simonh

This is one thing I think RQ3 got right. The special exception for the first point of a spell in RQ2 has been a constant source of arguments, rules checking, erroneous stat blocks and mistakes in play. Never had that problem in RQ3, except when someone mistakenly thought the RQ2 rule applied. Now whichever way the rules get standardised, someone will have an original copy of the rules PDF and we’re back to square 1 again. Oh well. At this point arguing about spell strike ranks is almost at the level of being a tradition

Simon Hibbs

Ok, I think I get it. You’re quite right it is a little confusing, but I think the rules are actually consistent.

You can cast any spell at all in a round, then engage in combat and attack in the same round. It explicitly states this in bold on page 195. Therefore the example given I. The text on page 194 must be referring to someone doing this - casting bladesharp or fireblade while not in combat, engaging and then attacking. It just doesn’t spell that out explicitly.

So to recap, while engaged in combat you can only either attack and defend, or defend and cast spells. However you can cast a spell (which may be an attack spell), then later in the same round engage in combat, at which point the previous restrictions come into effect.

Simon Hibbs

10 hours ago, Mugen said:

If you only consider quality of success, there will be a lot of ties.

And in cases where there is an active protagonist and a passive one, a tie is the same as a victory for the passive one, as his goal is to prevent the active character from reaching his goal.

For instance, if a gard is searching for a hidden character and both have 60% in their appropriate skill, the cases in which the guard finds the other character are when :

-He rolls between 13 and 60 and the other player rolls 61+

-He rolls between 4 and 12 and the other player rolls 13+

-He rolls between 1 and 3 and the other player rolls 4+

For a total of 24.35% chance of success, from which we can substract the 1% chance they get the same result on the d100.

This stuff is complicated. I’m not sure that’s the correct way to combine the different probabilities.

EDITED: Oops, found a silly bug. Updated below

I just worked up a Python script to go through all the possible combinations of guard and player rolls and count up the successs. It came up with 2943 winning combinations for the guard out of 10000 possibilities, or a little over 29%. I didn’t consider fumbles though. I used ‘elif’ to avoid double-counting.

# Chance of success for 60% skill
# Remember range() starts at 0

# g is the guard, p is the player

s = 0 # Success counter

for g in range(99):
    for p in range(99):
        if g <= 2 and p >= 3:
            s += 1
        elif g <= 11 and p >= 12:
            s += 1
        elif g <= 59 and p >= 60:
            s += 1

print s

Simon Hibbs

1 hour ago, Tarumath said:

I mean, I understand the principle but in this case knowing how much points you are "supposed" to use would be better than choosing whatever you want, otherwise player characters would probably end up either underpowered or overpowered.

Changing rules unless you really understand them is just going to break the game most of the time.

A GM can break any game with the greatest of ease, or even a thoughtless miscalculation anyway. Being a little under or over generous isn’t going to break a game by itself. As long as the stats are within the rollable range and not egregiously above or below an average set of rolls, you’ll be fine.

Im glad the game doesn’t waste space on alternate ways to do this or that. Whatever alternate systems they put in for generating stats, a lot of GMs would just use their own favourite method anyway.

Simon Hibbs

7 hours ago, TrippyHippy said:

The real point, however, is that it is simply a misrepresentation of Lord of the Rings to suggest it is shiny and hopeful. It isn't. 

 

I think that’s true. It has shiny things and hopeful things in it, but that doesn’t make it shiny and hopeful, any more than it having dark and sinister things in it makes it dark and sinister.

I’m sure shamans use the Spirit rune in their magic and practices, it just isn’t surfaced as a rules level concern in RuneQuest.

I think the GM pack will be a screen plus misc support materials, and maybe a scenario.

Simon Hibbs

The restriction is against attacking magically while also attacking in melee in the same round. So you can attack in melee in the same round as casting a spell, as long as it is not an attack spell. Since Bladesharp is not a magical attack, you can cast it while also attacking physically in the same round. You could not do this if the spell was Demoralize though.

Simon Hibbs

12 hours ago, Iskallor said:

I saw that the spirit rune isnt for pcs anymore. I thought the majority of Praxians had it? And what about shamans?

That’s not how I take it at all. In RQ everyone ‘has’ every rune at some percentage rating or other, it’s just that these rules mainly for Dragon Pass humans mainly focus on a certain set of runes and their effects. The binary status of ‘Having’ a rune or not in the HQ sense just isn’t a thing in RQ.

Simon Hibbs

It’s possible there was a highest roll wins tie breaking rule in there at the time of the QuickStart, but it’s got removed in favour of a strict level of success ladder and now there are some residual references hinting at the old method in the text. Looks like we need clarification.

Nonsense. Only the Popular Revolutionary Army of Char-Un truly represents the Char-Un people and true spirit of revolution!

