skoll

I'm not generally too fond of point-buy as a chargen system. I feel it encourages min-maxing - all the stats will be just at the thresholds. But that's besides the point. While I know, that players think they want to start with as powerful characters as possible, I have found, that everybody enjoys the game more, if the characters aren't allpowerful, and when there's room for improvement. In other words, I like to start out with pretty average characters, but ensure, that they get enough experience, so that they can reach the heroic measures they crave for.

I wouldn't compare starting in Glorantha with starting with RQ6/Mythras. In Glorantha it's easy to tie the supplements together, and the question really is more where do you start. With the RQ6 supplements it's more a question of what kind of campaign you want to run. The quality of TDM publications is so high, that I wouldn't look into anything else, unless you are after something very specific. If you are an unexperienced GM or challenged timewise, or simply want a straightforward campaign, go with BoQ. If you want a sandbox, take MI. If you want a grim semi-historical setting, that really challenges your players to roleplay, MB is the best you can get. (I have been running it over a year, and it's the most fun I have ever had as a GM, and my players are loving it too.) If you want something completely different, there's Luther Arkwright. (If you don't know what to expect, read the comic book. Actually, read it even you don't plan to run it.) Or you can wait for Classic Fantasy. Thennla I'm not familiar with, so can't say much about that.

I like it. It makes rune magic more usable while keeping an element of sacrifice to it. I assume sacrificing your POW decreases it for good. Will there be means to increase it apart from the normal method of increasing stats?

What some might find overwhelming, is the amont of material available, with no definite ruleset to use them with. Back in the day it was different - you basically had one (or two) version of the rules, and you used what supplements your FLGS happened to carry. Nowadays there's HQ and several versions of RQ (and soon 13th age). With the success of the RQ2 KS campaign, all the old supplements are back in print, plus there are all the HQ supplements (plus GtG, which contrary to what the name suggests, is not the best starting point). I can easily understand, that somebody completely new to Glorantha might feel overwhelmed when trying to decide how to get started.

Frankly, I also liked that fact, that certain magical benefits costed more than just mana - that you had to sacrifice a piece of yourself. Unfortunately many of the issues listed by Harshax were true in our games. Especially the Disruption spamming.

Combat rules (like adding Special Effects, even if they aren't in the RAW) and many other rules are relatively easy to mix and match. Based on what we know so far, our group will probably tune combat in some way. The main thing I'm expecting from the new edition, is runes and Glorantha-specific magic rules. One pretty fundamental thing, that I really, really they hope they won't go back to, is the POW economy.

Thank you for the explanation Jeff/MOB. While I would have preferred to have RQ6 as the base, I can understand the reasons behind your decision to go with RQ2. I just hoped this explanation would have been released right when you announced the change of direction. A lot of gnashing of teeth would have been avoided.

It seems Chaosium is making a point of not mentioning anything Pete/Loz have done with MRQII/RQ6. Reading Jeff's posts it's easy to get the impression, that those versions never existed. In my books RQ6 is superior to RQ2/3 in practically every aspect. I for one am very disappointed in the design principle of "not causing too much discomfort to RQ2 veterans". Luckily RQ is easily houseruled. I plan to continue using Action points and Special Effects even if they aren't included in RQ:G.

I just hope the new version will be more than just a nostalgia trip for old-timers - the impression I have got of the project so far. A lot has happened with RPG's since RQ2 was released originally. I would hate to see all the development of recent years thrown away for the sake of backward compatibility.

If I understood your post correctly, your main issue is with characters with 90% in Lockpick but only 8 in DEX, or 90% in Sorcery skills but only 8 in INT. I have been pondering the same problem, but eventually took a completely different approach. Basically any skill development is capped by your characteristics. Right now I'm applying this only with Endurance and Willpower; they are capped to 6xCON and 6xPOW respectively. In the next campaign I'm thinking of taking this into use with every skill - the cap would be base skill x 3.

Four months ago you stated, that the upcoming RuneQuest Glorantha release would be RQ6 with some minor tweaks. What made you change your mind?

