womble

Oh, handy that! All my party were at that one... Ta.

Indeed. I'm not saying that a Farmer-born shouldn't have skills in Farm. But those four years out in the big world will have far more effect on our character than the current system allows for. It's thoroughly inconsistent, too. How many 'Infantry' get trained in only infantry operations for the first 18 years of their life. In Sartar? I guess the rules on inexperienced adventurers suggest that the 'Occupation' skill levels are for 18 year olds, with the 4 x +25 and 5 x +10 'personal interest' skills being what you get as part and parcel of the 1622-1625 arbitrary generation. But how many people "grow up" as bandits? That seems more likely to be a post-18 career 'choice'.

I've just (having run my players through the published thing) become dissatisfied with the superficiality of it.

In a lot of the cases (like trolling off to Esrolia for a siege) there isn't enough time in the year for them to be doing anything other than 'the exciting stuff' and 'travelling back and forth to home'; certainly not enough time to get their 'default occupation rolls' each season. To me, in addition, the continuity doesn't make sense: why, if (for example) between the Siege of Nochet and the Battle of Pennel Ford, the characters had gone home, would there be a narratively causal link between the two in their lifepath?

If anything, I'd put it the other way round: have the characters pick 'military' occupations for their 'Occupation' skill choices, and flesh out their 'farmer' backstory with their 'personal interest' picks. Which is hardly an intuitive use of the system as presented.

Not sure the Gloranthans really have the concept of the Teenager. But neither did the RW til the latter part of the 20th Century, so I imagine slang could arise without needing the construct.

13 hours ago, boztakang said:

I'm sure somewhere there exists a "xylophone" (xiolaphone?) made out of various sized trollkin captured in stocks and variously bashed and prodded to make entertaining "music".

 

A bit like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9nGyPz9uT0

Convincing the High Priest/Examiner that they're worthy of the office is the 'classic' one. In many Cults there may be Politics involved; if it's a spur-of-the-moment thing the Cult they're progressing in might be suspicious of motives.

Convincing the God they're worthy: weeny 'dream-Heroquest', or this-world HQ, maybe?

Sure, they were farmers when they went to Iceland. No problem with that. But while helping Samastina out in Nochet for a year, then trailing after Argrath to Pavis via Pennel Ford, they won't have been being farmers; they "should" be selecting from a different skill development list for those years. For that matter, they weren't being farmers for 1622 either, because there was no farming going on in the Great Winter.

The 'previous experience' bit represents a synthesis of the character's 'life so far' which includes childhood, adolescence and their 3-5 years since initiation into Adulthood. Yes, someone born a Farmer should have an improved Farm skill, but 3 years 'off adventuring' (which is what a lot of the lifepath stuff leads your characters to doing) won't do much to bring that up to the same level of Farm as their cousin who stayed home in Sartar til the Dragonrise. Sure you can shim the system, but it's disappointing that it's so necessary.

They do IMG. But 2 double damages isn't quadruple damage. I consider 'double damage' as "+100% damage", so one application is doubling, a second will triple, and so on. So your example would do triple damage, IMG.

Where such multipliers are directly additive is when they are applied separately because of some condition. So if a power gave you "double damage that gets through armour" on top of your above example, you'd have 3d8+3 for a Broadsword to get past armour, and all the damage that got through would then be doubled. If you had two such double-through-armour powers, they'd add in the same way the outside-armour multipliers do, to make the damage that gets through tripled.

I don't see Darksense as having much mystical component, personally. I  think of it as a combination of sonar, passive sound and vibration sensing and EM vision in the infra-red, with some pretty good smell-o-vision added in for 'flavour'.

Really big-ass trolls being able to hum 'brown noise' is an interesting side of Darkness...

1 hour ago, Tywyll said:

Yeah you nailed it. Most supplements in the old books showed beings that realistically had levels of power you couldn't achieve in actual game play. At least in Dnd you can reach 20th level in a campaign and reasonably take on Tiamat. RQ never felt like it allowed that. And you certainly could never hope to be the next Arkat as a Pc.

I appreciate that RQG characters are more powerful to start with than older editions, but they are still as chaff before the power of some older edition heavy hitters. 

Another issue I think comes from how damage is handled. As damage dice produce wide results, especially for large mythic foes with several dice damage bonus, but armor and protection exists in a linear line, the further you get from human expectations the more swingy combat becomes. Basically you either laugh off damage or lose a limb...there is little middle ground.

One of the big problems with the 'damage curve' is the 'avoids *all* armour' nature of crits. I never understood how a projectile weapon could 'bypass' a magical sheath of armour. Or, if Protection/Shield/Armouring enchantments somehow always had leaky points, why someone didn't invent a kind of magic which didn't. If magic defenses always count, then standing up to the big greebly's megadamage just takes more sacced POW.

