styopa

RQ2 was a creature of its time. Most other rulesets of the era was any better (and a lot were a lot worse). IIRC C&S was probably the best-organized, but still not great.

IMO "Evocative" is always in tension with "useful". Fluff can also get in the way, and did, in RQ2. Maybe it's the fact that I came up through wargaming, but I want a rulebook to be a reference work FIRST of all. After all, most of the time you pick it up you're not doing so as an entertaining work of literature, you're picking it up to look up a rule, or table, or value. You want to find it and get back to the game as fast as possible. RQ2 was a very evocative rule book, no question. Far moreso than the more sterile, generic RQ3. But if you really look at the RQ2 rules as a text, they're HORRIBLY organized. Things are hard to find, it's simply not that USEFUL of a reference work (well, until you know it by heart; then again, at that level of familiarity the D&D DMG is also useful and it is horribly organized as well). I'm glad they're going with 3 books for RQ4, if only to put the rules in one, the setting in another, and the creatures (because they take a lot of space) in a third. That makes a lot more sense in terms of utility.

1) I'm entirely with him on the idea that init being based on DEX (exclusively) is nonsense. It's a kludgy old relic of RPG yesteryear. To me, "initiative" in a fast paced situation has to do almost entirely with i) basic physical reaction time and ii) experience. i) this is probably why Dex has become such a canon in RPGs for initiative. Obviously, some people have better reflexes than others. There's significant human variation. He's a little off the track going down the semantic rabbit hole of the specific MEANING of dexterity, apparently forgetting that most games use that term for a catch-all of a collection of what may be almost entirely unrelated factors (balance, reflexes, etc) that do impact reaction time. This is a more-or-less physiological thing, and thus definitely degrades over aging. ii) experience has EVERYTHING to do with it; from muscle-memory to simply 'having done it before' to the 'panic-factor' of the inexperienced... all contribute to why a 40yr old is a much safer driver than a teen: she can (barely even noticing) avoid accidents that would catch a 19yr old. 2) his "point" about the thing with the pushback spell simply showed that he didn't know how to PLAY TACTICALLY with initiative; with such a spell, for example, it would be FAR better to HOLD action until they'd wasted their init moving up and THEN pop the pushback spell. Just like a healer that wins init, it's stupid for her to cast a healing spell when nobody (yet) needs it; far better to hold action and drop it when it is needed. That's how sequential init works. The fact that he doesn't "get" that part of it doesn't mean it's ipso-facto a bad system. 3) no, people really don't act in sequential order. We all understand that initiative mechanics are meant to be simplifications of great numbers of actions that (IRL) happen in parallel, right? I don't really understand his reference to RQ because RQ, as much as I love it, STILL has a sequential resolution system. His beef, and his sense that RQ doesn't have the issue, is with people doing whatever they want when their initiative comes up based on the situation at that point. This (I agree) unreasonably empowers toons with bad initiatives because they are much-less-impacted by the earlier actions of people with high init. They get to react "for free" in essence. What he likes about RQ's resolution is in the statement-of-intent mechanic which is then resolved through the SR (sequential) system). One could, theoretically, do that same thing in D&D, if one wanted. (It also sounds like he had a better RQ dm, imo.) 4) let's remember at the end of the day, the mechanics of an RPG combat system aren't about simulating to a high degree of accuracy how combat precisely proceeds. We may like to debate that they are, but they aren't. What they are is ALWAYS a COMPROMISE between what (we believe) is reasonably authentic and what takes an appropriate amount of time. Sure, you could develop a hyper-realistic melee combat system (the Phoenix Command of melee, if you will) that parses what happens in each 1/10 of a second, uses an impulse-based movement system to simulate better (with narrower time steps) the simultaneity of melee, and maybe even reach the goal of a perfect simulation. NOBODY WOULD PLAY THAT, because most people don't want to spend a 3 hour gaming session figuring out what happens in 10 seconds of combat. RQ already pushes that boundary for lots of players (sure, let's play out that attack of 20 trolls on a party of 8 PCs...3 hours might be optimistic). No, RPG combat systems are about resolving the conflict of combat in a way that appropriately recognizes the abilities of all present, gives a result that's reasonable based on that clash of abilities, and does it all in a reasonable amount of time. Hell, Robin Laws more or less rationalized it down to roll your "combat" skill vs their "combat" skill and in one roll you've determined the winner. Also, Lindybeige's next video in that series is pretty good too; however RQ wasn't the first with a fumble table at all. I'm pretty sure Arduin did it before RQ was published. He has some GREAT points about common issues in melee combat, problems, and the necessity of secondary weapons particularly in light of changing engagement ranges. This is something I'd LOVE to figure out a more authentic set of mechanics for RQ4. Finally: I wonder if he understands that collars DO fold down?

