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Does your character have any sort of niche, that is is there some area that he can cover that the others cannot, or at least cannot cover as well as he does? IMO what you need is some way to make/keep your character effective. Typically that means being able to do something better than most of the other characters. It tough because you're character is new, and thus not as experienced or probably as skilled as the other investigators. So if you can find something that they failed to cover very well, you can focus your attention on that, and become their resident expert in that field. As your character isn't as "Mythos resistant" as the other characters. you might want to focus on some area that won't involve confronting Mythos beings. As you get better, you can branch out and learn other things. So you could become the groups Pilot, or Computer expert, or mechanic or whatever.

Okay. The point for it was made some time back. It wasn't my intention to piss you off, but I believe I can back it up with quotes from your own posts. Maybe we should take that to PM? Or just drop it?

The first posts about the hazards of bringing D&D players into RQ (or any other RPG) didn't.

Hold it. Back when I first chimed in about the hazards of the "D&D" mindset when bringing D&D players into an RQ game you went on for several posts before claiming that "game balance" was a recent thing and not part of old D&D or the retroclones the have popped up in the last 15 years. So we went back to AD&D, where it existed (Wilderness encounter aside). Now you retreated all the way back to the OD&D White Box edition, where, once again, it existed. Now it is certainly definable in the old White Box set as 1) it was the the first RPG (or close to the first) and was breaking new ground, and 2) they only had so much rom to try and cram in the entire game. I did, and Roko's not wrong. If you look at the encounter tables, the level of the dungeon determined which tables you rolled on for monsters, which in turn were groups by hit dice. The goal was for most encounters on Level X to be with monsters with X hit dice. And that was the same basic method used in AD&D, too. Yes, it was possible to occasionally run into something that completely outclassed you, especially if the party was low level, but it was pretty rare, especially considering the size of the typical D&D party back then, with hirelings and henchmen. Where you have a point is with OD&D and even AD&D's Outdoor encounter tables, which were entirely random in their distribution, to the point where, back in the old days we used to say that all the farmers had to be 12th level rangers just to be able to go out and tend the fields. I think you are in denial. I can cut and past the original encounter tables, if you like. Of particular interest are the MONSTER DETERMINATION AND LEVEL OF MONSTER MATRIX which groups monsters by Hit Dice to a particular depth of the Underground (or dungeon). The distribution is such that the top levels of the dungeon will be populated mostly by low hit dice monsters, and the deeper levels populated by high hit die monsters. And if you want to go even father back I can dig up CHAINMAIL. The whle "balanced encounter" thing more of a wargaming thing, and where it comes from.

Because as a Samurai he should have put his duty before the distraction. Yes it did. Just look at the old AD&D module and you will see that they were all "balanced" for a particular level. Anything and everything in an old TSR AD&D was "balanced" as a obstacle that the party could overcome in a straight fight. It wasn't a well defined (or even as well thought out) in older editions but that was more due to a lack of understanding in how the game worked. Back in original D&D there was a problem with thieves passing fighters because the designers didn't realize what the thieves lower XP cost to level would mean at higher levels. In D&D you have to have some degree of "balance" just because the game system favors level so much. I'm not saying that a GM shouldn't tailor adventures to the abilities of the PCs, but I am saying that not everything in the game world should be automatically limited based on the PCs capabilities. For instance, you don't limit the height of any building or cliff based upon the level and experience of the PCs. Instead you go with the assumption that the PCs won't go a jump off an 100 foot high cliff. No, it not the only way to use (I'd have said play) the game. But then you and your players run and play other games. I think if you went a grabbed a bunch of people who haven't played RQ or some other game besides D&D, you'd see a lot more of the stuff I've mentioned. Not so much. Again, it's not the game per say, but the mindset of the die-hard D&D players (and DMs). The reason why I mentioned here is that a GM running RQ should be aware of this if he is bringing D&Ders into a different RPG.

Yes, but system tend to influence styles of play. Actually quite the contrary. The player in that adventure, was a samurai who was on a mission for his daiyo. He had no reason to divert from his assigned duty to go chasing tigers. Where system cones into this is that D&D players assume that anything that appears in the game is "balanced" for their characters and thus scaled to their capabilities. I've had similar results with dragons, with people warning the PCs about a dragon, and even having it marked on the map. So what happens? The PCs go off to kill a dragon, with unfortunate, but predicable, consequences. I've been watching one D&D group all summer long that have playing an adventure where the group repeatedly goes into the lair of some giants, kill a dozen or so, retreat, heal up, replenish their magic, and do the same thing again and again. That the giants keep doing the same thing over and over despite the fact that the strategy has been consistently unsuccessful amazes not only me, but the players as well. The DM however, just considers it all good "game balance". Back when I was running Star Wars I had to repeatedly remind the longterm D&D players that no matter how experienced they got, they'd never equal a Star Destroyer, and that they could always stay and fight. The thing that's so maddeningly about all these thing isn't that they happen, but that the players never accept that their approach wasn't the right one under the circumstances, and would do the same thing all over again the next time around.

