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deleriad last won the day on March 21 2019
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RPG Biography
Started with RQII back in 1982. Ran and played in Call of Cthulhu, Ringworld and Stormbringer. Have since run many campaigns in RQ3, DC Heroes/(MEGS as now is) & CoC. Currently running MRQ. Have played in Champions, Star Trek (FASA), V & V, Cthulhutech. Played D&D just twice in my life, Traveller once. <br />
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Contributed to early issues of Dagon, Tales of the Reaching Moon and had an article printed in Heroes, right next to one by Jonathan Tweet. -
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Mythras - a bit of Luther Akwright. The One Ring.
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Edinburgh, UK
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Blurbidy blubidy blurb.
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Indeed. The "mouth-feel" of a die rolling mechanic is definitely part of the intangible element of a game. It's sort of RNA vs DNA. If the DNA of the game is its basic building blocks then, mechanically you have various ways of implementing d100 roll under but they can feel very different. Likewise a skill list is in BRP's DNA but the name of the skills, the granularity of them, splitting into common/advanced feel like variations in expression rather than fundamentals hence thinking of them as RNA. I would say RD100 has some variations from BRP in its DNA (especially non-linear scaling of special results) but is mostly difference in expression. Same with Mythras with the major variations being combat and "POW economy". Technically, if you have a d100 roll under system where you always have a 5% chance of success if you can roll then whether you set the actual die results of 1-5 as auto-success or you say any roll within 5 points of your skill is an auto-success or some other auto-success mechanic then the DNA of the mechanic is the same but how it feels in practice can be quite different. (D&D went through agonies with THAC0 charts and AC.) It will be interesting to see what happens with various BRUGES fantasy heartbreakers now that ORC is here. It's the first time that (unlamented Legend aside) it's been easy to homebrew traditional BRP.
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Ultimately that comes down to determining what the levels of success "mean" and what the ratio of them is. For example, if a "good" success happens in about 1/10 of all successes then how much "better" should it be than a normal success? Probably not 10 times better but clearly, because it is a pretty rare occurrence it needs to be significantly better. If a good success happens about half the time that you succeed then it will clearly be better than normal but possibly not "twice as good". To a large extent, the whole random number element of the game hinges on this. As a historical note, D&D did not originally have criticals (or fumbles) and Gygax argued against them for as long as he could. He believed in limiting randomness and extreme cases. RQ definitively proved that players love the drama of extreme results. As a game, the moment of rolling the dice is (or at least should be) one of the most dramatic parts of the game. Some players hate and fear it; some love it and embrace it. For me, I like the notion that a "special" success is almost non-existent for a novice but quite common (or maybe even more common than a normal success) for a master; that means the chance for a special success needs to be non-linear in some fashion. Probably then we should use log tables. It was good enough for DC Heroes. 2D10, exploding doubles with a log base e lookup table is where it's at.
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Middle aged adults have been complaining about how ignorant young people are since the dawn of time. Plato and Socrates did it. So I have zero respect for any opinion that includes it. In general, people tend to be good at the things they need to be good at. If you're designing a *game* to sell then it needs to be engaging, fun (for some value of fun), accessible and so on otherwise no one will buy it or play it. Probably the most fundamental element of a role-playing *game* is how do you determine what happens when there is a degree of randomness present but the imaginary characters have different capabilities that might affect the outcome. If you then think in terms of a "user interface" how do you design the method of determination so that it is intuitive, easy to operate and is engaging when it happens. RQ and the percentile system came about, in part, because Stafford, Perrin et al found the d20 mechanic in D&D unsatisfying. They preferred the greater complexity and granularity of d100 which was a brave move at a time when many wargamers found buying and using a d20 to be problematic. Interestingly, Steve Perrin stuck with d100 but Greg Stafford preferred simpler systems and moved back to d20 for Pendragon, his magnum opus. There are undoubtedly multiple ways to design a d100 roll-under system, one of which is that which RQ pioneered: multiple levels of success and failure derived arithmetically from a [potentially modified] success chance. It's possibly also important to remember that the first two systems (RQ & CoC and, implicitly in the BRP booklet) that 100% was the cap on skill ability. In RQ you had to be a hero (Rune Lord) to get a skill over 100. At the most abstract level my personal preference for a d100 roll-under system is one where your skill doesn't change in-game during a test, where it is capped at 100% and where levels of success and failure can be read directly from the roll without performing any sort of arithmetical operation. You could actually argue that d100 was the first type of this system because you rolled two dice and rather than adding them up you read one as a 10's die and one as a unit die. Anyway, division and arithmetic in a game is fine for those who like that sort of thing. If I were designing a game now that I wanted to sell, I wouldn't include a mechanic that involved division and multiplication unless the game was about division and multiplication.