I'd guess anyone with the skills to write it is waiting for RQ4 to come out.

Your point is well taken, and thanks to Nick J's posted videos on the subject, I feel far more informed on the subject, thank you. On a tangent: Curious that the dirk has no tang at all? Going back to the minutiae of which "rapier" is represented by the RQ weapon list (the Bronze Age thing called a "rapier" by archaeologists, or the late-Medieval thing more widely recognized as a "rapier"), I'd still say firmly that the gross differential between stats between a shortsword and a rapier would strongly imply that the RQ2 "rapier" is indeed, the latter one, anachronistic as that may be. Personally, I'd find it amusing if someone showed up at a fencing bout with one of the Bronze Age ones, insisting that "this too is a rapier, really!". Of course, they'd likely get owned due to reach and, lacking a crossguard, nearly no ability whatsoever to parry...

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B018uRj3WEzoSUZjYmtobVByQTA That's my latest version of an excel character sheet. Yes, it's tweaked for my personal RQ3 homerules, but it's excel you can easily modify it. A few things I felt were useful ideas: - since hp and mp are constantly changing, we have them as SLIDERS along the edges, instead of numbers you write and erase 00's of times. Use a small paperclip and just slide it up and down along the edge of the page to indicate current values. (same with fatigue steps and luck points, which we really don't use much in play) - body hp thing has separate lines for MAGICAL armor points, PHYSICAL armor points, and NATURAL armor points in the "order" in which they are hit with damage, if it matters. - skills are tracked on the back, but all the constantly-used action skill values have places on the front of the sheet. The goal would be that you have everything you need quickly on one side. In a perfect world, the sheet would be completely automated but I found that ultimately more trouble than it's worth in a lot of contexts (so many exceptions...) so the only things that are automated are SRs, hps, location hps, and damage mod (according to our more-gradual 1d4 progression...houserule) My intent ultimately is that when RQ4 comes out, I *will* be rewriting this with more automation (ie Passion sliders, so if you increase a passion by +15, automagically the opposite one drops 15) etc.

I daresay that's the truth for any of those silly boxes that AH ever sold. Stupid money-grubbing move.

I didn't honestly even know there WERE bronze-age things called rapiers until I was doing research to reply to this thread. And then was wrong-footed as my entire point was to say "it's not that much different from a gladius" (my canon is RQ3) only to double check before posting and note that RQ2 didn't call it a gladius, RQ2 called it a shortsword. :/ If you could point (ha ha) me in the direction of good information on the topic? I'm interested. Are you saying that they were more like (and used comparably to) a more-or-less-hiltless poignard? The wiki for "rapier" doesn't even concede the USE of the word before 1500, and confines itself to a fairly narrow clade of weapons. I see things like "The Bronze Age Rapier" by Malloy, but honestly, the applicability of the word "rapier" in that context utterly escapes me? Sure, if your use of the word 'rapier' is "one handed sword with a narrow blade used for thrusting", hell that could even apply to a gladius, but I would imagine most people would agree that's NOT a rapier?

It's one of the fundamental reasons people enjoy Glorantha so much - it can literally be anything without having to adhere to some faux-Medievalist (or worse, Tolkienesque*) canon. *I say this not because I dislike Tolkien at all, it's just ground that so bloody many RPGs have trod (trodden?) so many times before.

