soltakss

I've just spent an hour on a post only to have it eaten. Not happy!

There are physical limits to normal skills, though, at least there are in my game. Sure, with a good run up and a good Jump critical, a human can leap 7m horizontally or 3m vertically, but even with a Super-Duper Critical they are not going to be able to jump 7m vertically or 14m horizontally. In my world, that takes a Heroic Ability or Magic. Actually, several Gloranthan cults grant magic that does that with no run-up or skill. The advantage of having a high skill is that you can do things easily that other people cannot. So, taking the Jump as an example. You are trying to jump over a chasm with lava flowing beneath and a horde of goblins behind you (a pretty normal state of affairs) and the GM says that such a Jump is Difficult and your Jump skill is halved. You have Jump 90% because you are a master/mistress but your Jump chance is 45%. Your colleague has Jump 150% and his jump chance is 75%. But, if the chasm is to wide then not even a special jump result will work - it's just too wide. Yes, it makes sense. I take it masteries would cancel in the same way as HQ, so 350% vs 250% is the same as 150% vs 50%. There is a problem with 101% - in RQ you'd get a 5% critical and 15% special. Using Masteries against someone with no mastery, your skill is 1% and 1 bump and you get no specials or criticals. 96-00 = Failure (Fumble Bumped) 2-95 = Success (Failure Bumped) 01 = Heroic Critical (Critical Bumped) Even if you say that 1% is the equivalent to 5%, you still get no critical: 96-00 = Failure (Fumble Bumped) 6-95 = Success (Failure Bumped) 2-5 = Special (Success Bumped) 01 = Heroic Critical (Critical Bumped) So, both results are actually worse than what the normal roll would be, on a Level of Success basis. HeroQuest doesn't have that problem because you only have 4 levels of success - Fumble, Failure, Success and Critical. 1 is always a critical, 20 is always a fumble and the rest depend on the skill. So, 19 and 20 give the same results, but 1M (1W) gives 1 = critical and a bump down to the opponent, 2-19 = failure bumped to success, 20 is fumble bumped to failure. 2M gives 1=critical and opponent bumped down, 2=success bumped to critical, 3-19 is failure bumped to success and 20 is fumble bumped to failure. So, the results are always as good or slightly better when moving across a mastery. BRP might not have that problem if there are no specials. If so, it's a shame as I like specials. RQM does that with Legendary Abilities which allow for people to do heroic things. Older versions of RQ had them as Special Abilities. I don't know if BRP has the equivalent, but it should do.

That's what we thought as well. In the end, the PCs were competing with these people. The Orlanthi killed Harrek and Argrath, the Troll was trying to cure the Curse of Kin, they had fought the Red Emperor on several occasions before allying with him, they had fought an earlier version of Jar Eel, Cacodemon and Cwim held no fears for them and rarely lasted more than 2 or 3 rounds. In the end, we had more of a Freeform-style campaign with a lot of politicking and HeroQuesting to gain allies to achieve long-term goals and skills weren't that important. You have to houserule because the rules are writen to stop at 100% with absolutely no thought as to what happens after that. Look at CoC for goodness sake, it has no concept of skills past 100%, or it didn't. Did we use it in play? Hell, yes. In fact, we even reached the point where we were fully enchanted and asked "What happens if we increase the level of enchantment and then boosted our CON, do we get another boost to HPs?" to which the answer was Yes, so everyone added another 3 or 4 D6 to the enchantment in case they doubled their CON (not hard - several of us had Rage of the Bull that doubled STR and CON for 1D6 melee rounds once per week). Was it a common approach? Yes, everyone in the RQ3 camapign did it, but they were all Rune Priests with 90% Enchant, so it wasn't really a problem. Gun-ho maniacs? Ours were so gung-ho it was unbelievable. When they went on an adventure or a quest, they were up for it 200%. None of your wimpy stuff, it was climbing over a mountain of corpses to get to the Broo Hero. They went through Chaos Temples like a dose of salts. Their rationale to the Enchantment was something like this. They could spend 1 POW to get Heal Wound that would heal a location, or they could spend 1 POW to get +1D6 General Hit Points that could make the difference between living and dying. If they doubled their General Hits then that doubled locational hits which meant they could take bigger hits without dying. If they doubled Vital Location Hits then they could absorb more damage in vital locations without going into shock. To them it was a no-brainer. You have to toughen up for HeroQuests if you are going against the Big Boys. That's an easy way to do it. Heroic Casting was always a HeroQuest reward or a Gift. There wasn't a single Quest to do to get Heroic Casting, rather it was a logical run-on for a HeroQuest. Imagine a Humakti performing the "Quest for Death" HeroQuest. He goes to Hell, comes back with the Sword Death. He does this as an Initiate and gets a magical Sword that does +2 damage + 10% attack (a +2 sword). He does the Quest again and this time gains a special ability to get Truesword reusably as an initiate (like the Yelmalian gift). He does the Quest again as a Sword of Humakt and gets his sword boosted. He does the Quest again and gets Heroic Casting of Truesword. What? You can't do the same quest over and over again! I hear people cry. Yes you can, people do Sacred Time ceremonies every year. Part of doing a quest is that you practice it first to iron out the problems. But, doing a quest over and over again causes problems. You may well get the same opponents over and over again or attract more powerful opponents than you would normally expect. You may have cokced something up on an earlier quest and have to overcome the problem over and over again. The benefits may become less and less. We also played that you could ask for Heroic Casting as a reward on a HeroQuest if you were a Priest or had the spell Reusably. Of course, Avatars and Heroes of a cult automatically got Heroic Casting of cult Divine Magic, so it wans't just for PCs.

