styopa
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Everything posted by styopa
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Exactly what I feel about mostali. Fascinating, but their worldview (curious that my phone auto corrected that to 'worksite) is so alien I can't see them as enjoyable pc's. Face it, the main charm of Glorantha is a combination of credibility and non-Tolkienesqueness...which means that if we take it reasonably seriously, the first thing to go is the trope of the mixed party of adventurers including the obligatory elf, dwarf, human, etc. Sure, it's not inconceivable in Glorantha, but in a Gloranthan context you even more risk jumping the shark before your party has even find adventuring...
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Always liked Aftermath's approach to combat, but way too detailed and simulationist for today's RPG market. I've always thought that if one were rewriting a combat system, it would be STR that does the damage (STR applicable being capped by the weapon size, for melee weapons and also capped by attacker's SIZ for melee weapons), and then converted to cutting/stabbing damage by the weapon, as appropriate. Attacker starts with 100% chance to hit, reduced by the target's (DEXx5, less the sum total physical non-natural AP on the target) - thus an avg dex toon (11) wearing 8pts of armor everywhere isn't getting any inherent avoidance benefit from dex increased by attacker's skill. Defender can also apply their own dodge as a further minus to the attacker's chance, but this % also comes off the defender's attack roll(s) as well that round. Max damage for blunt/cutting is 2x the location's hp. Max damage for thrusting is 1x location hp. Any damage to body hp is resisted (cumulatively, with a new roll when new damage occurs) vs CON on the resistance table....fail means target can ignore pain and keep functioning normally. Depending on location of strike: (All presuming the location itself isn't anyway incapacitated by the damage) Limb/Abd: Success means that location stunned for that round (no action), Special: stunned for that round (no action) target has init penalty in subsequent rounds = damage done on that strike, Crit: limb disabled. Chest/Head: Success means stun for that round (no action) target has init penalty in subsequent rounds = damage done on that strike, Special: incapacitated, Crit: death.
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You should read the designer notes, chap 14: "...But with Rune points, you don't pre-buy specific Rune spells. Instead you can spend your Rune points to cast ANY spell known to your cult and subcult. ..."
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Never saw that, that's really good. Thanks!
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That'd be too bad. I never bought the RQ3/AH version because their money-grubbing splitting of Trollpak into what, 3 different products? always bugged me. Trollpak was magnificent. I would have loved a comparable treatment of Aldryami and Mostali to complete the set. What we got in Elder Secrets was so abbreviated & pretty weak - hell, the Dobyski illustrations alone still haunt me. I ran a very short interstitial campaign that was all Elves with people that had been pretty experienced Gloranthan players (so they tried not to just play them like humans with elf-masks on), so I'd had to drum up a much more substantial treatment of elves that kept them relatively alien, not to mention fearsome in their home woods.
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Was talking with a player yesterday, and we hit upon the simple mechanic of 'stances' as realistic and potentially useful tactical options for RQ characters. There are 3 possible combat stances: Normal: allows you the usual 1* attack and 1* defense option in each round. All-out attack: You ONLY get your 1* attack at half-again your skill. You get no defense action. All-out defense: You ONLY get your 1* defense at half-again your skill. You get no attack action. *: as usual, if >100% you can split The above is probably the simplest version. Then the Minotaur's 'enrage' doesn't have to give them a special magical ability, it just puts them into all-out attack mode. It also makes missile weapons more lethal (if you allow it to everyone), if the shooter isn't threatened by immediate attack. Alternate versions, not really thought through: - Attack/Defense stance lets you split attacks/defenses using that higher value, even if it's not above 100% (you don't care about getting hit)? - Attack lets you attack slightly faster (no hesitation for self-preservation)? - Defense might allow a shield to parry multiple attacks from a single attacker (ie like a normal dodge, but at half value for subsequent attacks after the first), or to allow dodge to be used against multiple attackers (but at half-value for each dodge after the first) - Defense might even allow additional AP to a parrying item (1d4 or your strength mod, whichever's greater, re-rolled for each attack), or allow a SPECIAL parry to still count against a CRITICAL hit (the current way a normal shield success works against a special)? NOTE: NPCs wouldn't be able to access stances unless it is something intrinsically sensible to the NPC - ie a minotaur. Otherwise NPCs (who often don't care about tomorrow) would be overpowered. Anyway, just some ideas we were bouncing around.
