styopa

Illumination, +1%

To be a member, you have to change your shirt every hour, and if someone asks you why your shirt is different, you simply insist it really never was different, but that they were perhaps misunderstanding the shirt previously, and that how they perceive your shirt now is, in fact, correct.

We are seriously, seriously bored and starved for news if THIS is what we're debating? I'll have to tell my players that if they DARE call me 'referee' or 'DM' during a play session, they risk apostasy and schism! I don't see the point of being dogmatic on such a silly, trivial issue.

That's what RQ2 called them.

Tangentially, what I believe is happening is more muscle memory than anything else. Repeat practice with anything actually strengthens brain dendrites along the necessary pathways, technically making the brain work less, delay less (even internally) executing sets of actions. Think about someone with 30 years driving experience vs a new driver: even if the new driver knows intellectually how to handle a skid, for example, they have to think it through to get the desired results. Someone with decades of driving experience automatically steers into the skid without *really* even conscious thought until it's practically over. This doesn't really have a RULES application, it's just an observation.

I was specifically talking about melee weapons at that point, actually. Yes, one could absolutely look at it like that. In fact, is probably one of the core differences that the varying base skill% is trying to get it, rationalized into a single number. A high base skill would be a weapon that takes little analysis/practice to use (or for which analysis/practice doesn't improve it much), while a low base skill is likely a weapon that requires a fair amount of experience or training to be using 'at full speed'. And I'm not going to repost his video, but Lindybeige makes a pretty cogent argument that whether you look at it as a speed penalty that goes away over increased skill, or as a speed improvement that goes with skill, a skilled user of a weapon is markedly faster in employing that weapon than a beginner.

For that matter, one might plausibly wonder why there are two different 'methods' for missile and melee weapon initiative? The hand-wavy bit about "well in melee there are all sorts of feints and such" works for D&D but has always seemed awkward here. (Not to mention the complete absence of skill improving the speed of a character's attack which is pretty clearly IRL true.) (I've always allowed characters to spend their attack% as 'feinting' which directly deducts from their opponent's defense vs that attack; obviously it's mainly of value to attackers with over 96% attack, where the loss of % is only hurting their chance of special/crit.) At least in RQ most missile weapons were given the (2) S/MR or (3) 1/SR speed, meaning you could (if they were handy) toss throwing axes, darts, or rocks just as fast as you could shoot arrows. (Oddly javelins were 1/MR while slings were S/MR, which IMO should be reversed.)

Because it just seems cheesy to me (regardless of RAW, not every rule is perfect). Feel free to disagree. In our game, higher and higher point value spells were typically harder to find and more expensive. For example, with spirit magic spells, if you actually did the 'fight it out with the spirit' thing, a heal 6 would be a harder spell to learn than a heal 1. By that same logic, it seems like it should be harder to come by a shield 6 than a shield 1. Call it a power-scaling brake. We rarely played that all out, just making higher point spirit magic spells increasingly expensive - a "1" might be 100p, but a 3 would be (100+200+300) = 600p. Dunno if that was canon somewhere or just our houserule. For divine magic, we said that you couldn't just buy shield 6. You'd need to sacrifice for shield 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 first, making high-end divine magics exceedingly rare. But with those RAW, if you have 6 people with shield 1, they can all cast them on a single target and give that target shield 6. Seems far too easy to get a shield 6.

I'd say such templates would be mostly appropriate for a setting/campaign book to keep the rules as portable as possible, but AFAIK the RQ-new rules will essentially be 'baked into' Dragon Pass from the start.

IMO that's a pretty narrow literalist reading of spell boosting. Yes, most of the time boosting is going to be to try to penetrate defenses, but I can see it also being used to 'reinforce' for the reasons already illustrated. And Countermagic 2 boosted with 3 points is different (again, pretty simply illustrated above) than Countermagic 5, clearly.

I thought they were already nearly done editing, and almost to art-commissioning?

Um, I'm agreeing with you. You're the one that said "..there's a point of far too rare for there even to be a special case, and this is beyond it..." Again, I'm AGREEING with you, *certainly* in the case of a finesse weapon like a rapier. But a club? C'mon. Considering that (I'd guess) most DM's are going to use "1h club" and "2h club" for pretty much any stick that's picked up and whacked-about from tree-branch to table-leg to Grendel's arm, sussing out the nuances to assert there's substantial handedness to the tool is pretty pointless minutiae. YGMV

Which direction the blows are coming from? Sounds like a rationalization to me. I mean, if it works for you, great, but if you're going to take that into account in this case, why not then have some similarly applicable modifier likewise for *anyone* facing a left-handed opponent? Or worst (as any lefty fencer will agree) a lefty facing a lefty? What it comes down to in this case, in which we can and do disagree is the left-right portability of the learned ability to use a 1h tool. If you learn to do something with your right hand, how much of that ability is *specific* to using that hand? How much is muscle-memory, vs internalized knowledge about (for a weapon) how the geometry of an attack works, what an opponent is watching, how to make a feint successfully, etc? To add complexity, I would expect it varies a lot by tool, too. There's not much finesse to a club - it *probably* doesn't matter a lot which hand you're using it in where other melee weapons may be very different.