You get that if you start off with high skill characters or roll them up as Experienced. If you start off with low skills and develop in play then you end up with almost every skill at Mastery, which is unsatisfactory for a whole different set of reasons. At/after University, we played in an RQ2 campaign for several years. My character Soltak Stormspear (sounds familiar ) had INT 11 and got 220% Bastard Sword as his highest skill, mainly because his INT was 19 for Swords and INT 6 for other skills (damned HeroQuesting). In RQ2 you had to roll beneath your INT to increase skills over 100%. But, we had PCs who were higher, Raven our Yeloranan Elf had INT 25 and 280% Elf Bow, I think, and Derak had Troll Maul of about the same, but Stuart who played him was very, very, very lucky on experience rolls and POW Gain Rolls. We played every week during term time and sometimes at the weekend on all-nighters, so you are looking at 30-40 sessions a year for 5 or 6 years with one scenario every 2 or 3 sessions, so 10-15 scenarios per year, but fairly often having ex[ereience rolls in logical breaks in the scenario. After Uni, we played every week, so it went up to 45-50 sessions per year. Some of the players converted their characters to RQ3 and we played the campaign for a number of years after that. In RQ3, you added your Characteristic Bonus to your expereinec roll and if you rolled over your skill or 100 you gained 1D6, as I recall, and these were now maxed-out characters in some ways, they had trained their DEX to 21 and STR/CON to the STR/CON/SIZ limit, so everyone had fairly high combat bonuses, especially the trolls, so skills advanced further. Derak kept on being lucky with experience rolls and his highest skill was Sense Chaos at nearly 400%. One thing we did play was that if the PCs had been on a Godtime HeroQuest where their skills were reduced to 1/5th normal, then they got 5D6 increase if the gained expereience on skills used on the Quest - this balanced reward with difficulty. It didn't happen very often but gave them some fairly large increases when it happened. Also, the PCs had magical items and abilities that they could use. Derak, who has Sense Chaos nearly 400%, was attuned to a Crystal that doubled his Sense Chaos skill in play, so he operated with a Sense Chaos at nearly 800%. Raven (RQ2) had Arrow Trance so could double her Self Bow skill and had a Speedart 4 matrix that gave her +60%, taking her over 500%. Brankist had a special ability that doubled his attack chance against Broos for 5 minutes once per week, he had 300% Bastard Sword, so this took him to 600%, if he went Beserk as well, he got 1200% Bastard Sword. Derak had sacrificed for Crush 40 over the years, which gave him +400% if he cast it all at once, something he very rarely did. I could go on. No, it is possible. Having a long-running and frequent game with rolled experience, magic items and spells it is possible to get very high skills. In fact, a Babeester Gor initiate with Axe Trance and 400 MPs to cast it with has a skill in excess of 2000%, that's with no Munchkimism at all, except the 400 MPs. Well, I use Special Criticals at 100% but they only work if you roll very low. We also had some Power Weapons, Raven had Power Arrows, Brankist had a Power Sword, that improved the level of success of a roll by 1. It all depends on the style and power level of the campaign. Some of our old players hated the new campaign because the PCs had skills in the 300-400 range rather than the 150-250 range. BUt, skill is skill is skill, there's no difference between having a skill of 150% or 550%, one is just better than the other.