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Except, as I understand it, each pool is available to cast ANY spell that god provides, so wouldn't each line in that case be the full list of spells you could get from Storm Bull and Waha respectively? Seems like that could end up being long lists. I think in this context 'cinematic' is used specifically to refer to combat that is less realistic, more demonstrative & flashy; part of that too is an improbable reduction in lethality. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon had very cinematic fights, for example.
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One would expect that was definitely on the list of beta testers. I hope the rules have been tested by people who actively try to exploit/break them. That's how you make a tight, consistent rules system. You simply cannot write good rules if your betas are all bought-in to playing the way the author(s) "think" it "should" be played. Then again, I come from a wargaming background that sees min-maxing as simply taking the game seriously: doing everything a serious player can do to be successful within the rules as given, not a sort of violation of polite gaming society...That literally just occurred to me why min maxing probably doesn't bother me at all.
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Not precisely your question, but I'd posted earlier in this thread something like it: "Becoming a Rune Lord (RQ3) generally involved becoming 90% in what, five or six skills? Generally, those would be things that the character is doing/enjoys doing (otherwise why pick that cult?) so we could assume they 'start their Rune Lord effort' at better-than-middling skills Starting at a base of 60%, with a skill mod of 5%, getting to 90 takes 32 skill rolls (st dev 12 - I only ran about 170 iterations, that would settle down with more) Likely the character is going to try like hell to get a skill check in every one of their primary target skills at least once each play session, certainly. Let's say they only manage that in 80%. Playing 2x monthly, then would be 40 sessions or a little more than a year and a half of play."
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That's a great point, and a good argument for the mechanism. Does anyone NOT hate the POW-bouncing economy and the constant futzing it implies to all related attribute bonuses? Thanks for the list and explanation. Maybe my Glorantha isn't sufficiently "mystical" enough but if my players are tasked to rescue herd beasts captured by an enemy tribe or steal a bride then they...simply go and try to rescue the herd beasts or go kidnap the bride? (Or try, anyway.) Seems either a.) strangely overcomplicated to resort to a sort of mythic-LARPing in place of simply doing the things in a mundane way, or b.) crazy overpowered (and not a little arbitrary) to be able to pull some fantastic ritual more or less out of the cosmos to enable some impossible or near-impossible thing to now happen. Frankly sounds like the Yu-gi-oh cartoon where they just make up crap to solve whatever new trick their opponent comes up with... Maybe I need to smoke more weed to have a better perspective. Seems like that's more a matter of tweaking than something wrong with the mechanic. Make the base 2x CHA and your complaint pretty much vanishes, no?
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Glorantha has *always* been a 'take what you want' world. "YGMV" = Your Glorantha May Vary is probably the oldest canon. Certainly the minutiae is there, if you really like navel contemplation. Moreso than any other world I'm aware of - including LotR or Tekumel. And a significant amount of stuff has been retconned at one time or another. Hell, some people believe Morokanths are vegetarians. But don't let the abundance of material at all make you think that it has to be that way in your game. I expect that almost nobody uses it all.
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In a world where heroquests can actually change reality, I'd say "evidence schmevidence".
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Honestly, I'd like to hear more about this. As my understanding of what heroquesting is, is both staggeringly hard and fundamentally changing rules of regular existence, I can't really understand how one could do that a lot or find it much fun? We'd talked about it in my campaign and while we didn't change the rules midgame (mainly because of some complications in application), I think there was general interest in simply saying that a combat skill above 100% allows the player to use the points above 100 to deduct from their opponent's score (kind of like old Rq2 defense). The toon with the reduced score keeps their original crit %. In fact, with th RQG single combat skill (instead of split attack/parry) makes this even simpler.
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At least in Glorantha everyone knows to blame Eurmal for "fake news".
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For that matter, if you're revamping the combat system thoroughly, I could see a logical basis for having a SINGLE HIT ROLL ultimately generate location and damage. It'd likely be complicated, but essentially a barely-hit ends up being a trivial wound - a minor cut on an extremity perhaps. A good hit means meaningful damage, ie a solid hit on an extremity that causes some debilitation, or a minor wound on a vital part like head or chest. A special means a serious hit on a limb, or a significant wound on a critical location, while a crit itself means both a serious hit & a critical location. Toyed with that a little, but it ended up Rolemaster-y, with a big chart (and then it was tough to apply to non-humanoids in any case) so I bailed on it as RQ canonical again may not be perfect but hits the intersection (for me) of realistic enough, fast enough and convenient enough.