2 minutes ago, Jakob said:

I actually consider everything mentioned features, not bugs, with regards to mythic play. If you look at the Odyssey, it is certainly not characterize by Odysseus having tons of HP, killing cyclopses left and right and succeeding at resistance rolls against siren's song. It's characterized by him being a smart and somewhat ruthless guy who keeps running into trouble, but who also knows when to tie himself to his ship and when not to pick a fight with a giant monster.

I'd say that works pretty well with most BRP games.

That's partly true, but the problem remains that there are stats out there for protagonists that the party kinda should be able to attain parity with, and they largely can't in the previous editions. And RQ isn't really 'most' BRP games; in RQ someone is supposed to be able to kick Cthulhu's sorry ass back home to Daddy Azathoth's place, and the conceit is that it might be the PCs. Which takes some serious extrapolation of any published material to date.

2 minutes ago, Jeff said:

As adventurers heroquest, they gain abilities that enable them to do things like shrug off damage and lesser spells, increase their hit points, do more damage, project their soul at distance, return from death, and so on. The hero characters I've made so far actually have far lower chances to hit than say characters out of Rune Masters, but can tear through them ("hey check out my augmented Lightning that does 2D6 per Rune Point, my effectively permanent Shield 6 spell, or my heroically augmented CON stat!"). They've gained their powers not through Super Skills, but as a result of questing in the Hero Plane.

And that, Jeff, is good to hear.

1 hour ago, PhilHibbs said:

You seem to be implying that the lifepath can't be chosen. The rules explicitly say, in bold, that you can choose or roll.

Aye, they do. I guess there's the implicit onus on the play group to make 'consistent' choices for the character concepts they're developing, but there is also the 'Old Skool' vibe in the ruleset of just letting the plain dice lie as they land (including random Occupation), which can lead to... oddness.

To be fair, the previous experience system in RQG often makes very little sense when combined with the 'lifepath' stuff, if you're just letting the dice roll. Anyone who set out to Iceland, travelled with Broyan to Esrolia, stayed there until Pennel Ford and then went via Jaldon's Rest to Pavis with Argrath would have an 'Adventurer' or Warrior background, not 'Farmer' or 'Noble' or 'Priest'. Maybe they were just a herder or scribe in the army's train. It seems often to require some mental gymnastics.

2 hours ago, Tywyll said:

Yeah, I was making an excel sheet earlier today for doing just that. So if you had an 80 skill, for example, any roll of a 84+ would be special and a 96+ a Crit.

To pick nits, only, and for clarity, 'my' approach would have that 80% give a success on 1-80, a special on 65-76 (65 thru 80 is 16 ticks of special, but the top 4 are crits, so...) and a crit on 77-80 (4%).

To constructively criticise your arithmetic for simply turning the sums on their head, you're looking at 97-00 for a crit, and 85+ for a special.

I'm looking forward to seeing how Heroquesting is handled in RQG. As Tywyll says, the d100 mechanic starts to creak once there's a lot of post-100 skills, and before this edition, there haven't been any 'official' D100-based Heroquest systems. We've got Wyters now (to support Hero Bands), though again I'm hoping there's more flesh going to be put on those bones in the GM handbook, to go along with the Heroquesting stuff. Rune Points and the way Enchantments work look like they're set up to support the higher level play we might expect out of the Hero Wars proper.

Why not have the full benefit? For starters, where did they get those 3 points of POW more than the other single-Initiation members of their party that are the same age at chargen? Where did they get the time to learn all the extra skillups? Do you give the single-Initiation folks additional skill points or POW? Do you let people choose two occupations and get the full benefits of both?

IMO, dual Initiation should be a tricky option, not a way of grabbing more skills and other 'ming' at character generation. They will have the full benefit as the game progresses, paying the cost as they go. At character generation there *is* no cost to dual Initiation.

6 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

But if it did allow you to shoot around corners it would certainly keep the spell useful to characters with high skill. Need to get a shot at someone who has cover behind an arrow loop. No problem. 

If they're behind an arrow loop, you can see enough of them for Sureshot to work on an aimed shot to the bit you can see. If they're stood to one side they're not shooting or looking at you...

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

What if the spell ignored penalties to the attack? So it would be 95%, bu it would always be 95%, ignoring things like crosswinds, partial cover, poor lighting, etc.

That's what it does:

Quote

...automatically hits—regardless of movement, range (if it is within maximum missile range for the weapon), concealment, etc...

