RosenMcStern

10 hours ago, Tupper said:

Remember that if many opponents the PCs fight are initiates, then the rune point economy favours the PCs opponents.  There are 4 people in the party (say) and they have 3 rune points each.  That's 12 to get through the adventure.  If, in various encounters, they deal with 20 opponents, they might have 60 rune points between them, so getting into a war of attrition over rune points is not a good strategy for PCs.

Jeff has explained very clearly that the "each initiate has three RP" equivalence is only valid for player characters. NPC will have Rune Points only if the GM explicitly decides that they do, and most enemies should not have any. So it is up to the GM to decide whether the bad guys do have that Dismiss Magic available to de-trance the Humakti. It is not automatic.

Atg, the key here is that the "antiattack" effect of the parry over 100+ (not present in RQ2) is way more significant than the antiparry (which was already there in RQ2).

It means that our 200% Humakti is able to go hand to hand with Bigclub the Giant. It does not matter how much damage the club does because the giant is big, against a 200% the attack misses (barring a 01-05, but note also that the giant has the same chance of fumbling with a 96-00) and it is the club that takes damage, not the sword as it would happen in RQ3. After some rounds in this way, not only the humakti has made some non-lethal but significant holes in the giant's hide, he is also fighting against Bigfist the Giant instead of Bigclub

In your uz example, it is true that the humakti must split the attack to hit both trolls in the same round, but in fact he does not need to. There is little or no chance the second uz will damage his weapon or score some damage with a massive attack, so it is better to cut down the first uz with a parry-downgrading attack on the first round, and just damage the weapon of the second one with an attack-downgrading parry. On round two, if the first uz is already down, the sword trancer cuts down the second uz, otherwise he goes on hitting the first and chipping away the second's weapon. With wolves or grizzly bears it is even more amusing, as the damage goes to the head or a claw. Don't tell PETA about this.

Same with the thrown attacks: the attack is reduced by the huge parry chance, so it misses and there is no chance of damaging the weapon.

I suspect 90% of the people who say the spell is not so powerful are thinking in terms of successful attacks vs. successful parries, but against a 200%er it is now (unlike RQ2/3) missed attack versus successful parry.

17 minutes ago, Psullie said:

But that's incorrect. The Huamki will fail to parry on a roll of 95+, and the defender will Hit on a 1-5 regardless of skill levels. Slim chances sure, but not guaranteed.

Exactly a 1 in 400 chance. You will pardon me, but I see no use in reminding the readers that this tactics has 399 to 1 chances of a favourable outcome. I think that writing "you always make the opponent miss" gives a much clearer representation of what to expect - and of the average RPGer's willingness to use this spell in this way.

3 minutes ago, Psullie said:

I'm not sure, the table on p199 says that with a Normal attack vs a normal parry excess damage goes to the hit location.

The attack will miss, so the entry that applies is "missed attack vs. normal parry". The problem is that not only the 200% humakti always parries, he also forces a miss on the first 5 attacks at least (more if he is over 200%. This is the most relevant effect, even more unbalancing than the antiparry, because it nullifies the advantage of outnumbering the sword trancer or using a bigger weapon that you cannot parry. No matter how much damage Bigclub the Giant does with his club, he cannot roll it and compare it to the sword HP when he misses. 

8 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Ah another new rule. But in RQ some of the damage could slip past the parry.

No longer the case in RQG when your weapon skill is boosted to 200+. As I explained in the uzdo example, the problem is that the huge skill of the humakti forces a miss on the attacker. Instead of some damage overcoming the weapon parry points that you would have in RQ2/RQ3, you have the humakti's sword damaging the enemy weapon with each attempted blow.

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And the Broos could always throw the  spears as javelins, backed up with a little speedart.

Thrown weapons can be parried....

Too little time to answer this in detail now, the answer will have to wait for a few hours. It is entirely possible that there are some mistakes in the text.

One point that I wish to underline once more : all this number crunching is not necessary during play, it is only required if you want to create your own armour suits.

8 hours ago, g33k said:

Even a huge mob of pathetic trollkin, if they are all desperate enough to ignore the risk to each of them, are a credible threat to both.

Alas, no. There is a point that no one on this thread has highlighted, except Tywyll, who failed to get the most important point, though.

The "multiple defense rule at a cumulative -20%", coupled with the anti-attack effect of a weapon skill, makes this spell extremely effective against mobs of opponents. Unless the GM allows the unrealistic option of more than 5-6 opponents per round engaging the entranced humakti with 200% sword skill, each round will see one poor fella slaughtered by an unparriable attack, and the rest with their weapons damaged because they will miss their attacks while the humakti makes his parry. In the case of trollkin, after round two very few of them will still have their spear. In the case of mobs of unintelligent or semi-intelligent opponents using natural weapons (wolves, bears, ghouls...), most kills will be the effect of parries, not attacks, and the advantage of numbers is not there, as a 200% swordsman is still at 100% parry when the sixth opponent attacks.

