styopa

I connected with Dave Morris, got his permission to convert to single-document docx and pdf. both should already be in the RQ downloads. See link.

I always liked the system in Harn. IIRC, it's basically a roll(+ something per damage taken) vs your CON each time you're hurt. Rather than a clearly finite system of hp it was wonderfully non-deterministic. Every wound was dangerous and to be avoided, but you could also be amazingly tough...you just couldn't RELY on surviving anything.

My prep is mostly: - creating the monsters (generally one per type unless there's a leader or unique i need to be present; so if they're attacked by 6 wolves, they're identical) - creating the lists of loot/magic items, etc so when they have the chance to have someone identify something 3 (real time) months down the road, I can be consistent! Our campaign's been running around 14 years now? Started with my sons around 11 and 10 I believe. A list of what their group has done in the old forums: http://www.glorantha.com/forums/topic/a-practical-guide-to-gming-runequest-3/#post-16009 ....since then it took off again, now with their college gamer friends as the group, and we're having a great time. They had a long arc of several interwoven overlapping adventures, including (more or less) the Sea Cave, Shadows over Bogenhafen, Balastor's Barracks, Village of Hommlet, DD1-2-3, Sunless Citadel, and now Dark Clouds.

even more dupe post 😐

^ PRECISELY why we play out most meaningful combats on a hex map. We rarely used figures as I was growing up (mainly because we were cheap), but as a GM now I find it much more visually stimulating, as well as making positioning and such much more comprehensible to everyone involved. Wipe-off vinyl hex mats are great, and on occasion when action is going to be concentrated in a place, I'll put in the effort to draw up a more detailed/pretty to-scale sheet that's stuck to the table, hidden under the usual battlemat until it's needed. The gasp at the reveal is practically worth the price of admission itself. So yep, we have zones of control as Rosen mentions, etc., as well as reasonably simple mechanics. Works terrific.

duplicate post

Seems rather canonical that even in an adventuring party, the 'scholar/sage' would be an older person. Seems like the price-paid reasonably for that role.

Makes a better sled ... ?

You enjoy a luxury of spare time then. /envy We play one Saturday every 2 weeks and I am sometimes literally scrambling Friday evening to convert something published to RQ. This week a pretty interesting one: Dark Clouds Gather. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Clouds_Gather

I can easily see a high-skill character launching multiple 'series' of attacks on a single target; after all, their skill would allow them to execute the whole series faster too. In a sense, that holistically addresses the complaints from lindybeige (on youtube) that RQ doesn't reflect the primary improvement that higher skill gives you: speed of attack. never thought of it that way.

Egil Skallagrimson never once saw a broo nor ventured near Snakepipe Hollow, as far as I know. 😐 It's not like it's graven in stone, just one possible approach. (shrug) RQG is delightfully flexible enough that a GM can just change the premise and throw the idea of one adventure per season out the window. Not everyone wants to play KoDP the RPG?

Assuming a starting skill of 30, a good skill mod of 15, and that the 'skill fail' roll is ONLY against the skill itself (not skill plus mod; ie the first roll would need to be a 16 to 'fail') some napkin math suggests to me that to get from 30 to 75 is going to take on average about 21.8 skill rolls.

Not....yet? Maybe it's time. RQG is evocative enough that it might attract them....so, who knows someone who knows someone?* *Harvey Weinstein connections N/A.

I *like* the change to rune points a lot, for exactly the reasons Jeff laid out in one of his blogs. I like that Repel Mosquitoes might actually see use, and think it will make the game way more interesting. I do think that such a large change to the rune spell paradigm required a little more cogitation to the spell lists available than what seems to be a pretty-near copy+paste of buckets of spells from older editions. (Shrug) Then again, their paradigm was based on adventuring once per season, meaning essentially every session would start with a full roster of points recovered. My game will be much faster paced, so rune point recovery will be a major balance factor I have to work out. I also will think about some mechanic to gate npc use of their rune points, to throttle (outside of my gm arbitrary control) the natural tendency of npcs to blow their points in every encounter to the detriment of players (npcs often have no tomorrow).

