Tywyll

3 hours ago, Crel said:

I've had some of the same concerns as OP. The raw roll of 3D6 can feel really, really mediocre. And as @Ian Absentia points out sometimes a low characteristic makes for great roleplay, but at other times it's just vexing. Currently, I've been having my players choose three points first to add where they want, as if from Bless Pregnancy, to be "what my family hoped I would be." Sometimes this remains true to character, sometimes there's tension. Then I had them roll characteristics in order, which seemed what's going on RAW before finally adding their bonuses from Elemental Runes. I somewhat like how this works, because you can end up with a really surprising characteristic which results in unusual play (like a Zorak Zoran berserker with CHA 18 who's just persistently, weirdly compelling...).

That's interesting. I'm using the idea of Bless Pregnancy but turned up to 11. The premise of my campaign is that the king of a large kingdom, upon taking the throne, had a bunch of divinations performed and learned that his kingdom and the followers of Law would be overwhelmed by Chaos in around 25 years, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. The loophole though was that he could get others to save it. So he gathered the most powerful Priests of the Mother gods and got them to blow all their rune points on his son and the children of several loyal dukes, in exchange for favors and having him send lesser priests and initiates to cover their communities while they were down their magic. So the players have grown us as genetic super-humans without knowing why. Now that they are of age, he is sending them out into the world to gather artifacts of great power in hopes that they will be able to turn the tide and save the kingdom. I let everyone roll 1d6+4 and add that many points to their stats. Interestingly, the lowest was 8 with most getting 9 and 1 getting 10 (I decided that was the crown prince because of course the king would have the most powerful priest bless his kid). So they have ridiculous stats and are walking godlings, the 1% of the 1%, kind of thing, but they are facing tremendous threats on their own. 

1 hour ago, Anunnaki said:

If this is useful for people, would you like me to drop a before and after example up?

Yes please. I'm more likely to add a flat +10-15% myself, but I'm always interested in seeing other's ideas. 

14 hours ago, David Scott said:

Given the Troll info in the RQG Bestiary and the info in the scenario, Whiteye is a troll Bandit and a Zorak Zoran initiate.

Yeah, that was my plan basically.

14 hours ago, David Scott said:

I'm interested in what Lizard Earth magic looks like.

I'd also recommend searching this forum as this isn't the first time using the Rainbow Mounds has come up:

https://basicroleplaying.org/search/?q="Rainbow Mounds"

 

Earth Magic wise I figured I'd have some summon/command Gnome, Crack, and whatever Maran Gor has. Might dig through GoG and see if there are other earth gods I could crib from. 

That or maybe I could give her Dragon Magic. There is the whole Dragonewt thing that isn't really explored in the module. 

Also I dug out my Avalon Hill version (totally forgot I even had it) and in there the monsters and things have slightly/majorly increased skill percentages so I will probably use those for the goons.

Last night my party got jumped by the rock lizards thanks to one of them fumbling a move quietly roll. He nearly lost his arm in the first round (bad for someone in a cult based on Yelmalio!!!). But they rallied and took the lizards down. 

Interesting. Well, I'm definitely going to make Whiteeye an Initiate, probably without around 6 rune points. If they make it to the great lizard, I'm going to give her around 10 rune points of earth related magic. 

8 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

I think so. It's always been the case that sorcery is "spooky and alien" to Heortlings and Praxians because it doesn't have visible and audible side-effects.

Are there any rules for this anywhere? Does that mean sorcery is invisible (except its effects)?

Do spells, especially Rune Spells, have a visual component when cast? RQ:Adventure in Glorantha had a very specific set of rules around what happened when spells of various intensities were performed and if/how you could (or couldn't) hide them. Divine spells literally had you momentarily taking on aspects of your god. Is that a thing any more?

23 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Some parts of the Rainbow Mounds are quite dangerous enough as they are!

I don't know... versus a group of characters that can toss rune magic around and have 80-100% in some combat stats?

So I was thinking of adding the Rainbow Mounds to my Griffin Island game. Has anyone done anything to update it to the new, higher skill level, characters and builds? If no, any advice on changes I should consider?