OK, so... Custom weapons now have Parry checkbox Enemy list is sorted by name The notes-field is bigger Also found a bug that prevented usign Enter (line breaks) in the Notes field - that's been fixed now

I'll add it later during the weekend. We have used the template notes for that. Do you think that works for you? The reason there hasn't been weapon-specific notes is, that the notes wouldn't be printed anyway in the weapons section, but in the notes section. (Or at least I think that makes most sense.) It's sorted primarily by rank, and secondarily by name. But if you think it should be alphabetical, I can change it. And you have noticed, that you can sort the list by any column?

Fixed. None. It's just to indicate to other users how powerful they can expect the creature to be.

The source it at https://github.com/skoll69/RQ6-Enemy-Generator. If you are not familiar with Django, mw/models.py defines the db schema for the MW part. (And enemygen/models.py for the RQ6 part.)

I was working with the MW instance of the tool during the weekend and this gave me the chance to review my code and better understand what kind of differences there are between the systems. Implementing a proper mapping support would require a significant refactoring of the whole code base. This is a bit too big of an effort right now, so unfortunately I have to bury this idea for the time being. (I'm not saying, it won't happen ever, but don't hold your breath.) On the bright side, Magic World instance of the tool is now available at http://ouropa.planeetta.com/rq_tools/mw_enemygen/. Try it out and let me know how does it work for you.

Hi all, I'm pleased to announce the general availability of the Magic World Encounter Generator! Those familiar with the RQ6 Encounter Generator can jump right in at http://ouropa.planeetta.com/rq_tools/mw_enemygen/ For the rest, here's a brief introduction. Magic World Encounter Generator is a tool designed to help MW GM's to quickly generate monster/NPC stats. There are two sides to the usage of the tool. 1. Generating stats. Just go the Magic World Encounter Generator, search for the monster you need, hit "Generate", and let the combat begin. 2. Creating new templates. If the creature you need (a Troll Warlord, an Archlich Sorcerer, a Direwolf; whatever your campaign needs) does not exist in the system yet, you can create it yourself. For that you need to create an account and log in. Once logged in, you can create any kind of monster/NPC specifications (the tool uses the term "Template" for these specifications) you need and make them available for other GM's. Right now it's still rather empty. I created a couple of orc templates and a few other creatures. Somebody should add at least the basic rulebook bestiary. (With the RQ6 instance of the tool the community has created over 2000 templates over the past two years and generated over 110000 creatures.) Note! I don't play Magic World myself, so there might be errors in how the tool is set up. If you encounter problems, or have any improvement ideas, let me know.

Thanks. This should get me started.

You don't need digital talent to participate in this discussion :-) You only need knowledge of the systems. I'm familiar only with Legend and RQ6 (and RQ2 to a degree), so I'm gonna need some help if I'm to implement support for MW for example. dragonewt, your example was a good one. Yes, everything that can be derived from stats (e.g. damage modifier) is easy to calculate system by system. But let's take the combat skills... Let's say you are an RQ6 player and create a template in the system. You don't know anything about RQ2 and don't care to know. What combat skills should the system give to the RQ2 instance of the foe? Or, considering how the foes created by the tool are used (cannon fodder), is RQ2 level of combat skill granularity actually necessary? And the same example from the other perspective. You create an RQ2 template, and add 7 different combat skills to it. How should the system determine the one combat skill for the RQ6 version of the foe? One question a lot boils down to is one how would/do you use the system: Would you utilize the templates created by others, or would you always create your own templates? If most users create their own templates, this mapping exercise is more or less pointless. Anyways, I'll start looking into MW and see what it would take to support it. If somebody feels an overwhelming need to compose a list of differences between RQ6 and MW, go for it :-)

