RMS

Anecdote from my youth: Much of my extended family got caught up in the anti-D&D hysteria - at least enough to not allow my cousins to play games with me. Anyhow, one day I was upstairs playing Stormbringer with my friends. My aunt stopped to visit with my mom. She came upstairs to say hello to me, saw we were playing games and asked if it was D&D. I told her it wasn't, and she commented, "That's ok. As long as it isn't Dungeons and Dragons." Then she left. Everyone broke down laughing when she left. When she walked in, the player with the Pan Tangian sorcerer had just finished purchasing a bunch of sacrifices to summon up a demon to bind. If there was ever a game that really should have bugged them, it was Stormbringer and the detail to which we went in "fleshing out" all the summoning and binding stuff! But it was ok because it was D&D! Note: the detail I added was mostly to make such a central portion of the game more part of the game, and to help control the amount of summonings going on a bit.

Apparently their day isn't the same as mine. It wouldn't accept the code and it's still today here! (It'll be tomorrow in 1 minute...must be EST based.)

I wasn't taking it seriously btw. It was said tongue-in-cheek. It's just that you aren't reading my facial expressions through the internet. It's important if you're looking at RQ combat vs. BRP combat and how the subsystems fit into the overall whole. One of the things that shortened RQ combats was that you ganged up on someone: one person *takes* his defense away and the next couple hit him with no defensive role. It builds directly into this discussion. Any Sword of Humakti, Death Lord, etc. that isn't averaging well above 25 points in RQ-Glorantha wasn't even trying. This is a different issue and one of the broken things in RQ3 magic. Enchantments RAW have no limits and with the assumed power gains in a typical game they can quickly get out of hand. If you don't cap it at all, enchantments can get out of hand. (Granted, you need the right spells and must also make an Enchantment role AFTER spending the POW, but still once the skill is up there it's pretty easy to pile them on.) However, I wouldn't actually call these house-rules (just so you can't object!) so much as just standard at-the-table rulings. Either way, I can see how this could have been abused and would have ruined everything else.

I always saw this problem much more with low-magic campaigns than higher magic campaigns. While playing in Glorantha, magic got quite high and it tended to shorten, not lengthen, fights in comparison to playing a low magic world with adequate armor and weapons available...which did tend to devolved into "waiting for the critical" if you ignored the fatigue system. The fatigue system did a very good job in those cases. It was just way to fiddly for me or my group to ever bother with.

The point was that it wasn't a problem in RAW. I did note what I did to make it even better. Sorry if that offends you. I thought someone might find it helpful. That's only if they stand back while you're on the ground. Any troll worth his salt would have been on top of you matching his superior STR against yours (or SIZ) and taking the boosted weapons completely out of the equation. Also, in RQ, while you were parrying that troll with your boosted shield, his five trollkin got free shots at you with no chance to parry. In BRP, you get to parry every one of them at only a slightly reduced skill. Not to mention the general tendency for everyone to run away once the Humakit "powers up" and then re-engages 15 minutes later with your own magic up and the Humakti's down. One of the beauties of RQ was that it rewarded good tactical thinking over plowing straight into the other side. Not in my experience. If you're boosting things with spells, it's much easier for most combat cults to provide damage boosting spells than armor boosting spells and since we're only talking about RAW none of those armor boosting spells count against a critical (which ignores all armor, including magic). Your experience is completely contrary to my experience in RQ. Mine was that high powered characters almost always had the ability to deal damage to each other. The big problem was that usually a critical killed whoever received it outright, so battles tended to become a series of attacks vs. parries, and then a critical results in a mortal wound regardless of whether the defender parried or not.

Nightshade mentioned it over in the other thread. I've always house-ruled that a Special or Critical attack in RQ did full damage to the parrying weapon. So a shield that parries a Special attack is almost always splintered and useless thereafter. In addition, in the RQ rules, such a hit almost always resulted in a knock back, frequently leaving the parrying person prone and very susceptible to a followup attack. I actually prefer this to the current method myself. I never found high skill RQ combat to drag very long. If it did, it was due to two very high skilled people in a duel, which usually was worth dragging out. Normal combats are still one by whoever has the tactical edge and the best long range weapons!