On 5/4/2019 at 5:22 PM, David Scott said:

I use Superworld and GURPs Lensman as my guidelines for RQ power. Hero points for building characters was based on a total of the seven stats, you rerolled if under 91. This was so close to GURPs 100 point standard build that it was easy to use the GURPs point scale to measure character build. I played GURPs Lensman and that had a good scale for measuring heroes, so using my previous table, I'd add this to it. If you've no idea what Lensman is about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lensman_series

Fair  75

Good 100 - (Citizen of the Galaxy) (Normal Gurps & superworld)

Very Good 150

Excellent 200 - (Galactic Patrolman) 

Renowned 400 - (Lieutenant Lensman)

Heroic 1000 - (Unattached)

Super Heroic 3000+ (2nd Stage Lensman) (Kimball Kinison 4158)

Theres a level beyond this that's unplayable.

I built a Troll heroquester team at 500 points (each) who still struggled in Snakepipe Hollow.

I would love to see those character sheets!

Do you make characters pay for mundane weapons (as they do in Superworld)? 

How do characters get so many character points?

20 hours ago, The God Learner said:

The distribution of the roll is indeed uniform, but recall that each location is hit on a range of numbers. So for the head it's 19-20, that is, 10%. Right leg 01-04 = 20% (if the table I just found somewhere on the internet is actually from RQ2). And so on.

That only matters over time. Every single swing has the same chance of rolling a 20 as every other number you roll. It should have been done like HERO system handled it (3d6).

20 hours ago, The God Learner said:

Good point. I have sometimes, in the same "vein" if you will, wanted to ghoulishly interview trauma doctors, ambulance staff and the equivalent regarding how these things work out in real life, to serve as the foundation of the ultimate wound system. Well, perhaps next year.

 

😁 

To be clear, I am always happy to sacrifice realism for playability, I just get tired of hearing how 'realistic' RQ combat is compared to DND or other systems with more abstraction when it really isn't. It just includes some more bells and whistles that those systems don't and has it's own abstraction and assumptions built in (and that's okay!).

22 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

1D6+2 (Elric! ringmail) is "objectively worse" than 4 (RQG Ringmail) or even 5 (RQ3 ringmail)? Plate armour 1D10+2 is "objectively worse" than RQ3 (8) or RQG (6)? Ok, 1D10+2 is 0.5 points worse on average than RQ3 plate. But at that level, you could say "RQG armour is objectively worse than RQ3 armour".

You are forgetting to compare Stormbringer armor to their iron equivalents, which you would have to do for a fair comparison (the Young Kingdom are not a bronze age society).

1d6+2 vs 7 (mail plus padding) all the time is objectively worse, when 66% the time it stops less.

1d10+2 vs 12 or 10 is again, much worse. 

There are ways to fix this that wouldn't have been too challenging, but they tried to roll in two aspects of the combat narrative forgetting they had already accounted for them in other aspects of the system, making a clunky, objectively bad mechanic that needs to be overhauled.

22 hours ago, NickMiddleton said:

In a fixed AV system plate armour always stops e.g. 7 points. There is no variability in the performance of the armour, only in the rating of the strike against the armour (the damage rolled). In a variable AV system the random amount of damage rolled represents the strike; the random AV rolled represents the passive defence achieved when / where the strike lands.  You clearly don't find that description / concept compelling. Others do.

Except via crits, where it doesn't.

Having two variable factors to achieve the same narrative results is clunky and unnecessary, as well as time consuming.

I doubt we'll ever see them. Glorantha has always been a metaplot driven setting where Pcs aren't as cool as the Npcs. Giving them stats would mean you could kill them and change the metaplot. So I doubt we'll ever see anything official.

And the new Heroquest rules might bridge the gap, but I am not holding my breath. 

Also I just don't know if a gritty realism focused system like BRP can handle the high power levels of such characters. Even superwoman characters weren't really 'take on an army by yourself' level of power, which the superheroes of Glorantha could do.

