styopa

August 24, 2019: I completely agreed with Jeff 2x in the same day. https://tenor.com/view/whats-going-on-the-office-jim-what-is-going-on-wtf-gif-3926604

1000% agree with the reasoning, both in game and meta. Good call.

Pretty well? I'm not sure what niche you're looking at, there are always disaffected groups but the industry as a whole is stunningly healthy with no end in sight, really. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-12-18-global-games-market-value-rose-to-usd134-9bn-in-2018 https://www.wepc.com/news/video-game-statistics/ (compare to the global film industry which is projected at $38bn in 2016 up to $50bn in 2020.)

Relevant to general subject; I'll just leave this here. We play that Divine Spells are guided by a god - meaning if you have an AOE spell, you can freely cast it amongst friends and it'll ONLY affect the bad guys. (Note that this is in your GOD's pov...meaning that atheist sorcerer may get anything from a tingle to full effect, depending how sacreligious they've been....) Also, zero chance of fumble. Which as you can see, isn't trivial. RQ3.9 spell fumbles.pdf

I was merely correcting your implication that there was no communication about CoC until about a year ahead of launch. That simply wasn't factually true. You know, you'd expect the licensor would remember things like that, I mean ... since they're working with the developers and all?

Maybe it used to be that way. But the "we keep it under wraps until it's done" thing hasn't really been the model for video game development for a decade. Now the model is more or less constant feedback, alphas, screenshots, dev blogs, update videos, reddit AMAs, marketing splashes...OVERcommunicating, if anything. There was in fact a fair amount of communication about CoC...when it was actually progressing. CoC was actually announced in 2014 for IIRC release in 2016. Then it was moribund for what, 2 years? before being re-announced in 2016 for 2017 release. (Inference: in the 2 year span the game basically crashed and burned in the hands of Frogwares; the 're announcement' coincided with essentially a complete restart and handing over to studio Cyanide). At which point, when it was actively, progressively being worked on, there was a trailer releases already for E3 2016, and another at the start of 2017 - ie clear progress and communication to fans. In 2017 it was pushed to 2018, again with reasonable communication to fans. It was finally released later in 2018. In 2019 software no news from devs in any social media stream = dead project, functionally. It may not be formally dead, but it's unlikely any meaningful progress is being made.

I think the RQG rules are more about neoteniy than neo-platony.

This was put together before the RQG sorcery rules were even clear - so it doesn't have techniques which weren't in RQ3 An "RQG" version would absolutely need techniques, either as another column or (IMO) more likely as operators between the runes like math symbols, which would likely boost the possible combinations to crazy numbers. Because you could then have just for rune combination 235 (Water,Stasis,(no form),Fate) 2+3+5, 2x3-5, etc. Something like: Summon: * Dispel: / Combine: + Separate: - Command: ^ Tap: v Damn, then you could even go down dizzying algebraic rabbit holes like order-of-operations for magical techniques? Just as 2+3*5 is 17 and not 25, maybe in magical parlance "everyone knows" SUMMON/DISPEL has to happen before COMBINE/SEPARATE, duh....maybe that's what we mean is actually happening when we miss a casting roll.

Oh no question, this just shows the variety available under pretty simplistic constraints.

FWIW early on I'd toyed with building a compendium of unique sorcery spells. Using this matrix Elements: Powers Forms Condition 0 No Element 0 No Power 0 No Form 0 No Condition 1 Darkness 1 Harmony 1 Beast 1 Mastery 2 Water 2 Disorder 2 Man 2 Magic 3 Earth 3 Stasis 3 Plant 3 Infinity 4 Air 4 Movement 4 Dragonewt 4 Luck 5 Fire/Sky 5 Truth 5 Spirit 5 Fate 6 Moon 6 Illusion 6 Chaos 7 Life 8 Death I'd thrown together the master list into which each spell could be dropped; so a spell that's Water+Stasis+(no form)+Fate = item 2305 This is assuming of course that you could only use at most one (each) of Element + Power + Form + Condition. The result is 2646 combinations, which should be enough for any College of Magic. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16IRfI7a8ZDoThviy9HxaAZWE8K-Bt-AIMU58r8I03rs/edit?usp=sharing

Fascinating discussion here everyone. Particularly for sorcery, I also feel we're missing any mechanics for cooperative casting. IIRC the lore is ample in referring to sorcerers (particularly God Learners) and lunar magicians working in concert, yet no iteration of the rules that I'm familiar with (I am entirely unfamiliar with HQ) has ever provided actual mechanics for it. (?) Or? Surely if we think shieldwalls, phalanx, and formation-fighting are commonly-enough employed that they're worth a full page of rules, the analogous magical techniques should also be available? At least for the meta in my head, that's a big reason the Lunars generally beat Orlanthi: sort of the magical equivalent of legions vs swarms of Teutonii (yes, yes, I know, the whole "Orlanthi aren't European barbarians anymore" notwithstanding).

