raymond_turney

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.

Hi, Have come up with rules for Legendary/Hero Quests {Jason and the Argonauts type stuff}. They are for Fire and Sword, but should be easily adaptable to BRPstyle systems. They are in RTF format, in the downloads section under rules. Hope they are useful, Ray,

There are some issues that have not been mentioned. One is that a group of individually optimized characters can be collectively weaker than non-optimized characters. I remember once in Greg's campaign playtesting Griffin Mountain, we had a large group of about 25 mostly rune levels. My characters were two followers of a Yelmalion rune lord. For reasons that I have forgotten, we split the party. The group on the opposite side of the river was attacked at night by trolls. They were Orlanthi and Humakhti and turned out not to have any light spells {oops}. I can see how that would come about, after all most of the characters only had a certain amount of INT, and it was all used for Bladesharp, Protection, Countermagic, Healing 2, etc. Each player assumed that at least one of the other players would choose spells useful to the entire party, but not the best for an individual character. So they choose the spells that maximized the power of their character in the most commonly encountered situations - and failed miserably against a much weaker force of trolls and trollkin at night. The second is that very powerful characters who are assigned to something other than a strike mission can be frustrated by enemies who cannot even injure them. A fairly powerful group of PC's, too strong to have random enemies appear and threaten them but escorting a caravan of mules, was very much annoyed by a fairly weak group of bandits. My bandits shot a couple of arrows at unprotected mules, and rode off. The PC's were forced to find a way to carry the goods that were loaded on the dead mule(s). They didn't have the ability to carry the goods themselves, and moved on. The bandits picked up the loot the PC's left behind and a couple of the less skilled bandits took the goods back to the village on their mules. The rest of the bandits got on their horses, followed the PC's, and dropped another couple of mules ... Another trick can be borrowed from Asian horse nomads. They used expendable ghazis, subject allies, whatever to soften their enemies up. This is a good use for zombies or trollkin. You hit the PC's with these expendables, the PC's put up all their spells, you wait for the spells to go down, and then you launch the real attack. Finally, players of high level near heroic and heroic and heroic characters can become overconfident. I recall one group, containing all high level characters, that decided to ride straight at an enemy fort and climb the walls. Everyone was much better with melee weapons than missile weapons, and wanted to play a glorious role. As 2/3 of the group ended up pinned beneath dead horses, we ended up parleying with the fort and withdrawing. The characters on the attack easily had more than the 3 to 1 advantage in power necessary to attack, but with most of that power pinned beneath dead horses, we had no hope of winning. Player stupidity can be a very strong equalizing force, but you cannot count on it when planning an encounter:) Ray,

I've found that it is important to vary the threats characters face, and the things threatened. This does two things: it prevents characters from being optimized to face known threats; and it insures that characters with different skill sets will profit from working together. It also avoids boredom setting in, when the PC's have figured out there tactical doctrine and pretty do the same thing against similar enemies all the time. For example, in one game I was having a lot of trouble with a very tough rune lord equivalent. Since he was a Yanafali, I kept things interesting for him by having a subplot be people attempting to administer his resources away {transferring troops to other commanders, getting his armor assigned to someone else, etc}. It was amazing how quickly he decided he needed an administrative specialist. {I was working for NASA at the time, and they had something called Zero-Based budgeting, which made an appearance in the game}. Also, in a game like RQ where a tank is heavily dependent on magical spells, adding some Dispel capability to the enemy mix can make a big difference. Players who thought their characters were invincible often feel less certain when their Shield spells go down. Also, in RQ and BRP {snd Fire and Sword} a fair amount of a character's defense is "active". Overwhelming them with numbers, so that they cannot parry all of their foes, is often an effective tactic. Offbeat forms of combat, such as spirit combat, can also be a problem for the PC's. As you might imagine, when facing high level parties I often use all three techniques, plus a demon or other large monster In short, by keeping the threat mix unpredictable and sometimes using non-lethal obstacles, it is possible to go a long toward balancing an inherently unbalanced game. On the other hand, by facing the PC's with pretty much the same type of opposition using the same tactics all the time, it is possible to go a long ways towards wrecking the balance of a fairly well balanced game. Game balance is much more a GM issue than a game designer issue, though the game designer should help the GM by making it easy to formulate a wide variety of challenges for the players.

I've noticed no anime influence. But then I don't play the anime influenced games and I've never lived in Japan, nor has any member of my gaming group. I'd say in evolutionary terms that the original FRP genre has radiated; there are now games for Space Opera, Cyberpunk, etc, which did not exist in 1980. There are a wider variety of games that support different role-playing styles - some people love Herouest, it leaves me mostly cold, and some people hate it. At the same time that RPG was radiating into different niches and becoming a hobby {like model railroading was when I was growing up} that makes you merely slightly odd as opposed to downright weird; it has lost its original niche of weird college students who had two much time on their hands to World of Warcraft. As for character death, it has probably become more rare for four reasons. The first is that in a fairly complicated system it can take a long time to create a character, so character death costs you something. The second is that as more decisions are made, and characters acquire personalities rather than being simple power gaming avatars, losing a character costs more. The third is that we just have less time to play the games - meeting once every three weeks if I kill off a character it might take 6 months for the player to get as good an understanding of his next character as he has of the one he is playing now. Finally, GM's are now more likely to have something besides character death to create dramatic tension in the game. In D&D 1st edition, the issue was whether you survived and came back with your EP, or rolled up a new character. Once you got to were you knew a cleric with Raise Dead, it was whether you brought back your EP from the current run you were on. LEDA {life energy draining} monsters were often more feared than ones that merely killed you, because they cost the player more. I'd say that an increase in the importance of settings relative to rules is probably the biggest change. Nowadays, you're playing Fading Suns or Glorantha first; BRP or RQ or the Fading Suns system second. On the other hand, I could probably find an AD&D game with a dungeon without looking too hard. Most players still play D&D; most of them still powergame {of course I also powergame }. etc. There has probably been less change in the hobby as a whole than people who change genres, try out edgy new systems, and put a lot of effort into their gaming would like to think.