(shrug) could be true. If so, however, I find very little difference between "Bronze age rapier" and a RQ2 Shortsword/RQ3 Gladius: (bronze age rapier) Certainly not enough to justify their significantly different stats?: (RQ2) Shortsword: Min Str: none, Min Dex: none, dmg 1d6+1, price 25, enc: 0.6, SR 3 (RQ2) Rapier Min Str: 7, Min Dex: 13, dmg 1d6+1, price 100, enc: 1.2, SR 2 Nah, while your assertion is certainly plausible, I think a simpler explanation is that the RQ2 rapier is just that, a rapier in the more common vernacular usage. And while yes, "xbows" as a thing certainly existed since the 6th century, I'd be hard-pressed to find pre-medieval hand-carried "heavy crossbows" and "arbalests". Maybe you know more about them than I do, certainly? Again, I think it's far simpler to conceptualize that RQ2 was (in today's parlance) an indie-level project (as were most RPGs of the time) and nobody gave much of a crap about meticulous anthropological consistency...it was about what was going to be fun. Trying to use such original stuff as a justificatory exegetical 'exclusion zone' about what is and isn't canon is a very modern retcon to what RPGs essentially were in 1979 and imo as an approach, deeply flawed. To the original point - calling out the miniatures maker for some failure to confirm to an asserted authenticity, well, that's a pretty modern internetty thing too. I think it's a cool miniature, and I'm delighted SOMEONE's making Glorantha/RQ miniatures at all?

MOB can correct me if I'm wrong, but there's so much deep-seated dislike for nearly-anything-RQ3 in Chaosium combined with a healthy heaping of blinding rose-colored RQ2 nostalgia that I can't imagine RQ3 *ever* getting this treatment. You seem to be somehow missing RosenMcstern's point? By the link you posted, Chaosium produced 5 box sets in 2 years. AH produced 17 products in 1985-1990 (that report says 19 but I flat-out disregard the stupid money-grab that were the character sheet "supplements"). And let's point out - there were EIGHT products, including new Glorantha material, JUST in 1988. Not specifically scenario material, no. But it's splitting a pretty fine hair to say "no new Glorantha scenarios" for "eight years". And that page is dated, not really discussing much (aside from your appended note at the bottom) about Sun County, River of Cradles, Shadows on the Borderlands, Strangers in Prax, Dorastor and Lords of Terror - really what I was referring to as some of the best game-supplements I've ever seen. Is it ironic to be cursing AH for spending so much time on reprints ... when Chaosium just took in $200k on RQ2 reprints, and is pretty much going back to the RQ2 well (again) and Dragon Pass (again) for RQ4...? Aside from MRQ/MRQ2, Runequest has been nearly nothing BUT "reprints" since the AH days? Hell, not to trivialize the astonishing amount of new content Jeff authored for the Guide, but c'mon - much of that was technically "reprint" material too? No, the direction they were going may not have suited you personally, nor Chaosium. For that matter, who chose to sell them the rights to RQ but not Glorantha? Was that their choice or Chaosiums? If Greg held tight to Glorantha by his choice*, you can hardly condemn AH for failing to produce Gloranthan material? *I genuinely don't know the case here. Your link, and http://www.maranci.net/rqpast.htm both fail to explore that particular nuance of motivation? If Glorantha RQ was flourishing so incredibly, why was the property sold to AH in the first place? That seems...odd. Not to mention, it's a little misleading to say "RQ was 2nd only to D&D commercially in 1983" and therefore somehow AH ruined it. That's like saying I'd run second to Usain Bolt in a footrace. Yes, I'd be second but it's not like "2nd place" meant "in any way close" in this context, at least in the US gaming market. If we're talking about the 1983 RPG market, it was D&D....RQ ...and then somewhere way down the list, what else? T&T? C&S? If you're asserting that RQ somehow lost it's place marketwise, you can't really be asserting that either of those did any better? In short, I don't think you've made an objective case for "didn't do what MOB wanted" = "almost killed the game". I bear no torch for AH. Hell, I'd have loved them to do a better job. Do I think they didn't understand RPGs? Absolutely. I too was annoyed at their gross money-grabbing too. Trollpak ended up in what, 4 different products? RQ3 probably made as many blunders in adding too-complicated and klunky rules as it did cleaning up and improving the practically-indie-product that was RQ2. There's plenty to criticize AH for in this context, full stop. But it seems to me like there's a little rewriting of historical narrative going on here to somehow contrive to paint Chaosium as the victim. "We were doing great and it was all rainbows and (non-Ralzakark) unicorns until that nasty big corporate AH came and wrecked everything because they didn't do what we hoped!" I don't know why? Wouldn't the true burden of that result fall on whomever made the choice to take such an allegedly-flourishing product and farm it to another company?

