiveness of their characters as killing machines. For these groups, balance is very important. Other groups don't have any wargamers who like power gaming, and for these groups, balance is less important. In these groups, the artificiality of starting high level characters may outweigh the advantages of making sure that the characters are of relatively even combat power.

Likewise, the issue of balancing encounters to PC's is an issue of player expectation. If the players know that some encounters will simply outclass their characters, and that they are expected to identify these encounters and run away, balance is less of an issue. Players know their characters will sometimes be outclassed, and that unassing the area is always an option. If the players think that all encounters are expected to be tuned for maximum dramatic impact, they may choose to attack an entire party of monsters which are individually as tough as the entire PC group. They will then feel betrayed when, with average die rolls, the monsters flatten them.

Oddly, wargamers are more relaxed about being expected to identify whether or not they are tough enough to beat an enemy than extreme role players {actors} are. Actors often expect the encounters to be dramatically scripted, and feel that there is no point having encounters that do not fit the script.

From a design perspective, a system should provide the tools so that a GM who needs to balance his games can; without imposing balance on GM's and groups who are not the kind of wargamers/powergamers for which this is most important. This is why game designers need to be aware of the techniques for balancing a game; and make it possible to use them; without worrying about building "balance" into the system itself.