There are several problems with Herouesting, which annoy me when I try to write a system for it. First, what is it? The concept of the heroic, and thus heroquesting, is actually fairly ambiguous. It tends to include actions that are very significant; actions that are heroic because they are very risky for the character undertaking them, actions that require exceptionally high levels of some skill to overcome obstacles or opposition, actions which are memorable because very flashy, actions which re-enact myth for the benefit of the community, and actions which open possibilities for the whole community by creating new myths. As best I can make out, Greg's idea of a heroquest is built around the combination of myth re-enactment; or myth creation; with one or more of the other elements. But which other element varies. If a character combines his venture into the world of myth with contending against incredibly tough opposition, he or she will need very high levels of skill. or which are cinematic in nature, he or she will need very high levels of skill, otherwise not. Partly to handle HeroQuesting, Fire and Sword has seven levels of success - fumble, failure, success, specials, criticals, and cinematic successes. So yes, to handle heroquesting you need higher levels of success. You also need myths Greg actually produced a fairly small number of myths for either RuneQuest or HeroQuest; so most people end up writing their own. This is a lot harder than it looks. There's a lot more to be said here, about narrative theory requiring transformation of the personality of the hero {which requires some means of describing the hero before and after change, etc} to the idea behind hero of a faces that a Hero deals with crises that require him to act outside the social consensus. But I'm still working on how to do this for Fire and Sword, and it is not included in the current version of Fire and Sword. Ray,

Hard to say, but a few that made an impression quickly come to mind: Harry Dresden series by Jim Butcher Three Musketeers and Four Musketeers by Dumas The VIking Art of War - By Paddy Griffith - not a good "Art of War" book but an interesting look at the Vikings and their weapons nonetheless. Horation Hornblower serious by Forrester Falco series by "Lindsay Davis" Three Kingdoms - Chinese classic, Moss Roberts I'm not sure these are my favorites, but they come to mind as books I've read at least twice and would not mind rereading;

Hi, Tourney Altar was named after my brother, Art. He was a playtester of Nomad Gods. By the way, there are two versions of Fire and Sword. The long version is the detailed version, and is about the length of RQ. It has the interesting stuff; and it is what is posted here. There is a short version, about the length of the first version of Basic Role Playing, written by my friend Morgan when he had to introduce new players to the system and found that the whole thing was sometimes a bit overwhelming. This is what you have to learn first to understand the rest of it. I think that the system is laid out in a logical order, and the basic version is unnecessary. New players tend to disagree with me {the sample size is too small to be sure about this}, and have found the intro useful. The intro is what is at the URL I gave in my first post. Hope this helps.

My name is Ray Turney {or Raymond - it sounds cool with a French accent, but I'll answer to anything resembling this unless it involves the word turkey}. I was one of the original Gang of Four authors of RQI, and so have a lot of experience with Runequest. Have also played a little Traveller, some Pendragon, and a fair amount of Call of Cthulu. Have written a new system, Fire and Sword. which the admin of BRP Central has added to the download page. Work on this system started when the RQIV project ended. I decided that what my group and I wanted was different from what the original designers of RQ wanted; so I started with Perndragon. First I dropped the traits system, because while I kind of liked it, my players hated it. So it started out as something like Pendragon Pass, but rules for specials and crits, and eventually even cinematic successes made it in there. Long weapon strikes first, then simultaneous was borrowed from Stormbringer. Instead of the traditional FRP "dead vs alive" dualism, we went to a system based on a variety of medical conditions a character might be in after he was "incapacitated". The old RQ I&II Heal 6 and your're fine went away. One of my players noted that in high level RQ, it tended to resolved by the first unparried critical success, so we dropped hit points in most situations In combat between humans, either a blow incapcitates or it does no damage. Further refinements to combat happened. Their are three magic systems, Spirit, Divine, and Sorcery just as in RQ III but Spirit Magic is focused on spirit combat and shamanism and the rules are cleaner. Casting spells depends on skill with the spell for sorcery, cult lore for divine; spirit magicans do not cast spells in the same sense, but summon spirits using a variety of skills. Instead of a couple of titles {rune lord, priest} dangling out in the middle of nowhere; there are a whole slew of titles and offices. There are also rules for keeping track of who owes how a favor to whom, influence, and other informal aspects of the political world. Day to day economics was abstracted into assuming a certain ordinary level of income and standard of living, plus rules for trading and extraordinary resources {things. The rules have a lot of "social skils, ranging from administration to seduction, and say something about which social skill to use when. Anyway, I encourage you to look at the downloadable rules here, and decide whether they are either a suitable base for your campaign, or have something worth stealing without adopting the entire system . A short introduction to Fire and Sword is available at: Fire And Sword - Condensed Version Sorry about using this space for an introduction to Fire and Sword, not me; but Fire and Sword is probably more interesting and more important to you than I am.