Gnarsh

Hah! Absolutely true. I've still got an entire notebook filled with various characters, most of which maybe got played a couple times. Those were good times... And you also had a GM who spent significant effort and thought coming up with any possible method of "cheating", and testing said cheats by building epic super-villains and blasting you guys into bits with them. You do remember "The Master", right? Muahaha! The most ludicrously overpowered character ever built, using completely by-the-book legal rules. Duplication and "power usable by others" is just wrong on so many levels...

Well, not going to go point-counterpoint on this. As I've stated repeatedly, if you don't like the rolling, then by all means don't roll. If you want every character in your campaign to start out with the best possible profession and the most possible skills, then by all means, do that. Heck, If you want to just skip that awkward period of time before characters get up over 100% and can "really do something", then by all means start all characters at whatever skill levels you want. The only point I was making was that starting out with lower skills, even in a group of much more skilled characters is not automatically a balance problem either for the players, or for the GM. It is quite possible to run characters with wildly different skill levels in the same adventure. Doing so at the low end isn't significantly different then doing so at the high end. RQ specifically is much much more forgiving then other game systems. There are no levels. There are very few direct offensive spells. There are no "saving throws" that take some kind of level into account. My beginning level character is just as likely to resist a spell or disease or poison as anyone else (barring some exceptional abilities of course). My stats are not inherently likely to be significantly lower then a much more experienced character's. I don't have a fraction of the hps of a much more experienced character either. My skills are lower. That's it. So I'll miss a bit more often. I can't rely on making that parry every time. Yup. That's a handicap. My point was that it's nowhere near the equivalent of a first level character in D&D attempting to play in the same adventure with even say a group of 5th level characters (much less 10th level or higher). A significantly lower skilled character in RQ *can* adventure successfully. He *can* survive. Assuming the GM isn't simply throwing nothing but uber powerful opponents at the group (I've already discussed methods of balancing adventures that allow for disparate character skill levels) he can even be effective. It's just that the terms you keep throwing around, the disdain you seem to have for "low skill" characters, suggests to me that it's not a mechanical issue we're talking about here, but one of personality and playstyle. *You* think that characters that can't do everything everyone else in the group can are useless, so you relegate them to "drawing fire" and "carrying spears". That colors your opinions on this issue. You're welcome to them, but I have to respectably disagree. As I've already pointed out with a couple examples, some of the most enjoyable characters I've played started out quite wimpy. And even on their first adventure, while unable to compete with their companions, I still quite enjoyed playing them, and I was able to find ways to make them useful beyond just drawing fire and carrying weapons for others to fight with. In many other RPGs, player character "balance" really is a necessity. In RQ, it's not nearly as important. it's quite easy as a GM to construct adventures in such a way so that everyone from the 17 year old farmer to the powerful runelord can all contribute and succeed and most importantly enjoy themselves. I've certainly never had a problem doing it as a GM, have never had complaints from any of my players, and have never had a problem on the other end as a player myself.

