styopa

7 minutes ago, Baragei said:

D&D as a game is plagued with edition-warring, because that game has an actual metric ton of editions, clones and spin-offs, so going by your argument there, no one should be playing D&D.

Did you actually just criticize D&D's confusion & variety of editions in a RUNEQUEST post?  Seriously?

FWIW I thought RQ6 did a good job of bringing RQ back into the commercial limelight, certainly, although some could credit that increase as a by-blow of RPGs flourishing generally today.  I think it would have been better had it been more closely tied to the canon/world, frankly.  

MRQ was fairly clever in going back to 2nd age, that was a fresh approach, if not as sound mechanically as RQ6 later was (which itself wasn't as sound as previous editions, itself ***very much only IMO***).

3 hours ago, soltakss said:

Personally, I don't really care what is in which edition of RQ/D100-style rules.

I take what I like and ignore what I don't, so I'll take the good bits from RQ, Mythras, Legend, BRP, Renaissance, Revolution and so on.

 

Which is perfectly fine for many people, particularly grognards that have been futzing with RQ systems for decades.

*NOT* so great for pulling in new players to the genre.

Runequest reddit has 306 subscribers, 2 viewing.

D&D reddit has 136,000 subs, 1300 viewing.

It'll really depend on how they're implemented.

I didn't play Pendragon, so my understanding of it is only secondhand, but AFAIK in that game the passions DROVE play.  For example, whether a character would lie to an NPC, cower in fear from something, etc could be essentially taken away from the player's control, and made subject of a dice roll result to which the player was expected to hew.

That would trouble me deeply, because that takes agency away from players.  

OTOH, Runequest *needs* runes and always has, not to mention a better "tie in" to the world of Glorantha.  That seems a natural place for them to dovetail.

Previous years Jeff's done a great job of youtubing his discussions of the Guide, hopefully that same plan is in place for RQ's discussion.

13 hours ago, Jeff said:

The presence of spirits are recognized by all Gloranthans, not just those who practice shamanism. Even a Brithini atheist acknowledges that there is a magical energy that surrounds everything "living" thing (I use that term very broadly) and that there are savages who specialize in communicating with and bargaining with those senseless forces. Such magic is limited, crude, and vastly inferior to sorcery, but it is definitely there.

Now many of those spirits serve the gods, and most spirit places are also important holy places to various cults. Priests and Rune Lords have rites by which they can teach any spirit spell they know to an initiate of their cult. And so on.

I think people are making more of a rigid distinction here than actually exists. Pretty much every culture and religion in Glorantha practices some variety of spirit magic, except the most radically materialist or transcendent philosophies.

The RQ2 explanation was that these spells simply "...involve the forceful alteration of the fabric of reality by the use of one's POW." (Presumably meaning "temporary POW" in RQ2 terms, ie MP.  No theoretical construct or interpolation of 'spirit entities' was even hinted at that time.  

Which, I think, was what you were saying a couple of posts ago: "... An animist might understand this as "the spirits aid my sword" while the materialists might understand this as "the natural energy flows briefly favor my sword" or whatever. ..."  

At the same time, then, to say it's "Spirit Magic" and not "Basic Magic", "Common Magic" or "Hedge Magic", etc is to take a side, isn't it?  To say that it IS, in fact, little spirits doing this stuff is saying that the animists are right and the materialists are wrong.  It seems rather unGloranthan to to attribute a single magical 'culture' that their interpretation is metaphysically correct.  Frankly, I could see it having all those names DEPENDING ON WHICH CULTURE YOU'RE TALKING TO.

1 hour ago, Numtini said:

I don't think they need to adopt systems if they're not needed. I do, however, think that if CoC has an elegant way of handling something that RQ2 currently doesn't, that ought to be the first "go to" for the solution. If it doesn't work, well it doesn't work, and you move on. 

I sincerely hope that the new RQ takes *everything* widely regarded as a "good idea" and implements it.  I get that it's based on RQ2 and they want to remain at least reasonably consistent with former materials* but RPGs (and what players have expected from them, and how they play them) have evolved a lot since 1979 or whenever RQ2 appeared.