1) I entirely agree that this is such minutiae that it's certainly not worth MENTIONING in rules text, unless you want a 10,000-page rule book filled with special cases. But as a DM, I don't mind hypothetically mulling over these edge cases conceptually so that I can have a ready explanation in case it comes up. And yes, in 30+ years of RQ play, I *have* had a player lose his shield arm, and pick up the shield with the main hand for use. And that';s what forums are for...we're not going to run out of discussion space on the interwebs. 2) to the point about shields generally (hoping the thread-context nazis won't drift in and demand satisfaction), I actually see what I'm talking about as a simplification of the rules because then the approach is consistent, without 'special exceptions for shields'. "For any one-handed weapon or device: If it's in your main hand, you're at full base skill. If it's in your offhand, the base is halved." Note, I'm only talking about the base skill - not whatever the toon has learnt atop it. This then means that the toon still gets the benefit of what they've learned, and for skilled enough combatants the difference between offhand and mainhand ultimately wouldn't make much difference....which makes sense to me. This would make the 'base' values for shields in rq2 actually be 10/20/40 (but usually halved in normal use)...I don't see that as too overpowered. Even someone totally untrained, picking up a shield in their hands to simply protect themselves could probably do a decent job of it with a large shield, after all (assuming they were strong enough).

Personally, I like to have a combat system that's both i) faintly realistic and ii) logically consistent... But hey, YGMV.

IIRC that became RAW for RQ3? Or we house-ruled it so long it became canon in my brain: - 2h weapon you can attack AND parry with each round - 1h weapon/shield you can attack OR parry with in around, but not both. I too would assume that shield skill was defined as your "off" arm in all usual contexts, which does indeed lead to some unclear logical results. Normally IIRC, offhand weapon use is at HALF skill. So would this then mean that the 'base' for a shield (5/10/20% for small/med/large - not actually in RQ2, but in the errata) is already halved because it's your offhand? If you were to grab a large shield in your good hand, would you be at base 40%? Or is the arm you're usually using it with considered in this odd case to be your primary, and your normally-main hand would be the 'off' hand so halved?

Clearly, that's not even 1SR of movement.

Happy to talk about rapiers.

How long do you want to keep going around in circles on this? Your example was 30' (9.144m), not 10m. So the first step would be to stop shifting the goalposts? Second, you said specifically "... In RQ, thanks to SR's the guy with the crossbow is going to be able to get a shot off before that happens. In most cases he can even change his action and "react" to the swordsman during combat and still get the shot off before being attacked." To suggest that a melee toon with a spear* has to perform some sort of special gavotte to "stop", "wait X SR", then "strike" once he's 14cm from his target is nonsensical. And you're complaining about the stilted artificiality of D&D combat? *Dex SR 0 with any melee weapon of SR1 could be as small as size 7 and still have a combined melee SR of 3. With a 2h long spear (SR0) they could literally be SIZ 1 and still have a melee SR of 3. I merely pointed out that in RQ it was in fact possible that a high-dex melee attacker COULD engage an average-dex missile combatant before that combatant could release the shot. It abundantly IS so. It even reflects real-life. I'm not even arguing that RQ isn't better, of course it is. Not sure why we're continuing to bother this thread with our tangent?

You're simply wrong. I said FWIW in your 30' example, RAW RQ2 a high-dex character (Dex SR0) COULD close 29.5' (9m) to melee an average-dex archer with a ready arrow before that arrow could be loosed (SR3). Considering the RQ2 text about combat SRs being used simultaneously for movement, then that DexSR 0 toon could be hitting that archer before he fired in RQ too. Very specifically I was discussing a high Dex character, vs an average Dex archer (sr3 per RQ2 example of average). And yes I said COULD, depending on if the dm allowed (per that discussion) the combination of movement and readying weapon for striking (as I would probably for a thrusting weapon like a long spear). He /she could easily have a melee Sr total of 3 or less with a Dex Sr of 0 (say a long spear and decent siz). Object all you want, it's certainly possible, RAW, not nearly the impossibility you suggested in your original example. Frankly, despite your desperate attempt to explain it away, all this exercise did was increase my respect for Perrin's sense of realism as IRL guidelines for police are that a knife wielder should be considered a potential deadly threat even if you have a gun if he's within... 30 feet.

To answer you in reverse order, 2) I'm looking at RQ2, page 17, "Multiple Activities Outside of Melee". 1) in that same section, it says that SR can be combined with movement. Thus as long as the attackers melee SR is <3 (ie Dex SR0, Siz SR1, and weapon SR 1 for example) his or her weapon would be available to attack by SR 3 when he/she arrives. If we're going to move around threads, I'd include the original post of the video crabbing about D&D initiative system, which started the digression.