I suppose that depends on how long a typical "adventure" is in the game in question. Whatever. In our game, a typical adventure tends to last upwards of 10-12 sessions (which may represent a single long adventure, or a series of related ones in which the same set of characters are all involved). Assuming your character gets into at least one fight per session, succeeds with his weapon skills at least once (not unreasonable, especially if he's fighting with a group of folks who can do things like throw bladesharp on his weapon to help him out), and in turn makes a significant percentage of his skill increase chances (also not unreasonable when you're starting at a lower skill), it's a pretty good bet you're going to make up that difference pretty quickly. You wont "catch up" of course, since presumably the other guy makes skill rolls as well. My point isn't about comparing the relative strength of characters. It's about whether or not a character starting with low skills is eternally stuck as a mediocre bit player that can never contribute (which is what was implied). And that's simply false. That character will make skill increase rolls. He will get better. It just doesn't take that long to get a character from virtually any starting skill level up into the 80-100% skill range with their combat skills. I've done it personally many many times. It's not that big of a handicap. Obviously, that depends on starting stats as well. As you pointed out, starting out older doesn't help that character much either. We use the "roll one die higher and throw away your choice" when rolling stats for characters. The assumption is that PCs are "heroic" to some degree. They may not start that way, but presumably they always have the potential to be (represented by their starting stats). I'd assume that joe random farmer with mediocre stats probably wouldn't want to embark upon a career as an adventurer, right? What the exact numbers are don't matter. The point is that the difference in weapons skill between a character with "farmer" as background and 2 years rolled for age and one with "soldier" and 12 years is exactly 38%. The difference is that the first guy is 10 years younger. In a game where you actually track time and in which characters age, retire, and die, that's significant in the long run. More to the point, after 10 years of adventuring, I think it's pretty safe to say that the guy who started as a 17 year old former farmer is going to be vastly more skilled then the guy who started as a 27 year old soldier. Clearly, he's going to gain more then 38% in 10 years, right? Again. That depends on what the focus of your game is. In my game we tend to play two characters apiece. This allows a player to play one more experienced character and one less experienced character. That allows for a smoother transition over time. Older characters retire, new character take their place. The bigger issue is that the player is having fun. Fun is not always defined by the skills on your character sheet. Or at least, it shouldn't be. Obviously, it's important to ensure that the players feel that their characters are accomplishing something, but accomplishments come in all shapes and sizes. My newbie ex-farmer character can stand next to a much better geared and skilled warrior in combat and make a *huge* difference simply by timing my attack to the same strike rank as his. He gets parried, I get a hit through that perhaps is just enough to put an arm down and turn the tide of the battle. Who "won" that fight? Certainly I wasn't nearly the threat that the other guy was, but if I hadn't been there it might have taken him 5 more rounds to wear down his opponent. And that's before even getting into roleplaying issues. In the adventure I'm playing in right now, I've got a relatively new character. He's an orlanthi barbarian type. And not incredibly skilled. I decided that he was hugely overconfident though. Swaggering around, calling out his name in battle and otherwise declaring to enemies that he had arrived and they'd better watch out! Sure, he's not really that huge of a threat, and usually spends most of the battle lying on the ground bleeding, but they don't know that. And every once in awhile, he gets a lucky hit in and takes something out (complete with war cry and everything). Guess what? I have more "fun" doing that then playing my other character (who's a pretty impressively tough centaur stormbull combat monster). Oh. And he's got a thing for beer too. It's called a roleplaying game for a reason. If it was a simple wargame, of course you'd always want to use the unit with the higher combat values. Who wouldn't? But that's not always the point here. We're not just playing a sheet of stats. We're supposed to be playing a real living breathing person. That's the whole point... If you don't like the random rolling, then don't roll. My point is not that a younger character isn't less powerful then an older one. Just that such a character is not useless, and may in time become a major part of a campaign. Again, if you play with aging rules, the mere fact that this character will live 10 years longer then the other one is *huge*. 10 years of adventuring will always net you more then 10 years of occupation experience.

Sure. But you have a much better chance of one-hit killing them, right? And you have more heal spells to use. I'll also point out that the factor you are describing is one of the many reasons why I use a "subtract combat skills over 100% from the opposing skill" system. It effectively resolves that, since two 200% guys fighting end up identical to two 100% guys fighting. And the bigger factor is that you aren't challenged by the random group of broos and bandits that might be along the way to the super powerful dragon or chaos terror you're going to fight. We touched on this in the balance thread. You're correct that it gets silly trying to make everything a challenge to the PCs as power levels increase. But that's a failure of the GM in my opinion. A good GM should certainly balance the major encounters of a scenario to the power level of the characters, but the game world itself should not arbitrarily get nastier because of that. Bandits should not be higher level because the players are. Random encounters should not be tougher because the players are. The players should always feel that their characters are more powerful when they actually *are* more powerful. And as a GM, you show this by tossing the occasional much weaker group of bad guys at the group. Yup. They plow right over them. They don't get much from it, and it didn't take much time from the game session, but it ensures that the players do get a sense of their character's power relative to the "norm" of the game world. IMO, that's kinda important. And honestly, it makes more sense... How does this affect training? Well, if you do it right as a GM, it doesn't. If someone wants to set a character aside and train instead of adventuring, so be it! Let him start up a new character and play that instead. We always allowed for a number of potential characters that anyone could play at any time on any adventure. Honestly though, training was always about supplementary skills. Main skills (the ones that you'd be using in that fight with a dragon) have a serious point of diminishing returns if you're trying to train them. No one trained their primary weapons skills. You'd get tons of increases on an adventure, and they'd usually go up pretty darn fast. It was things like sorcery, lores, and stats that you spent time training up if you could. Maybe your game is different, but in mine, if two identical characters are created, and one spends the next 30 years doing nothing but training, and the other spends the same time adventuring, the adventuring character will so massively outpower the guy who trained that it isn't even funny. His skills will not only be higher (massively so), but he'll also have whatever neato magic items he might have gained on his travels. And that's excluding the possibilities of unique abilities, spells, rewards from deities and whatnot that tend to make long standing characters both unique and powerful. I just never had any issues with training in RQ. It certainly was never a route to too much power in any game I've played. It served mostly to help players round out their characters. Getting dex to that next SR cuttoff was huge for example and something that virtually everyone did. I'll also observe that it seems as though you didn't play RQ with encumberance rules, or you'd not dismiss the benefits of increasing str, nor the disadvantages of a high siz stat...