Continued from RQ2 Premium Reprint - What would it take I'm the developer of the RQ6 Encounter Generator. dragonewt is right on the money. There are basically two ways to approach this. The simple way is to have each system as a separate tool. This would mean, that you need to add all the encounter/enemy specifications for each system separately, but it would be pretty easy to add support for new systems. The other approach would be to implement some kind of mapping between the systems, so that a Troll Warlord added to OpenQuest would also be available in RQ6, RQ2, Legend, and all the other systems (let's leave non-d100 systems out of this for the time being). This approach requires significantly more work, but would also be more rewarding. Frankly, I'm not sure if this approach is feasible or event possible, as there are several unique features in many of the systems, but if there's enough support in the community, I would be interested in exploring this option. Maybe a third alternative could be to implement mapping for simple non-magic-using creatures, and leave magic-users system-specific. Anyways, let me know what you think. And as mentioned, if the mapping-option can't be done, I can add simple support for a couple of other system, if there's enough interest.

Hi, What platform are you developing this on? I mean, will it be a web app or a native app? If native app, what OS's are you planning to support?

As has been voiced out by several others, I'd prefer one forum for Glorantha the setting, and separate system-specific forums for game-mechanics discussion.

A note on crowd****ing. Crowdsourcing in this context means, that the community participates in generating content for the tool - i.e. the NPC/monster specifications. This is already happening on the lead of hkokko and some other active members of RQ6 community. Crowdfunding on the other hand, I find extremely unlikely to happen. The target audience for this tool is very small, as are the sums of money - I believe - people would be willing to pay, so it just doesn't add up. Nonetheless, adding simple support for new systems is relatively easy and shouldn't take forever. (The implementation is already quite modular under the hood.) By simple support I mean, that the NPC templates entered in one system would not be usable in other systems, but all other features would be available for all systems. With just the current feature set the tool could be quite useful for many GM's. It's the advance features (e.g. support for chaotic features, or randomly naming the generated NPC's), system specific rules (e.g. RQ6 mysticism) and special cases (e.g. spirits who can manifest physically) that will require more time. Exhausting that list probably would take forever, even if I would work on this fulltime. That again, most of these advanced features are not needed 95% of the time.

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Howdy all, I was pointed here from http://designmechanism.freeforums.org/rq-encounter-generator-rq6-stats-for-enemies-t268-20.html (thanks for the heads-up, Jason). When I started developing this tool, I did have the ambitious idea of supporting all/most D100 systems. Quite fast I realized that to begin with, it's easier to support just RQ6 and MRQII/Legend. Eventually I decided to concentrate on RQ6, as even a second system would have introduced a lot of complexity. Nonetheless, the idea of widening the range of supported systems is something that has been on my mind. There are two possible approaches. 1. The easy way would be to keep the systems separated. In other words you would need to enter the specifications for each NPC/monster type separately. This would be easy to implement (shouldn't take more than a day or two per system), but it would require a significantly bigger effort from the community to enter all the NPC specifications/templates. 2. The more ambitious way would be to build some kind of conversion from one system to another. So if somebody has already entered a dwarf musketeer template for OpenQuest, but could use it with Legend, RQ6, whatnot. This approach would be far from trivial, but I am intrigued with the possibility. 3. A mixture of the above, where some systems share the template pool (e.g. RQ6 and Legend), and some have their own. Realistically speaking (I'm currently the only developer on this, and my time is limited), I could implement a decent support for Legend easily enough (and I have been wanting to do that for a while already). I know Legend well as we used it before RQ6 and the differences to RQ6 are quite small. Anything else would require more work. I'm not too familiar with any of the other D100 systems and I know that some systems differ more. For example if the stats used are different, the approach #2 above won't likely be feasible. But, if there's support from the community, I'd be happy to turn the Encounter Generator into a generic D100 tool. Hosting has not been an issue so far, but basically I have nothing against moving the hosting someplace more suitable. So, if there is interest, to get started we would need to 1. Identify the first one or two systems to support 2. Figure out if it's possible to come up with a simple translation formula we could use to convert the (currently) RQ6 based templates into the new system. 3. See where we get from there... The development backlog is visible at: https://trello.com/b/qtZ31uxJ/rq-enemy-generator In case there are other developers here, the backend runs on Python/Django. The source is available at https://github.com/skoll69/RQ6-Enemy-Generator. If you feel like contributing, please contact me by email.