I was going to do the same. Apparently, Issaries had to rush Hero Wars out because they had run out of cash and needed something to sell. The books are cramped, the layout is abysmal and the rules are confusing. Apart from that, it's OK, I suppose. I never actually played Hero Wars, I only ever played HeroQuest. Yep, I'd agree with all those comments. The rules are very clear, although Greg Stafford has tried to make an elegant and simple system confusing and complicated by adding layer and layer of extra rules that don't really help the game at all. Mythic Russia did a good job of simplifying the rules. I'd agree with those comments as well. Since playing HeroQuest, I tend to not bother too much with NPC stats and only focus on important NPC attributes. My game style was always a bit story-based, but not to the extent that HeroQuest is, so that didn't really change my gaming style. I do, however, allow players to control the background a lot more than I used to, although they don't really want to at the moment. HQ is not at all gritty and I prefer BRP to it in many respects. We play a RQ campaign alomngside a HQ campaign and we enjoy both in different ways. The "problem" with HeroQuest is that anything can be used to counter anything, with penalties imposed if the Narrator thinks the skill is not very relevant. This is sometimes difficult to get your head around. It also makes HeroQuest really good for Super Hero games where the Super-Quick character can dodge a Death ray by running away from it, or the Super-Strong character can simply take it on his chest. The main example of this that I use is the situation where a warrior attacks a young woman with a sword, using his Sword Combat. The young women flutters her eyes and counters with her "Don't Hurt Me, I'm Beautiful" skill (Or just her Beautiful skill if you want). The woman's player argues that she is using her beauty to make the swordsman not want to attack her. In HeroQuest this would be allowed and is a reasonable defence. I've discussed this example with my gaming group and other people who play HeroQuest and they all agree that they would use this tactic in that situation. In fact, my gaming group didn't even argue with it, they said straight away that it was fine. In my experience, if people can see that this is a valid tactic then they would enjoy HeroQuest, if they think "Oh, no, how can a woman defend a sword attack with her beauty?" then they probably wouldn't enjoy HeroQuest, or perhaps wouldn't get a lot out of it.

Sorry for posting 4 consecutive posts on the same thread, but HeroQuesting is an area in which I am PASSIONATELY interested.

Is it? Specials are Skill / 5, Criticals are Skill / 20. Those aren't Munchkin. Why should extensions of Skill / 100, Skill / 400 or Skill / 1000 be Munchkin? They are merely extensions to provide graded Levels of Success for high skills. If you have skill success judged by Level of Success (so a Critical beats a Special no matter what the actual skills/rolls) then you really need extra Levels of Success past 100% otherwise things get really boring. Two characters with 2000+% skill auto-critical, ignoring rolls of above 95, which makes their skill resolution very silly indeed. If you have extra Levels of Successthen someone who rolls a 04 would do better than someone rolling a 20, making the resolution more granular and interesting. I can't see a problem with having extra Levels of Success. Why are they Munchkin? I really don't understand what you mean by that term.