First off, we play runelords a bit differently (they're a step above priest in our game, so essentially a runelord-priest rather then an alternate path). Also, the GM running the game at the time only granted the level to legendary "hero" level folks (and no one had done it yet). He basically thought that runelord DI unbalanced the game, so he made it incredibly rare. Um... But one of the characters on that adventure did become a runelord. However, in terms of the powerlevels of our game, this was arguably the most powerful and capable group of adventurers we'd ever fielded. A couple of powerful priests with powerful magic swords (boatloads of runespells, allied spirits in the items, etc). A powerful shaman (also with a bunch of nice items and lots of spirits, elementals, etc). A couple sorcerers, one of whom had a pretty powerful artifact type item on her. An evil hobbit (trust me!). And a handful of other priests and senior initiate level folks none of whom were "beginning" by any stretch of the word. About half the group had recently returned from an ancient dwarven city lost in the Gods war, where truestone was mined. So yeah. They were powerful (and pissed off a freaking Balrog...).

I can see this in other games, but this really isn't as much of a problem in RQ (especially RQ3). Skills tend to grow to 100 pretty quickly. Adventuring gains tend to outpace occupational gains. The difference in whether your character started with a 50% combat skill or an 80% combat skill tend to only matter for the first adventure or two. One of my greatest characters (darn near legendary in our campaign) started out exactly as a 17 year old character. As beginning as you can be. Wearing leather gear (ok, leather+curboilli, so 4 points of armor). And as luck would have it, her first adventure ended out being one of the longest and most epic scenarios the GM had run to that date. Let's see, we started by gathering up pieces of a medallion to an oracle. We're talking about years of game time traveling around the world, exploring some of the most nasty and dangerous areas. Powerful liches. Massive gollum-statue things. Powerful wizards. A land full of vampires. A visit or three from a time-travelling-body-snatching Old One. Finding and destroying a powerful artifact. Oh... And dealing with a powerful Balrog that owed the party death (from a previous adventure). Yup. Great time to roll up a brand new character with base starting skills, right? Sure. She didn't contribute much for awhile. But she'd get some swings in during each fight (mostly sticking next to someone who looked a lot more threatening then her of course!). She'd make climb rolls when we were climbing over things, and sneaks when we needed to sneak, and hides when we needed to hide. By the time we finished that long adventure, she had combat skills well over 100%, a few minor magic items, and had made a name for herself. After the adventure, she was able to quickly make priest in her cult (and get some better armor!). She ended up being among a group that got deported from the lands we were at (long political story behind this), and over time became a major leader in the new lands they traveled to (there's an earldom named after her now). In fact, at the time she was one of the first characters in our campaign to get combat skills over 200% (and only maybe 10 ever have). Largely because she was so much younger then everyone else when she started (we do play aging pretty straight), and partly because I played her pretty constantly for a long time and in a lot of adventures. The point being that there's no inherent reason why a very low skilled character cannot advance over time and become a major force in a campaign. None at all...

I thought that was a requirement for playing that game?

Hah! Well, I played Twilight:2000 once. Briefly, and once, but yeah... Where was I? At the risk of being obvious, I don't think the mere fact that someone has lived for X years and played Y games over that time has anything at all to do with the "breadth" of their roleplaying experience. I used to GM at RPG tourneys back in the day. Trust me. There are a zillion players who've played many many RPGs but who I wouldn't trust to put the car in park, let alone consider good roleplayers. I'd also question whether the sheer number of games one plays at all makes them a good roleplayer, much less a good gamer at all. I know a guy who playtests games as a side job. He's a great guy. Can quote rules from more game systems then I care to count. But he can't stick to any one game system long enough to do more then learn the mechanics half the time. He gets bored quickly and moves on. I suspect that most players who buy a new game system every month or so are similar. Sure, they've got "breadth" of experience, but I've got to question the "depth". Personally, for me it's more about the game world and the storyline. I've played dozens of game systems over the last 30 years or so, but have probably only spent significant time playing a handful. And of them, RQ has easily been the longest and most often played (yeah. I'll toss a plug out there). Started playing shortly after 1st edition came out, and really have never looked back. The game mechanics of RQ were superior when they came out, and still are equal if not still superior to pretty much any other game on the market (largely because most game systems have adopted concepts that RQ came up with 30 years ago). I've just never been interested at all in playing any other high-fantasy type game in any other system for any length of time. Every time I've tried I end up thinking "Gee. I could simply incorporate this scenario or campaign concept into RQ and it would work better". Games in other genre's worked great though. Loved champions to death. Really enjoyed Shadowrun (2nd edition of course). Dabbled in Vampire. Um... Probably a few others that I can't think of right now. Now, if we want to talk about depth and/or campaign length... That's a different story. The current RQ campaign I'm playing in has been running continuously since sometime in 1980 (the originator played a different game world for a year or so before switching to the current one). Players have come and gone (I think there's only 3 of the original left). But the entire campaign has been played in a continuous timeline from a starting point about 28 years go in real time (and I believe 120 years now in game time) and has run straight through. We've had characters start, adventure, retire, grow old and die during this time. Many of them. There are some characters being run today that are the great grandchildren of some of the earliest characters. It's not uncommon to run plot threads in this game that take 3-5 years to play out (real time, so upwards of 15-20 years game time). There may be a game or two out there that's run a longer single contiguous campaign, but probably not by much. So you can take your breadth all you want. I've enjoyed playing in a game world with a long and rich history, that has survived intact for so long and looks to continue for a long time to come. IMHO, that's why we play roleplaying games, right?

