Jonas

Page 81 (print edition), sidebar Harmast's Narrative, end of first paragraph: "At that time the veracity of the cult was impugned, and we can be sure Belorden recounted his friend's words faithfully."

I can't make heads or tails of this sentence. What does the one fact have to do with the other? Are there sentence fragments missing?

On 8/19/2023 at 3:07 PM, metcalph said:

Suggest replacing Dragon Pass with Apple Lane.  Dunno where the Rockwoods Temple is.  

Is the temple in Apple Lane really Major, though? The one in the published books is definitely just a Shrine. 

p. 62: "Another member of the Third Council awoke to the threat of the barbarian hero Jaldon Goldentooth, then directing some divine energies to aid the beleaguered Six Sisters upon the border with Prax."
This reads as if Jaldon was aiding the Six Sisters. That's probably not what's intended. Maybe change "then directing" to "and then directed"?

p. 93, Slonta. This is just a copy-paste from the history section on p. 89, it provides no actual information about Slonta the way we get for her sisters.

15 hours ago, styopa said:

Crit attack does max rolled, ignoring armor, while special does rolled x2; this means that in some cases it would be BETTER to take the special result than the crit result.  Can we let them choose which, if they get a crit?

(frex, d8+1+d4 max damage would be 13 ignoring armor, or an average of 16 points with a special; if the target has 0, 1, or 2 point armor, the special result would be better)

Maybe we don't have to choose: reading the chart on page 3 literally, every crit is also a special... though the other text on the page seems to indicate differently.

14 hours ago, styopa said:

...which was always one of the odd, imo broken mechanics in the RQ2 system: why are missile weapons intrinsically faster than melee?  Likewise the special treatment - only afforded to missile weapons - of repeat attacks based solely on strike ranks, whilst melee are limited to a single attack unless one's attack can be divided.

The justification in sim terms seems to be that when you are engaged in melee, your attention is divided between all the stuff that's happening. If you're not engaged you can focus on doing just one thing. In game balance terms, I'd guess the intent is to compensate missile users for the fact that their weapons are useless once an enemy has closed with them (or one of their allies - the shooting into melee rule is pretty harsh).

As for the rune spells going off on SR 1, this seems to indicate that you don't actually "cast" these spells, you just send a thought to your god and bam there it is.

Your other questions are things I'd like to know, too.

6 minutes ago, theWoozle said:

Are we missing Spirit Combat attack skills/spells?or is it more generic and you just make a 'spirit attack' and success = damage. 

Unknown at this time. In older editions, spirit combat was pretty bare bones, but p. 19 implies that there is more to come.

54 minutes ago, Flsocialworker said:

I've played CoC, but never played RQ. I'm running the Broken Tower new adventure next week.

I'm confused by strike rank....So is it Dex + Siz + SR of the weapon= When they act in combat? Dex 2, Siz 1, SR 6= 9

Older RQ looks like characters can act more than once per round. The quick start rules look like only 1 action per round. 

I listen to podcasts about RQ and they talk about action points, but I do not see them on the Pregen characters.

 

1. Sort of. Your formula is correct, but the weapon SRs are not in the quickstart rules. What's listed on the characters is the total, after all calculations.

2. No, they're pretty clear that you can do more than one thing. In some cases. Page 8 says that your attack is considered to take up the entire round, but it seems this only applies to melee. The examples on page 7 show that you can, among other things, shoot two arrows if you're fast enough.

3. Action points are a thing from the Mongoose versions of RuneQuest. Never in the editions from Chaosium.

P.S. as opposed to the AP economy of MRQ, it seems we get unlimited parries in this edition. Something all player characters will thank the gods for.

Carthalo, p. 29: does he have 80% or 95% Spirit Combat? It's unclear to me what spells he could cast to summon a ghost (p. 30). or what skill or stat he would be rolling against.