HeroQuesting is ALWAYS interesting. HeroQuesting is often about fighting the Big Ugly Monster, especially when you fight it in the same way that your deity fought it. The traditional progression was Normal Person-Initiate-Rune Level-HeroQuestor-Hero-Demigod-God. Now we know that Initiates can be HeroQuestors and even non-cultists can be HeroQuestors. HeroQuesting is a Path that is taken at whatever level and for whatever purpose. Opinions may vary, but I've never really found that BRP struggles, with some Houseruling. All of which exist in RQ, the Father of HeroQuesting. In RQ, you could get beyond that with no trouble at all. You could use Strengthening Enchantments to double your General Hit Points, then use Strengthening Enchantments on infividual Hit Locations to double those as well. It was expensive but doable. Also, we played that you could use Hero Points (different to Fate Points, gained through HeroQuesting) to permanently increase a characteristic above species maximum. So, 3 Hero Points could increase CON past 21 or past the STR/CON/SIZ limit. It took a while, but we got high CONs for some PCs. Some magic increased CON past normal maximaum. If you have a spell or effect that doubles CON past Species Max then someone with CON 21 SIZ 15 normally has 18 HP, but has 29HP for the duration of the CON-Doubling spell or effect. Stack that with Strengthening Enchantment with a lot of spare capacity and that gives you 58 HP. I'm not saying that every character would do this, just that it is possible. And, to counter claims of Munchkinism, this is merely using rules extensions that were brought in to reflect divine gifts. There's nothing really Munchkiny about a PC with 58 HP over one with 18 HP. We used Heroic Magic as I've covered elsewhere. In my current campaign I'm using Divine Presence, which counts as generic Divine Magic that can be used to cast a Divine Spell that the PC knows, working in the same way as Heroic Magic, expcet that Initiates get Divine Presence on a One-Use basis and Rune Levels (including Acolytes) can repray it in the same way that they repray reusable Divine Magic. OK, can you tell me what you mean by Munchkin Gaming? In any case, Hercules would have 500% Club and a lionskin that made him immune to edged/bladed weapons and ..... No problems, HeroQuesting cannot be covered by a short post. Nor can Powerful Gaming.

OK, I split it in two. Somthing about the message being too long. I dunno, Triff, sort it out will ya? One thing is for sure. HeroQuesting is not just High Level (Powerful) Gaming. Sure, if you plan to fight and kill the Wargod then you have to be pretty hard. But, if you plan to copy what Perseus did to get Pegasus, is that as difficult? What if you want to marry the daughter of a nearby chief but have no money or status, can you perform an Abduction Quest and carry her off to be your wife and if so how powerful do you have to be? What about the fairytale stories of fools and normal men who cross over to the Otherworld and bring back treasure? How powerful are they? So, I don't think that a discussion of High Level Gaming is that important for HeroQuesting. What is more important is to understand what HeroQuesting is and how it relates to the setting you are using. Once you do that then you can work out what extra rules you need. Don't get me wrong, I am all for High Level (Powerful) Gaming and with a few tweaks RQ/BRP can be extended into those realms where some people are afraid to go. Talking from a RQ background, the barriers to Powerful Gaming using the RQ Rules are: 1. Levels of Success for skills 2. Availability and scaling of magic 3. Coping with demonlike/godlike beings Without going on a Super RuneQuest rant, these are the things that I have tended to use to make RQ scalable. 1. Levels of Success for skills: Failing on rolls over 96 / Fumbling on 100 Only having normals, specials and criticals as success levels. Someone with 500% skill should not fail 4% of the time, the same as someone with 100% skill. Similarly, they should not funble 1% of the time, the same as a 100%er. The way I have got around this is to introduce a sliding scale where the higher the skill the less often people fail. This is in 90% (Mastery) increments, so someone with 180% succeeds on a 96, 270% succeeds on 1 97, 360% succeeds on 98 and 450% succeeds on 99. If they rolled 100, then I'd say they only Fumble if they don't achieve a Special success on another roll. So someone with 300% who rolls 100 will only fumble if he fails a 60% chance (61-100). This means that someone with 500% only fumbles on 96-100 on the second roll, which isn't too bad. Someone with 500% skill auto-specials, which is fair enough, and has a 25% critical chance, but there is no further chance of getting a good score. This means that opposed rolls get a bit boring. I give a Special Critical (1/100th of skill, round down), a Super Critical (1/500th of skill, round down) and a Hyper Critical (1/1000th of skill, round down) that only come into play when a character gets skills of 100%, 500% and 1000% BRP has different ideas about Specials and Criticals, so the calculations may differ but the ideas remain the same. RQM has no specials, but I like specials and would continue to use them. 2. Availability and scaling of magic A priest with Shield 40 takes 40 days to pray it back at a Temple. I play that powerful priests may pray spells back faster depending on various gifts. A priest with Shield 40 can cast it once then doesn't have access to it until he prays it back. A nymph-daughter of Voria has Flowers but once cast has to pray it back before casting it again. I have the idea of Heroic Casting that is one level up from normal Divine Magic use. Someone with Heroic Casting of a Divine Spell can cast the spell using his own Magic Points (Power Points in BRP - or is that PP? What's the problem with PP anyway, is it something like Nut ), so a Priest with Heroic casting of Shield, 15 POW and Shield 5 can cast Shield 8 using 8 MPS, then cast Shield 6, using 4 MPs, leaving himself with 1 MP. Such castings cannot be used with One-Use spells, otherwise they cost POW rather than MPs, and they can't draw on spirits, MPs in crystals or enchantments and so on. I don't have any Heroic rules for Sorcery or shamanism, except that my Shaman rules and Spirit Combat rules are different from RQ2/3. 3. Coping with demonlike/godlike beings Godlike beings are big and strong and have a lot of Armour Points and Hit Points, otherwise how could they have survived against other Godlike beings? In RQ/Glorantha, we have stats for Cacodemon, Crimson Bat, Mother of Monsters and Cwim, all of which make these beings hard to kill. HeroQuest (the game) has stats for many other powerful beings. HeroQuesters need to be able to fight these beings on an equal footing. Firstly, I have the Rule of Equivalence which says that a HeroQuestor meets similarly powered beings while on a HeroQuest. Technically, that should be similarly-powered beings to the HeroQuest being performed. So, a HeroQuestor who is an initiate should meet initiate-level creatures. Semi-Divine HeroQuestors should meet semi-divine opponents. Why/ Because it makes the game easier. Also, why should Mighty Mark the Lunar HeroQuestor bother opposing an Orlanthi initiate on a Quest when he has servants such as Mini Mike to do it for him? Secondly, anyone on a Godtime Quest (in Glorantha) has all skills divided by 5. Why? To make the game easier. It allows us to use creatures from the Monsters Book without having to make silly looking skills for them. It also means that not every blow is a special and makes combat more interesting. Thirdly, anyone on a supported quest has the backing of numbers of people. This backing can take several forms. One form is a number of Hero Points to use on the Quest. Another form is a boost to a skill or spell. Another form is to make a spell Heroic for the duration of the quest. The people supporting the quest can be damaged or even killed by a quest failure, so this is not a trivial thing to happen. So, RQ can be made more scalable so that HeroQuesting can succeed and so High Level or Powerful Gaming can be done. No PC should be made to retire just because he becomes a Rune Lord or reaches 100% or becomes a Hero or kills a God or for any other reason that the Player or GM has grown so tired of the character that he is retired. Anyway, those are some of my thoughts about HeroQuesting. As always, these are My Opinion Only and only really apply to my games. But, they are My Opinion after thinking about HeroQuesting for over 20 years Your Game Should Vary .....

