GAZZA

The "until the lower skill reaches 0" doesn't appear anywhere in the rules (though I don't disagree it's a good idea). RAW, 195% versus 5% becomes 100% versus -90% (which is still a 5% chance).

That's the thing man, I'm not sure I do know what the intention is. Bullet point 3 flat out states that it's possible for a 130% Sword skill to have an increased chance of criticals and specials. It has no reason to exist other than to make that point. If, as I had previously assumed, a skill of >100% meant that you and your opponent both reduce your skills until they are both 100% or less (which is what happens according to bullet point 2, but not bullet point 1 if only one skill is >100%), then bullet point 3 can never be relevant. Any prospective 130% skill would be reduced to at least 100%, or more if faced with a skill over 130%, so unless bullet point 1 really does mean (as it appears to) that higher skills are not reduced if the lower skill is <= 100%, then bullet point 3 is just a waste of page space. It's really hard to believe that the intent was if I have 199% to your 99% I get no reduction, but if you have 101% I get reduced by 99%. However, whether or not this is just a case of extremes ("nobody is going to be running around with 199% skills") or an actual case where the rules are, well, contradictory I couldn't say.

Don't worry @ffilz, you're amongst friends here. I'm using RQG but starting in 1615 so I can run all my old RQ2/3 material (we're about to wrap up River of Cradles tonight I think, moving on to either Apple Lane or Borderlands next). Indeed I would say that the idea that a majority of posters playing RQ at the moment are using exclusively RQG material would be a fairly surprising one to me.

I've seen similar things in Steve Maurer's Hero Quest rules. Not sure how practical they are - certainly at most reasonable levels of RQ a critical will kill most opponents, meaning anything more is just overkill. I suppose if you're fighting the Bat or the Mother of Monsters or something that's not necessarily true.

In RQ3, and I believe also in RQ2, there was a very good reason to carry a shield as well as a 1H weapon - a 1H weapon can't attack and parry in the same round. You want to use a 1H sword? You'd need something else to parry with. Didn't have to be a shield - you could dual wield like the emoist of Driz'zt fanboys if you liked - but you needed to use whatever was in your other hand to parry with. I wonder if a similar rule in RQG would address any of these issues.

Fair enough, but I am the GM, and I need a reason to use what the author has written. The author's job in an RPG supplement isn't to convince himself, but his audience - and this is a new iteration of an existing game, which has been deliberately targetted (using RQ2 mechanics!) at that audience, so it's a bit disgenuous to take a "because I say so!" stance. In fairness I don't think this is the stance that Jeff has taken - he has an entire thread where we can ask questions about why decisions have been made. (Which is not to say that I find his reasoning at all convincing in many cases, but that's fine - I'm sure reasonable people can disagree, and nobody has suggested Jeff is going to barge into my roll 20 session and tell me I'm doing it wrong).

Didn't Arkat beat them to that revelation by an entire Age though?

Is there any consensus about what the God Learner Secret was supposed to be? (I've heard "it's only a game!" proposed, but I understand Greg specifically said that wasn't the case).

Pages 201-202 that explain what happens if you have >100% in your weapon skill seem to be a little unclear. The way I've been playing it so far is that if I have 115% Sword, and my opponent has 80% Shield, then I attack as if I had 100% Sword (01-05 Critical, 06-20 Special, 21-95 Success, 96-99 Fail, 100 Fumble) and he parries as if he had 65% Shield. In other words, we both get -15% to our skills. However, that actually appears to be wrong. It appears that the reduction in both skills applies only if they are both over 100% (bullet point 2). Bullet point 1, which talks about >100% versus a lower skill, does not say that the higher skill is reduced. And indeed bullet point 3 (which talks about a Wind Lord with 130% having improved special and critical chance) would be meaningless if it did work the way I thought it did, since there would never be a case where an effective attack skill exceeded 100%. So, this seems to be an excellent deal for someone with 101+ weapon skill: you reduce your opponent, and you suffer no reduction yourself (unless they've got 101+ too). What I want to know is: Is this correct? What if I have 201% and my opponent has 101% - RAW, he goes all the way down to 0 (so just the base 5%) and I have 100%, but if he had 2% less (only 99%) then I'd have no reduction at all, and thus twice the chance to critical or special. This seems a massive disparity between opponents with 99 and 101 weapon skills.