These are people who have played D&D for decades. It's not inexperience, it's an over abidance of the same experience.

It's not all that hard to make an incendiary with household items. Even a can of hairspray will "work" to some extent, and making some sort of thickened fuel is easy. The big problem is finding something that can drop a Mythos nasty before it gets to attack, or being able to scare it off with fire. The latter is more up to the GM than the game.It's a lot like scaring off a bear. In the real world, making a lot of noise, banging pans together and such, can actually scare a bear off. But that only works in game if the GM is aware of it, and decides to run it that way. So you kinda need to know if waving a torch is going to be effective in driving something away, or just aggravate it.

Yup, becuase it safe ground where they are certain to succeed. The fact that the game is rigged doesn't even dawn on them. Notice how D&Ders tend to use the phase "balanced" to represent encounters that aren't? The thing is, it's not really what D&D is trying to do, it's just a case of players being conditioned by experiences and learning how things really work. For instance, anyone who has ever been in a campaign where the GM will never kill a PC or wipe out a party "learn" to become reckless because they will always get away with it. That's not what such GMs were aiming to do, but it's what happens. It's also why I wish. I've found that even when acquainted with the idea of other approaches they reject them out of hand and revert to their "tried and true" methods. I end up feeling like Yoda, telling them "You must unlearn what you have learned." And even other RPGs. One of the problems I had with MRQ1 was that it looked and felt like RQ as written by a die-hard D&D player. A lot of the game mechanics, such as magical damage against shapeshifters, Orlanth having the Chaos Rune, or swapping out weapon damage tables to make the game more deadly, fit with the way D&D works but clash with the way RQ and it's related games have done things. It's a complete paradign shift.

I think the problem as it stands works out as follows: Players assume that since they have gamed for a certain amount of time, they must be good. They don't realize that, say, driving to and from work everyday for 20 years doesn't make you Mario Andretti. Player also assume that because they have gained a lot of XP and leveled up characters they must be doing things right. They don't realize that XP and advancement are built in, and more a factor of playing time than success. Players assume that all encounters have to be "balanced" (that is heavily rigged in their favor). They don't realize that just because they decide to provoke a dragon, the GM is under no obligation to nerf that dragon. Players would much rather blame failure on some external factor (the GM or game system) rather than even consider the possibility that they might be at fault in some way.\ Players don't like to fail, and so would rather go back to doing whatever they were successful at.

It's not just "we" who have to recognize this but "they" (the players) must as well. Now if they don't want to play a different style of game that perfectly okay, but that doesn't mean that I should be forced to run something that I have no desire to. What happens is that the players express a desire to try a different game, then revert to their standard method of play, and get upset when it doesn't work. I've explained things to players until I'm blue in the face, both before and after things go sour, with little effect. The thing is they don't believe that there is a different approach, and just assume that what they have been doing for years in D&D is the tried and true correct approach, and that something else must be wrong when that approach doesn't work. What seems to happen is that they have learned things from previous gaming and simply reject information to contradicts their previous experience. For example, most D&Ders don't surrender, because in D&D that usually leads to their characters being killed or enslaved and leads to everybody having to roll up new characters. Now, when running games such as RuneQuest and Pendragon, things don't work out that way, with many opponents willing to ransom off prisoners, but the players don't buy into it and just fight on until they are dead or incapacitated. In the James Bond RPG it took me several years to finally get ONE player in a group to realize that surrendering is often one of the best ways to get inside the major villain's stronghold, find out his plan, and be in a position to stop it. He only figured it out because he got stuck in a situation where he had to surrender, and he only did that because he had just lost a few characters shooting it out. Now the player had been told this, scene it happen in multiple films, had a handout that pointed it out to him, and yet refused to believe that it was true until he finally decided to try it out. Oh, and it seems to be exclusive to D&D players. Most other gamers seem to get it that game X isn't going to play the same as whatever they were playing before. I think it's because people who play other RPGs have probably played multiple RPGs early on, and find that out right way, when they try their second RPG. D&D players, however, are much more likely to have played only one RPG (D&D) and that for a long time, so they learn things that might apply to D&D but don't hold true elsewhere. Tactics such as rushing missile troops over an open plain work as a valid tactic in AD&D (and even D&D to a lesser extent), but can wipe a group out in a game like RQ or CoC.