The example on page 17 of the RQ2 book disagrees with you. (shrug) 1) it calls someone with Dex SR3 as "average dex"so that's what I was using. 2) it says EXPLICITLY that character will fire the first arrow on SR3, no sooner. 3) a DEX SR 0 character could start moving immediately on Dex SR1 (3m), SR2 (+3m now at 6m), and on SR3 (pg15: if two combatants have the same SR, higher DEX goes first) - in this case, the charging guy has a much higher Dex and would arrive at 9m (29.5') and strike before the lower-dex guy would release the arrow. I think the RAW are pretty clear? Obviously it's my view, as I wrote it. So we disagree. (shrug) My point anyway was that he was thematically flailing about looking for reasons to hate on D&D5e, and chose for his example HIS inability to understand how to mechanically approach the D&D initiative system in the most useful way for the spell he wanted to cast. In the specific example he used, if it were in RQ's SR system it wouldn't have been any different, really - let's say he could pop his spell early on SR 2 or 3, he'd have done so, and (providing the opponents had stated "we're going to move to attack him" previously), being knocked backward by his "push" spell would just mean that on their SR (later) they'd get up and move toward him. His explanation of 'how RQ works" wasn't "how RQ works" it was how HIS DM ran that game of RQ which was (statement of intent) + (DM adjudication of what happens) - which a DM could likewise do in D&D just as well, for that matter...in RQ2 BTW there's nothing about changing your statement of intent or reacting aside from being able to cancel actions which are no longer possible. His complaints are literally pointless.

Not actually. See below. In any case, I'm not sure I'd be quite so categorical. I know we all here prefer the RQ system so it's sort of preaching to the choir, but in the first place, the D&D system of initiative is DELIBERATELY simplified toward speed and MGF, with the rationalization that at least whatever irregularities there are, are consistently applied so they don't benefit one side or the other consistently. Either way, my point was that his rant was sort of off the mark. ALL game systems I'm aware of use SOME sort of sequentialist approach to resolve nearly-simultaneous actions, whether it's the simplistic (D&D), the more complicated (RQ) the even-more-complicated (SFB's impulses), to the "you've got to be kidding" (Phoenix Command's 1/10-of-a-seconds resolution). I'd say that your example - while clearly proving that RQs sequential system is in my view intrinsically better - amounts to a quibble because it was in my view a deliberate tradeoff by EGG. If they'd trivially opted for the alternative of declaring initial actions and then executing using their mechanics (which would have been much more in the spirit of EGG's wargamey AD&D original rules), they'd be much closer to RQ results anyway. FWIW in your 30' example, RAW RQ2 a high-dex character (Dex SR0) COULD close 29.5' (9m) to melee an average-dex archer with a ready arrow before that arrow could be loosed (SR3). Considering the RQ2 text about combat SRs being used simultaneously for movement, then that DexSR 0 toon could be hitting that archer before he fired in RQ too.

Except that 'meta' rules help a DM be consistent in interpretation, and allow players some conceptual understanding of frameworks that are, after all, entirely imaginary. I'd say both of those are unalloyed good things? I'd say it's obvious that there's enough 'wiggle room' in the mechanics that there are a number of models that could potentially be rationalized to fit the mechanics as given; thus, DM's always have leeway to have their OWN interpretations and systems. I'm not sure I agree that postulating some 'meta' concepts of magic necessarily are the start of the slippery slope to one-true-gamism. They certainly don't have to be. For example, IMG there are all sorts of variation from canon; I wouldn't even faintly suggest that others follow my mental wanderings, they're for me, my players, and my campaigns alone. More likely, if I refer to them at all it's going to be because I've used them so long that I've forgotten they're house rules and not canonical.

I'd like to pose a few magic interaction questions to you, because I felt they were pretty clear situations but my players have interestingly differing opinions. I'm just curious how others play it. We use RQ3 rules but I don't think version actually matters much here in principle, as these go more toward meta-concepts of how magic works. 1a) a character has protection 2 on them, and someone casts protection 3. At this point, I think we'd all agree that effectively they would have prot 3 functioning. Then someone casts a dispel that takes away the prot 3, do they still have the prot 2 remaining? 1b) would this be any different for divine magic, say someone had shield 1, then cast shield 2. 1c) sorcery? Say, resist damage 4 then resist damage 6. 1d) in each of these cases, assume the HIGHER ones was already existing, and then (for some reason) someone cast the lower-power one; presumably in every case nothing would effectively happen as a higher-power spell already exists...but would the mp still be spent or the casting be considered "used"? 2a) a person has a protection spell, some physical armor, and also natural armor: an attacker against them crits. Does it ignore EVERYTHING (magic, physical, and natural armors?) or only some layers? 2b, c) same question, with divine(b) and sorcery(c) 3a) a person has protection 3, and someone casts shield 1; does shield 1 stack atop prot 3 (effectively giving them prot 5, countermagic 2), partially stack (giving them prot 3 (ie the best in existence in that category), countermagic 2), or replace the protection (giving them prot 2, countermagic 2); What about vice versa - someone has Shield 1 and casts prot 3? 3b) a person has protection 3 and someone casts damage resist 4: do they stack, partially cancel, or does the DR replace the prot 3? Vice versa: has DR 4, and someone casts prot 3? 3c) a person has DR 4 and someone casts Shield 1 on them? The reverse? 4) would countermagic 2 in existence prevent detection by a detect life (1 pt spell)? 5) attack spells can be boosted with mp's to help overcome defenses; can defenses likewise be boosted with "defensive" mp?