*I know the new Chaosium doesn't have ample resources, so this makes sense.  At the same time, this backward focus somewhat condemns us to "oh look, it's Pavis...again".  Glorantha's a big, big world, with tons of cool stuff.  If you browse around, you'll find some fascinating campaigns run in Safelster and other places.  Heck, the (IMO) greatest-ever narrative of one of the old house RQ games was mostly set in Pamaltela.

4 hours ago, Revilo Divad Of Dyoll said:

It depends on which version of Final Fantasy he liked.  If he is thinking of the kind where each character would have a particular summonable ally (e.g., Bahamut or Shiva), that could reasonably be modeled using a Shaman and a spirit ally.

In that sense, then yes, pretty much every version of RQ AFAIK has had a "spirit ally" for Rune Lords of any sect.  Those don't necessarily (again, as far as I remember) need to be tangible creatures but could be "summonable" things?

23 hours ago, Jeff said:

Spirit Magic in Glorantha is exactly what it says it is. It is a spell to get a spirit to create an effect. And pretty much every Gloranthan culture uses spirit magic. It is not the same thing as shamanism (which is a type of spirit specialist).

Meh, it's asserted to be so, but works nothing like that in practice.

There is, as far as any of the rules ever in RQ history as far as I know, no "spirit" that gives a sword +5% to hit and +1 damage (Bladesharp).  Spirits can deaden sound (Silence)?  I have to use a spirit (Spirit Binding spirit magic spell) to bind a spirit?  That's rather recursive.  And by the logic that these are all being done (in a hand-wavy way) "by spirits", then I could cast a Spirit Screen around my pile of gold and make it undetectable by Detect Gold?   No such mechanic has ever been implied?

TBH, RQ doesn't really have a "*poof* there's a monster doing what you want" esthetic.  At least in RQ3, there were summonings as a ritual thing, but they were (AFAIR) limited to spirit creatures in some way or another.  There might be a "call X" for mundanes, but it would depend on one being nearby.  It was certainly never a combat-tactic thing.

It's one of the lines where RQ magic diverged clearly from D&D; another example would be AoE spells - RQ doesn't really have any.  Instead of everyone having +1 swords, everyone's got Bladesharp 1 (which has the same effect).

Personally, I've always believed that the spell lists for RQ needed SUBSTANTIALLY more quantity, in almost all aspects.  Spirit magic always had a reasonably broad variation, although I think the regionality of it was underplayed.  Most games I played in (or DM'd, admittedly) the same basic set of spirit magic was available no matter where you were.

Divine magic was simply too few spells, and the POW sacrifice system compelled players to really make the same optimized choices because it was so expensive to get a spell..  Further, most cults have a stock list of common spells and then a small handful of cult specialties.  Combined, that made them (IMO) too dull and predictable.  Every Orlanthi Wind Lord had spells X, Y, and Z.  The new RQ divine spell point thing will help a lot in the predictability, but I do believe each major pantheon should have its own ample common spells, and then each god have a pretty good selection too.

Sorcery (of which I believe I'm one of the few people that seems to have liked RQ3's approach) needed tons more spells, and more flavor.  The spell-list archetypes was a fine start, but then I'd added someone's RQ spell list from Tekumel, letting my sorcerors choose from vanilla (but flexible) spells from the book or more elaborate and interesting spell effects that might be slightly more efficient but far less flexible individually.

It seems to me like it would be a logical goal to try to "revamp" the system for 2016, and then harmonize them across various games.  Sort of a BRP 2016 which then has "COC" flavors, "RQ" flavors, etc.

I like the 'tiers of success' thing (imo someone in the RQ3 community had done that back in the 80s, with terms like supercrit, etc maybe that was Steve Perrin), and don't know why RQ6 (in particular) didn't adopt it.

Ergo, a success vs a fumble is the same 'degree of success' as a Special vs a Failure, or a Crit vs Success.  Seems pretty robust.

In particular for RQ6, it could have been implemented to mitigate the balance issues of some of the overpowered special effects.  ie "you have to have 3 successes to pick from this group", etc.

