Hey all, just popped in to say how much I appreciate the designers notes series, and the fact that Runequest/Glorantha is getting it's "ultimate format" after all these years!
Unlike a lot of people it seems, I like it all. Special Effects from RQ6 needed to be limited in some way to be interesting, otherwise the players did just pick the same one's over and over. May as well just use the old Impale/Critical format in that case. A critical/special chart would also be highly welcome, as the Fumble table was always, always, always good for a laugh. I'd like the RQ3 back straight up, honestly.
Over the years I had a number of player's characters battered to their heroic death via total hit point loss, so yeah, I am in for that too.
Add the Pendragon passions -- great! Not sure I want them THAT powerful though. Think about it -- Hate Chaos at 20, err 100%. Storm Bull characters would be locked on rails to fight/suicide against every chaos horror that they came across, while at the same time trivializing every encounter of feral broos or such. How about Hate Law or Hate Life from the bad guys -- it would get nasty very quickly. My solution: cap the possible impact of hatreds unless aligned at a Rune level. Yes this could take away from the clan on clan feuds, but the pure Pendragon mechanic was too powerful when applied to combat. For some reason no one ever minded the passions from being able to allow a love poem to be written though.... Big swings of combat power I'd rather see coming from Rune manipulations.
Last long standing personal bugaboo -- Two Handed weapons vs. one handed weapons. Two handers just seem the choice of the standard monster hunting hero, while the classic Broadsword + Shields seems anemic by comparison. RQ6 got around this with passive blocking (although can't you just SE to not the shield every time???) but while in Pendragon most characters wouldn't part with the 1H + shield, most of my RQ players gravitated to 2 handers as they were simply vastly better at penetrating armor and getting an incapacitation.
I'd also love a statement somewhere about the rarity of armor, mainly to make it clear that the players don't start born with mail -- unless they are, of course ;-)
Dissolv
