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BWP

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Everything posted by BWP

  1. Well, if that were true, then this particular illustration is the worst possible way to indicate it. It's just not how you present information, if you want that information to be interpreted correctly! The human mind excels at forming connections (indeed, it will do so even where there are no connections whatsoever -- thus, conspiracy theories), and a piece of art depicting various animals standing side-by-side will inevitably, by default, be assumed to be depicting various animals standing side-by-side. It would be contrary to human nature to interpret it in any other way. If you just want to illustrate what the various critters will look like, you do it the way every other bestiary since the middle ages has done it: you provide individual depictions. If you want to depict scale, you include a human figure (or some other obvious reference point). If you want to depict comparative scale, then you make sure the art does so correctly!
  2. Oh boy, I can't wait to read the Kygor Litor cult again. I may get the vapours from the anticipation on that one alone. Yeah, I know ... of course it needs to be in the book, and for (what we hope will be) many newcomers to RuneQuest it won't be, like, the tenth time they will have read it. It still doesn't fire me up all that much. Ah well, I'll cope. It doesn't diminish my anticipation for the book at all. I do hope, though, that the new RQG line will avoid needless repetition within itself as much as possible. For example, suppose that sometime down the track the decision is made to produce a new edition of Trollpak. I would hope that such a hypothetical product would include a note like "for full descriptions of several important troll cults, see Gods of Glorantha" rather than just reprinting those cults; use the pages thus saved for information/different cults/scenarios/whatever.
  3. I have the same issue with Firefox (running on Windows). No image, just the file name.
  4. The only complaints I ever had about most of what came in the RQ3 Deluxe Box (leaving aside issues of physical presentation) was the lack of Glorantha material and the inclusion of the Fantasy Earth material. The latter could have been worthwhile if it had been developed into ... anything ... but all we got was a large map with no information on it. Uh, thanks. In terms of mechanics, organisation, etc. I too thought RQ3 was the bees' knees ... mostly. There were problems, of course, there always are. Errata cleared up some of them, questions to Chaosium helped a lot, house rules handled most of the rest. From my perspective, as a player and a GM, the Character Generation system was pretty much worth the price of entry alone. Far superior to what we had in RQ2, or just about any other FRPG on the market at the time. Easily customisable, too. On the other hand you had Sorcery which was an excellent concept that doesn't seem to have been playtested by real human beings at all. (Recent revelations that most, if not all, of Chaosium's playtesting involved very experienced PCs as opposed to new characters generated straight from the books go a long way to explain problems like this. A beginning sorcerer has, in my estimation, virtually no chance of ever becoming anything other than a beginning sorcerer; whereas, of course, an experienced sorcerer is pretty tough.) There were other similar sounds-good-but-needed-more-work mechanisms like Fatigue. The sample "encounter tables" wasted several pages of Book 3. (The revelation that the most likely thing you would "encounter" in, say, rural cultivated land are farms, farmers and farm animals is both obviously true and generally pretty irrelevant to most actual games.) Note that my Glorantha-related objections concerned the lack of the material, not the separation of it. I was totally OK with the latter.
  5. BWP

    RQG- Wish list

    I never said anything about should. I'm simply saying what the rules are. Your Game Will Vary. No problem with that ... but if you turned up to play a tournament game and expected the GM to use the same rules that you've been using, you might have an argument on your hands. For my part, I particularly dislike the "halve your chance and hit anywhere you want" rule. I'd prefer a (admittedly, more complex!) rule where you roll the hit location as normal, but get to adjust the location based on how much percentage you sacrificed for the attack (or something like that ... I don't have the specifics of what I wrote up conveniently to hand).
  6. BWP