IMO that's sort of where Sandy was going with his Tekumel implementation of RQ Sorcery (note, this is DISTINCT from Sandy's Sorcery rules). RQ3 presented less "spells" than generic spell effects. They were utterly banal and somehow managed to make spell casting a dull affair. Sandy's Tekumel enlivened RQ3 sorcery by using it only as a magical platform from which he built MAR Barker-flavored incantations. Compare RQ3: to Sandy's Tekumel: (Which sounds intrinsically more fun?) Note the latter is a straight 5mp to cast, then manipulatable as to range, etc.. To your point, and to Crel's a lot of these spells were either not really boostable in the generic, flavorless RQ3 way but actually gave different effects when different intensities were reached. As glorified versions of the cantrips that Crel was talking about, I saw them as more 'assemblages of effects' whose results were more than the sum of their parts in a straight-sort-of-magics-as-physics approach, but likewise were far less flexible. And yeah, they were in many cases crazy overpowered. But one has to ask oneself if 'balance' as a metagame structure isn't the polar opposite of realism, in some ways. As a Gm that prefers sandbox over dramatic narrative, my concern about balance has more to do with looking at the societies as competitive entities: if a person in society A can do 1d3 damage with 1mp, and someone in society B can do 2d6 with that same 1mp without some countervailing cost/constraint, how is it that society B isn't running amok? But that's probably another thread.

Oh absolutely. In RQG it says explicitly: "This chapter provides a bare bones overview of sorcery, a subject to be expanded upon in future RuneQuest supplements." Bare bones, unfortunately, implies that this is the actual structure (presented in simple form) to be elaborated on later. "Placeholder" would give me more optimism that the future rules might be significantly revamped. It's not impossible (IIRC for example the 2-weapon rules evolved into something significantly different in the errata thread(s)), in fact, I sincerely hope that they DON'T feel too much of a need to hew to the structure so far presented.

Ha ha, would you be surprised that I totally agree with you? Honestly, Colin's pretty much the only one I think that completely understands it (math major /surprise; which meta-conceptually fits "how" I think a western sorcerer should be anyway...) and if I didn't implicitly trust him I'd probably have tried to do the same thing you did with about as much success. On a tangential note, the exact note of frustration you end with is PRECISELY the same #$&^#$(#*....sigh I end up with whenever I try to decide once and for all if I'm going to like RQG (and thus feel it's worth the time to really filter out the frustrating bits) or just keep using RQ3.9 that we use because we're all comfortable with that anyway. I'm still sitting on that bloody fence. Just about every week I change my mind. 😐 Yeah, whiffed opportunity. Even though I liked RQ3 conceptually more than most, even I admit it was a version 1.0 (or maybe 0.9), and needed LOTS of work to make it playable and - like you mention - even working it ends up being practically throwing spreadsheets around. I'd hoped RQG would really take a step up and try a new approach, the implementation of runes screamed to create something like the (video game) Magicka magic system (where spells are essentially just combinations of runes...more runes = more powerful stuff, with different combinations resulting in different effects): Why everyone should be stealing Magicka's spell system and https://magicka.gamepedia.com/Spell_Combinations or I understand Ars Magicka has a similar approach (will be looking into that today, in fact) https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/6458/any-games-with-a-magicka-like-experimental-combination-based-magic-system But as I mentioned above, I suspect what we have is the result of someone holding their nose about a system they deeply disliked but felt obligated to include. That's never going to great.

Congrats!