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*I* can do this stuff easily. *I* don't have a problem with it. A surprising number of people I have played with, can't. I've also seen way too many sessions get bogged down by someone doing a skill roll, getting + something or other, - something or other, making a roll and trying to figure out whether they have succeeded yet alone whether it is a critical, special or something else. Given that the name of the game is *Basic*... you don't really expect to be hit by having to consult a page full of numbers to see if you succeeded at something. If I am just running a one-off for people who don't usually play and/or are unfamiliar with the system I usually keep skills under 100 and tell them if you roll a double it's twice as good if you succeed and twice as bad if you fail. If it's a hard test then they have to roll twice and succeed twice (keep the worst roll). If it's easy and they fail, they get a second chance for free. Though it may seem like a time sink, the second roll mechanic is surprisingly dramatic and engaging. "Almost impossible" - if you roll 01-05 you succeed through some form of blind luck otherwise you fail. "Very easy" - if you roll 96+ something goes wrong otherwise you succeed. Skill vs skill - best roll wins. (high roll breaks tie) Mechanically it's not robust enough for a full rpg system but as an intro it works perfectly well.
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I find in actual play, dice flipping works well around 50-80% but after around 90% it starts becoming trivial. Players do always start asking questions like if something is easy then what about a "very easy" option and so on. The advantage of numerical modifiers is that you can always make the modifier bigger. Also some (but not) all players love having skills of 200%, 300% and so on. Personally, I like capped skill ranges and I don't like doing math during a game. In some ways I would like (as an example) the gap in ability between 80% and 90% to be a lot more significant than the gap between 20% and 30%. However that is not easy to achieve. The R100 method is an elegant way of doing that because there are a lot more special chances in the range between 80-90 than there is between 20-30. Not sure if it is still the case, but in Call of Cthulhu it used to be the case that you couldn't get above 100 in a skill without modifiers during a skill test. That was partly to keep player characters at risk of failure. Mastery in BRP was always pitched at 90%, not 100%. Personally, I would like to see skills over 80% to be rare and at 90% or over to be exceptional. That does mean playing with a capped range and some sort of accelerator which gives skills in that range some form of non-linear advantage over those below.
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I thought the cleverest system I have seen is that if your units die is lower than your 10s and you succeed then you "special succeed" (likewise failure). E.g. skill 41% then your possible range of special successes are 10, 20, 21, 30, 31, 32, 40, 41. As with all these types of dice tricks though many things are impacted 1. How good is a "special". In this case it can't be as "good" as a traditional BRP critical. If it is then you have a game with a lot more criticals and everything that implies. 2. Awkwardness of checking a dice roll. Sounds odd but it is easy to forget to apply this. It's the sort of thing that tends to trip up players. 3. Skill progression is no longer equal. You get more benefit increasing your skill from 41-43% than you do for increasing it 46-48% because you get more specials. 4. Stops scaling at 100%. So you really have to decide that 01-100 is your skill range or come up with an alternative. In my BRP fantasy heartbreaker I would have skills that cap at 100, modifiers that affect the dice rolled (rather than the skill value) and a specially marked units die. (Or else an additional die that is rolled along with the d100.)
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No, that was Pete and Loz. I did come up with an adaption of folk magic to Gloranthan spirit magic but I forget whether that was used in AiG - I would have to dig out my copy of AiG. I got asked, as a thought experiment, to come up with an adaptation of theism to Gloranthan rune magic. Apparently it got criticised by Chaosium for being too much like HeroQuest which, I thought, was the point. Must admit to getting a bit salty about that 🙂 Although I admire the content that Chaosium has put out for RQ Glorantha, Mythras is my preferred flavour of D100.