I take the 'etc' to mean all environmental modifiers. I think I'd be inclined to say that if there were actual cover that could potentially stop the projectile, close enough to the target that the projectile would have to pull an impossible trajectory to hit, that hits to the covered locations would hit the cover. But an aimed shot at an exposed location will auto-hit. I think I would disallow Sureshot (it wouldn't trigger) if the target was, say, visible only because of a mirror that bent the light back near 180 and the arrow couldn't make a nice parabola that 'looks' like an arrow trajectory. I don't see it as letting you shoot round corners, just meaning something you have a tiny chance to hit becomes a near certainty.

3 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

For sure they'd get no benefit from eating anything animate or otherwise, but I think the instinct to eat would still be there. Zombies do love brains, after all.

Most zombies that love Braaaainnnnss actually need them to survive, I thought? Still, the ZZ who made his pit-trap-cave-troll-zombie would have to remember to tell it not to eat the walls of its confinement..

3 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

I'd never thought of it that way, I don't think I ever mapped the numbers to the world like that. I guess that's just a difference in the ways that different people think. On the other hand, I have come across D&D players who hate BRP because rolling low is good, and that just made no sense to them. I guess that's similar - "Roll low to hit, but high for damage? How am I supposed to train my dice for that???" 🤣

My objection, such as it is, to the 'high (but not too high) for some things, low for others' school of game engine design is that it is simply inconsistent. It means "adding to the dice" and "adding to the target" accomplish different things. It means changing mental expectations. Using 'highest successful roll' (assuming both are the same general level of success) emphasises this flip-flopping.

It's only a little thing, but the sheer difficulty I've seen people experience in figuring out Pendragon chances to hit and crit for higher-than-20 successes (not dimwits, neither: programmers; research veterinarians) on a 'casual' basis argues that it's something that can disrupt a table. There's a lot to be said for the 'best you can roll on the dice' being a consistent number, and being consistently determined.

My example above, there was a wind wall giving a terrible (don't remember how much) negative to hit. Plus the half-chance for calling head. The character was a master shootist, but would have been at way under 50% to make the shot without Sureshot, even after adding in Speedart. Sureshot is part of a master archer's toolkit for making the shots that simply have to be made regardless of interference and difficulty.

Absolutely. A general whose haruspexes told him the omens were bad would seek to avoid offering battle until the omens changed. But they were omens not "unchangeable predictions". If a general under bad omens was unable to avoid battle, he'd be at a disadvantage, in the Real World because his troops believed they were, and in Glorantha, both because the troops thought they were disadvantaged, and because of whatever reason the Gods were trying to tell the general to avoid contact.

14 hours ago, M Helsdon said:

One of the things in the back of my mind has been to see how Bronze Age and early Iron Age warfare works in a world that works roughly in the way the majority of the people of those times thought their world worked. A glaring difference is that those cultures believed the future (and the will of the gods, pretty much the same thing) could be foretold in omens and portents; in Glorantha none of the deities accessible to mortals can foresee the future. But...

Gallic priests: "Our gods say: 'Fight hard and we will carry the day."

Roman haruspexes: "Jupiter is with us! The might of the legions is unstoppable this day".

One set of gods gotta be wrong... unless the Gauls are slackers...  I don't think the Ancients really believed their Gods could fortell actual predestined fate; sometime they could give warning or hints of things that the mortals had missed but conflicting Gods might often have conflicting opinions that it would be up to the Mortals to sort out. 

Oh I see what you mean. Intriguing.

Also, speaking from experience, that aimed shot to the head still might not be the best choice... Think of a creature that has extra armour to the head. I still recall, a couple of decades later, using Sureshot to defeat atmospheric conditions, calling an aimed shot to a head, using a Speedart, rolling highish on the damage (for once) and the shot mostly bounced off the 10 point horns-and-skull armour of the broo shaman. But, as Thor proved on Thanos, going for the chest is just as risky. Probably better to pick a less obviously-in-need-of-protection location and hope for a functional incapacitation rather than an insta-jib.

1 hour ago, PhilHibbs said:

How exactly do you "aim low"? Whatever your answer is - if it works, it's cheating.

Gamers: they're a superstitious lot...

Re: 'greatest margin of success'

14 hours ago, Tywyll said:

Would you handle it the same when skills are above 100%?

Also, if you do do that, why not simply roll high and add your skill to the total?

For skills over 100, I'd take the higher skill down to 100 and subtract the same from the lower (assuming skills lower than 200), as that's how I read the rules working - it retains the higher chances of crit and special for the better skill without making them 'dead certs'. 

Rolling high and adding skill is actually my preferred method of constructing a game engine, but RQ relies on crits and specials which are an arithmetical function of your chance to succeed, most easily reckoned at the bottom end of a d100 roll. Still, at my current table, I'm having the crit be the top 0.05 portion of the success range, and special be the top 0.2 portion, with 01 to [.8 * successchance] being a plain success.