Perhaps what's needed is some Knowledge skills: Train (Characteristic), which has a default of 0 and cannot be raised by experience. If a PC wants to try training someone's STR, they need to make a successful skill roll or else the effort is wasted; for that reason, to actually make a living at it needs 90% skill (for example), but PCs can try training each other if they like. Remember also that that training cost is revenue, not necessarily profit. Perhaps it requires significant investment in special diet, drugs, and equipment in order to perform the training, which consumes 50% or more of that fee.

This is very much a "have your cake and eat it too" deal though. Your argument for "it's easy to convert" is "if you like 13AG you can convert", more or less - you even specifically point out that you're not really converting so much as reinventing (which again, I never said you couldn't - just that "dead easy" means something like "13 STR here is 16 Muscles there, 99% Sword attack here is +6 to Sword there, or whatever - not "99% sword and some other good weapon abilities, hmm, closest class equivalent is an Orlanthi warrior, even though he's a Yelmalion, but near enough, let's arbitrarily make him level 6"). The thing is, if you accept that, then "classes specific to Glorantha" is no longer a selling point over D&D4e, since you could just do that there as well. ("99% sword and some other good weapon abilities, let's make him a Fighter and give him some appropriate feats"). In any case I'm really not ragging on 13AG. I'm even (as of yesterday) going to be playing in a 13AG campaign. But my initial point - more or less, that if you are getting into Glorantha and are confused about whether to go the 13AG or RQG route - still holds: all else being equal, 13AG is a dead system and RQG is not. As 13AG will not be getting any new material, if you find yourself wanting to play outside the quite narrow boundaries laid out in 13AG (for example, you want to introduce a western sorcerer, or explore illumination, or do something in Kralolera) then you'll have to convert that even if RQG eventually publishes fully fleshed out supplements for these. But that's all else being equal. If you're familiar with/a fan of d20 based systems, and you don't really mind converting (or you're fine with inventing your own stuff), by all means 13AG is a perfectly reasonable game and - lest it seem I'm damning with faint praise there - it is also a game that showed a lot of promise before being cut down in its prime. I would have been perfectly happy to live in a world where the supplements mentioned in the 13AG core book were actually still on the table or already out, and I would prefer a world where both 13AG and RQG were live systems.

So we have costs for weapons and armour in the combat chapter, costs of poisons/antidotes/et. al. in the skills chapter (thank you for that @jajagappa), and everything else in the equipment and wealth section. I mean, with the prices for mere ingredients 10 times what RQ2 had, I don't think there's going to be a rush of individuals plonking down 500L for POT 10 poison antidote supplies. Indeed quite the opposite, you might reasonably go "questing for rare ingredients" to sell them to the temple. But in any case, I've never really understood this resistance to having prices for things. No GM forces the PCs to quest for bronze ore in order to get a spear made, or for carrots in order for soup. If you want poisons and antidotes to be rare, that's fine - but honestly poisons are extremely OP in RQ, and every second monster has some sort of venom, so stocking up on antidotes is about the only reasonable way to fight such things. And given that venomous abilities is on the standard Chaotic Features table, it's not like you can always know in advance when you're going to need them, so it makes sense to stock up.

Yeah that works. I've posted on your recruit thread - what's with all the dudes talking about D&D? This is 13A right? I mean it's like D&D but I thought we weren't supposed to say that.

I'd count all those as a "beginning shaman". You're not really an established shaman if your fetch has a POW less than the species maximum - 30 or so is reasonable.

I'm signed in, I still get that. Have you made it public?

The equipment list in RQG is a bit bare; it seems (from the bits on poisons and so on) that poison antidotes are still a thing in RQG, but there doesn't seem to be any prices for them. I could just use the RQ2 alchemy price list but I get the impression that it's a little OTT for RQG. There doesn't seem to be an easy conversion formula though; the armour prices in RQ2 are comparable (a plate cuirass is 200L in RQ2, 175 in RQG) but RQ2 wants 2000L for Disruption, whereas it would only cost 50L according to RQG page 257. Not sure how many RQG PCs are going to be able to afford 400L for a POT 10 system antidote poison, say. Anyone have any suggestions for RQG poisons, antidotes, and the like? Any hope for an RQG alchemy system (something RQ3 badly lacked compared to RQ2)?

