womble

At which point any sucker of average intelligence or better (13 for a human, right?) can be a master sorceror. And the only reason they're old is because getting POW gain rolls is slow. But classes of Sorcerors can take a week, if the Government is paying. Which means at least half of the platoon are able to cast something at substantial effect. When you've got 50 guys working together, and 50 more troopers providing their mojo: Isn't supporting your point. Those non-sorcerors can be Theists or Spirit Magicians; they're not casting Sorcery, ever, cos they can't learn a Rune or a Technique. And who cares if every other trooper is 'only' casting one spell at 'considerable' effect? There's 50 of 'em supporting their mates. They're all immune to something, Castbacking, +2d6 damage, bouncing half the 15-point hits they take and ignoring the target's armour half the time or better. Only it doesn't work like that: the Earth Elemental just gets shredded by the combined melee damage of the unit before it can really do any damage; maybe it gets to engulf one guy. There aren't many Large Elementals floating about; they're a beyotch to Command. And how many Sever Spirits are we going to see before one of the Castback spells works and drops your Champion stone dead. Or the Champion kills, let's say, half a dozen guys with his full 18CHA of sacced POW; 7 if he's really good, but has then shot his Rune Point bolt, and there are still a bunch of mincing machines coming his way, and he's no Shield or Truesword. We're not talking about one-on-one, or dozen-on-dozen, which is what Orlanthi are 'optimised' for; we're talking about Society-on-Society, if you're going to talk about how Realms can and can't exist under a given metaphysic. Sure, the wives could've "Bless Champion"ed their hubbies with what protection spells they can mange, but unless you bring the whole Tribe with you, you can't mount an offensive longer than, oo, a week or so, and still have very much magic left for actual defending rather than prolonging the spell. And even with the wives along in tow, they're getting 3-4 points a week back, which means they'll soon not be able to make their Champions' buffs last til next Clayday. That is more magic than they have available. To date, I don't think we have any way of storing Rune Points... And versus a General with 2-300 in Battle, you just know you're going to get led on until your buffs run out, and then monched. The first City-sized polity that can get this model rolling will soon dominate its neighbours and have the root of a pretty unbeatable operational/strategic machine. Sure, it takes some organising, but so does any army.

Oh yeah. Good point re: 2d6+6. So minging about a PC having 20 in either SIZ or INT is even less justifiable.

Doesn't necessarily mean more people have the given Rune as their highest-of-3; that 10% wouldn't make a second-pick Air Rune higher than a 1st-pick... Just means everyone's a bit windy, and the windiest Sartarites are windier than the windiest Grazelanders... However, looking at the NPC stats so far available, it looks like not everyone gets three Elemental Runes, and 50% is actually a notable score for Form/Power runes; Ifni alone knows what their 'lower' Runes are supposed to be... Total of less-than-100 for the pairs? Is that even possible?

Another thing with Shaman is that you actually get something specific for becoming a Shaman, which you don't, directly, as a Priest, unless you get an Allied Spirit. You get improved Spirit Combat Damage, a couple or so abilities, Second Sight, Discorporation. Specific things you can do directly. Things like having a Fetch are 'potentialities'; mostly they're things that 'can be improved' like saccing for more Rune Points is for a Priest. Priests' benefits are more along the lines of 'opportunities for growth'.

Lots of tables like 'assign n points' character generation systems so players can play the character they want to. 18-going-to-20 for a given stat really won't be out of the ordinary in the wider PC-sphere. In a society, you're looking at half a percent at 18; how the Runes manifest themselves, from a demographic perspective, I have no idea. Do Solar-focused Societies tend to have higher Fire Runes than Storm ones do (and vice versa for the Air Rune)?

I've always wondered what 'funny' tasted like.

There aren't many hard and fast rules about becoming a full Shaman from Assistant. Given the PCs are meant to have been doing their current Occupation for the past three years, the 1 year qualification period has passed, and, RAW, it's just about awakening the Fetch which can be as hard or easy as the Ref decides. Though one hurdle is that the Assistant Shaman has to have a way of Discorporating; they don't get to do it out of sheer natural talent until they already have a Fetch. Easy enough to get as a Daka Fal or Waha Initiate though. Edit: definitely the one of the easiest Rune Masters to hit early, whatever character generation method is used, though Priest from the off is also doable with an 'assign your stats' method.