Hmmm, this has turned out to be a long post and should probably be split into two, but I'm tired and my wife is annoyed with me for being on the computer for too long ...... There are problems with HeroQuesting that have nothing to do with game design. First of all, what is HeroQuesting? We all know, or some of us know, what HeroQuesting is in Glorantha, but can we use that in other worlds? My first thought would have been "no". But then I watched the BBC/NBC Rome and in the last series, a woman who had been wronged performed a ritual where she camped outside her rival's house, dressed in sackcloth and covered in ashes, crying out for justice for several days with her slave pouting askes over her head, when her rival finally came out, she made a sacrifice to the gods of the underworld and cursed her rival. This is clearly a HeroQuest Ritual in the Gloranthan sense. She took a well-known ritual and directed it at her rival, made a sacrifice and caused a measurable effect. Star Trek the Next Generation had a number of episodes concerning Worf performing various Klingon rituals that had several real effects. These were also HeroQuests in the Gloranthan sense. So, Gloranthan-style HeroQuests do have their place where religion is strong and magic has an effect. These aren't the myth-changing HeroQuesting but are the Myth-Emulating HeroQuests. Quests that cross into the Otherworld, however, are very different indeed. Some settings have Fairie as a place where people can cross into. Medieval Britain, and presumably Ancient Britain, has stories of people crossing to Elfland where they lived for many years without aging. There are fairytales of people crossing over into Giantland or going to the Underworld and bringing things back. Ancient Greece has Heroes going to the Underworld or magical world and bringing items back as do many Mythologies around the world. Mythic Russia (the game) has interaction with Fairytales and their inhabitants. Quests that change the nature of the world are another matter again. If you have Ares as the God of War and your PC goes to Olympus and defeats him in battle then kills him, then the PC becomes a God of War. This is a Quest that is quite possible. What happens to the worship of Ares? Well, dead deities are worshipped, so his cult would continue, but he would perhaps lose some spells. Certainly many worshippers would defect to the cult of the new Hero and the balance of power would change. How can we use HeroQuesting in games? The first type of HeroQuesting can be modelled fairly easily by having different Rituals for different HeroQuests, with each ritual giving certain powers or abilities to the user of the ritual. Frogspawner kindly alluded to this when he mentioned the way my HeroQuesting rules work for Gloranthan RQ (they also work for the HeroQuest game). There may well be other ways of doing this. I've played with many different systems for HeroQuesting and some of them have had some good ideas but none has really worked for me. The second type of HeroQuest raises problems of its own. How do you cross over into the Otherworld? What forms does the Otherworld take in your setting? What creatures live there, what can you do there and what can you get out of it? How does magic work on the Otherworld? Is each Otherworld different or do they share the same rules? How powerful are people from the Otherworld? Are they deities with god-like powers or are they just spirits and sprites with some magical ability but nothing vastly superior to normal people? How do you get back to the normal world and what can you bring back? The third type of HeroQuest raises its own problems. How do you interact with the deities of your setting? Do they live in a certain place (Olympus, Asgard) or are they out of time? Can you just go there physically or do you need a ritual of come sort? How does magic work in the realm of the gods? How powerful are the gods? If I am a HeroQuestor of Athena and I go to Olympus to fight Ares, how can I compete? I might have Truespear 10 and Shield 30, but how does that compare with Ares? Surely the God of War should be more powerful than that? What are his skill levels? I may have 500%, is this enough? What is a WarGod's skill in his best weapon? 500%, 1000%, 2000%? When do I become powerful enough to chellenge a God? What happens when a HeroQuestor succeeds in a challenge or HeroQuest? What can he bring back? Perseus brought back Pegasus and Medusa's head, Jason brought back the Golden Fleece and Medea. What are the effects of a HeroQuest? All these things must be considered before developing a HeroQuesting system for BRP. One thing is for sure. HeroQuesting is not just High Level (Powerful) Gaming. Anyway, those are some of my thoughts about HeroQuesting. As always, these are My Opinion Only and only really apply to my games. But, they are My Opinion after thinking about HeroQuesting for over 20 years Your Game Should Vary .....