Not for me. For me it's kinda frustrating. Most of the gamers around here are D&Ders and it's hard to get much else going, and that mindset is one of the major reasons why. There's one guy in the area who hates my guts and won't game with me because of it. He'd get killed every week for doing suicidally stupid stuff (charging six opponents with a single starting character-that doesn't even work in D&D), but I'm to blame, supposedly because I only give them one way to solve a problem. In fact I allow for multiple solutions, it's just that his preferred method of frontal attack is the one that most baddies plan for, and the one that tends to rack up the most PC casualties.

That's partially because one of the things that Chaosium did back then was adapt their game system to whatever setting they were trying to emulate. That helped to capture the feel for the settings.. They could have easily just adapted Elric and the Young Kingdoms to RuneQuest, give the God of Law and Chaos RQ style cults, Rune (Divine) spells and such. But they didn't. Instead they tossed out all of that and came up with sorcery rules which better reflected the world of the Young Kingdoms than RQ's magic system did. it made their stuff more immersive and less about the game system. By contrast look at the Licensed stuff TSR did for AD&D. Generally, they would shoehorn the setting to AD&D. So much so that it didn't even feel like the source material anymore- it was just AD&D. I think that some of Chasoium's greatest accomplishments were not what products they made, but the approaches they took to making them.

With you there. It's just funny how players might take the news. I've had plenty of players who thought they knew what I meant when I warned them and gave them details about a different RPG who ended up shocked and surprised in play. It's partly because D&D uses a deceptively heroic approach. Most adventures treat the PCs as heroic underdogs who somehow succeed despite the odds being stacked against them, when in reality D&D is heavily rigged in the PCs favor. So a lot of players blow off the warnings as typical hype, often with disasterous consequences. For example, in one campaign a PC who was traveling on a mission, passed through a village where the locals were up in arms over a rampaging tiger that was killing people. The player got in into his head to track down and confront the "tiger", but did so under some mistaken assumptions, including the idea that it wasn't really a tiger. When he finally caught up with it, he turned to me and said, "I can't believe you threw a tiger at a starting character!" My reply was, "I can't believe you threw a starting character at a tiger!" His whole way of thinking was that it couldn't be a tiger because his character wasn't experienced enough to deal with one, therefore it was "unfair" for a tiger to be in the adventure. But the tiger wasn't part of the adventure at all, just a hazard, in the wrong direction, that he was warned about. The PC had no reason to spend days tracking the tiger down. But that's the D&D mindset and preconceived expectations. It's a tough habit to break players of.

Yeah. What I think we need more Glorathan names for "Elves" and "Dwarves". As soon as you use those words, most people think of standard FRPG species. It probably starts them off on the wrong foot.

Good point. We only got "longform" cult writeups in the RQ2 days. Depending on where someone draws the line, they could easily exclude most of all of the RQ3 cult writeups, ditto the HQ ones.

I guess that's good. I got something for Pendragon (a draft of the Book of Castles) that he had started that I'm not sure it anyone over at Nocturnal has. It might have wound up in the Book of the Warlord or one of the latter supplements. I should probably contact somebody and check just to make sure I don't have the only copy of it.

I'd say hesitate, but do it anyway. It some ways it's like discipling a child. The goal is to try and get them to understand why they are being "punished". One of the hurdles I have with D&D players in other RPGs is that D&D teaches them certain things that don't hold true in other RPGs. So when things don't work out as they expected, they get confused, angry and tend to blame the game system or GM rather than their methods. Years of D&D has taught them that those methods are sound, so the problems lie "elsewhere". Experience points and leveling up tends to reinforce this belief too. The idea is that since they got up to X level they must be doing something right. Once, when running RQ3, I completely shocked and horrified a group of longtime D&Ders, when one of the PCs had an arm severed in combat. The way the players reacted, you would have thought that I had actually cut the player's arm off., personally. To their way of looking at things I had crossed the line and broken some unwritten rule of gaming. I really took years to change that outlook, and the problem was compounded by the fact that most people, rather than change their preconceptions, will run back to D&D where they know how things work and are protected.