Also, remember that RQ3 professions were "parent occupation". In other words, that's the profession your were born into. There was no requirement to keep it, and in fact there were rules for changing profession if you wanted to. We typically allowed a new character to pick any of the more "standard" professions that might be available in the area if he wanted without penalty (obviously, you couldn't just choose to be a noble if you weren't born to it). IMO, they added flavor to the game. It wasn't just "I'm carbon copy warrior number 19...". You were something else when you grew up, and then you (presumably) decided to go off in search of adventure, ran into a group of troublemakers (the rest of the player characters) and things just snowballed from there. There were a couple very useful aspects to the profession lists as well. Firstly, it just gave you a general sense of what a given type of person might be able to do. If your characters for some reason need to organize a group of farmers to help defend their village from raiding barbarians, how skilled are they going to be? What skills might they have that could be useful? What magic? Can they sew? What about the local thieves guild? What kind of skills are they likely to have? How about a group of longshoremen? The professions gave the game environment a bit of consistency and foundation that many other games lack. Additionally, it was a nice resource for player characters during offtime. If I don't play a character for a few years, what skills does he gain? Maybe I want to pay for training or something and roll a gazillion dice, but boy is it simpler to just find a profession that fits what he's doing when he's not adventuring and use that as a guideline (we allow some substitution of skills when doing this of course). Maybe my Earth cultist *is* a farmer when he's not adventuring?

Well, we actually created a whole set of new martial arts skills that higher skilled folks could learn (basically, you had to have a combat skill with 100% attack and parry). Within that system, we introduced things like riposting, splitting skills unevenly if you wanted, better aiming, fumble avoidance, removing impales, increasing average damage (used the old truesword method for this), etc... Those were add ons though. We specifically left them out of the basic combat system so that they didn't impact lower level combats. The idea is that below 100% skill, you're basically just doing straight attacks and parries/dodges. Nothing special. What you roll is what you get. Oh. We also modded the crit system a bit. Instead of no armor at all, a crit reduces all ap by half (including parry). We found that worked better at balancing out the use of parry versus dodge (for more or less the reasons I've discussed earlier). We also put specific limits on armoring enchantment. In addition to limiting total enchantment to double original APs, we restricted the parrying benefit for armoring shields and weapons. Basically, you can armor enchant a weapon, but you get no extra parrying effect for it. The weapon is just harder to break. Shields can gain up to half again their base AP for purposes of parrying when enchanted. Armor can gain the full x2 APs. The objective in our game was to make each method of defense useful and viable by itself, but with varying benefits. These adjustments worked pretty darn well. Dodging is effective due to the combination of level subtraction and increased ability to potentially armor locations over parrying items. Parrying with a shield is effective due to simply being able to add more to the total APs (since crits only halve, you're much less likely to take damage from a crit from a lesser foe). Parrying with a weapon is least effective at preventing damage, but with our martial arts system allows for ripostes (which by themselves are pretty darn powerful effects). We also use a combat system that allows a character to subtract their natural skill over 100% from an opposing skill. So a significantly better skilled warrior can often make an opponent miss (at at the least drastically reduce the chance of being specialed or criticalled). There's a few other minor house rules we use as well. Obviously, those are pretty significant mods to the base game system. But we've tweaked them over the last 20 years or so and have them pretty much perfect at this point (for our game anyway). We have powerful characters that use any of the three defensive methods. All of them are quite effective. At the lower end, obviously shield parry is pretty dominant, if for no other reason then a higher starting chance and more total APs. However, any method can and does work and all of them become more effective as a character gains skill. I've always found this particular topic to be fascinating, simply because there are so many different ways to approach these skills and so many different seemingly minor rules that can significantly affect how the abilities work and therefore how balanced they are. There's no specifically right way to do this. However, I do think it's important within a game mechanic context to try to make sure that the choices offered to the characters in terms of development have a somewhat equivalent pro-con balance. If everyone in your game uses shields because that's always a better way to go, it might be a good time to look at why that is and maybe make some adjustments. Same thing with dodge. At one point in our game, dodge was actually too overpowered (trust me. It's possible!). Whatever works and makes your players happy is good though...