Nor does throwing in bigger opponent able to overcome the humakti parry help that much: five uzdo with troll maul have more or less the same effect as five trollkin, as their maul attacks will miss, forfeiting their chance to damage the sword - which instead can damage the mauls. It will just take more time for the humakti to hack the trolls apart or to break their weapons, but the odds are still largely in his favour.

Just think of the first encounter in the Broken tower: a guy with Sword Trance can take on the whole lizard pack single-handedly. For each attack he takes, there is only a 1-in-400 chance that he takes damage, and a 398-in-400 chance of damage to the lizard head or claw. Anyone betting his money on the lizzies?

Is a sword-trancer invincible ? Of course not, but he is virtually untouchable by unintelligent foes, no matter how powerful. It is up to you to determine if a 1-point rune spell should allow this in your campaign. Extension is not the problem, as casting it on demand when you face the right kind of opponents is possibly a more effective strategy.

The format for PDF cards is not the same as that for printed cards on DriveThru. It would take some time to adapt the format, and time is the limiting factor at the moment. I wish to prioritize the production of a couple of supplements which are long overdue.

The artwork is the problem. Do you have its copyright? The ogl does not allow mixing its contents with illicit materials. The One thing these cards have which Is better than the official ones Is the picture. If you own It, everything Is ok, otherwise the standard cards seem clearer to me.

Another point to explain better in the rules, I suspect.

In a charge, attack and movement are contemporary. This means that both Jimmy and Rob attack on SR 12: Jimmy because his Charge includes the attack, and Rob because his attack is "ready to be triggered" because of the Wait action. Comparing the two "melee SR values" in this case is a procedure used to determine who attacks first withing the same SR, and trying to keep into account size and weapon length in an interaction which is otherwise based only on the attacker's DEX.

When Rob attacks Jimmy, the latter has already spent 5 SR for charging and attacking. If Jimmy survives Rob's attack, his own blow then takes place without paying any more SR. Only disablement can prevent him from rolling for his attack.

The free action for the attacker is thus not necessary.

Hi Rob, thanks for all these useful comments. I will send you episode one of the Red Moon Rising playtest in a couple of days, I only need to merge the two files I have ready.

PS if anyone wishes to playtest Red Moon, too, just PM or mail me.

Yes, Yes and Yes.

Note that Create Scroll and Create Matrix are there for compatibility with D&D - style and RQ-style games respectively. So they might be absent from some settings.

I tried to nitpick and was nitpicked

After several intense sessions of layout and graphics, we realised that the above convention about the skill score being "without Traits" when it precedes the Trait list, and with score when it follows it, could not work very well in practice. Therefore the skill score will from now on always go directly after the skill name, and refer to the value "with traits" if there is a Trait list. In other words, it will be the number you have to roll in the most common case.

So for instance for our cute sohei we would have 

Close Combat 53% [Kenjutsu, Yari], Concentration 54% [two spells], Perception 54% [Hearing, Vision], Survival 52% [Endurance].

...and it ends with a single "i", not two. Just to be insufferably pedan precise.

Plus, given the importance of Holy Days for character power management, and the fact that RuneQuest is no longer generic but tied to a very specific setting... perhaps the holy days for the cults that player characters are invited to join at character creation time should have been in the core book ? Just to be precise, again (see above).

On 12/31/2018 at 7:43 PM, Roko Joko said:

Yeah, in a Glorantha context it would be interesting to have Traits be a special thing you can learn from certain cults.  The rules already provide other ways to get buffs - rune augments, heroquest rewards, and spirit and rune spells - but if you want even more chrome that's a way to get it.  Or if you just wanted to hack RQG to make it more like Rd100, with a smaller skill list.

Be careful about how you implement this. Either you follow the "hack" suggestion which Roko Joko provides here and trim down the entire skill list (doable, and there are options in Rd100 for using the good ol' experience check method instead of improvement points/rolls), or you should be rather careful with 30% bonuses. Traits as bonuses are designed to work with base skills in the 20% - 30% range, not the possibly very high base skills that you can achieve while making characters for RQ(G). I suggest you rule that the general skill suffers a -30% to the roll if used in a special way, but this penalty is avoided if you have the Trait. For instance, you can have Shadowing default at Sneak -30% or Hide -30% if you lack the Trait, or at the highest of the two if you have it. Handling skills such as Sense Assassin or Sense Chaos as a +30% to an existing skill could be... a little bit overpowered.

It should be "yes by default", as it is for Traits. Another point to check for clarity.

Some stunts do not, others do, according to the description in the rules and the Narrator's decisions about the power level in the campaign. Sometimes one specific stunt in a set does not occupy a slot, while others do. For instance, when you learn Martial Arts instead of Brawl, you also learn the basic stunt of your Martial Art style (Acrobatics for Capoeira, Kick for Karate, etc.) at no cost in slots. Further Martial Arts stunts cost slots.

If you wish to use stunts as Simon suggests above, I would recommend to have Specialization Stunts occupy one slot each. Hyper-specialisation often comes at the cost of not having the time to study other branches of the same skill set. Note that languages are a notable exception to this and always use up one slot only.

Yep, i can see some contradiction in the first two points. Clarification needed.