See? You lot must have dirty minds

Looking at areas where radiation has had an effect (Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl) it doesn't look as though there are screaming hordes of mutants running around nor does it look as though entering such zones means instant death. Most of the illness/death/damage was done in the immediate aftermath of the event. Further down the line, many people got cancer or other radiation-induced effects. Perhaps there are more congenital problems with births and descendants of survivors, but I don't know how much is talked about and how much is hidden in ther records. So, looking at real world properties of radiation isn't really the way to go. The Forbidden Zones have several properties: 1. Being nuked is a bummer 2. Cities are ruined and the survivors either died out, ran away or mutated 3. Mutants live in the cities. Mutants are a bummer. 4. Most of the Forbidden Zone is wasteland and is therefore difficult to survive in. A lot seems to be desert, for some reason. 5. The Forbidden Zone was forbidden for a reason, well serverl reasons. It was dangerous, it had ancient relics that could corrupt good apes, it was a Human Place and therefore should be avoided, Ape Religion is based on certain falsehoods that the ape leaders know about but don't want everyone to know. I shouldn't think that much of the Forbidden Zone would be that radioactive any more. Most radioactive isotopes very quickly degrade, having relatively short half-lives. Materials with long half-lives are not that radioactive, by their nature if they have long half-lives it takes a long time for half the material to decay, which means the rate of decay is low which means the radiation is low. So, much of the danger is from material with short or medium half-lives and effects the immediate surviovors or the next few generations.

Actually, to be pedantic ....... (Where's the Pedantic Smilie when you need it?)

Ah, that didn't even enter my head. Your "nut" in English slang is your head, or can be, so to "nut him" means to head-butt him. I don't know what "nut him" means in American. Perhaps he should have gone and had a fag instead .....

