Kränted Powers

On 11/15/2022 at 2:19 PM, davecake said:

To learn at character creation, it needs to be a tradition that they could have studied for some years, though not necessarily on their home island. 

I think it would give some nice flavour to a campaign if each of the islands would be known for its own Martial Arts tradition. So, at character creation,

1 …they would get a bonus if the choose the local tradition. 
2 …each islands has 2–3 traditions to choose from
3 …the island has only one tradition – they will choose it

And then continue like you suggested; finding a new master would be a good objective for an adventurer.

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

I would allow them to have whatever traditions made sense.

If it is a tradition from another island, perhaps they learned it from a travelling master.

Yes, that sounds reasonable. I think it might be more interesting for the players, if they start with a Martial Arts Tradition of their own home island, and later "collect" the other traditions from other islands.

Aah, ok, I mean this: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/411738/Korolan-Islands-Hero-Wars-in-the-East-Isles--Volume-1?term=korolan+
The campaign seems to be inspired by South Pacific islands like Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, Bora Bora and New Zealand – something else than "Tolkien Fantasy".
 

New Korolan Islands campaign book looks pretty interesting and inspiring, especially the Martial Arts Traditions.
How do you guys handle "learning different Martial Arts Traditions"?
Do you allow players to choose whatever Tradition they want or only the traditions that are available on their home island?

8 hours ago, Stephen L said:

If I were a good enough GM to have any black belt techniques, the one I would aspire to would be quite the opposite: how do I encourage the players to guide the play, and not how do I guide it.  That, for me, is best for encouraging player involvement. 

For me what works is asking players questions.  Why do you think you failed that roll? What happened?  How do you think Queen Leika will react, now that you’ve killed Asthmatic Bob?

That’s how I get the players involved, because we are all deciding together how the story unfolds, and how we interpret the dice, and the GM is only the conduit by which the players interact with an unknown scenario.

 

Very good point of view. I think the GM is the entertainer and guides the show.

8 hours ago, Bren said:

Back in the day when I ran and played a lot of D&D and D&D-like systems, I used to be very meticulous about variably awarding and tracking experience. 

After playing DD and RQ in the '80s, WFRP was the game that opened our eyes to award XP for different things.

 

This discussion is getting interesting turn; "talkative players" vs "silent players".  Punishing somebody? What is this? One of the Game Master's jobs is to give every player their share of attention. 

Many silent players are good roleplayers (talking less, creating a memorable character with few words) or creating great ideas for solving challenges. They will get their XPs for that. So are more talkative players too. Who will define; who is too talkative or too silent?

I think this kind of a problem is somewhere else than the rules or the XP system.

One of the Game Masters' Black Belt techniques is to guide the style of the play by rewarding XPs. 

No worries, as you mentioned, this works nicely for our group of RPG veterans from the '80s.

I recall that the box-ticking mechanic resulted in players desperately trying to use every skill during a session.

And if you ROLEplayed well ("created memorable character with recognizable persona"), we did not know how to reward that.
At least, this was a roleplaying game and not a board game, right? 😉 And some players got annoyed because he always came up with the plan while others waited until it was time to roll the Attack dice.  Then…

…we bought WFRP 1st edition and our eyes opened wide. The XP system endorsed different kinds of roleplaying than just …skill checks.

Anyways, RQ III+ is my favorite game engine.

45 minutes ago, Susimetsa said:

Are you rewarding players or characters? A player can easily have a great idea while playing a character to whom such an idea would never occur. Thus, rewarding the character for the player's idea seems off to me as it might also be an example of bad roleplaying, e.g. a math wiz solving a logical puzzle while playing a troll who cannot count to 3. That's an extreme example, but you get the idea. At the same time, I would not like to stop smart players from sharing their ideas, so I'd allow them to toss the ideas around, but in the game world, the idea would probably be represented as a group effort.

 

Moro! I think this is not so complicated at all. XP system is just like playing WFRP in Good Ol' '80s. 
Player "acts" using the logic of his PC in given circumstances.

Yes, I got the idea. I have never had that kind of a problem. We have always solved them.

I encourage my players to creative roleplaying – the stats of the character (or the game mechanics) will limit the actions. 

This is very simple: e.g. the party is attacking a tower. The objective is to conquer the tower. The battle will occur, bloodshed is inevitable. The defender is ready. Then, one of the PCs gets an idea of how to make the defenders surrender and open the gate without bloodshed. 