I was never really happy with any initiative system I ever found. The RQ one is simply upside down in the first place leading to all sorts of broken math, and every other one I either stumbled across or tried to craft either 1) encouraged sequential-movement silliness where whoever acted could rules-lawyer their way into performing actions that made no actual sense while everyone else was "frozen" awaiting their turn ("I run around behind him and stab him in the back!"), or 2) was ridiculously overcomplicated in the instance (combat) that should be really quick. I was so desperate, I admit, I've occasionally considered hauling out the impulse-move-chart from Starfleet Battles on occasion but even I could see when my desire for verisimilitude had gone too far. Never went so far as to actually try to implement it, I'd expect my players would lynch me.

Really? Who asserted that? Monster Coliseum Vikings Land of Ninja Griffin Island Glorantha, Crucible of the Hero Wars Gods of Glorantha Elder Secrets of Glorantha Troll Pak Troll Gods Into the Troll Realms Haunted Ruins Sun County River of Cradles Dorastor Snakepipe Hollow Apple Lane Lords of Terror Gloranthan Bestiary Shadows on the Borderlands Strangers in Prax Daughters of Darkness Eldarad RQ Cities RQ Monsters ,,,,and let's not forget who actually published Dragon Pass? Curious to describe AH's stewardship as "Not enough material published to support the game" .... ? I daresay that list not only compares favorably in quantity to the entire sum of Chaosium RQ products before it, some of the products there are among the qualitatively best supplements I've ever owned for ANY game.

In re your 'Sword of Humakt' example, I actually disagree. Hand a Sword of Humakt a flail that he's never used before and no, I don't see that he somehow organically 'should' be deadly with it. Re related skills, I'd say that since the variety here is probably endless, most of those would HAVE to be left to DM ruling unless you want a 1000-page rulebook. Logically, yeah, related languages should bonus each other, sure. For example, RQ practically invites it by the way they classify their weapons into '1h blunt' vs '2h blunt' etc. I give any player with a skill in a SPECIFIC weapon in that table, half skill with any other weapon on that table unless they get a skill roll which might improve that skill, then it becomes a specific one... Yes, it's possible for a little-used specific weapon skill to be later overcome by larger improvements in another specific skill, such that "half of the larger skill" is greater than the specific; then the smaller specific just defaults to the half-value for the time being. PERSONALLY, I'd love to see a little different approach to the new RQ rules, where development leads to specificity. So for example, you might just have a base "weapon" skill up to 50%. Once you get over 50%, you'd have to specify "1h edged" but that skill would be good across ALL 1h-edged category weapons. Then at 75%, you'd have to specify a specific 1h edged type (broadsword, for example). All your 1h edged would remain at 75%, but your skill with the specific kind could then progress to 100%. At 100%, it's with a SPECIFIC WEAPON, in sense that experts tend to treasure a specific tool in their mastery. Not only would this represent what I think would be a fairly realistic system, then NPCs would be easier to roll up, as their (likely lower) weapon skills would be more general. That BBEG might be great with his particular magical scimitar, but whoever picks it up, if they want to become really GOOD with it will need to commit to using it.

Well, they've always played together. It just meant in another way that they were murdering each other.

First, you may want to review the the Veksø horned helmets, from the later Bronze Age (ca. 1100-900 BC) In any case...I'm not sure it's quite so cut and dried as you imply. This keeps getting tossed around because the source material's pretty flippin' unclear and keeps using the term 'it's a bronze age world' as a shorthand. According to RQ2: (text) "...Glorantha is an ancient period and early Dark Ages World..." (addenda) "Technological Base - Glorantha is a Bronze Age world. This general statement is meant to illustrate the social development and cultural level of most of the people in the world. In addition, the prevalent metal in use there as many propertiessimilar to our own bronze. Bronze is used throughout RuneQuest to refer to the terrestrial metal to which it is most similar. However, Glorantha bronze can be mined directly from the ground, and has some properties dissimilar from our earthly metal." So in fact, Glorantha is only 'bronze age' in a general technological sense. Clearly, Glorantha is NOT exclusively a Bronze Age world: crossbows, greatswords, rapiers - are all grossly anachronistic in a "bronze age" setting, and nigh-impossible to usefully make with bronze (although, conceivably, a bronze-age crossbow could be made mostly from wood). This of course excepts Mostali tech as a known-aberration from the norm.

