Akhôrahil

Pendragon is a miracle of game design, and when I heard about the new edition, my first thought was "what are they even going to change?"

I'm a polygamist that way - I play multiple games, and I think it's fine if others play a game that I do, I don't demand exclusivity.

Assuming it's publicly available.

We're more in "general quality improvements" here, but also... maybe? It takes very little space to do the experience rules (you can ignore Practice and Training), and they kinda matter.

”Sartar” and ”Starter” do sound similar!

I think it's pretty bad (but then I also have membership in that band). I don't think I have ever seen a game that is this good in all the other aspects while having this poor consistency and rules-editing. The rules look like they've been slapped together through copy&paste from different products. It's understandable if the game was produced in a hurry, but that just makes cleaning it up more important. I could not in good conscience recommend RQG to anyone new to roleplaying because of the lack of clarity and consistency. But then, I guess that’s the idea behind the starter set. Yes, it just takes work. Virtually all professional games do it better than RQG. I would guess that the decision to include a lot of old baggage for compatibility reasons was a big offender here. Errata would help. Second edition would be better. Putting a lot of editing work into the Starter Set might be the most practical at this point - then use that as a springboard. The risk with not doing it is that you can keep locking in bad rules when you publish supplements, and then you get increasingly stuck with them. If I wanted to create my own game, I would do that. I buy games in order to get a working rules-set, not a Choose Your Own Rules game. Since it's doubtful that even the designers are in complete agreement about what the rules say, you also risk cascading inconsistencies in future supplements when everyone uses their own interpretation. I thought I was getting crazy when I tried to understand the Attack vs. Parry outcomes the first time. * Beyond just clarity and consistency, I think it would also be wise to look at some of the most conspicuously odd rules. Do we really need both a rule about Species Maximum for characteristics and a different rule about how you calculate Characteristic Gain chances, especially as these produce the same result for humans? Does that special rule about only Dex for Species Maximum actually fulfil any purpose? Why on Earth can't a spear or a greataxe damage other weapons on a crit, when they can on non-crits (and why would a greataxe of all weapons be unusually bad at damaging other weapons and shields in the first place?)? Make up your mind on whether SR is an initiative system or an action economy. Things like that, that do nothing except add complexity and confusion.

PCs lose their collective minds upon finding out that this is the one where the EWF won.

At the very least, weekly - as a an initiate, you need to sacrifice 2 MPs weekly just to remain in good standing, and it's hard to imagine that the god doesn't benefit from these sacrifices.

I kinda agree - MP sacrifices give pretty good bonuses compared to sacrificial animals or actually valuable goods, while still having barely any cost to the worshiper. This tilts the entire system - no-one in their right mind should sacrifice anything of value when MPs work as well or better and at essentially no cost. This is part of a wider issue with MPs - they're supposed to limit what you can do with magic, but don't really because of speedy regain and easy access to storage.

I want a second edition with better rules editing. I don't think anyone would say that RQG is a polished product rules-wise. But yes, definitely an errata collection - the QA contains everything from "actually change this rule to the exact opposite" to "if you want to change things about the world, you can!" It's not particularly navigable or information-dense. Or - wild idea! - make sure that the Starter Box is properly edited and then build on that. The whole point of publishing a starter box is that it should be accessible without decades of RQ knowledge that you need in order to interpolate what a rule is supposed to mean.

This is both easy and makes sense - the idea is supposedly that each species has a maximum potential, one that is calculated by exceeding the maximum rollable by a small amount (1/6th, in this case). Honestly, you could probably just apply it outright even for species that roll something besides D6s, if you think of it as how potential maximum relates to maximum rollable. It's not clear why dice involved should affect anything...

How could anyone think that it's a good idea to have one system for Species Maximum, and a different system for Characteristics Experience checks, and these just happen to be have the same outcome for the overwhelmingly most used species (oh, and an ability that is specifically designed to improve POW gain doesn't in fact work becuase of this)? What possible purpose could this complication serve!? What kind of game design principle would approve of this?

QA thread.

Correct, this is not official. Any static modifier, whether +1 or +100, counts as one die. You should very likely houserule this, as it makes no sense.

Ruling is out, Expand Soul doesn’t help with POW gain rolls. I think all of this is nonsense and I will keep using Species Maximum for POW gain instead of this weird oddball rule.

Another thing that I wonder about is whether the gods and spirits benefit from larger MP sacrifices. Because if they do, then a culture that said "screw it, we won't just sacrifice 2 MPs at holy days, we're going to do 10 MPs instead, and as often as we can!" would actually feed their god/spirit into higher strength at a very marginal personal cost.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is absolutely the way to do it - use Species Maximum instead. But it’s not what the actual rules say.

Yes, exactly. P. 361 says it affects species maximum and hence POW gain rolls, while p. 481 doesn’t involve species maximum in the first place. It’s a clear contradiction.

Something like 1617-1620 sounds right for The Colymar Campaign (the Wiki has 1618).

I was thinking the same. "Blue Bloke Clan", and so on. (I know I read somewhere, likely not canonical, that the chaos-killing god is 'The Storm Bloke'. The notion that by any reasonable standard he must have a tapir body with a herd-man head in order to show off his bestial nature is disturbing in the way Glorantha does so well.)

It's also silly that a creature with a stat of 10d6 has a racial maximum of 70, while one with 5d6+30 - better by any standards - has a racial maximum of 66. Fortunately, this is easily patched by the obvious houseruling of letting 30 here count as 5d6 for species maximum purposes instead of 1d6.

RAW, you need to keep racial maximum separate from characteristic gain calculation, which means that you could in theory have a chance to to gain a characteristic point which would then either exceed racial maximum (unlikely) or get flushed down the drain. This would be instantly obvious if humans didn't by chance have the same value in each. I ignore the rules on p. 418 - characteristic gain is [Racial maximum] - [Current], which is the obvious way to run it, even though RQG makes up a completely new rule here. For additional weirdness: Shaman Soul Expansion increases Species Maximum for POW for the Shaman, but this has no effect on POW Gain Rolls...

Correct, but characteristic gain follows a rule that's completely different from Racial Maximum: "To determine if POW increases, add the adventurer’s maximum rollable POW not including any Rune characteristic modifier (i.e., 18 for humans) plus the minimum rolled POW (3 for humans)." "If done by research, the player must first roll to determine if the research is successful by adding together the adven- turer’s maximum rollable characteristic value (not including any Rune characteristic modifier) plus the minimum rollable characteristic value." And then the example for POW gain is back to Species Maximum, even though it's not in the actual rule. And Soul Expansion on p. 361 says that since Species Maximum is increased, POW gain chance increases. It's a complete mess.

I think it's ridiculous that Characteristic Gain has weird special rule that's completely different from racial maximum, so I go with [Racial Maximum - Current Value] for everything. It'd be pretty crazy to research POW in the first place, too, when it's so easily raised by other means while other stats aren't, so I doubt it will ever come up.

Apprentice Shamans have a truly massive advantage when it comes to getting to POW 18.