XP is rewarded for the PC for the great idea for meeting the objective.

This was a very "Dnd-ish" sample.

Nowadays, when our games (or plots) are more like Game of Thrones (compared to DnD Hack'n'slash -style), the roleplaying is much more creative. The solution is not to "deal a ridiculous amount of damage". It is more like diving deep into the motivations, needs, and weaknesses of NPCs/monsters and manipulating the situation with those elements.

17 hours ago, Godlearner said:

Do not need to. Some people are good roleplayers and some are not. Why punish people for skills that their characters have and they do not. If they have a good idea then they will have an easier time getting things done.

Yes, I understand. 
I think the opposite way – it is not fair to punish the players who actively participate and contribute to the story, only if one of the players happens to be the more passive type of a player.

Rewarding the players for many various things gives them more options to "shine". I have good experience with rewarding; a silent guy who used to solve all the challenges nowadays seems to enjoy bringing his character to live on the table etc. And sometimes the challenge is solved without any dice or skill rolls. Then the reward system works nicely. But, hey, everybody has their own style. 

14 minutes ago, Runeblogger said:

What does this mean, exactly? How do they increase the level of success?

Sorry, I didn't explain it. I wrote it on some other topic…, here we go:

We've been using opposed rolls like this: the one who succeeds better wins. 
Attk skill 80 > "60" (D100) = +20
Def skill 50 > "29" (D100) = +21, defender  wins.
Or even when failing:
Attk skill 80 > "90" (D100) = -10
Def skill 50 > "59" (D100) = -9, defender  wins.

And of course, Special will win Normal Success and Critical win Special. If it is a tie with 2 Specials, the higher skill wins.

So, the player can use points from the XP Pool to increase the level of success after the roll. So, if you lost your Attack roll vs the Enemy's Dodge roll by 5 %, you can use 6 points from XP Pool to win. But, it will never change you Normal Success to Special or Critical. You can use it only to increase the difference between numbers.
I don't usually like the "Pools", but this seems to work, and the players like it. It's kind of Fate point, which is nice. 

There was a situation once, where the players were fighting each other …and that was exciting because the players saw each other's Pools getting used, hit by hit. 

3 hours ago, Godlearner said:

box-ticking

How do you award players for good roleplaying? or good ideas?

I'd like to hear your house rules for XP.
I'll share mine:

Instead of box-ticking, we use a system similar to WFRP (1st ed) in our RQ campaign.

After a session the players are rewarded XPs:
3 pts for joining the game
1–3 pts for roleplaying your character
1–3 pts for ideas that solved challenges
1–3 pts for surviving "a scene"
1 pt for the best D100 roll in a session (this rule is for our board gamers)
1 pt for beating an enemy (physical or social combat)

+ 2 pts for each player who voted you as "The Best Player" of the session. (The Best = best acting, best description, best idea, etc)

After collecting all the points, the player continues with the normal advancement system of RQIII (rolling D6 for the amount of the increase and D100 for successful increase), with exceptions: you can increase whatever skill you want (yes, unlogical sometimes, but fun) and you do not lose any XPs; the points "lost" in unsuccessful increase, will be collected in XP Pool. Points in XP Pool will be used later to increase the level of success (skill rolls).

The players seem to enjoy the system very much.

And your system?

On 1/8/2022 at 2:15 AM, KPhan2121 said:

I didn't like the idea of both characters failing but the one that fails the least will win by default.

Yes, I don't know if there's any real-life logic there –  sometimes a competitor who fails less might win. 😉
Anyway, it has saved time a lot.

On 1/8/2022 at 11:48 AM, Mugen said:

What's good with your method is that you avoid the usual counter-intuitiveness of "blackjack" resolution methods, which is a problem for some people, but the trade-off is that it requires a lot of substractions for a result that is very close to simply comparing the d100 results.

 

Yes, I like it, because the fight is over quite quickly.  
Oh, we have found this quite easy; subtracting one number from another – and that's it.
Even after couple of beers, it seems to be easy. 😄

Since 2006 we've been using opposed rolls like this: the one who succeeds better wins. 
Attk skill 80 > "60" (D100) = 20
Def skill 50 > "29" (D100) = 21, defender  wins.
Or even when failing:
Attk skill 80 > "90" (D100) = -10
Def skill 50 > "59" (D100) = -9, defender  wins.

And of course special wins success and critical wins special. If it is a tie, the higher skill wins.