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Hell, is it 5e that in either the example or beginner modules, even offers the option to dispense with random damage entirely? I seem to recall some adventure where it says something like the goblin hits for 1d6 (3) meaning a dm that wants it as simple as possible can just use the single value?
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I prefer the canonical RQ way, but I think Jon's point is that base skills being a fixed value is a naked rationalization and should be recognized as such. Realistically, not everyone should start with the same bases - regardless of background, a person with good strength and dex is NATURALLY going to be better at throwing a rock than a klutz. No intrinsic reason at all. In the same sense you COULD have HP be (STR+CON+CON+SIZ+SIZ+SIZ)/6, you could certainly have varied stat collections to represent various bases, in the same way that some skills are base 05%, and some are base 40%. Again, I prefer the RQ canon system of (base) + (mod derived from one or more stats) because it's simpler, IMO. But I don't think any amount of NIHism should blind us to recognizing that any approach is - like all models - an inherently flawed representation of reality that happens to sit at the intersection of realism and convenience, both very subjective measures.
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So true. I made the error of allowing players fairly frequent training opportunities early on, allowing them entirely too easily to get to the above-50s in a bunch of their skills. So the subsequent campaign became frankly hectic, as these players have been almost literally DRIVEN from event to event across Genertela for 10 years. Fortunately once they hit runelord status the 90% time/money to cult crimped their ability to train at will (sadly there isn't an explicit such need for sorcerers..and by the time I thought of one it would have been a punitive retcon). As a result of my experiences I'd made this training 'minigame' in excel in case anyone finds it useful. It's fairly system agnostic RQ2/3/MRQ/Mythras. Once RQG comes out, if people want, I'd be happy to adjust it.
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This is a Character Training worksheet in excel, although I call it a training minigame because it's damn fun. (OK maybe not damn fun. But more fun than calculating training.) A few comments: Sadly, it does NOT run in Google docs, and I don't know GD's feature set well enough to know if it ever could. Costs are generally based on the estimable Kim Englund's excellent training costs table- listed on the 3rd tab. 2nd tab explains the various matrices used to generate the results. Having made too much training time available to my players early on, and them having lots of cash to blow, I spent a lot of time thinking about the cost/benefits of training. I couldn't argue much with the costs in Kim's table (far better than canon), I thought about "what are the other possible drawbacks of training hard constantly?" Injury: the consequence of training is, of course, the omnipresent chance of injury - strains, sprains, or worse. So I built this sheet based on risk levels for various skills. The odds of being injured are lower with a MUCH better skilled trainer, or training slowly. Of course, trying to train hastily, or self-train (for skills where that's possible) increase the risk of mishap. (Self training significantly reduces but doesn't eliminate the costs as well.) The second consequence is uncertainty: in real life, you never know of course when you're going to "get better"...just that you eventually, probably will. Thus this table. Select the skill to be trained (there are also generic categories like "Other, risky, cheap" for skills not listed) and enter your current skill, relevant skill category bonus, INT (makes training easier if you're smart), APP (makes training cheaper if you're pretty). It will tell you if you can train it by yourself, and you decide if you will do so, as well as if you are taking it slow & careful, normal, or hasty. It then tells you the risk level as a result. Yes, training high levels of climb all alone is damned risky. Finally, I didn't like the determinism and predictability of the RQ canonical method of "ok I have 40 hours to train, so I can train that for 37.8 hours and get a check, woo." Thus, this table turns the mechanism on its head. A player recognizes that "oh, I have some free time, I'd like to train" and tells their DM what they'd like to train in - the DM fills in the details, and gets a result like "After 16.5 hours, and a cost of 45p, you get a skill check." The DM has to tell them "ok after about a half week, you get a check." or "you've trained for a couple of days but haven't gotten a check when the Fire Nation attacks..." It also gives the result, if the DM wants to use it. The sheet will give a result based on the final risk level, and the consequences of a fumbled check. (Screenshot above.) These can be severe...my suggestion is that when training highly dangerous things, serious thought be given to training slowly. Ultimately, the player has to make realistic decisions, recognizing if they're extremely skilled in something, it can take WEEKS of training to get a check. Will they really have weeks to spend? Only their DM knows... Let me know if you have questions. -
FWIW...number crunching To become a Rune Lord (RQ3) generally involved becoming 90% in what, five or six skills? Generally, those would be things that the character is doing/enjoys doing (otherwise why pick that cult?) so we could assume they 'start their Rune Lord effort' at better-than-middling skills Starting at a base of 60%, with a skill mod of 5%, getting to 90 takes 32 skill rolls (st dev 12 - I only ran about 170 iterations, that would settle down with more) Likely the character is going to try like hell to get a skill check in every one of their primary target skills at least once each play session, certainly. Let's say they only manage that in 80%. Playing 2x monthly, then would be 40 sessions or a little more than a year and a half of play. Obviously, this is subject to a lot of assumptions, but IMO it wasn't that hard to reach Rune Level...comparable to AD&D's reaching 10-12th lvl toons.
