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Baulderstone

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Everything posted by Baulderstone

  1. I like challenge. It has the advantage of being both a noun and verb. A mountain range can be a challenge (noun) that the PCs take on. PCs can also challenge (verb) a troll. Mechanically, it makes little difference, but it makes the term more versatile in how it can be used in table talk.
  2. I ran it with the playtest rules, and it plays very well. Also, from the KIckstarter Update:
  3. I'm all for taking the time for what you feel needs to be done. I'm going to care more about the quality of the final product more than how long it took to put together,
  4. There was already a discussion about that. There is going to be a new Mythras forum, and all the RQ6 threads are going to be moved over there. For now, just keep posting stuff here and it will end up in the new forum.
  5. One thing to keep in mind when making custom skill lists or adding skills is whether your players will be filling particular set roles. If that is the case, be careful about not having too heavy an imbalance in the number of skills needed to fulfill each role. The character with a role requiring a wide range of skills has to spread their points a lot further when building a new character. Not that this kind of role structure is necessary in BRP, but it does happen in some games. It's also a bigger thing to consider if you are using Experience Rolls instead of Tick Boxes. If one character build mainly relies on four skill, while another relies on eight skills, the first player is going to have an easier time covering their main skills with Experience Rolls.
  6. I'm a big fan of DCC myself. Despite my reservations about using SE cards, I like some crazy randomness, especially with magic. I love the way every spell has some side effect unique to the caster in DCC. The tables in DCC, however, are designed to be tables. SE's in RQ5 aren't. SE's cover a range of things that would be in entirely different tables in more random game. They cover special attacks that particular weapon types make. They cover critical results for both attack and defense. They cover applying fumbles. They cover special maneuvers. They cover choosing to make non-lethal attacks. As a list to pick from, they make sense. Putting them all in the same deck of cards or table becomes a mess without some careful thought put into the design.
  7. Was this a response to an earlier post. I agree with what you are saying, I am just trying to fit it into the context of the thread.
  8. It's just that there is already a constraint on SEs as you need to of achieve certain success levels to use them. I see the cards leading to regular situations where a player gets great roll and gets no or a lesser benefit. When someone with a three card gets a critical while their opponent fumbles, it's going to be very likely that they won't be able to apply three cards to the situation. Given that it is a rare event, it could easily create frustration and annoyance with the rules. If a player is looking to buy a great axe in town, then it suggests its something new they want to try, so its no big deal to delay them acquiring it. However, let's look at the character who has a great axe. Part of the coolness of the weapon in the Sunder SE. You can try and just chop an opponents shield in half. With the cards system, that becomes a very rare occasion. The Sunder card is going to spend a lot more time in the hands of people that can't use it. Same with Impale Impaling weapons should be able to Impale, and it feels odd to lock the result behind a card draw. Entangling weapons no longer seem worth having in the game at all. Certain SEs really don't feel like they should be restricted. Close and Open Range don't seem like things that should be restricted to showing up maybe once every other combat. Another side effect is going to be prolonged combat length. If you can't apply Special Effects strategically, they have less effect on the game, making attrition more central. Even earlier editions without Special Effects had reliable means that meant critical results had a powerful effect. Ultimately, it seems like the system would lead to larger analysis paralysis over the long haul. In a typical game, players soon have an idea of exactly what SEs will work for a situation. With cards, players will always be confronted with a mishmash of Effects that don't really do what they want to do. This can lead to people staring at their useless hand, wondering what to do with it. I'm simply trying to identify issues that the system could create. Maybe have a hand size closer to ten might mitigate some of the issues. I think that simply giving a short list of suggested SEs to new players gives the same benefits as the cards without the frustrations.
  9. Sorry. It sounds as if I was coming off as accusing you of not playing the game right, and that really wasn't my objective. I've read enough of your posts to respect you as a fellow fan of the game. "Circumstances" really isn't the best word either. My point was that Special Effects can really come into their own when they players need a victory that isn't based on killing people. I've read through Book of Quests, and I can't recall if that is something that comes up or not. I could go on, I'm not really looking to convert you. It's really more of a case of me wanting to explain why I like Special Effects. It's not so much an argument as a counterpoint. Based on everything I have heard, it seems like Special Effects will be easy to drop into the new edition it I want them. Sorry once again if I came off as confrontational.
