styopa

I'd have rolled d100 and a d6: 3-4 add 100, 5-6 add 200. Trystero beat me to it. Last weekend we played, I had a player desperately searching for d10 to roll damage. He had like 3 d20s lying in front of him. Millennials.

Er, why no just a d300 and reroll 295+? I trust nobody here needs an explanation on how to do a d300?

IMO RQG essentially pushed into it's own territory, instead of trying to be consistent with other RQ-engine legacy products like BGB or Cthulhu. Since those derived from design decisions made originally by RQ in the very first place, I guess we'll see if history follows form this time. Only when it's been bad.

To be precisely accurate, gdh (lbb version) later was republished in hardcover for ad&d as deities and demigods. It was only after the first print of ddg they ran into the ip issues, so subsequent editions didn't have them, but the first edition still did. Actually, it was Chaosium's threatened lawsuit after the first printing that led to a compromise for the 2nd printing where tsr gave Chaosium credit. Tsr later decided that they didn't want to credit a competitor directly, so just removed the sections in the subsequent editions.

It's considered a feature mainly because the (linear) progressions of 3.X resulted in ridiculous numbers like "I'm rolling a d20 with +43". Crunching that down to SOME plusses but great swathes of them obviated by advantage/disadvantage (which is a GREAT mechanic, btw) was a strong progression from 3.x to 5e. Your first point is absolutely correct, and a deliberate design decision. Your second point ironically may be partly a result of RQ. Tweet, Cook, and Williams all were quite familiar with (and iirc Tweet was a big fan of) RQ. Again IIRC it was him who really implemented the novelty of skills generally in D&D3, and it's not unlikely that the 'portability' of classes - the dipping into classes for 'packets' of abilities' - was a deliberate way to get out of the straitjacket of D&D class system. Nor, to be clear, does it make it ipso facto worse, either. I don't think you'll have much debate here that RQ is a fundamentally better system here, of course. ENWorld? Maybe. Ultimately it's a subjective call, which is why debating them generally (as opposed to specific mechanics) is futile. There are some features of 5e I like very much but on the whole no, it's not a better game for how I like to play RPGs. Then again, how I like RPGs (I can pretty much guarantee) is likewise not what others on this board would agree is fun, either.

I think it's a size comparison ONLY size-relative between the US (ie for US customers) and Genertela. Having Canada's outline on there is confusing and misleading. It's not that (nor did I suggest) that latitude-wise Genertela is north of Toronto....latitude as a concept is pretty pointless on Glorantha, anyway. Glorantha's flat, so there is no deformation to a flat projection. The US map doesn't actually deform that much in different projections: ...so the point, if you're not considering that Glorantha is where Canada is, is moot. Heck man, I live in MN in a 110-yr old house with no airconditioning, and we have an entirely different (not better, not worse, just different) experience of the year compared to people who spend the entire 365 days in consistently 70-degree fixed-humidity rooms. When my sons started in Boy Scouts, we had a campout where it rained (hard) for an entire week - where even stuff you kept dry was damp. Their takeaway was a much deeper appreciation for SIMPLY BEING DRY.

IMO I don't think weather and conditions are given nearly the respect they should be in simulation. It's too attractive to players to just load up armor as high as can be, the only real negative consequence is in spell casting. (And RQ was the first to really even try to simulate that.) Even heavily armored ancient forces from Rome and points south wore as LITTLE armor as they could get away with, suggesting that even if your life/safety was on the line, you had to compromise armor with discomfort. That said from a theoretical point of view...I too only really use it when dramatically driven. I've tried lately just using the weather the day we game as what it is in-game, as closely as possible. Glorantha is by and large astonishingly temperate to subtropical. Sure, there's Valind's Glacier but if Genertela is the size of North America, if Trowjang/Teshnos is Florida, then Glamour would be somewhere near Minnesota....but which mythical forces have made 'moderate' in weather.

Every iteration of D&D from LBBs, the BECMI fork, AD&D and all subsequent editions. RQ- and Cthulhu variations starting with 2. A host of other RPGs from the Morrow Project and Aftermath! to Bunnies and Burrows, Paranoia, EoPT, Boot Hill, V&V, VtM, to John Carter WoM. Basically about 80-90% of the titles listed up through 1990 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_tabletop_role-playing_games . It's a fair hit, but wasn't honestly intended as a slap at 4e. I thought 4e was perfectly playable (and thought it would have been a far better mechanical underpinning to Neverwinter Online than the silliness they have), just that in my experience *none* of the groups I'm aware of play 4e at all. No reason to try 13th Age if it was based on 4e, but as that's been cleared up, I'm thinking again of trying it as a gateway drug for some groups.

I know that they'd taken a bunch of the crowd-edits into the text up until the printing cutoff, I believe. After that, they had to get the book out. I'd asked if subsequent edits have been maintained on an errata sheet but I don't believe I ever got a reply.