Those "Notable" Traits and Passions should be their own pinion for the character too. Opponents with even the measliest political or social nous should be able to manipulate the knight into all sorts of trouble. We're hitting a sort of inflexion point in our game at the moment, where the second generation knights are filling in their fathers' places in the Eschille, and the last battle did not go so well because we (as a group) expected to do as well as we had been, combined with the fact that we're fighting knights now, and they're harder than Saxons cos they get horses too...

It's what my character (my second; the first died gloriously at Terrabil) in my current game ended up doing. He gets over 300 annually from Traits, Passions and Religious and we don't even get 100 for Chivalry yet (nobody's going to dish out respect for a concept that isn't really recognised until Arthur is established, is how my GM sees it) though he qualifies. I have gone 'full Passion' and spent all my Glory Points on "Loyalty (Lord)" which is now at 30... Was the most Glorious Knight and got to Knight Arthur at the Tournament. GM thinks he's too overpowered, with three or four other Passions over 16, but I hate to think how vicious he'd've been if I'd put 'em all into Spear Expertise and just kept the Passions sitting at 20 with normal Annual Improvement points: "Can I Passion? Oh goody. Autocrit with spear."

Actually one way Rolemaster did deal with the Death Spiral was to have spells which allowed you to set it aside for a while, for some classes. Spells that cleared off "Stunned, unable to Parry" results and negatives for Concussion hit thresholds having been passed, or set them in abeyance for a shorter or longer time. But, being class-based, those weren't available to everyone, and they took resources which you may or may not have had left. I think the absence of the death spiral in any given game is a philosophical design decision, quite often, rather than an omission by negligence. DnD doesn't have such a thing, none of the BRP games have ever had anything but fine-unconscious-dead distinctions, except maybe as optional rules. RM was the first place I found it, I think.

The exact opposite of the pain-mechanic of not eating one? It's not often you see GMs hitting players with penalties to skills/Passions/whatever for skipping meals, or bonuses for having just sat down to something special, but I do see people getting on and roleplaying such 'trivia' anyway... On a slightly larger scale being feasted by a Chieftain might push your Loyalty (Clan) up, or your Rep. More social than limbic, I know.

Oh, there's a thing: magic crystals don't often have restrictions on use... makes them more risky vessels to keep a Spirit in as someone with magical sight and the appropriate Control spell can take them off you and set them on you in Spirit Combat (at least), which can be a bit of hindrance if someone else is trying to put pointy things through your bodily corpuscles.

I should probably read the Shaman rules again... that sounds fascinating.

Yeah. That's what I'm anticipating out of the Sorceror NPC (I chucked him in for shits and giggles - he's a Sword Sage wannabe) as we go on. It doesn't take much. Lack of opportunity for active seeking of POW gain rolls is the major bottleneck I think I'll see.

That was exactly my point: the Control needs to be cast before you let it out, not, as Psullie said a couple of posts previously: release then control. I was pointing out that not only doesn't the Control not automatically work if you've released the Spirit, but for Control(Entity), it takes potentially many rounds of Spirit Combat to bring a now-useless (cos it has 0MP) Spirit back under control, unless you just want to have it clear off after it's done its work. We've been through this in this thread, and Psullie misspoke himself; I was helping him say what he meant to in the first place.

Ticks on your Loyalty([group you're drinking with]). The problem with implementing an incremental detriment for sub-incapacitating damage (and lots of games have done that, notably Rolemaster) is that it tends to lead to a "spiral of death" whereby the first hit effectively decides the contest, because the person hit first will be at a disadvantage for the rest of it. Apparently, people don't like playing that kind of game, or that's what's been asserted by some games designers when I've seen it pop up in discussion before. Me, I don't mind. Some of my favourite memories of Rolemaster have come from "Rocky-style" moments of getting back up off the floor at 70 penalty, and somehow winning. Or just plain surviving long enough (as the Big Bad hammered my character into the ground like a nail) for the Long and Silent Stride Ranger to fillet the Troll. It does mean more bookkeeping and probably slows the game down a bit. Not sure how you solve the 'death spiral' effect. But then I'm not sure it needs solving; someone shanks your leg, you're going to be slower getting out the way of the next prod from that spear, even if they didn't cripple it. A 'gritty' game like RQ should have room for that sort of tension.

Most Spirits have more POW than the capacity of a crystal. Even a measly 5pt Crystal can hold that 5d6+12 monster you somehow managed to beat down because Spirit Screen and rolling a crit or two... I'm pretty sure there's a limit of one Spirit per Binding, whether that's a Binding Enchatment or a Binding Crystal. It might even be explicitly stated somewhere, but I get a feeling it's clearly implied throughout.

