Lordabdul

There's been an update to the KS, in particular there's a new "gimme everything" pledge for $699. Also, there's a YouTube playlist for new miniature turntables. This way you better see what they look like from all angles. Personally I like that almost all of the sculpts make you go "huh, that's interesting", regardless of whether you like it or not. You can say negative things about the character designs, but I think "bland" would definitely not be it except for maybe 1 or 2 of them.

Since the time between shooting arrows is "5 + DEX SR", in effect, your friend Robin will be able to shoot arrows faster than you. So that works out I think. What isn't modeled in RQ is, for example, your friend Robin being in fact generally slower than you at most things (lower DEX), except reloading because she practiced drawing from her special-designed quiver a lot, and so that makes up for the difference. If you want to be crazy you could for instance model this by adding a new "Fast Reload" skill where, if you succeed, you get a couple SRs back (and you fail, you waste SRs... on a fumble you drop your quiver or something). Nice house rule, thanks for sharing!

I always get surprised by RPGs where specific skill descriptions have specific rules that go along with it -- not nearly an RQG-only problem but yes, I often make the mistake of assuming a skill is self-explanatory when, really, there's a chance there's more to it. But in the case of the Riding skill, I agree with @g33k that these look more like good general rules for any skill, really. Ideally, this paragraph would actually be moved to the "Experience Gain Rolls" chapter and presented as an example. YES Which is why I'd really love it if Chaosium would spend some time in 2020 to really go through the whole RQG text again and release a 1.1 version or something. I probably would not put this in a house rule per se, and instead just add a blurb about the GM having the ability to use common sense for what a character did between adventures that might warrant an experience roll. For example, consider a Praxian currently visiting Esrolia as a mercenary/bodyguard. If you write the rules like that, the Praxian could get an experience roll in any Esrolian cultural skill. To give a few examples: Farm: probably not? I don't imagine our bodyguard is killing time plowing the fields around Nochet? Or maybe it's because she can see farmers working all around her, so she's picking up a few things... but is that really worth a full 1d6? (maybe 1d6-2?) Intrigue: maybe? She can hear Esrolians being up to no good at the tavern or something? Customs (Esrolian): Yes, definitely! Spirit Combat: Nope. So to reiterate, I think using the cultural skills list of the place you're spending your time at is a great recommendation for GM, but probably not as a "proper rule". Of course, you could also take this rule in the other way: sure, the Praxian can pick any cultural skill, but that will influence the next adventure! The player picked "Farm" and "Intrigue"? Okay then, by next season, the mercenary has somehow become involved in some political feud between 2 rich farming families!

I agree. Just because she likes some of them doesn't necessarily mean that she created them (directly or indirectly). The draconic origin of dinosaurs is complicated enough to have plenty to play with already, and it means we have a different angle (and potentially more interesting) to think about the relationship and interactions between dinosaurs, Dragonewts, and Earth Shaker priestesses.

Sorry for being picky but I'd say it simulates the real world more than other systems, not necessarily "better" Yeah, I think RuneQuest's DNA/goals has always been about (1) making low-tech melee weapon fighting more realistic, and (2) making magic more sophisticated. Other aspects of the system are deliberately not as crunchy, which results in a fairly non-uniform crunchiness throughout that some people might be bothered with (hence house rules). Gloranthophiles are blessed enough that there's no less than 3 officially supported game systems (you can stretch it to 4 if you count Mythras!) from where to start before you add house rules... I don't know if any other setting has this kind of luxury!

Sorry if I sounded mean, that wasn't my intent -- I was merely asking about the reasoning behind 6 skill levels since the way you wrote your replied made it look like you had just come up with that table 5 minutes beforehand. But I explicitly said that I didn't want to think about it Aside from the fact that I explicitly said I'm a GURPS-fan you mean? The point wasn't to say that GURPS is the gold standard. The point was to say that GURPS is considered "overly complicated" by many gamers, and so it should give you pause when you design a system that's even more complicated than GURPS. No, why would you think that? It just had one already. Yep. If Darius' idea of fun is "more realistic income and education inequality" then by all means he should proceed -- it's not my fun but I support and love to see people come up with house rules. My point was to highlight that this kind of change tends to seep into many other parts of the system. Even if you have different design goals ("realism" vs "game balance"), it does affect all that other stuff one way or another... so that's why I was challenging Darius' quick reply composed of "it's easy, look" followed by a simple table.