    RQG- Wish list

    (I don't know why I can't delete that tag for Jason Durall in the quote.) Not any of the groups I've ever played with. It's always seemed clear to us that SIZ modifiers are a reference to the SIZ of "the target" as a whole, I've never seen anything in the rules that states or even implies that you should apply those modifiers if you're only considering "parts" of a target. For an aimed shot, halve your chance (and delay to SR10) is the rule-as-written (Book 1, p.50). Note the errata that specifies you apply all relevant modifiers before the halving. Regardless, putting the RQ3 missile hit tables back into the rules is probably #1 in my personal list of "house rules that I am contemplating". Count me amongst those who think that dropping those hit tables is a dopey idea (for all the reasons that have been stated). Of course, the good news is that re-adding the rule is trivially easy to do.
  7. My copy of GM is heavily worn, and very well-thumbed, and many of the pages are now coming loose (i.e., the binding is failing), but it took many years to get to that point. I'm not inclined to complain. Most of my RQ3 books are still OK, but that's largely because I either didn't make much use of them (Monster Coliseum, Vikings) or learned to take more care (Elder Secrets, Genertela). My Gods of Glorantha main book had its cover separate early on in life. The books in the Deluxe Box, on the other hand, only survive as well as they do because I took the precaution of covering them in clear plastic (doesn't do much to stop the covers from separating, though). Of course, the "winner" is the softcover Deluxe compilation (the way it should have been issued in the first place ...). Remove the plastic wrapping, open the book to the first page, and WHAM. Every single page is now separated from the spine. Just terrible production values on that one. River of Cradles is almost as bad, although that turned out to be something of a virtue, since in my copy (not sure if it was a general problem or a one-off) the cult description pages were assembled in the wrong order. Caused a lot of confusion on my first read-through!
  8. Sorry ... a bit confused ... the "Volume 1 collection" is issues 1-5, right? Issue 6 is separate?
  9. BWP