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I think his question is how (ie where, when) to actually sign up.
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Ruled out? • Agimori: a dark-skinned race <- analogous to Earthly negroid• Veldang: a blue-skinned race with no Earthly equivalent. • Vithelans: they resemble Earth’s East Asians.<- analogous to Earthly mongoloid• Wareran: a fair to olive-skinned race <- analogous to Earthly caucasian How do you get "there are no caucasians" out of that? (conceding of course there really is no thing as 'race', but there are recognized general ethnicities: http://blog.world-mysteries.com/science/how-many-major-races-are-there-in-the-world/ )
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Nah. I'm not terribly fond of the determinism in picking special effects, frankly. I think the Mythras model works well enough for mano-a-mano duelling, but doesn't scale to (my imagining) mass combats very well? I think the action-point budget weights numbers of combatants extremely heavily - too much so for fun, really. It might be exceptionally realistic, but then again RQ has to rationalize some things: frex we let SIZ 8 things have a STR of 15 (shrug). The numbers-advantage might work well enough for the players because vs the BBEG it usually is a handful of players ultimately vs one, but especially as players get to be more powerful, numbers will turn against them - ultimately (in Mythras) almost penalizing players for becoming powerful in a way (with no AoE spells, etc) that they can't counteract. IIRC RQ2 started to have this in its appendix combat options? But yeah, RQ3 formalized it. I'd evolved my house rules to something actually simpler in application, NOT based on specials: bashing weapons, if damage>=SIZ (bipeds), check to fall prone. For every 1/3 SIZ in excess, possibly go back 1m if check failed. If multiple of SIZ, automatically go back 1d3m for each multiple of siz, then check to fall prone.* Specials would do much more damage, so they were simply more likely to induce such effects. *neat result: just using club damage (1d6) and assuming a baseball is SIZ 0.1, this means a typical player would bat a ball 35d3 meters or on average about 200' or a max of 345' w/o strength bonus. Home runs are typically 340+ feet. Mickey Mantle's 'longest home run ever' of 643 ft is slightly less than a perfect roll on a special (or more likely a special plus a sizeable damage mod). Ultimately, the RQG rules are going to be just the same as any other rules set: amenable to houseruling as needed. I'm just looking forward to a core system that's a living, breathing, supported product that lets me run games and if people want to buy the rules somewhere, it doesn't have to be some ancient collector's price from ebay.
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Hell, if they don't do it, once we have the pdf, I was thinking about seeing what I could find online and doing it myself. Visual appeal is just so compelling.
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Also, just thought of this: Not sure if we're not too late for this, but if you said "hey, to run this game with the pregen characters and the monsters in Broken Tower, if you wanted to use figures you should get figure X(url) Y(url), and 4x Z(url)" that would be super helpful. Probably more accessible for people unable to drop $40+ on a few actual mini figures (minifigs are stupid expensive, we all know) would be if you could commission some quick artwork (particularly if it's already somewhat done for the bestiary?) to generate paper standup figures specifically correct for the creatures in the sample adventure. Make it available as a free download with the rules. If you have the artwork and need help making standup minis out of it, I'd be happy to help. (I use the binder clips, clip it to the bottom of the figure, then remove the spring-arms, works perfectly as a minifig.) This sort of thing: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/102147/Monster-StandIns-Paper-Minis I know we all CAN run games in our heads and verbally, but *particulary* for demo games, having a nice, color printable PDF multisheet battle map and figures - even paper standups - gets peoples' attention. Ala