Yeah, that was identified early on as a major flaw in RQ3 mechanics*, and oddly it was imported into RQG. RAW then an apprentice with 1 spell (meaning maximum Free Int) can technically cast a more inherently powerful spell than Tim the archmage? Pardon me but that's simply goofy. *and relatively easily addressed mechanically in Sandy's version, although I too disliked his trading of duration for a hold-as-long-as-you-have-Presence. Shrug. Thus lieth the slippery path toward "clusterfuck" homebrew rules.... IMO far too powerful. Essentially you're allowing them to trade spell flexibility in that instance with castability - that's too little cost for what's a (in utility) a massive reward. Sandy's Sorcery Rules already has a mechanic is inherently simple, consistent, and that I think works just fine - the Art of Speed which allows you to reduce the SR spent to cast a spell by -1sr/+1 mp *BUT* it has to be used in conjunction with the same system's intrinsic caps on manipulation-according-to-skill. In that case then you a) are costing a sorcerer both fuel from their gas tank (mp), and b.) lowering their ability to empower the spell in other ways because of that manipulation cap tradeoff. I don't think the MP cost alone is enough, the mechanical the-faster-you-cast-it-the-simpler-it-has-to-be (effectively) is a nice balancing technique. Unfortunately the RQG sorcery rules are kludgy because RQGs authors were faced with a conundrum: sorcery wasn't even faintly a part of RQ2, and yet it's since been canonized in lore. All they had to go by was an RQ3 system, great swathes if not most of which they fundamentally disliked. (Don't misunderstand me, there were large bits of RQ3 sorcery that did suck.) And the inclusions of Runes into the rules system was a fantastic opportunity specifically for sorcery. Sadly they HAD good examples all over the place - Nick Effingham, Sandy Petersen, etc all had addressed components - but chose not to farm afield for material. The whole thing feels very bolted-on to me, from its very inclusion in the RQG rules in the first place. RQ3 was meant to be a more objective "rule system" independent of setting it belonged in that rule set; RQG is about Dragon Pass, full stop. That's great, that's meant to be RQGs design intent, and it pulls it off. So why include a magic system more-or-less antithetical to the Deistic culture of the area in the first place (to say nothing of retconning decades of lore to justify it...are we really saying LM doesn't provide adequate resources to worshipers himself)? That the gears don't quite mesh is disappointing but shouldn't be a huge surprise.

Canonically, RQ sorcerers aren't the D&D style 'flinging fireballs Archmage Tim" type. Never have been. Then again, I haven't exhaustively read the RQG Sorcery but I think Jeff/Jason would fully agree that what's in there is absolutely minimal, according to what's needed to only support the (new) Lankhor Mhy adjunct sorcery thing, ie both fairly narrow and shallow. Full sorcery rules will follow in the indefinite future, if/when we get an expansion focused on the West, be it Ralios or Loskalm. In the meanwhile, http://www.hibbs.me.uk/snarks/sandysorcery.html has Sandy Petersen's sorcery rules, making RQ3's sorcery EMINENTLY more playable (albeit with some bugs of its own). But to get back to your main point, IIRC someone characterized powerful sorcerers as "Killing their enemies day by day, from 15 miles away". Simply put, with vast resources of mp and time, sorcerers obliterate Rune magic casters, hands down. Certainly,. Rune magicians have been amply buffed in RQG (RQ3 Divine Extension simply doubled the duration per point, so 15min (default) spell became 30min with Ext I, 1h with ExII, 2h with ExIII, etc.so 5 points is 8 hours. In RQG 5 points is A YEAR) but AFAIK no Runic ability exists to blast someone from beyond the horizon, where sorcery did (at least it used to). EDIT: I just checked, it seems RQG not only ridiculously buffed Rune spells, they massively gimped Sorcery - formerly 10 points of range manipulation in RQ3 would give a range of 10km, RQG is ONE km. Apparently sorcery in RQG *has* been gimped severely. I wonder why?

Wasn't one of the stated primary goals (successful, IMO) of RQG to bring RQ and Glorantha more into synthesis anyway? ie. not so separate and distinct as they've historically been?

...on crushing it in the ENnies.2019 Yeah, this is tangential (but not unrelated!) to RQG but this certainly shows that you guys are "doing it right". What a distance Chaosium has covered since 2015. Sincere congratulations. Aside from (hopefully) vast piles of wealth as your games succeed, I can't think of a clearer signal that whatever you're doing at Chaosium now, you're doing it right. Thanks for saving Chaosium from the pages of history. I'm sure Greg is pleased.

Ah, now the source of soltakss comes out...

"Well hello there priestess...I notice you've got a little Death Rune in you...would you like another...?"

I think you took me too literally. I wasn't ACTUALLY asking for a new rules edition.

If only we had a new edition of the rules system so someone could really go in there and fix this hodgepodge of antiquated mechanics from umpteen previous editions that don't *quite* work!

While I sympathize with your intent, IMHO you're going to run out of gas quickly trying to find a motivation for every character in every adventure. Sumath gave some great suggestions but sometimes you're just going along to keep your buddy from doing something stupid.