Why not? Because you have to draw the line somewhere about what to model and what not. RQG drew the line there and I don't feel the need to move it... and that's coming from me, a big GURPS nerd, a system that does have different skill difficulty ratings. But see, it's "easy" to come up with a table, but it's harder to make it work and justify it -- if only vaguely evidenced by the many lines of text to try and justify it immediately afterwards. First, your table has 6 levels of difficulty. GURPS, a system known for supposedly being overly complex, only has 4. Why did you pick 6? Did you think about it? Second, your table only addresses training. Why are character creation rules exempt for this? Why would 21 year-old basket weaver and a 21 year-old alchemist have the same ratings in their respective professional skills when one has an easy skill and the other has a very difficult skill? How are you going to address gameplay balance? Different difficulty ratings will mean that different characters will progress at different speeds. You might realize that, given the categorization you've done, some occupations will be unfairly "slowed down" while others are "boosted". People with "difficult" rating for their main professional skill will progress slowly, which affects their yearly income... but if their skill is "difficult", surely they are in some expert field and are bound to charge more, no? So you have to go and check back on all the income amounts. And you have to check back on all the skills marked as "main occupation skill", to see if that needs rebalancing. And also you need to see if any occupation has an unbalanced skill list compared to other occupations... I call that the "suck it, healer" problem, where if you want to play, say, a druid-type healer, you need to learn medicine and surgery and herbology and chemistry and all kinds of stuff like that a suddenly you have a whole bunch of "difficult" skills, so your character creation points evaporate way faster, and your character progression comes to a crawl, compared to the fighter guy who only spends points and improves his weapon and shield skills (both average in difficulty). So then you need to maybe change the skill list, to fix the problem of some occupations having too many skills by grouping several skills into one or something... and so on. This thing is going to slowly and insidiously ripple through the whole game system and next thing you know there's something slightly wrong or unsatisfying with your characters and your campaign, and you realize what you've done. Or maybe your players are not so picky, maybe your campaigns don't last that long, maybe you end up with a bunch of PCs that don't expose this problem too much or at all (like, say, everybody's a fighter!).

I'm quite certain the upcoming GM guide will have alternate character creation rules similar to the many different creation rules in CoC7. Of course I agree that point-buy systems are really good at making equal characters while letting players control what matters. My point was that if the Sorcery rules are so reliant on having extremely good INT, and there are little, if any, other rules for improving INT after character creation, then why wouldn't the authors change the default character creation rules to have characteristics determined through literally anything else than rolling dice? It feels like these 2 things don't work well together.

Yeah that's weird. Those Spirit Magic spells are not variable-cost spells, so I'm not sure what that means. The only explanation I can think of is that they're pre-boosted. So Slow 6 is a Slow spell that comes boosted with 5 MP, for casting it on enemies that might have magical defenses.

I understood Jason's comment more as "each parry gets the penalty of its respective attack", which is where it break apart quickly -- I wasn't the only one who understood it that way AFAICT. But if that's what Jason meant, then yeah I think it's a decent rule. Let's wait for the official word on that.

Oh wow I haven't heard about this in, like, 20 years. Makes me want to play Rolemaster again... (the new unified edition is supposed to be released this year I think?)

