styopa

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

Good call.

9 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

Yeah, and how's that been working out for the video game industry?  I don't feel a wealth of confidence eminating from the fan base in general.

!I!

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.

6 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

I'm not dismissing the use of Rune Magic, and I get what you're saying... But I'm disagreeing with the usefulness of it compared to sorcery (except in sudden melee combat... Which, even Common Rune Spells lack great value, and you need to keep a tight rein on).

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

24 minutes ago, Jeff said:

You clearly know more than me. I guess I will stop working with the developers on it.

Honestly, when the licensor says there is a game in the works, why on earth do you feel the need to correct the people working on the game?

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?

22 hours ago, Jeff said:

You are aware how long it takes to develop a computer game? Just like with Call of Cthulhu, I wouldn't expect anything until about a year or so before launch.

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.

5 hours ago, davecake said:

@Jeff has mentioned Neo-platonism, so that is a relatively official source of inspiration. 

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

2 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

Heading for 6 months, and their website still doesn't have anything on it.... awesome.😕

7 hours ago, lordabdul said:

Sure but what I meant was:

1) The Condition Runes are not mentioned in the RQG Sorcery rules so I'm not sure they ever apply? Isn't it implied that you're just using the Magic rune under the hood and that's it?

2) Even if the Condition Runes were used, wouldn't you need an extra column for the Techniques? "Command Plant Death" is different from "Summon Plant Death" for instance.

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.

3 hours ago, lordabdul said:

Nice -- although I was a bit confused at first because you called it "Life" instead of "Fertility" (which is the term RQG uses). Also you have some "Conditions" instead of RQG's techniques? (Command, Combine, Separate, Summon, Dispel, Tap). Was this for a previous version of RQ maybe?

I think that assumption will very quickly be proven false. Take the very first sorcery spell in RQG for instance: "Accelerate Healing" (Fertility, Command). I'm pretty sure we can come up with at least a couple other spells that would have the same runes as their base.

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

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).

3 hours ago, metcalph said:

On the topic of cantrips, my opinion is spirit magics exist and are used for that purpose.  Rune Quest Sorcery is not intended to be a valid alternative to other magics in all circumstances but an act of mini-creation like solving a partial differential equation or composing a legal argument. It's intentionally slow, cumbersome and potent. 

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:

Quote

Palsy

Ranged, Passive, Temporal

This spell affects the nervous system of the target if the caster overcomes the target's Magic Points with his own.  Each casting of the spell will immobilize one random hit location of the target if the intensity of the spell is greater than the location's hit points.  If the chest, head, or abdomen is affected, the results are the same as if those locations had been reduced to zero hit points, though there is no actual reduction of hit points.

to Sandy's Tekumel:

Quote

Labyrinth Of Elongated Shadows (5)

(Grugánu)

If the target fails to resist, he is transported to Ksárul's horrid Citadel of the Twelve Pylons of Ta'lar, a mighty fortress established on the Forty-Fifth Plane, ruled by the Demon Lord Qu'u.  This is a place of utter darkness; no light can exist here. The wretched victim wanders through this tenebrous edifice for the Duration. Each minute spent here, he has a 10% chance of meeting one of Qu'u's hideous insectoid servitors. These servitors often won't harm a minion of Grugánu or Ksárul, but attack outsiders, as simulated by a 1d100 roll. The target also rolls 1d100, adding his Special Success chance in his highest weapon or sorcery skill. High roll lives. A dead victim's corpse reappears on Glorantha naked and wrapped in a silky cocoon.

Unfortunately, the taste of flesh might draw one of these servitors to the caster.  If the target is slain, the target’s POW% is the chance for a servitor to hunt down the caster at some future date. 

(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.

1 hour ago, Hzark10 said:

So, should I then consider the current Sorcery rules as a placeholder until the official rules come out? Or, use Mr. Peterson's rules in preference?  Not sure if I will have any Sorcerers in the campaign I am gearing up to, but want to make sure I understand the rules first and knowing which system is better will be a huge step in that direction.

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.  

9 hours ago, Crel said:

I tried codifying it once, and eventually gave up while still writing the spells because I finally parsed enough versions of Sandy's sorcery to hit this "oh, that's why everything's screwy" stage and kinda gave up in frustration when I realized I should be revising and developing, not just editing and synthesizing the documents together.

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.  😐

5 hours ago, davecake said:

it is no secret that I found the sorcery rules incredibly disappointing. They seem to have kept many of the worst parts of RQ3 sorcery, or even made them worse (it is still very much ‘spells and spreadsheets’ to work out how many long duration spells are up etc, still restricts sorcerers to a narrow range of spells), and added a few more. 

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.

23 hours ago, TheHistorian said:

A friend picked up the preview books for me at Gen Con. The Gods books were signed and numbered (edition of 40 apparently), but the Magic book was only signed. Anyone hear how big the print run was for that one?

Congrats!

7 hours ago, Crel said:

Generally, I believe the biggest challenge with RQG's sorcery for players is the Free INT system. I feel like the core's system works for Lhankor Mhy Indiana Jones types but yeah, is tough for playing other sorts of wizardy folks. Unless you're willing to bypass it with enormous POW expenditures on an inscription of a single spell.

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....

7 hours ago, Crel said:

I haven't tried it out in a game yet, but one idea I had was to let sorcerers develop cantrips based on a spell they knew, using the spell research rules. A cantrip would be a set formula for a sorcery spell, that they can't manipulate. Casts at spirit magic speed on INTx5 (instead of POW like spirit magic--just gotta remember the damn thing as quick as you can), fills one Free INT, and always costs its exact MP. So you don't have to wait three rounds to cast Finger of Fire strength 5 (7MP, 3 base + 4 levels of intensity in strength) and be ready to go when the fight's already over. A sorcerer would probably have to have mastered all associated techniques/Runes to develop a cantrip, and maybe a max casting% of their % in the base spell (otherwise you'd just develop a bunch of cantrips to cast at INTx5 and never bother working on spell improvement).

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? 

2 hours ago, Jeff said:

I emphasise that this is a RuneQuest forum to encourage you to think what that means in terms of the RQ rules. Otherwise move this over to the general Glorantha forum.

 

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.

5 hours ago, soltakss said:

Soltak Stormspear was Illuminated when he met Nysalor on the Spirit Plane and gained 1D6% change of Illumination, rolling 5 and then rolling 03 a few weeks later at Sacred Time. He met Nysalor again and gained 1D6 Nysalor Riddles. As he was a Wind Lord, he delighted in asking Yelmalians his Nysalor Riddles instead of the normal Orlanthi Riddles in the Riddling Contest. Bad Soltak!

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

9 hours ago, g33k said:

Yes, but still...  It may be something the Humakti can notice, and be interested in.

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

6 hours ago, prinz.slasar said:

I get your point and don't want to derail this thread, but:

Is it really necessary?

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!

5 hours ago, pookie said:

Which leaves the other three characters. I want to involve them, but am not sure how. Anyone have any suggestions?
 

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.

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

In addition to "summon cult spirit" the caster also needs "command cult spirit" to make the elemental do anything.

Depending on your inclination, being able to summon a fire elemental (and then just running away) might be useful enough.  Just sayin'.