There are 3 tiers of issues, as I see it: Tier 1: actual typos and such. I think it's fair to say that Chaosium welcomes such crowd editing (although I saw one poster whose repeated semantic and grammatical corrections were pretty consistently wrong, so that's negative productivity right there) Tier 2: issues with mechanics - less productively useful for Chaosium, but useful for other players to see alternatives to the mechanics presented. The Runequest community, like most street orphans (and for kind of the same reasons over decades), has grown to be astonishingly flexible, resourceful, and creative...they've likely home-brewed a dozen alternatives to every single rule. Chaosium obviously had to pick one to be canonical, but ygmv: seeing these alternatives may even spark a new gm to come up with something nobody else has thought of. If nothing else, it will teach them that nobody need hold these rules as sacrosanct , which imo makes for better gm'ing. 3) tier 3 is just bitching, complaining that the rules didn't include x idea, or y approach. It's the least constructive but due to anonymity finds fertile soil on the interwebs. Frankly, Chaosium forum managers have a firm understanding of the Streisand effect, and generally lets these threads die a deserved death as they peter out, only stepping in when the tone gets excessively personal, etc.

In RQG it's available to any priest of Ernalda or Eiritha, I believe. So pretty common, as I'd figure there are more of them together than Orlanthi RL's?

Yeah, there's really little to no balance in the cult lists. It was less of an issue in previous iterations, as Rune Spells were expensive, so people only sacrificed for the worthwhile ones..thus having 2 good ones and 14 crappy ones was meaninglessly different than 2 good ones and 1 crappy one available. Now, of course, there's going to be far more critical focus on the breadth of the spell lists (or lack thereof).

Eiritha, actually. Not really that important; if you fail to cast it, you don't lose the rune point, you can just try again next round. I mean unless you're totally going the wrong direction, you'll have at least 50%.

Not really. To have a playable game, you have to have 2 things: mechanics, and material. Mechanics we have. Material is wildly inconsistent: - creatures are largely omitted. I get why (there's going to be a bestiary, so why produce the same material twice?) but that it's omitted is irrefutable. - otoh we have ample cult info (which will be provided again in the cults book) and we have ample campaign info (which probably should have gone more appropriately into a settting-book for dragon pass) If you discount the massive background knowledge most of us (here) come to RQG with, as well as the bookshelves and hard-drives full of RQ2, RQ3, MRQ, MRQ2, RQ6 stuff...then no, I would agree that *just with the RQG book alone* without creatures to populate the world, monsters to fight, etc this isn't a playable game in a single book...unless you want to populate your campaign exclusively with ducks*, trolls, trollkin, broo**, runners, elementals, and horses - that would be an odd campaign. *the bestiary oddly names each creature in plural: the entry isn't for "duck" but duckS (which would be normal if the category were a broad genus, then there were subvarieties, ie Trolls or Elementals), but where the categories are for a single type it's syntactically odd? **the bestiary says "broos". I thought the singular and plural of broo was ... broo?

Or, have a Chalana Arroy person withholding action, then they can do whatever they like when someone drops. It's kind of their raison d'etre.

So the DM is controlling our characters and insisting what our responses "should" be? I hate that.

Nah, Jason's right, it's decent mike, they're just too far apart and the sound needs some eq love.

Shouldn't something with high INT/STR/DEX/POW/CHA have good bonuses in everything ?

It's all points on a spectrum, really. At the far end of "let's skip mechanics and get to the adventure" you've got FATE and diceless games as narrative heavy/mechanics lite systems. At the other end you've got Phoenix Command and Aftermath as "let's spend 4 hours meticulously simulating 3 minutes of action combat". I'd say D&D is toward the simplistic combat end. Personally I chose RQ so many years ago to move toward a more simulationist system deliberately. I'd guess most people would find either extreme a yawn. My group is annoyed by certain inconsistencies, so we've house-ruled RQ3 combat into a more impulse-like system by flipping it (we count down to one, Dex/Siz SR are bonuses) at the cost of some portability and requiring conversion every time we run actual RQ material.* *less of a burden than it sounds, we exhausted RQ published stuff years ago so I'm either converting other game system adventures or creating ex nihilo anyway. We're going to start a separate RQG campaign, and run RAW with an open mind. Rather than prejudging based on all the things we "think" we probably won't like, we're going to play it as presented and see what we get. After a couple of sessions, we'll have a kibbitz session about what works, what doesn't, and then try to come up with a minimal set of HR.