1 hour ago, PhilHibbs said:

Random armour is a different game system to fixed armour, you can't say one is "worse" because the other is "normal". So long as armour dice ratings, weapon damage, damage bonuses, and magic are all balanced against each other, then you can't say that one game system has armour that is "worse" than another just because it has a die roll. That's like saying RuneQuest armour is categorically worse than D&D armour because it doesn't have a chance of making the attacker miss completely.

Sure, you shouldn't just replace RQG armour with a die roll that caps out at the vanilla RQG AP, without changing anything else, but I don't have a D5 anyway.

Sure you can say it, especially when the other elements of the system are not changed in any significant way to balance the reduction. Stormbringer introduced random armor and did away with Hit Locations but added Major wounds. It didn't need to do all of these things. Major wounds full encompasses the gritty reality of hit locations, you don't need variable armor. By keeping damage values the same but making armor variable on top of major wounds, keeping criticals and specials, they made armor objectively worse then it is in any other version of BRP where its a static value. 

But I agree you can't compare ablative armor with armor class as that's apples and oranges. 

2 hours ago, NickMiddleton said:

Quantifying physical action down to that level seemed a really cool thing back when I first played RQ - and it tended to chime with the reality of my HEMA experience. But after a decade of HEMA and a couple of decades of RQ and similar systems I came to find the execution unnecessarily fiddly. More abstract systems could capture the feel, and descriptive and narrative logic could supply the colour that location charsets were providing. I haven't run anything using hit locations for over a decade.

By reality do you mean the liklihood of hitting certain things? That may be (though I would argue the d20 is a terrible die for rolling locations thanks to the fact that every number has an equal chance to be rolled). But it doesn't model 'trauma' well, which it perports to do. Look at daggers with their 1d4+2 damage. People survive multiple stab/slash wounds in the chest, head, abdomen, etc and sometimes even fight off attackers. This is impossible when the average person has 5 hits in the chest and can take two dagger hits.

In defense of this you can only lean on abstracting what a 'hit' means, but RQ/BRP models blow by blow combat, not abstract combat (which many fans deride in systems like D&D). You can't have it both ways.

Now, I'm not arguing the system should be super realistic as such things just bog down play and RQ hit locations are usable, even if they fail at their stated goal. It just rubs me the wrong way when its held up as 'realistic' when it clearly isn't. 

2 hours ago, NickMiddleton said:

Just because one doesn't agree with or understand a model doesn't make it dumb. An armour that provides 1D6 protection _by definition_ provides a range of protection - that armour gives you 3-4 protection typically.

I perfectly understand it, thank you. And because of that, I find that as a system it is a poorly thought out relic of the 80's and dumb. It should have been updated or evolved in the BGB.

2 hours ago, NickMiddleton said:

If fortune favours you / your opponent is unlucky / your position yourself well, you get 6 points of protection (the blow lands absolutely perpendicular in the centre of a piece of armour, maximising its ability to spread the impact / provide the highest resistance to the blow). If it all goes poorly for you / well for your opponent you get a single point of protection (the blow angles in to catch the edge of a piece of armour / gets funnelled in to a gusset or other weak point). Now if your opponent has fluffed their strike (only rolled minimum damage) how you position your body / how lucky you are probably wont matter that much... but if they have executed their swing perfectly (got their full weight behind the blow ) you need to hope  fortune favours you...

All of that is encompassed with a variable damage roll. You don't need two points of variability to narratively achieve modeling what you describe. It also adds yet one more roll to combat, slowing it down. 

2 hours ago, NickMiddleton said:

A lot of the factors hit locations  are trying to model (but for some get too fiddly / to fragile as a result) are abstracted in the interplay of variable armour values with variable damage rolls

There's a  separate argument that if using armour value rolls ALL values should be multiple dice (so the distribution is biased to more common value), which would give armours a somewhat more predictable value. But I've generally found that it falls in to the "pay off not worth the effort" pot, as I'm happy with standard values.

That would be better, slightly, but I agree its not really worth it. 

2 hours ago, NickMiddleton said:

For me idea that armour provides an absolutely consistent level of protection / damage nullification I find deeply counter intuitive. I like their being a variable element that "belongs" to the defender (AV) as well as one the "belongs" to the attacker (damage dealt) and I have found variable AV and major Wound levels to be _much_ faster / easily communicated to new players / flexible in play.