    RQG- Wish list

    While I'm not committing to anything until I see the final version of the RQG rules, I am at this point planning a whole bevy of house rules for combat. I'd be surprised if there's any group of "experienced" RQ players (regardless of which edition, or editions, they have that experience with) who won't be doing something similar. The printed rules form a nice baseline. They're not the last word on the subject, and every GM will adapt and modify to suit his (and his group's) tastes. Now, if you regularly play at organised tournaments (or otherwise move between different gaming groups), you probably need to keep a very good grasp of what the "core" rules are vs. whatever your preferred house rules are ... but otherwise, it's your game, do whatever works for you!
  10. My 2-inch RQ2 box is in tatters (I still have the individual pieces though!) and my copy of Borderlands isn't much better. Many of my other Chaosium boxes show varying levels of stress. I used to think it was just the Chaosium boxes but on reflection many of my other boxed RPGs show similar deterioration (most of the 1-inch Avalon Hill RQ3 boxes are still in pretty good nick though). So either (a) game boxes are not really built for the abuse that gamers hurl at them; or (b) I'm a bad person who can't look after his games properly. Hmm. Oh, and yes: my copies of Big Rubble and Ringworld have the same reversed wyrm.
  11. I think that a chance of dying-of-fright (for PCs) is at variance with the concept of Maximum Game Fun, but as a GM I'd be happy to just decree that various NPCs can die in that fashion, to heighten the dramatic tension or whatever. If someone really wanted a rule for it, I'd say that any fumbled SAN roll, or anyone who loses an amount of SAN equal to or greater than their current CON, has to make a CON roll to avoid an immediate coronary (or perhaps a brain hemorrhage). At the same time, sometimes SAN loss is over-emphasised both in the rules and in various published scenarios. I don't have any specific examples immediately to hand, but as a player I'm unimpressed when asked to make a SAN roll for something that is, in the scope of things, pretty conventional. See a close friend mysteriously swell up and explode messily while you're standing next to him? Sure, I'd be prepared to pay a penalty for that. Stumble across a decomposing corpse of a complete stranger in an isolated location? Well, I've no arguments that it would not be unpleasant, and perhaps a good reason to lose my lunch, but as a reason to lose SAN it seems excessive to me (particularly if my character is no stranger to the sight of unpleasant corpses, e.g., a Great War veteran, a police surgeon, etc.).
  12. There's some sort of implicit pressure, I think, to jump in and immediately have your brand new characters standing on the world stage influencing the outcome of the Hero Wars. Which is fine if everybody (including and especially the GM) is up to it. For everyone else, that's really daunting. There needs to be an emphasis on an introductory adventure. I really liked Apple Lane for that. You just feed in new bits of information as you go along. Entice your characters into wanting to know more about the bigger picture, rather than just dumping it on them (or expecting them to research it for themselves). The new GM doesn't need to know it all, either. Learn and grow. "Introductory" does not necessarily mean "beginner characters". If you want your characters to start off experienced, that's fine too -- but in that case you need to know enough to give them a useful backstory. It's all very well to start a new game as a Rune Lord (or equivalent) but if the player knows nothing about his cult and how it fits into the surrounding world I'm not sure how satisfactory it will be. Regardless, though, neither players nor GM need to know everything ... just enough to get by where they currently are, knowing that they'll find out more as they go along. A group of Sartar Orlanthi tribesmen don't need to know the history of Prax, for instance, nor do they even need to know the history of the Lunar Empire ... other than how it's affecting them, right now. I don't think Glorantha is really any more difficult than any other detailed fantasy world with a complex history. I think maybe though some people find it a bit scary because it's not traditional (by which I mean, D&D-ish). However, just because it's a really weird looking elephant doesn't mean that you don't eat it the same way as any other ... one bite at a time.
  13. Oh man. Now I want this so bad. There's a glaring fault, however. One of those duelling figures needs two horns. How will we know it's a broo otherwise? The other figure needs a glowing star on its arse. (Is there a rune for "pony"?) Hmm ... Hasbro's RuneQuest ... Magic is Forever.
  14. Well, of course. Citadel broo figures were always great figures, and they even called them "broo". (Actually all of the old Citadel RQ figures were brilliant IMO.) Then GW made the decision to only make Warhammer figures and all those great broo ideas had to be called something else, and "magically" the Warhammer universe includes "chaos beast men" (or whatever they were officially called) and you're off to the races. Clearly the whole Warhammer thing worked splendidly for GW, but I miss the old Citadel figures line (their D&D miniatures were pretty good too), back when 25mm meant 25mm, not 30mm. Of course, I am an old fart.
  15. OK Pentallion, you think I'm being silly, I think you're talking nonsense. We're not going to be playing in each other's games so I guess it doesn't matter. All I can tell you is: if you brought your arguments to my gaming table when I was GM, I'd tell you a flat "no, it doesn't work that way" as the response.
  16. The spirit and/or the enchantment itself knows who you are, or finds out who you are, when you make the attempt to use the item. How does it do it? Presumably it "examines" you on the spirit plane. Or maybe it makes a quick spiritual phone call to the Storm Bull Help Desk ("We're ready to help you in all your chaos-fighting ventures!"). What is unreasonable (IMO) is to expect that the spirit and/or enchantment knows everything about everyone regardless of whether they are or are not interacting with the spirit or anything attached to the spirit. That would imply that all spirits and/or enchantments know such things. Which in turn would imply that all shamans (at least) also know all those things. Which would make them pretty much all-powerful ... I know shamans are tough, but I don't think that they're that tough. I suppose one could postulate the existence of a spirit who has the power of being able to Detect Enemies all the time, without needing to cast the spell. If so, why would you then need it to cast the spell? Would it even be able to cast the spell? That would be a second (albeit related) power that the spirit has. In any case that makes it more than "just" a Spell Spirit (as they are described in the rules). "It's fantasy, therefore it doesn't need to make any sense whatsoever" is lazy hand-waiving of the worst kind, and indeed, is 100% contrary to the rules of the game being played. Why bother with an involved and detailed system for creating enchanted objects if you're just going to make up the end result anyway?
