styopa

Curiously, this was one point where RQ3 went BACKWARDS from RQ2, which did have (optional) rules for bash and slash. IIRC AHs RQ3 (I don't have the rules handy) did say specials on bashing weapons did special knockback, because I always thought that was a pretty bad rule: it was largely meaningless in most situations, astonishingly overpowered in others. The only electronic copy I have of RQ3 is GWs one, and I don't see anything about special knockback in that, so not sure if I'm remembering wrong, or simply not finding it...

I like the use of the special effects to still differentiate the 'flavors' of piercing/cutting/bashing weapons, without burying every swing in a host of special rules. It's a good compromise.

This x1000. Doesn't matter which version of RQ you play. I'd strongly recommend reading the RQ6 quickstart rules (http://thedesignmechanism.com/resources/RuneQuest Essentials.pdf) to get a feel for the flavor of them. They appeal very strongly to some players. It's not a long read.

It's one reason we ruled that any parry of a natural weapon causes damage to that location. Suddenly, with that (tiny) change, the tremendous psychological advantage of having even a little weapon in your hand vs a natural-weapon attacker (given comparable skill levels) seemed to make sense. We did allow that a sapient target with an available limb could parry for an effective 3AP - ie if someone's trying to stab you with a knife, it's not inconceivable that you can 'bat away' the knife. In fact, if you watch people just starting training in anti-knife techniques, that's kind of how everyone starts...very, very few people try to 'dodge' a knife slash/stab. In regards to my example of a large creature, I think people got a little tangled in the specifics of the allosaurus. If it helps, consider instead a giant, which by rq2 rules would be siz 3d6(per 2m height)+18; so a 6-foot giant (?) would be siz 29; a 12'er would be siz40. Re MJ Sadique's comments on SR, I'm still a little baffled? How, mathematically, does starting at SR1, and counting up to 12 (or 10, RQ3) - which is RQ RAW - differ from starting at SR12 (or 10) and counting down to 1? Even setting aside the slavish linking of 1sr=1second (which is explicitly rejected in the RQ rules, btw), I truly don't understand how they could possibly be different? Admittedly, this isn't what I do; as I've described before, and which MJ is probably alluding to. I *do* use an open-format SR, where people roll init dice based on the 'openness' of the setting. D12 or even d20 are used for wide-open spaces, d6 for cramped little tunnels, meaning that the 'weightiness' of a +2 for dex is more significant in cramped quarters. But I'm not advocating that for anyone else, I'm simply saying that at the most basic level it's odd to count UP from sr1-sr12 instead of from 12 to 1, because of the concomitant caps it puts on mods (they can't get better than 0). And, reflecting Rosen's point about movement, he's intuitively right: we don't count movement as such against SR for weapon-strikes.

I rather expect they will, given IIRC Jeff's offhand comments at some point that he really felt Shamans needed more fleshing-out than RQ2 had. In any case, I'm rather interested to see it.

I disagree. First, I disagree with your dismissiveness about SIZ. A *crapton* of creatures in RQ are above SIZ 22 - in RQ3 (because that's the book I have handy) the size of the smallest-possible horse, or a largish Dark Troll. Are you seriously asserting that a largish Dark Troll - SIZ22 - should have the same reach as an Allosaurus (4d6+32 or an average of 46)? And while Dex is more constrained across species, even something as pedestrian as Baboons have a Dex of 3d6+6, meaning they could train that up to 24+9 or 35. Reasonably well-thought-out mechanics will scale properly to cover both. There's NO logical reason that initiative has to count up (causing the ceiling) instead of down (which could be open-ended). None. Game mechanics that artificially "make it easier" to kill massive, terrifying things may be perfectly fine for you, I find them as silly as arbitrarily ruling that a 1h sword does 2d20 damage... which would have the same effect of making bigger creatures easier to down. Let's remember that RQ4 is going to be based primarily on RQ2. If we're talking about what the rules "should" be, I presumed we're talking about RQ2 because that's pretty much where the RQ4 rules will be.