MOB I love ya man but you criticalled your "sneering gamer snobbery" check on that one. Ew, that's too bad. Most D&D players will tell you "it's ok, but it's not D&D". I'd even considered getting it to sort of ease my local 5e hardcore groups into a little more substantive setting...not sure I'd bother. If it's 4 they won't even consider it. I'd love it if someone clarified that it was a 3.X variant, as a number of the groups do still live in the Pathfinder ecosystem which is about 3.75. I have no problem putting RQ up against 5e. I think 5e is perfectly fine vanilla fare, and RQ won't be for everyone, but I expect that - as in the 1980s - some do yearn for something a little more substantive than what D&D offers. I'm perfectly fine not being the FotM game.

No, it's simply sloppy cut and paste without editing. @jajagappa is correct in identifying that different cults address it differently, no, the "priests" thing doesn't universally apply.

I'd 1000% agree with you at least insofar as it really ISN'T particularly interesting - that's a wise distinction I failed to call out. As should surprise nobody here, I appreciate tight mechanics and their approach to conditions, surprise, etc are very methodical and rigorous. It's only taken them 5 editions to get there... But as a game setting to actually care about the character, and the world they exist in? You're absolutely right, it's banal. Well commented. Hm, never saw that before. Skimming it, it seems a little bit FATEy (a positive, but I've never actually RUN it) but intersecting with a class-like mechanic that immediately is a negative for me. While I see it's interesting, I'm not entirely sure it's the tidal wave you imply. I'd love to actually see the rules, minus the colossal waves of pretentiousness. Eek.

I think in primitive environment it would be commonsensical that they recognize at least some specialization in any important role - it might not be formalized into a "job" but we all know that Grog just seems to make things that taste good and Marraga, well, she just seems to have a sense how to find the deer. I believe I saw something about flint knapping being a rather specialized skill but I don't recall if this was the author's speculation or had some basis in fact. It would likely all be on the basis of natural ability, and nothing remotely resembling training for a job...except perhaps the "job" of shaman/god talker, etc. I believe (at least it seems widely accepted in the archaeological things I read) that this was indeed a very apprenticelike situation?

Tangent to a tangent-thread: I get tired of this simplistic binary meme. "AH is teh DeV1l!!" https://www.maranci.net/rqpast.htm gives it a fairly objective retelling. AH were greedy as hell, and made lots of mistakes in their lack of understanding of RPGs generally and fans in particular, the "bad old days of AH" - while giving us plenty of rehashes of RQ2 products - also gave us some of the most fantastic supplements the game has ever seen, supplements that compare quite favorably with the best of Chaosium's days, products like Sun County, River of Cradles, and Dorastor. Vikings was as culture rich and interesting a creative setting as anything from 1979. Genertela was a bigger info-dump for Glorantha fans than anything Chaosium created, and GoG, while not being nearly as charmingly folksy as CoP or CoT was far more comprehensive and authoritative than both combined. The fact is that as much as AH is *constantly* maligned for abandoning Glorantha as a setting, licensewise they had NO CHOICE. Let's not forget either that Chaosium themselves were dabbling in non-Gloranthan settings with the uninspiringly-titled Questworld. As much as AH richly deserves brickbats for its failures, it's Chaosium that made that choice in the first place. As someone who continues to play both games, I don't know that comparing RQ(ancient) with AD&D(ancient) is even meaningful today? There's no question that a) RQ was a better game mechanically at the time, and b) D&D *crushed* Chaosium in terms of the follow-on products. Chaosium produced what, maybe 15? 18 products over the next 5 years, TSR had by the end of 1984 approximately 400 substantial products for sale (disregarding magazines, collections, boxed-sets, and non TSR products). And as for the Hearts and Minds of gamers? I think we know how that went. RQ was a more quality game, and Glorantha a more quality setting...but I believe it was Stalin who opined that "Quantity has a quality all its own." Guess which is better for making a sustainable business? This is why it's so essential that Chaosium today has recognized this and (AFAIK) already has a number of supplements in the pipeline. That's great. D&D5e is a GOOD GAME. The rules are tight, simple, and fast, and far more reminiscent of the good bits of AD&D than the accretions of 3.0, 3.5 or the benighted 4.0.. The mechanics are clear and predictable (if not very realistic). The product suffers from excessive balance-itis (a need to make sure everything is equivalent) and simultaneously from power-creep as their business model seems to (very WotC-like) demand programmatic releases of things intended to overpower previous publications. Obviously, this is a mountain you can only scale so long. Also, much of the game is based on what are now self-inflicted cliches. Their products that try to blaze new ground simply don't sell as well. For me, RQG...well, the jury's still out. I'm concerned about some things in there, I like some other things. I'll be honest, I fear an opportunity to really crystallize some of the mechanics and take advantage of some modern ideas/approaches has been missed by an over-slavish nostalgia for RQ2. For my part, I recognize that my stance would almost certainly have been an over-slavish nostalgia for RQ3. Neither is appropriate in 2018. 5e is too good a competitive product RQGs amazing attention to setting is a strong leg up, however. Mainly, I want a book in my hands that I can actually sit and read at length. I'm 50, doing it on a tablet or phone just doesn't float my boat. I believe fundamentally the RQ mechanics are still light-years better than d20 but they are inherently more complicated and crunchy, and I don't see the general culture going that direction. Meh, no big deal. FWIW rambly threads are to me the most interesting because that's how conversation HAPPENS.