  17. Err ... if I have a magic spirit that can tell whenever someone has ill intent toward me, why do I need it to cast a spell that tells me that someone has ill intent toward me? And, how does the spirit know that someone that someone has ill intent toward me without first casting the spell? Aside from the logistics of enchanting, which are often prohibitive in their own right, they don't just waive away logical problems. Glorantha is magical, not stupid. I think that I'd rather have the approach of "permanent" magic items being sourced at GM whim. Where do they come from? Who knows? There's no shortage of possible answers. Not everything needs a detailed explanation. If a player insisted on discovering how to make such a thing himself, it sounds like a HeroQuest of some sort to me ....
  18. Will there be a version of the character sheet available without artwork? Because to me that looks like it will be really, really hard to read whatever numbers are pencilled in. I'm not fond of whole chunks of the sheet being rendered unusable by artwork. Many a (used) CharSheet I've seen over the years (for a variety of game systems) has small but important notes scribbled into corners all over the place. I don't see "nice art", I see "wasted space that I can't write notes into". FWIW. EDIT: Never mind, just saw the other thread where it's mentioned that the option of "plain" character sheets will be there. Excellent!
  19. I found MiG and MiG2 invaluable in tracking down stuff I had missed when I was very interested in doing that in the mid-90s (not that I'm less interested now, but life got in the way for a long time). I'm pleased to say that I have most of the items listed above ... and most of what I don't have I'm not especially interested in acquiring. Books from ca. 2000 onwards, though, represent a very large hole in my collection (I don't own many HQ items, for a start). One day, maybe ....
  20. Which part of "attack", implicit or explicit, excludes ranged attacks? If I am making a ranged attack, am I not making an attack? Explicitly or implicitly? Where in the spell description(s) is the explicit statement "this spell only works for melee attacks"? Are you sure you know what "explicit" means? If you, as GM, want the spell to exclude ranged attacks (for whatever reason you want to make the exclusion), you are entitled to make that declaration. I don't think anyone here would say otherwise. If you, as someone who claims to read and understand English, state that the spell description "obviously and/or explicitly" excludes any form of attack that isn't melee, and/or that it "obviously and/or explicitly" includes elements of being a berserker (to any degree), and/or believe that "obviously and/or explicitly" the game designers meant anything not actually written in the text, then you are reading words that do not exist in the spell description(s), and are instead trying to pass off your personal opinions as if they were objective facts. Heck, if I was running a game and somehow a character had (legitimately) acquired a skill of "make hurtful remarks", I'd be happy to let the spell increase the chance of that working, too! Ultimately, it's all about game fun and (in the case of Glorantha) emphasising the magic parts of the world (i.e., the myriad ways in which it differs from our own). YMMV.
  21. "Game balance" is bollocks. Who is it not "balanced" for? If it seems to give the players unexpected strength, then any GM worth his salt will find ways to lessen the effect. If it's the GM who gets too much power, then he needs to adjust how he sets up combat situations! As for "clarification" in the new version of the rules ... of course they can make the write-up as specific as they want, it won't hurt. But the existing versions of the spell are already completely clear -- it's just that some people don't like the end result. If the new version of the spell explicitly states "melee and ranged" will those people like it more than they do now?
  22. Huh? They were explicit. Absolutely nothing in any of the spell writeups says "melee only" or otherwise distinguishes the weapon (or attack) types affected by the spell in any way. To paraphrase your statements, now suddenly you're adding exclusions? To be precise: "chance to hit" is three words; which of those three words means "melee weapons only, of course"? It's your game, you can play it however you want. Don't start quoting your interpretations as if they were holy writ, though, when the published text does not support your assertions, at all.
  23. Who's "we"? You can decide whatever feels right to you and go from there. Speaking for myself, I don't find the evidence behind your initial statement very compelling ... mostly because you haven't supplied any.
  24. That's a very narrow definition of "fanatic". The dictionary definition is "filled with excessive and mistaken enthusiasm, esp. in religion". I think modern common usage would de-emphasise the "mistaken" part of that definition, and expand it to many other areas of everyday life (particularly pop-culture), hence "fans". Are you a RuneQuest fan? Does that mean you are filled with blood lust towards people who play other games? I hope not! OK, but it's a spell in a game, not a grammar contest. Let's look at the spell description. Uh ... it increases your offensive skills, and decreases your defensive skills. In RQ2 and RQ3 it also restricts the type of magic you can use to "attack" type spells. None of the versions I looked at (I don't have all versions to hand, but have no interest in any editions other than RQ2/RQ3/RQG) say anything about "blood lust". Reading between the lines there's a definite vibe of becoming really, really focused in killing (or at least defeating) the enemy, to the point of being disinterested in defending yourself. That could be "blood lust", sure. I'm not saying that you're "wrong" in that interpretation, but it's not the only interpretation. It could also be "I am more interested in taking down my enemy than anything else right at this moment" which is merely a statement of priorities, not "frothing at the mouth". (It doesn't even eliminate the possibility of deciding that things are very dangerous, and it's time to leave.) If the best way of defeating my enemy is to fill him full of arrows -- or blast him with lightning bolts -- or beat him about the head with a hammer -- it doesn't change my focus on that task. I have no problem at all with including the spell's benefits to ranged attacks of any kind, and if I was using magic that included a "roll to hit" component, I'd expect the bonus there too.
  25. Plenty of people play with house rules in ASL. I try and avoid them, as you want the game to be consistent from player to player, but people are people. Not sure what you mean about the "library" bit though. My "Glorantha" collection (including various versions of RPGs as well as various 3rd-party books, etc.) takes up way more shelf-space than my ASL collection, and there are many Glorantha books that I don't own.
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