Only it does nothing of the sort. Sorcery can be extremely powerful. It has also never existed in a vacuum. As has been said before in this thread, the societies where the higher-ups are Sorcerors have lower-downs who have both Rune and Spirit Magic. So the trivial stuff can get done with the easy Spirit Magic, leaving the top nobs to work on ending the world by accident. The cosmological incompatibility of Spirit Magic and Sorcery in the canon setting has been laid out, and you're ascribing results to that which suit your own prejudices. If you don't want to consider that your assumptions about the consequences of the incompatibility might be overstating the case, that's fine: YGMV, but to require the world to change to suit your viewpoint over that of the caretakers is pushing it a little. You call it an arbitrary rule: is that just because the default setting as-published for RQ3 where Sorcery was first trailed under the noses of starting players was non-Gloranthan? Are you assuming that the only reason for the incompatibility then was for game-balance? I do not know that to be the case. Perhaps it is. Perhaps there's someone who was 'there' at the creation of RQ3 before it went off-Glorantha who can say whether the incompatibility is Gloranthan or Avalon Hillian. To avoid droning on: it seems to me that your disastisfaction stems from the fact that you believe that Sorcery and Spirit Magic being incompatible would preclude some of the major achievements of Sorcery-based societies: I believe the game designers disagree, and personally, you're going to have to say something new to convince me, let alone them, that it's sufficient impediment for a Society at a Geopolitical level to not be able to do what it has been said to have done.

It's still a thing. Mentioned in that telling paragraph on p366: "...Spirits may be bound into a magic crystal...The binder of a spirit can use any spirit magic the spirit possesses and the magic points of the spirit to fuel spells." No shilly-shallying about with having the spirit fill the crystal and having its own MPs. With a crystal, it's like a binding enchantment, you just get the option to store your own MP in it, if you don't happen to have a Spirit to bind into it just yet.

The thing with Sorcery is that it's the 'long game'. There are no 'caps', like you have for Rune Magic, or Spirit Magic. POW keeps coming to those who 'act' and there's always something you can do with that POW to make your Sorcery more powerful. There are only so many spirits you can Bind, Rune Points you can stash away. There is a limit to how many stored MP you can usefully use with Spirit Magic and Rune Spells (even if that limit is how fast you can refill the stores). This might mean that 'adventurers', especially starting ones, find Sorcery a bit pointless, because it is, obviously, weaker in the short term and tactical time frame.

Is there not also the consideration that once it's out you need to first, engage it in Spirit Combat, and second reduce it to 0 POW before you can tell it to do anything?

That's what I understood, too, from p260 "Control spells automatically work against creatures while they are bound in items." (my emphasis) If it said "...bound to...", I'd see Psullie's sequence of events working, but I think it may have just been a slip of the keyboard, which is why I was checking what he meant. It may be that the rules mean to put more emphasis on 'bound' and less on 'in', and the state of 'bound' may persist once the critter is out in the world again, until it has fulfilled its required single command. In this case, I don't much mind either way. There's a certain aesthetic preference for the Spirit manifesting out of its prison and being told 'out in the real world' what to do, rather than the more humdrum 'doing it all inside the belt buckle (or whatever the enchanted item is)'.

I'd count the binder as 'the one that put the spirit into the binding', for the purposes of my Glorantha. That way the restriction works for crystals too, which do not have a 'maker'.

Just to be picky, and only because we're trying to sort out how this work, shouldn't that be cast the Command(Entity) first, because it's only automatic while the entity is in the binding? Or does 'bound' as a state apply until the spirit has performed its one required task upon release?

That's not what it says. It says "...the binder...can use..." Which doesn't necessarily imply that it's the spirit that's doing the casting. The section on Allied spirits also says: "They can use each other’s magical abilities, including spell knowledge, magic points, and Rune points." Again, 'use'. You may be right, and you're certainly right that the spirit itself can't (be commanded to) cast most of its spells from within the Binding, but I'd lean towards the 'user can cast spells the spirit knows' interpretation, because the language admits it as a possibility, and it's how it used to work, with no indication that there's meant to be a change. The section about spirits being unable to cast out of Bindings makes no mention of MP-sucking, either; combining the two on p366 reinforces the 'can use' interpretation in my mind. Wish it was clearer though. Like so many things. Sometimes they're dead pernickity with their terms and other times they just breeze on by using vagueness.