I think you're right. I suspect it probably worked out along the lines of Steve, Greg and/or Chaosium keeping a list of errors, errata, or potential changes to the rules as they went along, and then incorporating them into the next batch they printed. And, as you pointed out, the possibility that somebody might have grabbed the wrong stuff at times. There might have even been things that changes that were made and then discarded later on when they didn't work out as planned. Just going from some of what happened with Pendragon, with Greg only noticing that the threshold for the Chivalrous bonus was off (calculated on five traits, like the religious bonus, instead of six), or the 22 point plate that he was thinking about, I suspect there were a lot of things that happened with various rules. back in the days before RPG forums and webgroups. that most of us weren't aware of. There is some rule stuff I've read in various issues of Wrym's Footnotes that was "official" but never showed up again anywhere else. Plus a lot of that stuff was done up in the days of typewritten manuscripts and files being store in a file cabinet, not on a hardrive. So there was probably stuff that got lost or forgotten along the way. I just found a bunch of old Pendragon stuff I did up 20-25 years ago, that I'd forgotten about, that is formatted for an Atari ST. I can just imagine how much stuff someone like Greg or Steve might have had tucked away somewhere.

There is a Cash and Assets table in Cthulhu Through the Ages, along with some other useful stuff for a 7th edition campaign set in that era. The big differences are that you tend to get a little more cash, and fewer assets

Yeah, that's very good advice. I usually try to start a campaign with a small area, like a village, maybe give then a handout of "Common Knowledge" with a bit of background on the area, local NPCs, and maybe a map. Such knolwedge is culture and location centric, meaning that is it usually very accurate on local matters and nearly pure speculation of anything far away. Then Ilet the player's knowledge of things expand naturally as they travel about, meet more people, or take an interest in some topic or other. That not only reduces what the players need to know to play, and the demands on the GM to know stuff, but also lets the GM adapt things to the group and their interests. It also gives the PCs stronger ties to the setting, and story hooks that can be used to get them involved in things. Players act a lot differently if the missing farmer they are asked to find is someone they know and grew up with, as opposed to a total stranger.

Thanks. The stuff you did on the various incarnations of Strombringer had me laughing. Years ago, when Chaosium updated the rules (the starting skills were a lot lower than in my original edition) I ran into a situation similar to the one I've described above in Pendragon. Same player, too. Only in this case his character was notably underskilled compared to the rest of the group because he was using the newer rules. I ordered the new version from my FLGS only to get the older version. Shop owner told me that his distributor claimed there was no such newer edition, but owner also told me his distributor was stopping by latter in the week, so if I wanted to explain it to the distributor I could. I brought 4 or 5 different versions of the game, with notes to help illustrate the differences The store owner (who I gamed with) backed me up. When the facts were pointed out to the guy, the distributor got angry and said "You got what you got."In the end the store owner dropped that distributor, not just because of that incident, but because it was indicative of how the guy handing his RPG stuff. He either didn't know the products or did but used ignorance as a means to push backstock. He went out of business about a year later.

I think knowledge about Gloranthan species has reached the point where terms such as "elf" and "dwarf" probably confuse the issue more that they help. Over the years, as more are more info has come out, it becomes more and more obvious that the Elder Species have nothing in common with the typical FRPG humanoid species, or even their mythical antecedents.

I doubt it. The GPC grew over 30 years of gaming a research by Greg, and benefited from multiple sources of Arthurian literature. A GRQC would probably have to be limited to a set time frame and region, say the HeroWars, and even then events probably aren't described in the same level of detail as the stories of King Arthur and his Knights. It would be nice to see such a campaign book, but I suspect it would be a lot of work and take a lot of time for whoever was in charge. MAybe some sort of group approach might work, breaking in down into sections with multiple authors each working on a couple of years or so. There would probably need to be some simplification in formatting too. {Ary of what allows the GPC to work is that Pendragon uses some common formatting and stat conventions that allows the resource of the same or similar adventures and stats (i.e. Young Knight, Famous Knight, Saxon Warrior) which greatly reduces the space required for stat blocks. RQ has toyed with this idea over the years, but not to the extent that Pendragon has. But then RQ had Foes, which could easily revised for just such a purpose. If there was such book though, I'd probably buy it, even though I've shied away from RQG so far. Come to think of it, such a book might be possible as a system neutral book that could work for RQ, HQ and 13th Age.

Thanks for the explanation. That must have been it. As I mentioned the only reason why I knew of the differences was because somebody I gamed with wrote up a character with his newer Players Book and there were some minor differences. As far as I can recall it was in the points for attributes or skills, and I think a couple of corrections, such as eliminating the double Latin Language line for Cymric characters. It;s hard to remember, as it's something that I last looked at over 30 years ago. Thanks. I'll check the copies I have. I think I took the shrink wrap off of all them them long ago. It's sort of a catch 22 with shrink wrap that removing it can reduce resale value, but keeping in on can damage the product (shrink wrap continues to shrink over time).