There was a children's TV series in the UK years and years ago called Tucker's Luck, a spin off from Grange Hill, and the main character was invitied to play a game of AD&D. He rolled up a warrior and the DM asked him whar he wanted to do against a foe. Tucker said he wanted to "Nut him" and they all recoiled in horror and said "You can't do that" so he quit the game. All us RQ fans watching said "He could have nutted him in RQ doing 1D6 + DB damage". So, don't belittle the Head Butt attack!

Do I? Really? Personal taste is the main reason. I just didn't like any of them and I re-read his collected works twice just in case I'd read them on a bad day. Nope, they were rubbish. He writes in a dull fashion. All his stories are the same. You can't visualise what he is talking about and have no empathy at all with the characters. As horror stories, they are not scary, which defeats the object. If you compare with someone like EA Poe, Lovecraft's novels come off a very poor second best and Poe isn't fantastic either, but he's a lot better than Lovecraft. The idea of seeing something that breaks your mind because it is so different was fine in the 1920s when new theories such as Relativity, Quantum Theory and the Expansion of the Universe were changing how people thought about the world and shattered what people thought about how things worked. But, nowadays with films and TV Shows, we see aliens left, right and centre, we have graphic horror films that leave nothing to the imagination and we have been desensitised to a lot of things. So, seeing some half-fish creature isn't going to break my mind and send me to the loony bin. But, I know that a lot of people like his stuff. There's a game designed around it as well, I think, that is/was fairly popular. This thread is about people's opinions. I believe, not an absolute measure of how bad books are. So, my opinion stands. An homage to Dunsany? Sorry, I didn't study Comparitive Literature at University and I'm not a book critic. What do I care about homages? I've never read anything by Lord Dunsany, mainly because I haven't heard of him before. I'd have preferred something original rather than an homage.

Can we pull the Wild West stuff from this thread into another thread? It's interesting but hasn't got a lot to do with Fate Points. :focus:

This thread has persuaded me not to buy the pre-release version and also to wait until the published version hits the shops. I'd rather wait a couple of weeks and buy it from a shop than order it, pay shipping and then have to wait for 6 weeks for it to arrive.

Yah, boo! Sure, there were loads of farmers, farmers' wives, shopkeepers, tailors and so on. But so what? If you have a Wild West setting you don't want to play a shopkeeper who just keeps shop. Well, I wouldn't, anyway. You'd want to play the farmer whose family was slaughtered by bandits, the pioneer whose sister was captured by Indians, the civil war veteran who has become a bandit, a lone gunslinger, the whore with a heart of gold, the crazy prospector, a group of bandits and so on. People don't play the 90% of people, they prefer the 10% of the population who were exciting and interesting.

The Apes seem to have guns that they've made themselves or guns that they had salvaged many years ago. So, they would be pistols and rifles of some sort. The mutant humans had guns that they had kept from when they were a military organisation, so they had access to some automatic weapons. They'd be difficult to maintain, though, and would eventually break down, so there wouldn't be that many of them left. After all, they had a working H Bomb and ICBM which they didn't make themselves! The big difference between the films and the TV series is the level of development of the humans. In the films they were almost the equivalent of herd men in Glorantha, semi-intelligent with no language skills, almost ape-like in nature. In the TV series, the humans were much closer to us, with language and civilisation, acting as slaves rather than animals. I prefer the approach of the films, but I see that the TV series allows the astronauts to blend in easier. Hawkmoon has Technological Enclaves where some technological skills have not been lost. This is the equivalent to the mutant humans in Planet of the Apes. I can see that happening more than just in the one place. As in any post-holocaust setting, you'd have dead cities, mutants, wormwoods and new civilisations.

What kind of critters have you got for the Bestiary? I'm assuming it contains wolves, bears, cougars, bison, deer, dogs, cattle, moose and snakes (especially rattlesnakes). You might need rules on anthills (for when people are staked out covered in honey/syrup). What about fantastic/mythical creatures? Red Indians (*) have Skinwalkers, The Wendigo is a cannibalistic spirit (like a passion spirit in RQ) but that's all I can think of. It would be nice to have some supernatural creatures for those who want more than gunfights, range wars and dodging outlaws. (*) Not politically correct and even possibly offensive, but you can't have a Wild West setting talking about Native Americans.