Or splinters, at least. http://metro.co.uk/2016/07/02/man-filmed-having-sex-with-tree-in-broad-daylight-5980915/ (SFW but yeah, I probably wouldn't on a work computer)

So....how'd Gen Con go?

I think the point of it being felt to be power-gamey was the fact that the use of it would easily GUARANTEE massive extra damage. Essentially, wiping POT12 poison on your blade is going to guarantee +6 damage, and given the sort of "rationalized" (vs realistic) rules, it all hit at once, right away. FAR too easy for players to get super lethal. In reality: - rarely would a meaningful dose of poison remain on the weapon after one exchange of blows, or even storage. Scabbard your sword? Gotta reapply poison. Further, the simple passage of time would eventually negate most poisons (I'd guess most poisons' lethality was directly related to their volatility) - application itself was obviously dangerous - poison is slow-acting, usually. That's the easy way that I dealt with poisons to reduce their utility. Barring crazy-expensive, volatile neurotoxins, I'd rule that poison damage happened per the rules, but was applied ONE POINT PER MINUTE (5 rounds). So yeah, you can use a poison arrow to bring down that target, but you might have to follow/track (or fight) it for 15 minutes before it finally dies. The only weapons I'm familiar with being poisoned fairly frequently were arrows or other missile weapons, and even then it's mostly primitive tribes or trivial/assassination weapons. In most cases I can think of, poison is/was a lethality-amplifier for weapons that are otherwise mostly ineffective - blowguns, shuriken, darts, primitive bows, etc.

I can only say, it's a magnificent work of fantasy worldbuilding, whether you use it to play in Glorantha or not. The art is some of the best fantasy art I've *ever* seen, and the fact that it's not just some 'crap the artist made up' but in fact is (in every case) instructional, illustrating some facet of Gloranthan life, myth, or culture is just pure bonus. I think every time I brows through the book I find new stuff that's fascinating.

No, just sort of contradicted cf. Elder Secrets box set book 2: the text certainly discussed a lot of the conceptual details of Mostali as later conceived by Greg, but the (Dobyski) pictures were still a bearded guy with a blunderbuss. Picture > 1000 words. I'd suspect that Elder Secrets was far more widely read/absorbed than a single issue of Different Worlds. FWIW, it seems that article "Why I dislike Mostali" may have once been up at Glorantha.com (http://www.glorantha.com/library/elder/dwarfs-dislike.html), I can't seem to find it now. But thankfully, the internet never forgets: https://web.archive.org/web/20090808104838/http://www.glorantha.com/library/elder/dwarfs-dislike.html (full article available) ...which essentially boils down to Greg being a complete free spirit, and Dwarves are "a drag, man". I'd argue his later comment that " The few real Mostali who seem happy and free are called 'outlaws' ..." is astonishingly (surprisingly, for Greg) solipsist in its definition of "happy".

Agree with omitting Mostali generally as a easily-played race, sorry. While they're sort of the expected-fantasy-canon (if we have elves, we have to have dwarves, right? TOLKIEN SAID SO!) their worldview is/should be perhaps the most alien of the elder races. The unfortunate fact is that when you have a game with actually well-realized sapient races, the hurdle to playing them authentically gets that much higher. Then again, who hasn't had the party where it's "a dwarf, an elf, a dragonewt, a troll, and a human all walk into the tavern...." where some of the fancy-pants authenticity is just simply ignored for MGF?

Great, thank you. Good info.

" I do think they are better not in the "players book". " Absolutely agree. I definitely look forward to seeing the Sorcery rules! Any approximate page count? When you talk about 3 books, are you saying 3 books that IN TOTAL might be around the 450 pages of RQ6 ? Thanks! Glad to hear there's progress.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean (with the bolded text)? Particularly the word "only"? It's certainly not the only thing that determines melee skill: Str contributes to melee skill OR Dex does (depending on weapon property), as well of course does character level (and maybe class), not to mention feats in certain situations. So a number of things affect attacks, much like RQ. If you're talking about what STR affects, it's used in determining melee skill, ranged skill with thrown, encumbrance limits, saving throw mods for several classes, Strength checks (obviously) and athletics (as well as a bunch of special abilities that use STR as a referent, like Barbarians' indomitable strength ability). How is that much different from RQ?