I've run a couple of RQ games long term: 7 years and 3 years of regular play, respectively. As mentioned, skills continue to progress, but it does taper off. OTOH, characters can still advance if you allow skills to go over 100% and the system holds up quite well for high skills, even for a character with a 200%+ combat skill. There's a myth that the system breaks down, but it doesn't at all. With the ability to get Specials and Criticals, and in combat to do things like split attacks, those high skills all have important uses. However, I do think in both cases that the games would have gotten a bit boring, if mechanical advancement was still the center of character advancement after that time. Instead both did move to political advancement, cult advancement, etc. as being the real center of character activities. Mechanical advancement was just a side-bonus to it.

True, but a good priest shouldn't have to travel too far. Sanctify and Worship FTW! Seriously, those are some of the first spells my PC's always picked up...after getting some others under their belt. They don't work so well with every god, but a man of Orlanth really only has to find a windy hilltop somewhere to be good to go...

To be fair, that was only true of Initiates. Priests (and Runelords in RQIII) have always had reusable divine spells. I'd assume from the use of the word "Cleric" we're talking about the equivalent of a priest in old RQ.

Yeah, but everyone just made Divine Magic reusable with appropriate ceremony in between uses. (Granted the houserule varied a bit, but I've never met anyone who didn't let initiates relearn their spells in some manner.) Completely tossing the system out for something else, due to one extremely minor (and easily houseruled) issue is pretty much the definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In general, the divine spells really do completely outclass everything else in the system too. Yes, you picked one of the exceptions, but what about Sever Spirit, Thunderbolt, Arrow Trance, True Sword, and the old defensive (frequent character saving) favorites like Shield and Spirit Block...or minor spells like Resurrect, Heal Body, Regrow Limb. The point being more that the feel/concept of the system works extremely well in play and is very atmospheric rather than blah MP counting systems: not that I really have anything against good old Battle Magic/Spirit Magic/BRP-Sorcery either. Also, the version presented in Vikings for divine favor would be a very good adaptation in some game worlds. I always liked the concept, though never had a place to use it.

I'm puzzled by this. Divine Magic in RQII/III is one of the best magic systems in any game system ever published: you actually sacrifice part of your soul (ie. POW) in exchange for magical powers, and it's represented and supported by the mechanics of the system. What's not to love about that? For minor powers, I'd just revert to the gift/geas style of the RQ deity writeups.

You might want to check out Talislanta. It might scratch that itch, as is. The 4th edition (and maybe 5th - haven't seen it) would convert to BRP pretty easily on the fly too.

The biggest difference to me was always the change from the opponents being the interesting, deep (not obviously *evil*) Lunars to the stereotypical orcs. It just made GI seem so shallow in comparison. However, it's a really simple change to fix that. I ran GI a couple of times and changed the orcs to an interesting human culture to make them more 3 dimensional and it ran great. GI also has an extra city developed for it, but does miss some of the really interesting GM encounters. While GM is one of my very favorite scenarios ever, I don't really know if I could recommend spending the $ for it, if you have GI, especially if you're skipping all the Glorantha goodness containted therein.

That's what I've always done in BRP games: highest success level wins. In the case of a tie, we narrate the exchange as such and reroll if it makes the most sense. In many cases, a tie makes perfect sense and so we just leave it. It's easy and the rerolls fit perfectly in the system IMO. After all, there are 4 or 5 rolls for every single attack in combat, so why does anything else need to be solved in a single die roll? In fact, until a couple of these conversations here, I hadn't realize that this never codified in the old days and that it's not officially written this way at this point. It was just too intuitive for me to ever bother trying to read the official rules, I guess. Ironically, I use the old RQ3 non-opposed combat system for attacks/parries still.

This is how I've always done it, and have assumed it's what everyone else does...could be wrong about that I suppose. I just start at 50/50 and adjust 5% for each point difference between stats. It does baffle me that people would complain about the math for this in a system where you have to mentally calculate 5% and 20% of every die roll. (I've ranted before about this complaint too, so won't do it here! ) Having said that, I've long considered using opposed STATx5% rolls only because it would be completely consistent with opposed skill rolls.