A fair point. If one wanted to get into the weeds of detail, one could easily postulate where the draw strength and damage of a bow were a direct function of the time invested in the process. While it's not easy, it's also not crazy-hard to hack a basic bow together. (The bowstring is actually the hardest part, IMO.) Of course, this is only going to be capable of killing small game....like we're talking 1d2 damage or maybe only 1 point. With long enough investment in wood, seasoning, other materials your basic kludged primitive bow evolves into a longbow or a recurve. Ultimately, the world has largely moved on to recurves from the longbow for a variety of very good reasons - essentially the performance for the price (in labor, materials, and technique) is a better return.

I think the idea of even gram-precision in bronze-age coinage is not likely unless we postulate some sort of Issarian magical forging and or a set of spells that can calculate the actual silver in debased coinage/counterfeiting, etc. These are roman denarii.

That is one for the ages. /applause

This is drifting way off topic, but I think it remains interesting. One of the reasons d&d ends up being confusing is because of all the bolt-on cruft that keeps getting added every time Wizards needs a little revenue kick. It's easy to paying a boom full of some new overpowered stuff when there's no canonical background to adhere to, so there's a ton of it, some self-contradictory, and with major issues of power creep. Glorantha is finite, and once all the pieces of the world's puzzle are written into rules (o happy day!), ostensibly it would be done.

Bow? Absolutely routine. Commonplace, even. Sure, some places had great stands of terrific wood and made better bows than others, but the MAKING of a bow was pretty straightforward, straightforward enough that they were pretty much a standard peasant's tool for hunting. Bows were made of wood; wood was everywhere. Sword? HIGHLY uncommon. Not only were the materials and expertise for making them expensive, they really were optimal for killing people. For Joe Serf, a good solid knife was many times more useful. Good info on http://www.bow-international.com/features/traditional/native-bow-woods/ including (what may be surprising to some) that English Yew...was NOT ideal for bowmaking.

Agreed. One cannot on one hand claim the system is "realistic" and "balanced". They're almost antithetical. I'd argue that D&D for example, is far toward the balance end of the spectrum, while RQ has historically been recognized to be toward the realistic end - even if the consequence of that is that there are indeed some character-development choices that are gimping (ie suboptimal). I think it's not much of a secret to say that at least what I see in RQG is much more a tendency to strongly push players to be a certain kind of character. One of the reasons might be to offer new players signposts to guide them away from suboptimal choices, at the cost of a little bit of cookie-cutter effect. Hell, want to play an actual bad guy and you might get kicked from the game.

Yet, if things were just wholesale cut'n'pasted without even the modicum of processing/editing to catch such an error, one would have to naturally wonder how much deeper thought was given to the impact of that same c'n'p text on the (some subtle, some not-so-subtle) rules variations present in the RQG rules from say, RQ3.

Sounds like typos or cut n paste without close editing, I believe the intent was to resist with pow, and get away from the mp-resist of rq3.

I find it curious to hear that some cults don't have rune lords...I presume their rune magic is cast by priests then? Otherwise, if they don't have rune magic, I'd assume their principals are shamans?

Thanks! Genoa is on OOCL PVCS service, https://www.shipmentlink.com/tvs2/download_txt/PVCS_E.html Unloads at LBCT Long Beach. Web cams at https://www.lbct.com/Operations/TerminalCameras I presume they're going to devan somewhere at a distribution center in Los Angeles, so given they're pretty uncongested, if it's FCL it'll be at the warehouse probably by Mon-Tue 27-28, and then it's a matter of whatever they need to do at Chaosium to start selling them. If it's LCL, add probably another 4-5 business days for availability.

Agreed. I think the new time-setting is at least a little refreshing, and allows (for those whose campaigns really want to nestle in the bosom of released products) for a breath of fresh air in the otherwise-trammelled ground of Gloranthan canon. But what do I know? I thought MRQ's attempt to move to the 2nd age - while the rules may have had mechanical issues - was a brilliantly creative idea for the setting. It's allowed our campaign to explore some Arachne-Solara-evading time travel, where Ralzakark sent our heroes back to the era of God Learners to 'fix' something in his past that allowed him to exist...they weren't happy about that.