" consecutive Sever Spirits were used as attrition damage "

How?  Maybe I'm misremembering, but isn't Sever Spirit more or less a save-or-die thing?  If they pass, they live.  If they don't, they die (but they don't get otherwise weaker for surviving the attack).  How is that attrition?  Or am I misremembering the spell?

I think there is ample granularity available in D100.  It's just a matter of the degrees of success and how frequently you want them to occur (with the follow-on question is: are the relative VALUES of these successes appropriately scaled as well)?

Frex:

RQ RAW (2, 3): Crit 05%, Special 20%, fumble inverse of crit but always 1%.  In this case, the "crit" should really be significantly better than the special, comparable to the value of a special over a normal.

RQ (6): "crit" 10%, with SFX available anytime you beat the other guy by a success level; my quick napkin-math figured this at almost 30% of the time with equal skills (not super confident on that result, sort of brute-forced it); one of my main issues with RQ6 was that this happened far too frequently, and that the advantages (the special effects) were overpowered for their frequency.

You could certainly brew your own levels, per jux's example: 

half skill: good success

skill: marginal success

(above skill but below halfway to 100): marginal fail

(above halfway to 100): bad failure

....certainly doable, but in that case I'd have to say that "good failure" would be so frequent, it would have to be weak or the system would be amazingly lethal.  Making "special" stuff happen more frequently really just makes the combats more brittle and specials less ... special.

I originally liked a system I saw that made doubles-rolls crits (as success or fail) until I realized that with a 95%+ chance to succeed, you STILL had a 2 in 5 chance of any failure being a fumble...holy crap that's nasty.  1 in 5 (RQ RAW) is already pretty harsh, where as your skill increases, your chance of a failure being a fumble starts at 5% and increases as you get better to 20% in kind of an interesting jagged curve.

Thinking more on my idea last night, even 10% is too cheap; for example a 50% attacker could jack his attack up to 100% for sacrificing -5 damage.  That sounds like a lot, but if he's using a Greatsword (2d8) and has a strength damage bonus (say, 1d4 or more) what he's sacrificing is, on average, only 1d8+1d4, leaving him with 1d8 damage and +50% to hit?  Nah, that seems too powerful.  And at 20% per point, I'm not sure anyone would use it.

Agreed, I was thinking about 10% as the 'value' too, actually.  5% seemed like it might be too 'cheap'.

As far as RQ2, meh, it could be an option.  I think the point of the RQ2 thing is compatibility with old materials, and a RULE change like this - not changing tables of values, etc - would still be ENTIRELY compatible with any old RQ2 material you pick up, no conversion necessary at all.

Just spitballing this out here:  what if you freely allowed players to modify their attack/damage rolls at will?  Maybe even parrying AP?

Again, this is just a hypothetical, let's throw out the following ratios:

5% = 1 point of damage.

So if Rurik at 90% attack is trying to hurt Bagdob the Chaos Warrior with the chaos feature of heavy armadillo armor-skin, it might be worth dropping his attack to 70% to really smack Bagdob with a +4 damage.

OTOH, if Rurik is fencing with his friend he might take -6 hp damage and +30% to hit, because he doesn't want to hurt his friend, but definitely wants to score the first touch.

I *might* be inclined to allow spending % in the same way to increase the AP of a parrying weapon (a master swordsman or daggerman could probably more artfully use the weapon for parrying than Glug the Farmer)

I *might* further be inclined to say that 5% = 1 point of damage = 1 point of SR - anyone could strike more quickly if they're not concerned with actually hitting hard enough to do damage, and the "long, slow windup of a mighty blow" is easily understood.

Hmm.  It would certainly make a more tangible benefit to having skill over 100% - since you're capped at 95%, if you don't really care about the increased impale/crit, I'd guess that % over 95% would almost always be spent as either a quicker attack or more damage, meaning really skilled combatants are DIRECTLY more lethal.

EDIT: there could be boundary caps on these manipulations, of course - for example:

- attack% couldn't be increased beyond 2x your original.