6 hours ago, BWP said:

However, a house rule that I've contemplated in the past (but right now I can't remember if I ever actually implemented it) was to allow someone doing weapon training to do A & P training simultaneously, with whatever combination of weapon/shield/whatever that made sense for the character. 

 

Exactly. If you watch anyone actually doing any combat training, it’s immediately obvious that executing an attack is only possible if you are also able to deflect or neutralise your opponent’s offensive capability. There are only two ways separating those concerns makes sense. Either you have no interest in attack, in which case your defensive manoeuvres can disregard offence and nit bother thinking about settling up offensive moves, but training this way means any offensive training you do separately will be useless with this defensive skill you’re training. Or alternately you have no interest in defence, in which case you can train in suicidal offensive manoeuvres with no regard to protecting yourself, but this training will be completely unusable in combination with any defensive training you do.

In practice combat training is about chaining offensive and defensive manoeuvres together in effective combination. The only feasible way to train in defence and attack in a combinable way is to do them together. At which point, your really training in one thing.

1 hour ago, Mugen said:

French game Celtic Legends had a location for the lower pelvis area.

Funnily enough, it was number 13.

If they were 'Friends' fans they would have made it Number 7.

Simon Hibbs

The lineage of this idea is an interesting and reasonably separate topic. I had no idea the BGB discussed combining attack and parry, and I know for sure there is no lineage from the BGB to this aspect of RQG. Jason was the primary author on the BGB, but the decision to go with a combined combat skill system for attack and parry in RQG was made quite some time before he became involved.

If it comes from anywhere, it’s probably the one idea to make it from RuneQuest 6, now Mythras, into RQG. Pete Nash, one of the RQ6/Mythras developers is a very experienced swordsman, is a long time member of the SCA and is very knowledgeable on historical fighting manuals. I’ve seen him give seminars on historical fighting techniques and the reasoning behind this concept in particular, and various other realism issues in RPG combat systems at games conventions. It’s Pete’s explanations and demonstrations of the practical techniques used in various forms of close combat that convinced me this change makes sense, and that while it’s not perfectly realistic, it leads to fewer unrealistic and anomalous situations than separate skills. Since the new Chaosium team know Pete and have had a chance to discuss this with him, I’m pretty confident this is where the idea came from, not the BGB.

Simon Hibbs

Mikus, Since you won't engage with or discuss any of my actual arguments or points, or any of the expert evidence I have presented in the form of HEMA training videos showing how swords and shields are actually used, and instead keep manufacturing absurd Dagger/Spear/Shield/Axe straw men, or dagger attack/parry/throw straw men, and you started out by saying you were not persuadable anyway, clearly there is no point in me making any points or repeating the ones I have already made or providing further evidence. That leaves no further productive places for me to go.

You say with combined skills in RQ you might as well play D&D, and that's fair enough. It can't be all that much work to house-rule in a parry system and D&D is a very well supported game with a very active fan community. There's even 13th Age which is a heavily D&D inspired, but far better thought out game with a recently published Glorantha supplement that might be right up your street with a bit of house ruling to introduce a parry mechanic.

RQ is also a highly moddable game. If I played in your group and you made a house rule to split out attack and parry skills, I would play that game with no issues. So have fun, and I hope one day we get a chance to meet up at a con and maybe have a beer or two together.

Simon Hibbs

2 hours ago, Jeff said:

I did NOT want to have the cover of RQG be another homage to RQ2 

And yet it has a homage within it. A really nice touch, I think.

Simon Hibbs

9 hours ago, Mikus said:

...he found himself severly disadvantaged defending with his sword, because he had failed to train or use his weapons defensively.  

I completely understand that and it's a fun anecdote. The thing is from a game system perspective, should a guy who Is highly competent at fighting with sword and shield, when the shield is gone be absolutely no more competent in defense with that sword than someone who has never picked up a sword in their whole life?*

Unfortunately that's the kind of character the old rules often gave us. After all your anecdote can be summarized as "I played this game and the skill system was so fine grained that all it took was for one piece of equipment to be unavailable to the character and the system broke". As I've said before, it really is a matter of pros and cons.

Simon Hibbs

* Also just because the character always fights with the shield 'on screen', that doesn't mean the character can't maintain a more general capability with practice during down time.

11 hours ago, Mikus said:

To assume that someone who normally uses a sword and shield will be just as effective in offense if he forgets his sword at the brothel is silly.  

Some nice straw you've got in your man there. You do know swords and shields have different stats in RQ, right? Furthermore, losing or breaking equipment is a real thing that happens and that a competent warrior should be able to cope with. maybe not as effectively of course, but at least at some level of capability above 'never done that before in my life'.

11 hours ago, Mikus said:

As for:

"The hypothetical one trick pony that only ever fought one way is really a rather artificial and ridiculous caricature."

No one ever said this so this is simply a straw man. 

My apologies, I must have misinterpreted the below comment from your previous post.