  10. It sounds like there simply weren't a variety of circumstances in combat. One thing the book talks about in the GM section is the idea that killing is not always a good idea. There may be serious social ramifications, for one thing. If you are trying to win a fight without leaving any corpses, the Special Effects you mention are about the worst you could pick. Sure, players will still have old standbys they fall back on most of the time. That's fine, but the options are there when you need them. Lot's of RPGs have rules for disarms, called shots, and so on. They are buried in the book. On top of that, they all come with penalties attached to use them, so players are discouraged to use them. Having a list of SEs in front of the players, with rolls that actively prompts the players to use them seems more in line with the design principle of having everything in front of the player that the new edition aspires to. It's also worth noting that if an NPC only has one section of their body armored, it will be the head, which can negate the benefit of the low HP total. The section also mentions Ward Location as a way for characters to dissuade blows to the head. I find the idea of using a table of random SEs to be a poor idea. As I mentioned, one of the benefits of SEs is that they allow players to choose more or less lethal tactics. If the decision between maximizing damage or tripping an opponent is random, important roleplaying decisions are removed from play. There is also the issue of SEs that require a critical or a particular weapon type. You would need to juggle multiple charts or do a lot of re-rolling. Cards could be an acceptable alternative. Players have at least some choice. You'd need to put a lot of thought into the card count per deck. Are all SEs going to have an equal chance of coming up? If there is only one of each card, impaling weapons are a lot less cool as they only can impale on the rare occasions that a player has the card when an SE comes up. With only three cards, it's easy to see situations where you have a hand that you simply can't use. Remember that of the 34 SEs, 22 are either solely offensive or defensive. Trying to fix the problem of players liking a handful of SEs seems a bad idea. It's saying, "Oh you like doing that, huh? Well, how about I take that away from you." You are much better off presenting combats that make other SEs more attractive than locking options down. As for new players, I think its a better idea to give them a small list of SEs, maybe five or so. These are handpicked to work with their weapons and be effective with their skills. At the same time, have the full list available to them. They can venture beyond the short list as they choose to. Having that small list means that you can be sure they know what each SE on the list does. With a hand of cards, new players are constantly being confronted with new SE, many of which will be poor choices, if they can use them at all.
  11. I like exchange better than sequence, but it has odd connotations too. A conflict can be an exchange, for example when two combatants exchange blows, but it suggests a level of give and take. In cases of extreme success or failure, there is no exchange. It's simply one side giving to the other. I'm not going to freak out whatever you pick. Just giving feedback.
  12. Yes, Special Effects seem easy to add in. This my hope as well. The POW economy will be even more a hassle with skill with a basis in characteristics. All the skills on your sheet that are partially based on POW will fluctuate along with a POW. However, they may be stuck with it. They have promised backwards compatibility with RQ2. Too many RQ2 supplements have the POW economy built in.
  13. Sure. You can even put it on the cover of the new edition of TDMRPG if you like.
  14. I was reading it regulary until May of last year. I didn't stop because I disliked it, but because I have been trying to let it build up enough to feast on it. I found the comments well worth reading, both the official commentary and the reader comments. I'm a more casual Glorantha fan, so I appreciated all the details others pointed out. It was probably best just read the comic the first time though. Just enjoy the story of it. You can always dig into the comments on a re-read.
  15. He contains multitudes. It's what gives his roleplaying creations such depth.
  16. I'm fine with conflict, but it can't hurt for something better. Sequence feels a little flat to me. It's just a bunch of stuff that happens one after the other. (1,2,3,4,5,6) is a sequence. I'm not saying I hate it, or that it would keep me away from the game, but it does nothing to draw me in either. I wouldn't worry about the fanatical anti-Forge crowd. You are not getting their business with this game anyway. One look at the more "narrative" elements of this game, and they will declare you one of the swine and burn you in effigy. Fortunately, these people are largely irrelevant.
  17. Just to add to my thoughts, I think there are places where more detailed social rules can be helpful. Maybe the PCs have two weeks to sway a council election. A PC might be trying subtly drop a slanderous rumor about the Princess into conversations with as many people at the Ball as they can. These are situations where actually playing out every step in real time could get redundant and boring. In these cases, the detailed rules are saving time rather than slowing things down. Canvassing a whole neighborhood over the course of a day would feel shallow if you put it down to a single roll, but you certainly don't want roll for every door they knock on, or worse, play a conversation with everyone in the neighborhood. I like social combat better on a macro scale rather than on a personal scale. I'm also a big fan of Robin Laws DramaSystem from the game Hillfolk. The mechanics in that exist to really set up the roleplaying, then almost entirely drop away while you are playing a scene. However, it is far from the system for people who need a die roll to make up for not being comfortable playing people with high social skills.