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Probably very difficult. Lots of issues but fundamentally RQG works as a "POW economy" where you sacrifice POW and regain it in order to gain benefits while RQ6/Mythras works with your POW as a limit and threshold; you don't sacrifice and rebuild POW, you use it a bit like a storage tank. RQG (like RQ2/3) also has an economy of magic items that you can use to enhance your abilities while Mythras (largely) doesn't. Full disclosure, I was one of the co-authors who wrote the long articles on animism in RQ6 (as was). I love the system but it did feel a bit like grappling with quantum mechanics at times. Obviously in a house campaign you just do whatever floats your boathouse but I would find trying to add it to the RQG mechanical structure more problems than it is worth.
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MIG3: Meints Index to Glorantha Feedback & Corrections
deleriad replied to Rick Meints's topic in Glorantha
I do have a bunch of the Obscurity Inc fanzines; it was the fanzine of the University of Edinburgh RPG soc, GEAS. I wrote a review of RQ3 for it; I don't remember what other RQ material it had but can dig them out and see. -
RQ 3e - Avalon Hill or Games Workshop?
deleriad replied to Zenith Comics Presents...'s topic in RuneQuest
The less money bit I agree with but the rest I'm not so sure of. There were some randomly inserted colour plates and sub-Warhammer illustrations that had little to do with what was going on and tonally at odds with the source material. The way they cut up standard and advanced also made the game largely unplayable without both. And, as you say the binding was also terrible. Obviously they were trying to recapture the success of their UK printings of RQ2 and CoC but that window had shut. As a UK RQ player who had forked out my life savings for RQ3 I was excited at first to see GW producing UK prints but they left a bad taste in my mouth. Funnily enough, my RQ3 boxed set has held up a lot better than the hardbacks despite many years of intense use. -
deleriad started following How Would You "Fix" Shadows of Yog-Sothoth?
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I got a copy of this back in the day (the one without the Shaman rules) and, initially, our gaming group were keen to try it out. We had mostly been playing non-Gloranthan RQ3 since RQ3 came out so I was particularly keen to see how Glorantha would be re-embedded particularly because I was Jonesing to run a generational campaign set in Jonatela. After ploughing through it, doing some char gen and starting to convert Rainbow Mounds, we gave up. It was just so much detail. At the point, as a group, we were quite into detail in lengthy campaigns but on the whole we were tending to simplify game play and character sheets. Less book-keeping more playing. RPGs in general had been on a trajectory of increasingly complicated and detailed systems from the mid-80s and RQ4 would have been the poster child for that. I'm not sure there's anything "wrong" with RQ4 as a system in its own right but it was just too much work to enjoy it. That said, I had mixed-opinions when I learned it had been cancelled because it meant that the RQ hiatus would continue. Plus I wasn't really keen on the narrative games that were emerging: ultimately I enjoy the type of world-building that BRP style games push you towards.
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This has happened to me too. I remember a player who just couldn't get her head around the notion that rolling 00 was 100 rather than zero.
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I use doubles for criticals/fumbles when playing with people who are basically non-gamers. It's simple and quite intuitive "twice as good/bad." I also use exact skill rating as auto success (e.g. 73% skill, roll 73 is auto success and even better than a regular double) and 00 as auto-fail. I don't use 01-05 as auto success or 96-00 as auto fail. I don't use skill modifiers. If something is hard I'll say you'll have to succeed twice or if it is easy, you get two chances to do it. Really hard is only doubles will succeed. (Really easy is you succeed but you can roll to see if you get a double if you like.) I have occasionally mulled over trying this in a "real" campaign but life has got in the way of regular role-playing. I did try using flipping for a while but it always felt kind of awkward.
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Although I haven't enjoyed many of the decisions that Chaosium took with RQ I think this starter set is all manner of amazing. It feels like all the right ways to introduce Glorantha to new players while scratching that nostalgia itch of us oldies. The visuals in particular are beautiful and evocative; they give the world a look that is familiar enough to latch onto while different enough to excite a sense of wonder. I'm never going to be enthused by the mechanics of RQ, but this product makes me want to jump into Jonstown and start playing.
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I do have an opened but unused Pearly King in Yellow pledge. Doesn't look like I'm ever going to play it so I would part with it if it went to a good home. I'm in the UK (Edinburgh). Send me a PM if you're interested.