- damage couldn't be increased beyond the max rolled damage of your weapon

- combat total SR couldn't be reduced below your Dex SR, and SR increased beyond the end of the round doesn't "roll over", you'd just lose your opportunity to act that round.  (or somesuch)

Thanks for the update Mike!

For a while we tried a fatigue system based around that: roll %doubles and at that moment we check your encumbrance.  Depending on your load, you got 1+ "fatigue" tokens that each gave you a flat -5% on any roll until you rested.  The logic being, the more times you rolled %ile dice, the more "stuff" you were doing, and in abstraction, the more likely you were to get tired.

Ultimately, it just became another fatigue system dropped by the wayside.  I've come to the final conclusion that mechanical encumbrance systems are either too trivial for the bookkeeping (most of the time) or too punitive.  Now, I just say at the start of a session, to each player "so, what are you wearing/carrying?".  First, them going over what's where, and ending up with "and the rest of the stuff is in my pack" actually helps everyone at the table visualize each other.  Second, then, if it's enough to burden them to some degree, I mention it and they either amend it or accept it.

Then, 3 hours later when something happens when I think fatigue/enc would be relevant, I just mention it and tell them that they're growing really tired, so at this point you're -10% on physical skills, -5% on mental ones until they take a substantial rest.  (That's the same penalty I put in place if people have hiked all day, and are attacked at night before they are rested, too.)

It's arbitrary, I admit, but people seem to agree so far.

As the RQ3 rules assumed you started at age 16 and gave them experience per year of age, I let players pick their age, up to 10 years older than 16.

For each year they didn't use, they got a one-use luck point.  Typically they'd start around 22-23, so they had a few luck points to absorb that unfortunate roll.  (Using luck points was one point for themselves, or if they wanted to save someone else in the party, it cost a cumulative donation of 2 from other members.) 

I think there was one who started a character at age 17, but his or her luck points ended up getting burned pretty quickly anyway.  

On 5/12/2016 at 9:11 PM, TRose said:

 If I remember the story right.

 The owners of an old and long out of business miniature company called Archive miniatures came up with two  figures called Barbarian Duck and his old lady as a novelty item. This was BEFORE Runequest.

 The  owners of Archive miniatures where friends with Greg Stafford and co and for fun decided to come up with a way to add the Ducks to Glorantha so people could use the minitiarure . I used to own a number of Archive miniatures as they where the original Glorantha  miniatures.

 

"We got us here the ultimate sort of God Learner, folks.  He don't just say this is all just fanciful makin's up, but that the very EXISTENCE of a race ain't nuthin more than a commercial pat-on-the-back 'tween friends."

"Well, then BURN HIM?"

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"Was Arkat a Duck?"

That would explain the pretty-much-permanent bad attitude.

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The Dara Happans are obsessed with the number ten and consider it and its multiples to be the perfect number. 

Well that would explain the whole bizarre universality of the metric system in Glorantha, no?

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With all the different version of RQ and BRP I always taken the parts I like and moved forward RQ6 is my favorite so far to jest strikes the right balance for me. But with that being stated I will continue to buy all the new RQ stuff love Glorantha and The Mythras products.

Probably the healthiest view point.  I've never understood the "I have to take a side!" tribalism, whether it's between RPG rule sets, favorite MMO, or local sports team.

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It's also worth noting that the original "BRP" pamphlet and the "BGB" version (also called "BRP") were very VERY different things, and not necessarily a linear evolution one to t'other...  So, it's necessary in "big picture" discussions like these to be clear WHICH "BRP" you are talking about!

So you're saying that there needs to be even a tree for the genealogy of BRP.  What a freakishly incestuous line.  

It's like the Habsburgs of RPGs?

I thought Strangers in Prax actually did a fantastic job of creating credible heroic characters in the RQ3 rules.  The coders and Arlaten both are well done.

I did think that they were geared a little too light, magically, but considering their roles they could be easily justified to have nearly any magic item needed.

I'd agree too that BRP came from RQ2, and spawned from there, but RQ3 did come from RQ2, not BRP.