The Mongoose rules for sailing are almost the same as the RQ3 ones. Although they do have a lot more options in Pirates which would be good in any campaign. I think the sailing rules are pretty much the same across the board, which is a good thing. Sailing on the Seas of Fate has Fumble and Disaster tables which look good and stats for ship-borne seige engines which look good as well with Blue Fire being the equivalent of Greek Fire. But, for me, the important things about sailing are: 1. How fast can I travel and how far? 2. How much cargo can I carry? 3. What skills do I need to use when sailing? 4. How do I repair/maintain/upgrade my ship? 5. How do natural phenomena affect me while sailing? 6. How does ship to ship combat work? 7. How does monster to ship combat work? Of those, I reckon I'd use 1/2/3 more than 90% of the time and 4/5/6/7 about 10% of the time. So, the rules shouldn't bog things down too much. In a Sinbad-style game you'd need 1/2/3 a lot but would also need the others, possibly 80/20 or 70/30. You also need better trading rules and rules for costs of travel, crew maintenance and so on. I'd also give a ship a character sheet of its own, with skills and abilities. So, one ship might be Fast Running the Wind and another might be Hard to Sink. Different ship types would have similar abilities. Treat a ship as a PC or NPC. Some ships have been awakened, possibly by a ship/sailor cult or by a sorcerer or shaman, and they will have skills and spells of their own.

They work OK. In fact, they are a little bit too simple. Basically, you use Seaworthiness to keep track of whether the ship can stay afloat and this is the main thing for ships. After all, most of the hazards are things like storms and wear and tear. Ship to ship combat is handled fairly easily - use each captain's Shiphandling skill to determine how quickly the ships close, in comparison with ships' stats. If they ram then use the Hull Points and Structure Points to see if the ship is smashed. You also use Hull/Structure Points if you run aground or hit a reef/iceberg. And that's about it, really. There are extra bits for cargo, speed and sailing, but you can ignore most of those most of the time. It all depends what you want to use Ships for. If they are a way to move from A to B then the sailing rules don't really apply except when there are storms. If you want a pirate or naval campaign then ship combat comes into play. To tell the truth, I use the rules for wind direction to work out how fast the ship sails, the Special Menaces for occasional encounters and ship combat when absolutely neccesary. I rarely use ship repairs, except for downtime and magical repairs are normally done on the fly with fairly powerful magicians. In Glorantha, I use the Closing and the Open Seas spell and the Closing comes down fairly rapidly if it is needed. In fact, in Glorantha that's what makes a naval camapign intersting. The rules in Monggose RQ are better and there are more rules in the excellent Pirates supplement that I'd recommend to anyone who likes Pirates and BRP/RQ. If you want to do trading as merchants then the RQ trading rules are very simplistic. You'd need to work out costs of food etc for the crew per day, work out the costs of ship repairs and maintenance, calculate profit margins on cargo and so on. It's quite complicated really which is why I tend to avoid merchant campaigns - the PCs either can't make any money at all or make stupid fortunes. But, a Sinbad-style campaign might be interesting - a combination of trading, sailing and adventuring.

Ian M Banks, yes, I struggled through a couple of those. I found them like swimming through treacle and didn't particularly enjoy them. The trouble with AIs is that you would have to put so many checks on them as to make them effectively useless. So, Asimov has his 3 Laws of Robotics. These are fine, except where you have military or combat situations. If you apply them to AIs you can't have AIs with a military capacity. So, they're out straight away. So you have to put something in so the AI doesn't take charge and knock your own side out. You need a way to countermand an AI or to take it over. But, an evolving AI would probably become immune. So, you need a way to turn an AI off. But, a distributed AI becomes harder and harder to turn off as its systems become separated. Even if you can turn it off, there's the moral and ethical aspects - if it is Intelligent, is it alive? It's a minefield, so I prefer my AIs to be small and dumb. Red Dwarf had the right idea - clever AIs that look stupid so as not to be threatening.

Looks very nice indeed. No hats, though. You've got to have different-sized hats. If you are using that kind of layout, then 2 columns would be perfect, twice the information and no space wasted. Being able to keep the prices constant is really useful. It's worth having a price multiplier depending on transport links, though. After all, shipping that red satin underwear via wagontrain across Indian Terrirtory is a lot harder than shipping via the railroad.