The third point has its own logic. A long range effect, like projecting your senses hundreds of kilometres away, is less powerful than an area effect. It is correct that the value to beat for an area effect be at least four basic points more per range increment (we could drop it to three times, by lowering the requiremet to double the value for range, and it would still be a huge +12 per range increment to the requirements for a permanent effect).

Also, there is one point that you should always keep in mind. The limit to the number of targets is in effect only with regard to the number of targets that can be affected in a parallel conflict that aims at inflicting some quantifiable in-game effect such as wounds, or loss of a sense, directly to the target. With regards to "narrative" effects, all targets in the area are always affected. In the case of the oni projecting an aura of fear, everyone who enters the location is immediately scared as hell, and any character trying to exploit the "it can only make three characters at a time demoralised" to smuggle an army of hirelings in the area will find most of them fleeing, or requiring a Command conflict agains the full Value of the ritual, with the Narrator determining the details, as for any conflict. Such an effect cannot cost the same as  simply "extending the range" of a power, and the rule that you have to increase Targets proportionately to range tries to enforce this point.

I am starting to think that it would be better to simply drop the part about "it can inflict the listed effects to x targets in the area" and move to an "area effects are a freeformed version of the basic power" approach. Less ambiguities, more fun.

14 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Becuase how give machines perfomr in battle is often best repsented by those values, and putting them on the same scale helps to do that. 

I cannot think of a situation where this is true.

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Because it can simplfy bookkeeping and mecha might be in situation where they do pit POW against POW or even STR or SIZ. It depends on how you go with it.

Ditto. There is no situation in which a Mecha could use its POW on the resistance table. If you disagree, please provide an example.

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Some weapons, often the same weapon, can be more effective against a given armor one series than in another. 

Example ?

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Is Revolution Mecha still in the pipeline? 

It is, but it will require a lot of changes from BRP Mecha, so it may take years. Other titles have been prioritized. Do not forget that BRP Mecha was originally to be released late 2009 / early 2010, and it actually appeared in 2013.

PS - Revolution has no POW, so the above considerations will not apply to Mecha D100 in any case. 

I do not really see how all this is supposed to be a problem in game. I understand your desire for coherence, but the focus for the rules of a RPG should be on how the machines perform in battle, not on keeping power levels proportional and coherent with the physical dimensions provided.

STR is arranged on a logarithmic scale, as in all BRP games, to allow the resistance table to work. The reason why is that sometimes mechas wrestle each other, and STR vs STR rolls may be necessary.

On the other hand, no mecha will ever plot its POW against another one's POW or Power Points, so why should POW become logarithmic, too ? POW is used only to limit the amount of energy available at a given time for a given Mecha, thus limiting - for instance - Getter Robot to one single use of Getter Shine per battle. A linear characteristics is more than enough tor this. For most real robots, POW is irrelevant, as their weaponry has an independent power or ammunition source and will run out of ammo after a fixed number of shots, no matter how much POW the mecha generator can output. Even the few weapons which actually draw power from the core, like a gundam light sabres, do it by simply transferring a charge which corresponds to a fixed amount of energy, and should thus be treated as "ammunition" rather than "power output per time unit".

Barring the case of wrestling, coherence among the stats provided for mechas is irrelevant, as it will not influence how the various machines actually perform in combat. What is really important for mecha games is that the amounts of armour and damage be balanced, so that the battles you see in the various anime can be reproduced faithfully. And so far I have seen no one commenting on that point.

Still in the layout process. I would hate to delay it beyond Christmas, but we wish to do it right. Even if the product will sell only some dozens of PDF, it will serve as a template for the improved Revolution D100 "Look&Feel" we plan to adopt for all upcoming products.

16 hours ago, Jakob said:

If I remember correctly, Revolution is capped at 100.

Your Memory roll was too high, Jakob  In fact, Revolution allows even starting characters to go beyond 100.

When your adjusted skill roll is above 100, you add your quota beyond 100 to your die roll for the purposes of comparing it to the opposition. This means that if for instance you have 140% and roll 49, it counts as 89 for comparisons. But you only need to make the calculation if a comparison is needed, whereas the "subtract to the skill before rolling" requires that you make the maths for all rolls. This completely eliminates the need for two-digit subtraction, and any kind of multiplication or division. I never found these operations difficult, but many people do.

As for the "philosophical" reasons why the blackjack method (roll as high as possible, but within your skill, as it happens in Pendragon and HeroQuest) is disruptive in classic percentile games, it may help to think in a slightly different way:

You roll low -> Thing went very smoothly and you went for the simplest approach to the problem. You did it, but not so elegantly and anyone who adopted a more sophisticated approach will outclass you.

You roll high -> Things went in the most complicate way you can think of, and only a real master could cope with this specific situation; if you are not such a master, you failed; however; if you were skilled enough to succeed, then your success outclassed anyone else's.

13 hours ago, Whisker89 said:

Hacking / netrunning was my main concern, but Conflict rules worked like a charm. 

And in fact, if you read the news in the crowdfunding campaign, hacking conflicts were the thing that really made me think "a generic conflict system is needed" in the first place. 

Here is the package for Red Moon Rising. Very basic information, but it gives you the idea about what game experience the full product will yield.