trystero

On 5/25/2018 at 12:23 PM, styopa said:

There you go, the most detailed rpg hit location table ever.  Iirc it was d1000.

It was, indeed. I loved that game (for what it was).

For those who don't recognise it, the left and right images in that graphic are from the Advanced Damage Tables supplement for a 1980s game called Phoenix Command, which wasn't so much an RPG as a gun-combat rules system with tons and tons of detail, written by a literal rocket scientist. It's complete overkill (pun intended) at the rules level, but remarkably satisfying as a way to scratch the "crunch" itch… but so completely focused on its one area of specialty as to be useless at anything else. (Try attacking a horse or indeed making a hand-to-hand attack without having purchased the appropriate supplements.)

I adore RQ for feeling gritty and crunchy without actually descending into sanity-blasting Phoenix Command-like levels of detail. (See? Brought it back 'round on topic by the end.)

On 4/27/2018 at 9:42 PM, Mad Ainsel said:

I found that RQIII was somewhat more "pedantic" mechanically speaking. I have to keep referring to the crit/impale/fumble table, which is becoming a chore for aging eyes.

I hardly ever used the table; "5% of success chance", "20% of success chance", and "5% of failure chance" always sufficed for my group.

I don't use miniatures or terrain; some plastic tokens on a quickly-sketched map on paper is about as much tactical representation as my games ever need. So I think I'm not your target audience.

I'll be interested to hear whether other folks use minis or terrain for Call of Cthulhu, though.

Can I play? Here are my colour and black-and-white versions, re-created in the spirit of the original but with some customizations (check box for tracking POW gains, lots of new skills, coin types/values/weights and hit-location HP fractions).

Human Adventurer Sheet (2).pdf

Human Adventurer Sheet (old, greyscale).pdf

5 hours ago, styopa said:

Someone's trying to find out if he has collectors items....

Honestly, that hadn't even occurred to me; I'm assuming all copies of BIG RUBBLE and RINGWORLD have the same logo orientation. I just wondered whether there was a story behind these two reversed-logo releases.

I've just noticed, glancing up at my shelf of RQ2 and other Chaosium "big box" releases, that while the Chaosium dragon logo typically faces to the left, BIG RUBBLE and RINGWORLD both have it facing to the right instead.

Wondering whether this was intended to mean something or whether it's just a random production glitch or oddity.

My first reaction to the cover art is that it's a lovely piece which would be great on a HeroQuest book. Its tone doesn't really match the tone of most of my RuneQuest games; it's larger-than-life and heroic and doesn't provide much focus on the gritty details which are (IMO) so important in RQ. But I'm trying to keep an open mind and will see whether the art grows on me.

I've been waiting to complete my collection and snapped this up yesterday as soon as I saw it was available. It's lovely.

(BTW, is it correct that both issues 1 and 2 were originally from November 2013, as noted on their revised editions' title pages?)

https://rpggeek.com/wiki/page/Call_of_Cthulhu_7th_edition_upcoming_releases has everything that I know about. No mention of Malleus Monstrorum, though.

pp. 62, 63: The description of Siren on the sheets for Jason Kernicky and Isaac Klein should say that her star is "in the ascendant" rather than "in the ascendance". (Same for pp. 8 and 9 in the separate Pre Generated Investigators PDF.)

pp. 82, 191: In the first sentence of Handout: Panacea 1, "wellbeing" should probably be "well-being" if the company is located in the US. In the last sentence, "state of the art" should be "state-of-the-art" since it's a compound adjective. (Same on p. 7 of the separate Handouts and Maps PDF.)

pp. 108: Paragraph 2, line 4: both words of "Rolot gas" should be quoted, rather than just "Rolot". (The pregenerated investigator backgrounds correctly quote both words.)

pp. 142–147: Remove the colon from the sentence starting "You and a team of experts have been sent…"; it's not necessary. (Same for pp. 20–25 in the Pre Generated Investigators PDF.)

Also, the title of the Pre Generated Investigators book should be Pre-Generated Investigators or Pregenerated Investigators.

I think AH's high price for RQ3 was part of the reason that edition wasn't as big a hit as it deserved to be. (RQ3 certainly didn't really take off in the UK until the publication of Games Workshop's licensed — and much cheaper — hardback edition.)

20 hours ago, jongjom said:

The weight issue is probably best compared to height (Body Mass Index: kg/m2). tl;dr All SIZ 18 RQG adventurers are overweight to obese. Even using the lightest (119kg) and tallest (205cm) options for this SIZ ends up with an adventurer 13.5Kg (29.8 lbs) overweight. To be healthy you have to be SIZ 18 height but SIZ 16 weight.

That's more indicative of how terrible a measure of health BMI is than of a problem with the SIZ table. BMI doesn't account for bone and muscle mass being denser than fat, squares height instead of cubing it for no explicable reason, and is basically junk science; see, for instance, this NPR article which points out, among other things, that BMI inventor Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet explicitly stated that his formula “could not and should not be used to indicate the level of fatness in an individual”.