They are separate, but they're also related. The degree to which PCs of different power level can adventure together is going to be a function of the degree to which the GM adjusts the encounters to the power level of the PCs. It's also going to be strongly affected by the makeup of the encounters themselves. I kinda touched on the concept of using mixed foes to allow for mixed PC powerlevels in a group. The idea being that just as it's somewhat silly to assume that you'd have 10 people traveling around who are all superpowerful runelords of their respective cults going out on a stroll somewhere, it's equally silly to assume that the random group of bad guys you run into are all identically powered as well. Most of the time, you're going to see a mixture. And to be honest, if you use a mixture of NPC foes, it's quite workable to have just a couple powerful runelord types in a group with most of the rest being a mix of initiates and perhaps somewhat beginning priests. Assuming you have some roleplaying involved in the adventure and it's not just a series of fights to get from point A to point Z, the power level of the characters shouldn't matter that much. Everyone can contribute to some degree. Sure, we can assume that the runelords are likely to be better even at most out of combat tasks, they wont automatically be the "best" at everything. Also, we'd assume that they're the leaders, right? So they're not likely to be the guys sent off to go buy supplies for the next leg of the journey while you're stopping at that small town, right? If you have a smallish sub-plot involving activities like that along the way, you can get the lower power guys into fun and trouble without having the superpowered guys overwhelming everything. This also depends on how large your playing group is and how many characters you play. We tend to play two characters apiece. Which allows for most players to play an experienced character and a newer character (which keeps fresh blood flowing as well). So everyone has something they can do in the big fights, but also can play around with the smaller stuff as well. Also, as I mentioned earlier, not every fight can (or should) involve nothing but super powerful bad guys. It's reasonable that the big bad guys who are trying to take out the party aren't going to turn down a bunch of weaker cannon-fodder type minions if they've got them. The broo villiage you attack isn't going to be full of nothing but Ralzakark's finest footsoldiers either. And even within a single cohesive opposing group of bad guys, there will be some who are powerful leader types, and other who are just average followers. Obviously, you shouldn't contrive this too much, but I've found that larger combats tend to "flow" pretty well towards ensuring that everyone fights something appropriately tough. If for no other reason then the really nasty bad guys will be sweeping the weaker players aside like nothing until someone tough comes up to challenge them. And the weaker guys? Well, they can get patched up and either help out, or hold off some of the weaker minions in the fight. More powerful characters tend to fight their way through the wall'o'minions first, meaning they're usually the ones to break through and charge the big bad guy(s). Sometimes, simply putting a lot of weak foes between the party and a small number of much tougher ones works wonderfully at ensuring that everyone is "useful" and participates fully in a battle. And given the cowardly nature of most chaos foes, isn't that the way they'd likely fight? I've just never found this to be too much trouble to manage as a GM. That's not to say I don't set restrictions in terms of which characters can/should go on an adventure. But I'm ok with a pretty wide range. Restrictions usually have more to do with the top level of the bad guys they'll be facing then with any specific problems with regard to balancing the group itself. If the main bad guy in my adventure is a small time slave-trader causing problems for a local village, with the main obstacles being finding them and dealing with his handful of hired toughs, allowing someone to bring his character who just happens to be the best swordsman on 5 continents, and who's resume includes "accidentally destroyed an entire plane of existence while on my way to doing something really big!" probably would be overkill...