RQ2, pg 16

Except, as I've pointed out before, RQ RAW are fundamentally flawed in counting the wrong direction. RQ RAW is a "lower is better" system, where having a DEX SR of 0 is better than a DEX SR is 3. This is the sort of antiquated, counter-intuitive thing that was quite common in 1st generation RPGs but was (happily, in my view) largely cleared away by D&D 3e; they really broomed their whole system consistently into a "higher is better" paradigm. The problem with "lower is better" for SRs is that it functionally caps abilities that should be open-ended. IIRC, SIZ caps at 22 (SR 0), and Dex caps at 19 (SR 0), meaning that mechanically it doesn't matter if you're Siz 22, Siz 66, or Siz 200 - they all have the "same" reach? Also with Dex - there's no difference between 19, 59, or 109. I find that doesn't make much sense. Further, while I agree in principle with your "replace the +3 flat value with DEX SR" as fundamentally more interesting and character-varied, you can obviously see how DEX SR of 0 in that math makes a high-dex character *insanely* fast.

For years we've used an initiative system that had two values: reach and quickness. Reach was used on the first encounter between two combatants in melee, quickness thereafter. We don't mind systems that were relatively complex in calculation, as long as those calculations were OFFLINE, out of game time, and resulted in quickly, easily-applied numbers when combat rolled around. Reach was Siz/10, dropping fractions.and quickness was Dex/6, drop fractions. Weapons had their own reach and quickness values, usually the sum of both was 5. So a 2h war maul was reach 4, quick 1, while a dagger was reach 1, quick 4. (There were some exceptions, like a lance was 5/0, while a pike was 6/0.) In all cases, higher was better. The short version was that reach would get you what could be (particularly in RQ) the critical first strike, but if you could safely survive that first clash, having a close-in weapon was advantageous. Generally we considered 'drawing a weapon' to take 5sr-quickness value, so a dagger could be pulled out with a SR penalty of only 1, so we did have players who did the 'javelin while charging then whip out a shortsword for the close-in work, which seemed realistic.

I think the point that I personally am at is that 'combat expertise' generally is portable, to some degree. Whether that's combat experience with a bowie knife, a maul, or a spear is irrelevant - it's the fundamental set of combat reflexes, etc that would be more or less universal. The "fighting art" so to speak. Skill with a style of weapon is portable, to a lesser degree - ie if you have the basics of sword handling, I'd argue that to a point, that translates - 1h swords generally are similar in approach, be they broadswords or katanas, or at least moreso than that skill would translate to axes or flails. Finesse with a specific type - ie a single edged 1h cavalry sabre - is what experts have, and why they're experts.

It would be nice if the RQ4 system was more or less unified with the CoC7 system, or that they were harmonized. HOWEVER, as CoC7 was AFAIK essentially a child born of different parents and RQ4 is focused more on delivering a RQ2.1+ experience, I'm not sanguine about it being so....

Actually, as Rosen alluded IIRC RQ2 *explicitly* states that 12SR and 12 second round is basically coincidental (although, imo, if they didn't want there to be an implied connection, it was a poor design choice to make them the same value), and should not be assumed to mean that when 1 SR passes, 1 second has passed. SR are merely a way to resolve/order events in a segment of time that would otherwise be nearly simultaneous in reality.

That's actually a pretty good point. It's a way to implement a mechanic (rather than DM fiat, which I hate) that says when players earn an xp check and when they don't. Frex, if you're fighting something with <1/3 your best combat skill, you get no skill check. Or 2 things (simultaneously) with <1/4, or any number of things <1/5 your skill = no check possible.* It could be a little 'tougher' if you use 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 respectively, too. *I'd still say you always could get a check from a fumble, since that always has the potential to truly wreck you. Although, you could also make that immediate - fumble skill check is the fumble-consequence roll, so really, skilled toons will only learn from a mistake when it's particularly bad. Hmm, might be worth considering.

I think I've laid it out here (so I won't go too far into it) but we have a fairly fast-advancing system: normal success gives you one check, special two, critical three. Fumble gives you one, also, always. (You learn from what you screw up and still survive.) Subsequent successes with that skill, if they don't give you more checks, give you ticks. Ticks can be spent at next skillup either 1:1 to increase chance to get a skill up, or 4:1 to improve the skill improvement if you get one. It works for us.

My angle tends very much toward what the group wants. I can DM either way, but my longest-playing group prefer a crunchier, story-lite dungeon-crawly game, so that's what we do. It's all about MGF for the players, really.