Nick

 

Static armor doesn't though. The random amount of damage rolled dictates how much protection relative to an attack. You also have Specials and Criticals which often/always negate armor as a factor, therefore handling the whole 'you hit a weakspot' narrative. You don't need all of these things together to achieve modeling the effect of armor versus attacks. 

2 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

It makes sense in Bronze Age Glorantha were people are wearing bits of plates covering only bits of the location... Helmets usually don't cover the entire face.

While I get that idea, I think the values should be much higher. If static AV is 6 you should roll 2d6. Static is 4 roll 2d4. Get that bell curve going as well as account for hitting the strongest place in the armor, etc. 

6 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Now where would you find this? I had thought that Adventures in Glorantha was abandoned when RQ 6 became Mythos (and long before that when the RQ 4 Adventures in Glorantha was abandoned). 

Cheers

I found it on the internet years ago. Fantastic game (though it is full RQ with hit locations et al). Very interesting previous experience system and a pretty playable sorcery system that clearly had influence from Sandy's Sorcery.

Yeah I am not a fan of hit locations per se. I find them far too fragile for the 'reality' they are trying to emulate. However, random armor as written is dumb. If armor gives you six points normally you roll a d6? So your armor is categorically worse than usual, even in a full suit? No thanks. I don't understand what's wrong with a flat value.

11 hours ago, seneschal said:

Good improvisation, keeping it simple.  Their initial foray can lead them into more complicated adventures.

Thanks!

They are on their way to Griffin Island, so plenty to do once there. I just needed some quick 'rabbit hunting' on the way!

On 4/25/2019 at 11:36 PM, seneschal said:

So, has the OP settled on an idea for the adventure yet?  😊

I ended up just doing a variation on the Apple Lane adventure from the Gm screen, only I had them come across a wagon that had been attacked and follow tracks back to the camp of the orcs....er tuskers. Something quick to get them into the system.

On 4/24/2019 at 10:43 PM, g33k said:

There's also the half-dozen adventures in the BRP Quickstart.  Any that /aren't/ fantasy could easily be re-skinned to be...

BRP quickstart? 

That's not bad but I needed something with hit locations.

On 4/28/2019 at 1:26 PM, PhilHibbs said:

Gifts can raise non-raiseable characteristics, but it doesn't say that that raises the species maximum. It could still work like Pentallion says, where it's temporarily above the maximum. I think that's a bit mean, though. You clearly have to have it already at maximum as well, you can't have POW 18 and raise your species maximum to 22 by gift.

They don't raise the max, but they can exceed it. Max is what is achievable without magic (or so it is described even though the earlier systems didn't make it possible to achieve) and gifts clearly are magic.

On 4/28/2019 at 4:47 AM, BalazarLightson said:

In my Griffin Mountain Campaign I had planned for King Skilfil could teach others how to obtain their own Heart-Piercer by following a particular Mythic Quest and hunt down a Manticore. 
You might also bring back the Femur Bone of a Storm God from the God time, using it like an almighty Club with Storm powers and such. Mythic Goods are Great to use, or to set up in a hero-shrine to grant powers to followers.

 

Oh that sounds awesome. I am about to run Griffin Island/Mountain. Could you tell me any more about the quest? I imagine some of my players would be interested!

On 4/27/2019 at 9:17 PM, Pentallion said:

During RQ3, I always allowed immediate gains in all skills used on a HQ.  No roll to go up, just go up.  That included power and allowed for increases beyond species max.  However, if the PC sacrificed that power the species max returned to normal.  In RQG, where they've made a serious attempt to slow down character growth, I've ruled that HQ's simply allow an immediate roll to try to go up in skills.  that would allow PCs to conceivably go up twice in one season, something they otherwise could not do.

Luckily that's not quite true...it does say the Gm can allow more experience checks in a season if desired (the one per season rule was one of my big beefs with RQG but it was pointed out to me that it wasn't as bad as I thought).