  18. I've never actually played Pathfinder, but I have run and played it's near identical cousin D&D 3. I found that mentality was largely created by Feat proliferation. It wasn't too bad when just the core books existed, but as more books and more issues of Dragon came out actions you had a lot actions Feats that described them. While D&D 3 added actual skill, which seemed a step in the direction of having more freedom, the Feats hemmed in what you could do with skills. On top of that, D&D 3 had much more limited character growth. You were only going to get one Feat every third level, and there were only 20 levels. The accelerated growth in 3E also meant that you would hit that 20 level wall in two years or less if you played once a week. Too make it worse, there was the whole thing with Prestige Classes, which pushed you into deciding your future Feats during character generation to meet their prerequisites rather than letting your character be shaped by their experiences during play. I can still remember making my first 3E character and hitting the sad realization that I knew every step of development my character would take over his career. Compare that to RuneQuest, where you may lack a skill to perform an action, but if you can find a bag of treasure and trainer, you can pick up a new skill in a new field without it limiting you in your other endeavors. While I am not the biggest fan of using your character sheet as a menu to decide what to do, at least in RuneQuest, the menu options are a lot looser, and you are a lot less constrained in what you can add to the menu.
  19. I'm always a little wary of getting into "social combat". I'm cool with Fast Talk roll and whatnot, but once you get into social attacks, parry and hit points, it often veers into abstraction. The problem for me is that if the player can add detail to those rolls to make it interesting, they can probably do even better just roleplaying the scene. Also, that player who isn't comfortable with improv will be happy to blow through the social scene with a quick skill roll. Way back when I was in high school, one of my best friends absolutely hated to get into roleplaying dialogue. He was just very self-conscious about it. He wasn't actually a bad roleplayer. His characters had reasonable motivations and acted upon them. We quickly hit on the magic of third person. He would never give actual dialogue, but instead wold narrate what his character was asking the NPC about. It didn't even really drag down the game. It would be like a scene in a Hammett book where the detective simply narrates what that he got information from the tobacconist rather than writing the dialogue out. The third person trick has been useful with shy gamers ever since. And once again, I have drifted away from the topic of the thread. This is why I shouldn't come here right after the bar.
  20. That got a worried reaction from me as well. However, the next paragraph after your quote makes me think that what they mean is that everything the player needs is right there on the sheet. At least that is what I am hoping. That's similar to what I am thinking, but you are seeing it as little more thematic, while I am thinking more of practical actions the players make. I'm with you there. Rules should take up as much page count as it takes to adequately cover them. <i>Call of Cthulhu</i> spends more time on combat than social interaction rules. Anyone that has played knows you spend a lot more time talking to people than fighting them, yet combat social interaction have exactly as much space dedicated to them is an needed. It would be harmful to bloat the social interaction rules or to pare back the combat ruler to meet a quota based on time spent on each activity in play. Combat would become abstract and vague while detailed social rules would choke out a lot of the roleplaying. To give another classic game example. Traveller usually dedicates a solid amount of space to ship design. Nobody expects you are going to spend an equivalent amount of space on designing ships every session. It's just that on those occasions when they are needed, the kind of people that design ships want some meaty rules for them. It is important to make sure that rules are present for things that are important to the game. It's also good to look at your game and ask if you need to throw out some rules that have very little to do with the subject matter. Obsessing on the exact page count of these rules is less helpful. Yeah, this has nothing to do with the topic of the thread. I just have a need to stomp on this idea any time I see it.
  21. I'd imagine that the penalty occurs without any effort. If you have Spear/Shield, and you lose either the spear or the shield, you are going to be more limited. It seems a bit cruel to put an extra layer of penalty on there.
  22. There are a lot of excellent board game adaptations to PC and tablets these days.Seems the best way to make it playable over the Internet is to make it an awesome game that gets good reviews and sales, then take it to an established company and make a deal to get it made. Given the success of King of Dragon Pass on mobile devices, I don't think licensing another Glorantha game in that market would be the toughest sell in the world.
  23. Okay, seeing the sheet is making me think that the game might end up justifying making this yet another entirely new edition. If all those Rune numbers do some cool things, you might solidly win me over.
  24. I agree with that as well. When I say I am not looking for anything radical, I'm not talking in terms of what would have been radical additions when RQ3, came out. I'm more than happy for time-tested elements from the 30 years between to be added in. Last I heard they were keeping a lot of the core mechanics of RQ6. Full backwards compatibility with RQ2 might be an issue. I've been happy to see the Power point economy die in recent editions. I really liked that RQ6 didn't have that, and one of the main reasons I was excited to get my hands on Adventures in Glorantha. I'll probably be picking it up at some point, but if it isn't addressing my concerns with they system, I might sit out the Kickstarter and pick it up later. While I like Glorantha, I'm already less enthused about a version of RQ that is Glorantha only.
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