So in every round something will happen.
If I remember right, there might have been some mathematical problem with thism, but I've been too lazy to check it out.

Yes, this is something that doesn't so much bookkeeping. Extra D20 among all the other dice for Fatigue rolls.

I better test this.

1 hour ago, Kloster said:

Agreed, it might work, is logical and coherent. But my experience is different: I tried several time to use this strategy, but the time needed to have the malus really count is way too long to get any chance of survival versus said armored tank, er, knight. with said experience and accompanying sword.

Last time we played, a fight took 12 combat rounds (couple of minutes). Maybe it isn't realistic to get exhausted in such an short time, but perhaps we could be a bit unrealistic and add FATIGUE check after each round. So that the more agile and faster fighter can run around his opponent to make him more exhausted. Hmm, I think there is a chance for a tactical option. 

A guy who teached myesword techniques outside in a nearby park showed us another trick. The more your opponent is running around the better the chance that he will slip. And this happened too. Maybe that's covered in Fumble rolls. 😉

4 minutes ago, Kloster said:

One of mine used it, and it never changed the result of a single roll, because combat were sufficiently short to avoid the -1% per fatigue below 0 to have any effect. The next GM (a player in the game we used it) decided to discard it completely.

I agree. We had the similar experience in the early days.

24 minutes ago, David Scott said:

Depends how crunchy you like your games. None of the RQ3 GMs I played with, ever used it. The sentence Starting from zero, an average adventure, can completely recover full fatigue points in 4-10 minutes, basically meant it was ignored as a time waster.

I think the Fatigue rule is another tactical option for players, so I would not want to lose it. Making heavily armoured knight (with too much experience on beer) run around the combat field until he is exhausted is not a bad strategy.

I wonder if somebody has solved this problem. I couldn't find a thread about this either. After all these years with RuneQuest III here are my solutions:

1) Current system:
Encumbrance is divided by Constitution. Each point means -10 % to all physical skill rolls and -1 strike rank. All the time, from the very first melee round to the last. So, it's not cumulative. We are not satisfied with this, but it's been fair for adventurers with CON 17 or 7.

2) Under construction: Roll each round.
This is not as bad as it sounds as we roll all the dice (to hit, hit location, damage) at the same time to speed up the combat (so we are not wasting time like "did you hit? Yes? Ok, then roll for hit location. Thanks. And then, damage roll, please"). 

Add one D20 (CON check) more WITH a modifier (encumbrance/CON). Each time you fail there's -10 % to hit and -1 to SR.

Any thoughts about this?

 

How did they handle Fatigue rules in RQIV? 
After all these years with our very tuned RQ3 engine, the Fatigue rules are still "the missing puzzle".

I agree with the opinion about the "film directors". The sketch shown above is a great tool when describing the clothing.

"A bit of movement and expression"

I think the challenge is that sometimes the drawings have many details, but as a drawings they miss the movement and expression. Especially when the style of the clothing is a bit strange, the drawing itself should be so cool that it would make the clothing look cool!

Comparison:

many details, but the costumes and the characters don't look very interesting.

Here the drawing style makes the simple outfit look cool.

There will be many interesting choices…

1 Cover and the logo
Bright colors or dark colors? The logo, I prefer the style Games Workshop had back in the days – visually great logos compared to the some of the typeface based "font"-logos.


2 Visualizating the rules
I remember an article from Adventurer or Imagine (million years ago) where all the Combat Situation Modifies were visualized with black'n'white drawings in a style of legendary Piero Ventura. Simple style, full of information ()

3 Realistic or High-fantasy art?
For me RQ is more close to "Hermann's Towers of Bois Mary" than the latest DD illustrations.

4 lay-out
Do you remember the Eyewitness books? Instead of the too obvious and perhaps a bit dull 2 column lay-out, the spreads like this might be refreshing: 

5 Should the illustrations be more humorous?
I think Chris Riddell's work has been great, Paul Bonner, Arthur Rackham, John Bauer, even Diterlizzi. Maybe not for Glorantha, but good choices for Warhammer Fantasy RP.

6 Inside art: color vs black'n'white?
As an old gamer myself, I prefer the look of the old black'n'white books with a touch of mystic or occult feeling than some of the new – candy colored –books don't have.

7 Typography
Level: professional or "my cousin knows how to use Word"…

Wow, this IS getting interesting!

Well spoken! I agree totally. You should be able to recognize Glorantha with it's many details – instead of general fantasy setting. I think Artesia has been a good example.