Certainly, and I even tossed in an example of an opposing priest using shield 4 and protection 8 to defend against the guy with the bladesharp and the truesword. I think that my original point has kinda been lost in all of this. Assuming you use a "dodge subtracts success off attack" system (which most people do use, and I believe is the default "standard" in the BRP rules), then all of those things actually increase the utility of dodge, rather then the other way around. IIRC, runemetal by default is 150% ap and 50% weight, right? This means that it's less restrictive on dodging then normal armor (assuming I'm remembering the weight thing correctly. I know we've always played it that way). So a successful dodge skill will always ensure that you get that armor on every single attack, no matter what. You can't be criticalled unless you fail your dodge skill. As the worn armor value increases, this makes dodge more valuable. Add in armor enchanting of locations and/or armor and this gets even bigger. A shield is nice, but if we're assuming someone with lots of time/power on his hands, he's going to have significant worn armor points even before casting spells (which add even more). His parry becomes pretty small in comparison. When we add in runemetal armor into the equation, my point becomes stronger. So, Joe the orlanthi runepriest can walk around in his rune iron platemail, giving him 12ap on every location. Add to that his shield 4 and his protection 8, and he's sitting at 28ap everywhere. Note, that this is before armor enchantment is even considered. In our campaign, we restrict this to double the normal AP of an item, or the HPs of a location (for armoring skin for example). Some campaigns don't place such restrictions, so it's hard to say what's "typical". If he's facing the guy with a truesword and a bladesharp 8, he could parry and probably do just fine. Average damage with say a broadsword would be sitting at 11+7+8=26. Easily stopped. Even before the parry. Max damage is 36+12+8=56. Not so easy. Even with a parry (but hopefully, not that common either). Note, however, that if Joe makes his dodge (assuming the "level subtracts" system), he can reduce an impale to a normal hit, putting the damage level back into the "I can take this with my worn armor" range. An average impale would do 22+7+8=37 damage. Parried, that'll be stopped. Dodged, that will be stopped. An average critical will do the same damage, but the armor will be avoided (so you just get the parry). Even with a hoplite, he's still taking 19 points of damage to a location (which will probably sever it). Same critical if dodged will result in only 9 points of damage being taken. That will likely put a location under, but not sever it. The point I'm trying to get here is that if you play where dodges subtract the level of success, the whole "critial kills a dodge" concept falls apart. What we find is that as worn armor increases in proportion to parry, dodge actually gets *better* against criticals.

As I stated earlier, it depends on where your game is in terms of armoring and whatnot. I play in a game that's more or less RQ3 in a modified Glorantha-like setting (actually based on the old QuestWorld stuff. kinda...). In our game, runemetal is *rare*. Let's face it, given the starting skill levels in RQ3, it's just not that hard, nor does it take that long, for people to qualify for runepriest. You just need some skills at 50% or higher (some 90%s depending on cult), and 10 points of runemagic. So it's quite common for a relatively beginning level priest in our game to have the exact spells and gear combination I mentioned earlier. My point was that without *any* extra gear, or power spent on enchantment, or heroic level augmentation of your character's stats and bodies, they can achieve the sorts of damage levels I was talking about. If you need to add in runemetal armor with perhaps some armoring enchantment to counter it, that's great! But it does not change the fact that those sorts of damage levels really are "normal" for any RQ3 game that uses standard RQ cults and spells. You don't need anything but standard RQ3 rules and spells to obtain them. And it's not even difficult to do!

Hah. Actually, the nastiest tactic I like that I ever did as a GM was when the party was being attacked by a couple Krarsht initiates in the Inn they were staying at. A priest was hanging outside in the alleyway using spells (via vision) to help the attack (and conceal his identity, since he'd already met the party and was working on sending them into a trap while pretending to be selling them a map they needed). I had the priest throw a sweat acid spell on the Challana Arroy *healer*. So when someone got wounded and he went to heal them (range touch spell, right?). Well... Let's just say the healer needed some therapy after that one.

I do a similar thing in my game. Not so much with the administrative headaches, but more about environmental problems (no. not like global warming!). The players were more or less "heroes" of the kingdom (or those rascally friends of the heroes who weren't perhaps so upstanding in their methods). But the adventures tended to follow larger plots that were outside the scope of the players to affect more then indirectly. For example, I'm currently running a set off scenarios that will eventually result in a fairly large scale bad guy causing all sorts of problems. But for right now, the big problem is that the island nation off the coast has been having food shortages and this will spill over into the area the PCs are living in. So while they can kick butt on any random group of broos that might wander by, for all their power they are still at the whim of fate in the larger picture of things. This sort of thing may not seem that critical, but in terms of making a campaign believable, it's *huge*. Not all threats come in the form of a group of bad guys seeking to fight the party. I've done the same sort of thing as well. In my game, I've actually come up with some special rules (extensions on engaged and closing rules really) that allow for foes with a numerical advantage to turn that into a real combat advantage. So a horde of trollkin can theoretically swarm over a group of much tougher opponents and win. Also, I've found that mixed groups of bad guys work well. Not everyone's going to be exactly the same and that should apply to the bad guys as well. This allows for mixed power level PC groups to work. You can have one or two much tougher PCs in a group simply by adding additional foes that aren't much tougher. Sure, the powerful guys will wade through them, but as long as you're challenging the bulk of the group, this still works. Obviously, you can (and should!) also have the tougher NPCs face the tougher PCs and give everyone a challenge. Also, it's not wrong for a GM to throw an encounter out there that the players are simply going to win. Let's face it, if you've got a party full of Rune level characters, exactly how many random encounters are going to challenge them? Sometimes, this can be some of the most comical and "fun" encounters and result in stories that players re-tell over and over though. We were once on an adventure with a "high power" group. Really high power. As in, we're going after some super old vampire-litch wanna-be deity guy holed up in his evil lair with his hordes of minions and whatnot to mess up his millennium. Along the way, the party's traveling through some hills. The ridiculously powerful (and hilariously "evil") elf shaman/gardener character spots a trip rope ahead on the trail. On a whim, he decides to just shoot the rope, gets a lucky hit and snaps it with a single shot from his bow. The party kinda shrugs and moves on. The next day, they see what looks like a well hidden pit trap. The earth priestess tosses out a large gnome and rumbles it. The party shrugs and moves on. At the end of the adventure, the GM admitted that he'd originally had a group of bandits there who were going to attempt to harass/ambush the party. However, after seeing how easily we just blew through their well laid traps, they decided that messing with us was just not a bright thing to do and packed it in. IMO, that was *vastly* more fun, interesting, and "real" then if he'd just buffed up the power level of the bandits and had them attack. It's important to treat NPCs as more then numbers on a sheet calculated to face and challenge the players. Sure, the adventure should challenge them (in multiple ways hopefully), but each individual NPCs presumably has a reason for doing what he's doing. Bandits aren't there to provide a fun fight for the PCs along the way. They presumably actually want to get some cash without dying. Broos may want to spread chaos and expand their cult(s) evil influence in an area, but each one will certainly prefer to do this by having their rival or competing tribe members die then themselves. Balance is important, but it's not just about balancing individual encounters. It's also about making the game world feel like it's a real place, with real consequences and rewards and in which the NPCs at in ways that make sense. So sure, sometimes that means that a horde of baddies are going to descend upon the player character's heads. Other times, that's going to mean that enemies will slink away in the night to plot some other less suicidal method of obtaining their goals...