Some games do say that And using the weapon at half-skill (RQG RAW) is so discouraging that in many cases I'd probably rather flee. But yes, this is one of those cases in RQG where it feels that... ahem... "design sensibilities" are clashing... old-school rules vs modern rules, or something. AFAICT RQ2 was just flat-out preventing you from using the weapon, while RQ3 was giving you a 5% penalty for each point you're missing (but without the DEX/STR trade-off). Looks like RQG is again a simplified middle ground between the two (not that I have a problem with that). I think what bothers me with the Free INT rules isn't so much how limiting it is for the poor beginning sorcerer... it's how limiting it is for character creation. If you go with RAW, you will roll the dice for each characteristic individually... which means when you get to INT, you get what you get ("and you don't get upset!"). Someone who has high hopes of making a famous priest can get by with a poor POW roll, as you can increase POW fairly well. But if you get a poor INT roll and you wanted to play a sorcerer, you're fucked. AFAICT, you have to re-roll characters unless you get lucky enough to get a 16+ on the INT roll, otherwise you start with such a disadvantage that I'm not even sure it's worth it. If INT was improvable through research and study then that would make it way better IMHO (Which should be the case anyway... it feels like the INT rules are still anchored in the 70s when people still considered "intelligence" something immutable that you're either born with or not... which... well, is kinda the basis of some racist and sexist theories in education, but anyway...). For that matter, it's also stupid that SIZ can't be changed -- after all, I'm pretty sure I'm a lot fatter than I used to be And tying it to increases in STR in a limited way (+2 at most, for instance) would also make sense.

I do like that RQG assumes you have a main occupation to work on, familial and religious duties, etc... and that you're not a full time adventurer. It means that: You're "training" your main occupation skills along with cult skills slowly but constantly. You only have limited (and probably consistent) time to train anything else. RQG already supports this. To model (1), you can pick up to 4 occupational and/or cult skills to roll for experience between adventures (RQG p416). To model (2) RQG has the training rules, where you can train only 1 skill or Rune per season. I would liberally interpret the sentence "an adventurer must train with an instructor for an entire season, and can do little else" to either mean that the trainee spends their whole time with the teacher or that the trainee uses all their free time to train, depending on the situation. Don't forget that checkbox-equipped skills cannot be trained above 75% as per RAW. What RQG doesn't support is: A skill progression curve Instinctively, it feels like it's easier to go from newbie to novice, than from novice to intermediate, than from intermediate to advanced. Some games can get away with a linear progression because their resolution mechanics are curved (like a 3d6 mechanic that results in a bell curve where going from skill 9 to 10 gives a lot more success chances than going from skill 16 to 17). RQG however has a "flat" resolution mechanic so if you believe in the curve, it would need to be included either in terms of time or in terms of increase. If we apply the curve to training time, it means you need to track time in order to know that you can get, say, 3 "sessions" of training as a novice this season. You could make a simple table where different "tiers" of current skill rating give you a different number of experience rolls to make. Like, say, between 0% and 19% you get 4 experience rolls, and each +20% tier gives 3, 2, and 1 experience rolls. It gets weird though when you're at 15% and get 4 experience rolls, and the first roll bumps you to 20% -- I'm not sure how many more rolls you should do then. If we apply the curve to skill increase, it means you get bigger/smaller rolls based on different "tiers" of current skill. Again, a simple table would suffice. Let's say between 0% and 19% you get 3d6, then between 20% and 39% you get 2d6, and after that's it's 1d6. Different skill difficulties Yes, learning surgery is probably harder than learning to tie knots. Games like GURPS do model that with different skill difficulties which translate to different character creation and training costs. I wouldn't try to add this to RQG.

Yes it makes sense, but the problem is about translating that into rules that do (1) hold up to moderately simple cases and (2) don't get too convoluted. Right now RAW either ignores the issue by letting you parry at super high (max) skill or, with Jason's "clarification", fails IMHO in at least (1), if not (2). That's why earlier I suggested possible house rules like "your parry is the highest (or lowest if you prefer nerfing it) of the effective (split) percentages", or "you can only split evenly, lose any remaining percentage points... parry equals effective (split) percentage". They provide the desired effect while keeping it simple.

LOL yes I guess Ok I'm tired

Maybe I need to look at the spells a bit closer, but I figured the PCs might look similar in terms of Runes/Techniques because combat spells might all cluster around the same things... but maybe that's not true... and now that I think about it, I suppose you can make support/healer sorcerers, "social/talker" sorcerer, etc. ....which maxes your INT, and that's if you even managed to boost it to 20. Most likely, a whole bunch of spells will out of reach for a long time. Worse, once you gain a mastery, you can't unlearn it, so on a purely gaming side, you have to be careful which ones you take. And when you consider that the Moon Rune is pretty recent, all things considered, you gotta wonder how sorcerers of the 1st and 2nd Age did it. I guess it helps when you're in a group. Do sorcerers heroquest? Isn't that something they should look down upon or something?