Yanioth, p. 43: as a priestess, even an apprentice one, her number of Rune Points seems kind of low. She doesn't really excel at anything besides magic, either, so as written she's the least useful party member.

9 hours ago, theWoozle said:

The character sheets have runes at the bottom with no explanation. Are these just decoration?

No, they're the runes the character in question has the most connection to.

Though there's a mistake on Vastana's sheet: she should have Truth as well (or instead of Moon).

17 minutes ago, theWoozle said:

The Strike Rank rules are leaving me with more questions than answers.

With initiative being a function of how many things the player wants to do in a round, do they have to go around the table and detail all of their actions to determine their Strike Rank and THEN take their actions in the SR order (low to high)? 

what is the actual function of the DEX / SIZ Strike Ranks? Is it a limit of some kind, or the Base Strike Rank? The example on page 7 gives the character a  Dex 11 (SR3) and suggests he could move, cast a spell, and ready his bow for 11 SR but what does the Dex-based SR of 3 actually DO as it seems to have no relationship to the example?

Some of the NPCs have a Base Strike Rank and some don't. Does it default to 1? 

I can answer some of this, presuming it works the same as in RQ2.

Statement of intent has always been a headache, and I hope they clarify that.

The base SR in melee is DEX SR + SIZ SR, while base SR for missiles and spells is just DEX SR. In the example, DEX SR is used in the casting of the Disruption spell: The rules earlier on the page spell it out: SR for a spirit magic spell is DEX SR plus 1 per MP used above 1. Disruption is a 1-point spell, so it's 3+0=3.

I think they just forgot Base SR for some NPCs, it's certainly not 1 but it won't matter 99% of the time.

42 minutes ago, Jeff said:

In my experience rounding 0.5 or more up is not substantively more difficult than rounding any fraction up. In fact, I for one find rounding any fraction up harder because it requires "unlearning" my gut instinct. 

But my point is that if you've learned the old pattern, there is no need for rounding, you don't need to do any calculations.

With the new rule, there is no simple pattern to learn, so you have to do the calculation, at least every time a modifier changes your skill before a roll. It eats up more time and mental energy.

I dunno, maybe for new players who don't have the old chart ingrained in them, it won't be that big of a difference. But I know I'm going to be houseruling this...

Well, if we're talking about rules here...

The thing that immediately jumps out at me is the chart on page 3. I see you've gone with ".5 or more rounds up" instead of the old "any fraction rounds up".

While this might satisfy mathematical purists, I feel it's a huge mistake in terms of playability.  With the old formula you just have to memorize a few rules of thumb (each unit of 20 or part thereof gives 1% crit chance, each unit of 5 or part thereof gives 1% special chance), but now you have to do either a calculation or chart lookup every time. It also gives a progression that's unaesthetic (for lack of a better word).

To clarify: by "forum" you mean just this thread? Because I'm not seeing any others.

So any and all comments should just be replies right here?

Not a typo as such, but the handouts on p 182 and 183 look... unfinished.

So I've only very recently had a session with a lot of melee combat in it, and I found a question that I'm unsure about.

When someone is attacked in melee and chooses to fight back or dodge, does that use up their action for the round? I can't find anything in the rules that says it does, it's just that a lot of other BRP-bases games have that rule, and it's kind of become second nature to me.

Even if it's not the intent of the rules, what would be the effect of house-ruling that in? Hmmmm... For one thing, it would speed up combat a little. But on the other hand, it would make high DEX a really big advantage, because the one who goes first would always have the edge of being the attacker.

So maybe it should just be clarified that you get one free reaction to being attacked each round?

I'm going to go off on a little bit of a tangent here.

Haven't got around to running A!C yet (still on the Orient Express, and after that I want to run some other game a bit to clear my palate), but when I do I will certainly convert it to 7e.

And just reading the A!C books I realize the first thing I have to do is prune down the skill list. There are sooo many over-specialized skills in there that will seldom or ever come up in actual play.