Yeah. It really does depend on the "flavor" of your game. How much armoring enchantment do you allow? Do you have stacking limits on spells? How strictly do you follow the encumberance rules? 30-40 points isn't really that high, even using "standard" spell rules. Let's assume you're playing in a game (like mine) where spells are capped at 4 points for rune and 8 points for spirit (ok. we use a scaling cap, but whatever). So a priest of humakt is facing you with a broadsword with truesword and bladesharp 8 going. That's hardly even out of the range that a random beginning level priest might have. Let's also say he's got sufficient points of the strength spell to get a 2d6 strength bonus (typically about a strength 4). Again. Nothing is out of the ordinary, nor even requires any houserules (aside from those limiting the possibilities). Average damage on a regular hit becomes (5.5*2=11)+7+8=26. Against someone with say a 12 point shield (pretty typical) and 6 points of armor (ring+leather, arguably the best ap for the enc in RQ3), he's going to take 8 points of damage to a location every single swing (which will likely take that location down barring significant strengthening enchantment). A special gets "ugly" in this situation, since it bumps the damage up an additional 11 points (now an average of 37) if he chooses to impale, or 5 points if he chooses to just take max damage. Max damage in that situation is 18+12+8=38 damage on a regular hit, and 36+12+8=56 on an impale. That's pretty brutal. Ok. But let's pretend that you're also a priest, and you've got 4 points of shield and 8 points of protection. That's an additional 16 points of armor. Note, that this armor "works" whether you parry or not. So your worn armor has jumped to 22. Suddenly, the 12 points of parry from the shield isn't as significant as the worn armor you get. Avoiding a critical matters *more* (since it's worth 22 points) then the parry. Of course, you could pretty safely parry as well, since in this case, your parry gives you 34 points of protection and the other guy has to get a lucky hit (an impale or better) to have much chance of doing any damage to you. That's an edge case honestly. The two skills are almost a wash. But if we transform that opponent into a Zorak Zoran priest using crush4, wielding a troll maul, and capable of getting a 3d6 damage bonus, suddenly are numbers might not look so great. Dodging starts to look pretty good when the opponents average damage hits 18+10+13.5+8=41.5 damage (yes, that's average for a 3d6 bonus, with a troll maul with truemace, crush4, and bludgeon8). I'll also point out that the above mentioned troll would only need some spirit spells (which he can pick automatically once he's a priest and spends one power for spellteaching), and 5 points of rune magic (and since he needs 10 to qualify for priest, that shouldn't be a problem, right?). So basically, any random zorak zoran priest can do this without any special items or abilities. IMO, it's quite common to face foes that can do that kind of damage. And of course, one of the disadvantages that PCs have is that while they're expected to fight and defeat many foes over the course of an adventure, each foe they fight is *only* fighting the PCs. Thus, he's likely to run out of shield before the foes he fights over the course of an adventure run out of stuff like truesword, crush, or slash. Having a dodge is pretty darn nice in those situations. Yes. It's harder to get the skill up. It starts at a lower base and suffers penalties based on enc. But more experienced characters in my campaign almost always take some time to learn some dodge just so that they have the chance to use it if/when they need it.