It depends on approach. Are you (as the DM) a storyteller primarily crafting a tale for everyone to enjoy? Some people want that, others might feel a lack of agency: either railroaded along the story you want to tell, or that their actions don't matter ("whether I think to search this room for a clue or not, the DM's going to throw it in our laps anyway if it's important"). Or, are you the impersonal arbiter of the world's rules, in which case you simply rule the way the ball bounces (or the dice roll) and characters *can* get screwed if they happen to miss the sole critical McGuffin? Obviously, these are archetypes, and most DMs fall somewhere on the spectrum. Where I think one gets into thin ice is declaring "THIS IS THE ONE TRUE WAY TO PLAY RPGs".

It's your board and your rules, so I guess you can declare something as "final" as you like and make it stick (here). I think people are simply proposing mechanisms to scale sorcerous casters' power because they feel that a small chance to throw a nuclear bomb doesn't 'average out' to balance against a moderate chance to do moderate damage. It may seem like it should mathematically, but in practice I think it's dull for the largely-impotent caster, and when it "goes off" it renders unnecessary the rest of the party's efforts, not to mention blossoming balance issues as the caster becomes even reasonably competent at casting spells with little top-end scaling in impact.

Well, Sheng Seleris was a shaman, so we know they can be hella powerful. I quite liked Sandy's Shaman rules, so I hope they're very much a model for how RQ4 went forward. In my campaign, more than any other tradition, their utility had a great deal to do with how immanent spirits are generally. If they're common, the shaman could quickly grow quite powerful, and their abilities had a substantial impact on the party's play. (Their absence is in my view the toughest part of porting over non-RQ adventures into RQ terms, because in Glorantha I believe they *should* be relatively commonly encountered. IMO it's harder to balance their impact on play as their impact-curve is pretty steep: an unprepared party will get chewed up, but even one person having a couple-point spirit shield quickly trivializes all but the most powerful spirit attackers.) I'm particularly interested in seeing what the mechanics are for the interfaces between the magic traditions: when can (or can't) a shaman use sorcery, for example? We know now that LM's use sorcery, so what are the boundaries (cultural, meta-magical, mechanical rules-wise) between the various traditions and where are the overlaps. Many cults have shamans as integral (Kyger Litor, Waha, etc) but Likewise, how the RQ4 rules approach spirit combat will of course impact much about how powerful/useful/necessary a shaman is to a party.

Glorantha: World of Relativism! I'd submit that should be a foundational rune for the world, but that would really depend on how you look at it.

Personally, I made my DM screen cover out of a collection of runes (basically the inverse of the above) and Simon Bray's magnificent figures of Glorantha: http://blackyinkin.deviantart.com/gallery/?offset=48

I'm not really sure what you're getting at here? Obviously memory is massively important in a largely pre-literate world, even in the literate bits before Gutenberg. I totally see both the point of a memory skill and (on the contrary) the point of leaving it out. Somehow my main question about Grimoires and their role in RQ4 sorcery was (entirely) missed?

So I'm curious what role Grimoires will take in RQ4 Sorcery? Is it merely a synonym for 'big old book' or is it a thing of meaning in itself? I know they played a role in other Glorantha rules sets (I didn't play that one at all), and they're mentioned a few times in the Guide. Are these plain-old-spellbooks (the 'memory palace' mentioned above sounds pretty much like D&D spellbook mechanics without actually having to carry around spellbooks) or are they something more substantial?

Such a magnificent comment. I've frankly always subtly or not-so discouraged people playing Tricksters, because (IMO) the general 'i don't really care what happens to you because of it but this will be good for a larf' sociopathy I've suspected could actually cause some interPLAYER difficulties that aren't (again, IMO) conducive to MGF. This suspicion was validated when I finally read the narrative of the Exigers Pamaltela campaign (http://seiyuu.com/okamoto/writing/campaign_log_2_0.pdf) ; Mister Man was perfectly run, and I'm pretty sure my PCs would have eventually just murdered him.

That's a tough call. It's fun when someone wants to play that way, but hard to 'call out' someone who's having good ideas to "shut up, your toon's not that smart"? I do use INT when it can be mechanically useful; so for example when we do statement of intent at the start of the round, I go by ascending INT order WITHOUT allowing extensive discussion (it's combat, after all). So the stupid characters have to sort of make their action choices in a vacuum, while the smart characters get to know what everyone (on their side, anyway) is doing first. It's not a huge advantage, but it does lead to the characters 'coaching' the dumber toons on "ok if this happens, you do this" which I think is both realistic and fairly funny.

Yeah, took me a bit to find Sacred Time, I thought it was just me. But it's just pretty.