On 5/16/2018 at 4:03 PM, Mikus said:

 So if I use a sword and shield and always parry with my shield and attack with my sword I still advance in parry skill with my sword and attack skill with my shield?  This is a simplification.  If you like it, fine.  Trying to defend it won't get any traction with me but the D&D guys lurking in the wings will love you for it.

From people with HEMA experience, that just isn't how people fight in reality, so the way RQ previously split out the skills resulted in an artificial distinction. A competent warrior will absolutely buffet or strike with a shield or block with a sword when they need to and will be much more vulnerable and ineffective if they avoid it. Furthermore in practice even if you primarily expected to fight with a shield, the fact is shields break or get lost so you would train in fighting without it as well. The artificiality of a game can distort these things (although RQ equipment absolutely can break). Also the fact that a character is optimized for certain equipment can create a perverse pressure on the GM to avoid creating circumstances where it isn't available. It distorts the whole structure of the game experience when characters are highly tuned in the sort of way you described. I just think it's much more satisfying to have characters that are broadly competent at what they do and can cope with circumstances a little outside their ideal comfort zone without breaking.

It looks like we're not going to agree on this, which is fine. One of the great things about RQ and BRP in general is how easily moddable it is, so it's not as if splitting skills is all that hard. Best wishes.

Simon Hibbs

12 minutes ago, Mugen said:

I don't have a clue how his Magic bonus is computed. Both Vasana and Yanioth have lower INT and POW, but there Magic bonus is +10%. And Vishi Dunn, whose INT and POW are both above 17, only gets +10%.

I think CHA affects the Magic bonus. The CHA attribute in RQG is far more important than in any previous edition of RQ. It's seen as at least partly to be force of personality. It affects relationships with spirits too, so is important for Shamans.

Simon Hibbs

EDIT - Cross post with Jeff!

The pre-gens are right about the level of competency I like to start my PCs at (1). Jeff's comment about being able to execute a well planned ambush is spot on. It's no fun playing a character if you only have about a 50/50 chance of doing anything useful. This is particularly important for non-combat skills because usually the outcome of an entire activity is governed by a single roll. At least combat is a bit more of a statistics game.

Also, you can tame high skills a bit with situational modifiers. It always seems a bit brutal to impose a -20% modifier or half chance on someone with a 50% or 60% skill, but if they're at 80% it seems more reasonable. After all, the skill % on the sheet only means anything relative to the expected difficulty of tasks. As a GM I find that useful, and more satisfying than handing out positive modifiers to make easier tasks more achievable. If a task is easy, what are we rolling for it?

EDIT:

(1) http://www.poppyware.com/dunham/glorantha/elric/chargen.html

Actually I was a bit more generous, I wanted players to be able to start characters off at beginning Priest or Shaman level.

Simon Hibbs

3 hours ago, g33k said:

Everything the PC's can do, so can the nomads (except specialized Rune-magic).  Presumably the Issaries merchant can at least ward the camp.
But I would expect any serious attempt on the caravan to be an ambush, that begins with missile fire & ranged death/incapacitation magic.

Again, I point to that HL guide, and routing through friendly territory...

Of course they can, but just because you can 'win' by killing more of them than they can kill of you doesn't automatically make it worthwhile. In other words, some of your people getting killed is always bad, regardless of how many more casualties you can inflict on the enemy, so the payoff has to be clearly worth it relative to just trading or extracting a toll with menaces, or watching their camp for weak or badly guarded spots and doing a sneak-and-grab of you see a chance, or all three.

Simon Hibbs

8 hours ago, David Scott said:

I forgot I had these, Paper Wars was an excellent product. I don’t know Simon’s alias on here, I wonder if he still has them on sale?

 

I'm sure I have the CD around somewhere in the attic, but I'd buy it again in a hot second.

Simon Hibbs

1 hour ago, Roko Joko said:

how are they supposed to not be surrounded in the middle of nowhere and outnumbered 100:1 over and over again

It’s a real problem, but good options include missile fire and ranged death magic. The ability to inflict even a handful of casualties should be enough to discourage casual attacks. How many of your family and friends lives would you be prepared to sacrifice for a bit of booty?

Simon Hibbs

Looking at a preview copy at Eternalcon, even just laser printed in B&W, I can easily see why it took this long. The Organization, layout and way the art integrates with and supplements the text is fantastic.

Magic Point storage is pretty much a must-have asset for any character that casts magic, which is pretty much any character in RQ. The problem is if they're common enough for all or most characters to have one, why can't some characters have more? But that can be seriously unbalancing.

For crystals this isn't as much of an issue because you can only attune one crystal at a time, so its's self-limiting. Perhaps that could be extended to all MP storage sources, so you can only have a connection to one at a time? It seems a little artificial, but might do the job. We'd still need a mechanism along the lines of attunement to establish or shift the link.

Simon Hibbs