I was responding to folks talking about the relative usefulness of dodge and parry in RQ3. In RQ3, all a successful parry does is give you more armor points between the damage and your skin. A critical parry is great, but anything less only adds points. If you're fighting something really big or even just with a lot of offensive magic up, parry can be less then stellar. It's just not that hard in RQ3 to run into foes that can do average damage in the 30-40 range. Against that a shield parry may not make much difference (again, depending on where you put ap values in your game of course!). Even if you don't play that level of success on a dodge subtracts, you're still putting yourself in a situation where the other guy has to special to hurt you. If he can blow through your shield parry on a normal hit, this is always going to be a better deal.

Well, that's the tradeoff, isn't it? In some situations, dodge was innately superior (high damage foes), while in other's parry was (low to medium damage, with better defense against specials and crits). Most of the time, you're going to be better off parrying, but if you're fighting something that will blow right through that shield parry and whack a location off/down, you might just want to dodge. Sure, if the other guy specials or crits, you're probably in trouble, but if he doesn't, you're better off. The other advantage to dodge is that once you get a sufficiently high skill with it, it becomes incredibly useful in conjunction with higher AP armor. Assuming you use the "success levels subtract" method (which we do), then if you succeed at dodging, your opponent can *never* critical you. If you've got good AP on your worn armor, this can be huge. It's quite possible to end up being better off dodging against a critical hit from an opponent, then parrying. How you balance these two will have a lot to do with how your game is set. The balance between worn armor versus ap on shields in your game will be a significant determinant as to which skill is "better", and should be taken into account when deciding what sort of rules to use.

The problem with this system, as I believe several people have mentioned, is that it places huge weight on whomever the GM has arbitrarily decided is the "defender". Basically, if the defender succeeds, he succeeds, and the attackers roll and skill doesn't much matter. I could have a 200% hide, but if the defender rolls under his 25% skill, he spotted me no matter what. Now that might be ok, but isn't really a good "opposed roll" system IMO. Yeah. This is still basically the same as "subtract roll from skill" method. If you have to do subtraction anyway, why not just do it once? Obviously, if you never allow skills over 100 in your game, the simpler "success-level, then high roll within tied success level" method works great. Once you have skills over 100%, you end up having to do some subtraction. That's why I've always preferred the "subtract roll from skill" method. It tells you how much you made it by, and gives you an immediate measure of success. I actually don't worry about crits and specials much either. Aside from roleplaying, it's not that important (ie: You *really* snuck past that guard!!!). Ultimately, with opposed rolls you want to know if this guy wins or that guy. How well he spotted you, or how well you hid from him isn't that important at the end of the day. The benefits of this method is that there's no change to the methodology, no matter what the conditions. Skills over 100%? No change. You're just subtracting from a higher number is all. Modifiers to skills present? Same deal. You just have an additional subtraction or addition to the initial skill level. The big advantage to this method is that as a GM, it allows you to resolve multiple things at one time. Let's imagine that your character is trying to sneak up on an enemy encampment. There is a guard on duty, as well as a group of people sitting around a campfire. However, unknown to you, there is also another NPC trying to sneak up on the same group of bad guys. Additionally, there is a terrain feature that you're using to advantage that blocks the site of the guard, but not the folks at the campfire and only partially blocks the view between you and the other sneaker. Using traditional rules, this situation is *incredibly* complex to resolve. You basically have to roll for each comparison, and the fact that the GM asks you to roll three times will hint to the player that there are three things that might spot him. With a subtraction system, the modifiers all simply roll into the subtraction. The player simply rolls his hide/sneak/whatever and tells the GM how much he made it by. The GM then applies that as a modifier to each group trying to spot the player, adding additional minuses based on terrain and whatnot. Once you adopt the idea that degree of success can be equated to a skill modifier for an opposed roll, this makes gaming incredibly simple. It also means you can use the same mechanism for non-opposed skill rolls as well. If a player is trying to pick a lock, he may not know how difficult it is. But if he just rolls and tells the GM how much he made it by, the GM simply determines if that number is greater then the difficulty of the lock and is done. Another advantage is that the player doesn't need to know he's making an opposed roll at all. Let's say a character is walking down a hall. You ask the player to make a spot roll. He does and as normal reports the amount he made it by. At the point, the player has no idea why he's rolling. Is there a trap? Someone sneaking up on him? Maybe just a GM making him nervous? He doesn't know. And as long as the mechanism used for opposed and non-opposed rolls are the same (to the player anyway), he wont ever know. And that's a good thing...