To show how limited that is: there is a total of 26 Runes/Forms/Techniques (there might be more if you consider condition Runes... I'm not sure why they're not listed). With INT 20 you can know 8 of those. So at most, a sorcerer can only master ~30% of all there is to master in sorcery.

RQG p384, under "Mastering New Runes or Techniques": "A sorcerer must have a minimum INT of 13 to understand one Rune and one technique. For each point of INT above 13, the sorcerer can learn one more Rune or one more technique. Thus, a sorcerer with an INT of 18 could know up to 7 Runes and techniques in total." So not "Free INT" per se (the text doesn't use this term) but, well, limited by INT still.

Thanks for sharing! (and you get a bonus point for your choice of profile picture!) Might I suggest (INT+DEX)-SR, same round? You need to react both physically (to grab/touch your inscribed item) and intellectually (to trigger the spell). I've got no idea how well it would hold, I just thought about it 2 minutes ago. While I understand the mechanical point of this, I don't think it makes much sense in-world.... spending MPs delays execution, but spending more MPs shortens execution? Errr.... Maybe you can re-use that idea for inscribed spells. For instance, imagine inscribed spells went off on their "normal" SR (DEX SR + MP spending SR), but if you pour more MPs into the inscription you can make it faster, because you're further manipulating the spell to miniaturize it, so to speak. Yeah Free INT seems very limiting in terms of how many techniques/Runes/etc. a sorcerer can master. I think the point is to force sorcerers to prepare spells by inscribing them (although we still don't know if the cost changes for unmastered Runes/Techniques) and then only casting spells "on the go" for those kinds of spells you "specialize" in (i.e. master, unless you're ready to take the extra MP cost). Not all sorcerers are "adventuring" sorcerers, so there's probably a good distribution of specialties, but as far as sorcerer PCs are concerned, I don't know if it would push them all to have the same things and look very similar, which would be sad.

Thanks a lot for the update! It's great news that the Red Cow Vol3 is still in a schedule somewhere, I'd love for this to finally come out. Has there been any thought given to the idea of releasing dual-system books, a bit like what, say, Achtung! Cthulhu did (they released a FATE and a CoC7 version of their books, with only stat block differing, effectively). It could bring more products to the HQG line with less effort (taking books from the RQG line) ? Maybe even to 13AG, who knows... Or do you think the design philosophy of those lines differ too much that they can't really share the same text?

Or to find convoluted excuses about why modern-day people are slightly better at listening.... like... errr, we can use our smartphones to record things and then play that back at higher volume! That's worth 5%!

Ooooo good thing I'm French then Was it available on one of the French forums or something? Either way I'd love to take a look.

I'm totally NOT up to speed on my Lunar/Solar material, but I couldn't find any obvious mention of that in GRoY -- do you have a reference? Also, isn't the Lunar upper class mostly Dara-Happans because of historical reasons? There could be a new faction gaining power and just deciding that you don't need the Ten Tests to be the Red Empress, as they start disassociating the Lunar and Solar politics?

For Glorantha specifically, I find that making a map also helps me visualize how far things are from each other, especially as I try to figure out how big farmsteads are and how far a clan's lands extend. Based on the number of people in the clan, I can figure out how many cows/sheep/fields I need (roughly) and therefore how big the lands need to be. If parts of the clan's lands go over, say, mountainous terrain, then I can see how many valleys need to be occupied, and how far that goes, which then tells me a few things about which kind of neighbours the clan might be fighting with. It basically gives me a minimum of plausibility, and gives me ideas for potential adventures or encounters or places to set scenes in. But it takes a looong time, so it might definitely not be worth it depending on your tastes -- I really just like maps For other adventures, like urban ones, those that are either all in one place, or those where you don't care about the relationship between the various places for the various scenes, then a map isn't necessary. Although even for a simple adventure where you go kill Broos in a hole, I would probably make map of the hole/ruin/cavern. Did I mention I like maps? Wait what's that?

Yeah I noticed that too, and strangely enough, it recently broke in other forums I visit that also use Invision Software. Is there are Y2020 bug?