(There's also this article pointing out that the average Denver Broncos player is obese according to the BMI, and that many athletes rate as overweight or obese.)

In their January 1985 catalogue, Avalon Hill sold the RQ3 Deluxe Edition box for US$38, which works out to about US$90 today. (They also sold the Players Box for US$20 and the Gamemasters Box for US$25.)

I seem to recall the Deluxe Edition box originally being US$40, but don't have a source for that. I do know from firsthand experience that it was £40 in the UK in 1984, which works out to £117.99 today, which in turn converts to US$154.28 today. Eye-wateringly expensive, that import.

After years of play, no-one wants to risk a TPK cutting things short. Having a backup NPC to restart the game is vital IMO.

Erm...

• Wealthy English minor nobleman
• Wealthy nobleman's Scottish valet-cum-ghillie
• Wealthy American occultist
• Wealthy occultist's English valet-cum-factotum (deceased, quite violently)
• French/Algerian occult-bookstore owner (institutionalised after committing a bloody murder and eating part of the body)
• French mechanical-engineering professor (left the group to try to get decent treatment for the bookstore-owner)
• Russian noble-born gentleman detective (institutionalised after dropping precipitously to 1 SAN)
• Bulgarian "antiquarian"/burglar

Plus the even-wealthier wife of the wealthy nobleman, who's back in London as the person who'll hire the next bunch of investigators whenif the remainder of this bunch all die or go mad at once, aka the TPK Campaign Rescue Option™.

As I read the rules, yes, you add penalty dice (or remove bonus dice, or raise the difficulty level) for each new attack roll, not just for each new volley. Hence the "First attack roll" and "Second and further attack rolls" headings in the "Rolling to hit with automatic fire" section starting on p. 114 of the Keeper's Rulebook.

I don't know, but I can hope...

Half the shots in the burst hit not because of cover or making three attacks in a round or the Hard success; it's just a general rule that half the shots in a successful automatic-fire burst hit. See the first bullet entry under "Resolving each attack roll:" at the bottom left of p.116; I hope that helps.

On 8/22/2017 at 8:11 AM, Atgxtg said:

...RQ2 had SIZ on 3D6, so the average character didn't get a db....RQ3 upped SIZ to 2D6+6, and the average character got a 1D4 damage bonus.... 

Not quite. The average RQ3 character has STR 10–11 and SIZ 13, so their total STR+SIZ is 23–24, and you need a total of 25 to get a +1D4 damage bonus. I agree that the RQ3 SIZ boost meant that damage bonuses were easier to get, but they were still not within the province of the average.

I'd love to see generic stat-blocks, which were common in RQ3 releases: the ones in Vikings (Jarl, Skald, Berserk, a few different competence levels of warriors, etc.) would be a good basis. Then named characters can just be "a Thane with 87% Orate" as opposed to needing a full stat-block.

I've always played that defenses are declared just before the attack roll; the defender does not need to announce them in Statement of Intent. We make the attack and defense rolls simultaneously, so the defender does not get to know what success level the attacker got.

So on SR 7, fr'instance, the GM says, "The brigand attacks Cormac with his battleaxe", and Cormac's player says, "I parry with my shield"; both then roll the relevant weapon skills and compare levels of success. (The attacker will often also roll weapon damage and hit location along with the attack roll to save time.)

20 hours ago, flynnkd said:

...I don't like having to roll to cast and then roll to resist... too much rolling, get rid of the casting roll, nobody wants to fail a spell casting. Its an archaic mechanism in this day of playability. (well, for me).

Whereas I really enjoy rolling to cast, because why should spell-casting be different from any other activity? The casting and resistance rolls serve the same function as the attack and parry/dodge rolls in combat, and while I don't like missing my attack roll, I wouldn't want to have automatic hits in combat, either.

2 hours ago, styopa said:

I think RQ3 tried hard to bolt handwavy bits to the floor of certainty; it's a wargame company.

As much fun as it is to blame Avalon Hill (sorry, The Avalon Hill Game Company) for perceived shortcomings in RQ3, it's my understanding that they didn't have anything to do with the design or writing of the game; that was all Chaosium. AH were essentially just the publishers, at least back when that edition first came out.

10 hours ago, styopa said:

There will be different move rates per species, but unless there's a radical change from historical canon, I doubt there will be any variation in move rates between individuals within a species.

I'm fairly sure you're right. But what I hope for and what I expect are different things. :-)

On 7/4/2017 at 11:36 AM, styopa said:

The whole movement thing is much more fleshed-out in the actual rules, I'm certain.

I'm just hoping that characters actually get different movement rates computed from their stats, rather than a single rate per species; this was another 7th-edition Call of Cthulhu change that I really liked (though admittedly movement rate is more important in CoC as a predictor of which character will live longest)..