Other than beginning Shamans, the Fetch is likely to have a lot higher POW than the body is, and they share the same Spirit Combat skill... so it's not that risky.

Don't forget that you can't swing a cat in any Gloranthan fiction/setting material without hitting a Hero Quest... and we've been waiting for RQ Hero Quest rules for literally decades.

Not dead easy. It can be done, sure - I've converted Champions supplements for D&D before, you can convert anything if all you're interested in doing is keeping the story and redoing all the mechanics, and 13AG is not the least bit mechanically compatible with RQ - you could easily convert D&D supplements to 13AG (because 13AG is essentially just reflavoured D&D - it's what is known as a D&D Heartbreaker), but with RQ supplements you are going to have to basically say, "Right, so this guy has 100% Sword Attack and knows Heal 4... I guess I'll make him an Orlanthi Warrior" or whatever. At which point you are at least going to wonder, however briefly, if you wouldn't rather just play RQ instead. For all its faults RQG is a lot easier to use with older RQ material (you can for the most part do no conversions at all) than 13AG will ever be, so you have to be really impressed with 13A mechanics to want to use RQ material with 13AG rather than RQG. Which, if you do, great! I bought 13A, and 13AG, they have my money, I'm a "supporter" in that sense, and if they were ever going to publish more material I'd recommend it as a valid alternative to RQ. But it doesn't seem as if they are, and if the best argument for 13AG is "well you can convert old RQ stuff over" then that's kind of a terrible argument, because taken to its logical next step you could do that with just 13A (no need to buy the Gloranthan supplement), or - frankly - D&D4 (or any version of D&D, but D&D4e is essentially identical mechanically to 13A). If you're going to publish a new system for playing in Glorantha, you cannot reasonably expect your customers to purchase unrelated material for a different game system published by a different company in order to flesh out your game. And 13AG needs fleshing out. The authors themselves tentatively admit this with their references, within the book, to forthcoming supplements that (it appears) will not see the light of day. To be perfectly blunt, RQG needs a lot of fleshing out too - 2 years and no gamemaster book, no cults book... it's not a good look for a system that has been as historically plagued with delays and cancellations as RuneQuest - but Chaosium do still have the rights to RQG and presumably will eventually publish more material for it. I don't hate 13AG by any means. It's a decent first book for a game, and it even includes some Hero Questing stuff (which is more than any version of RQ ever has, despite it being a core part of the setting). It was clearly written by people with a love of the setting. In a parallel timeline where RQG wasn't published and they retained the rights to publish their intended supplements, I would absolutely be strong supporter. But unfortunately we don't live in that timeline, and I couldn't in good conscience recommend 13AG to a starting GM that wanted to get into Glorantha for that reason; the target audience has pretty much shrunk to 13A fans that are also Glorantha fans, which is by definition a smaller subset of people than just Glorantha fans in general. By all means if 13AG is your bag baby, play it and love it! I certainly intend to steal bits from it, and I'm not regretting the purchase. And to be absolutely clear, there is nothing I would like more than to discover I am wrong about future 13AG supplements and if they appear I will almost certainly buy them. Can't really say fairer than that.

There is, I believe, a canonical High Healer broo, though I'm not sure if they're illuminated or not. If not, then it seems even Chaotic creatures are not banned from CA. (Unless the broo had undergone the Cleansed One hero quest I guess).

I can't really add to any of the excellent advice you've already been given, but welcome aboard @Dethstrok9 and I hope we make you feel as welcome as everyone made me feel a few weeks ago when I created my account here.

One of the Seven Mothers is a Chalana Arroy knock off right? Wouldn't s/he get the spell too, and if so... well, that's your go to for "but Chaos is just an illusion anyway ..." followed by Sleep/Throat Slit. (I don't know if whoever the Seven Mothers equivalent of CA is gets Sleep, perhaps they don't). In all seriousness though I don't see a big deal about making Sleep CA only, or River Eyes ZF only, and so on. But, given this is RQG where even initiates get reusable Rune magic, it's hard to argue that making them Rune spells isn't the right approach. (Though something like River Eyes would need a boost for that).

I am sure I'm not original, as I grabbed the advancement house rules from somewhere here I think. I did it for two main reasons. Firstly, I've tried to run Glorantha games before (with RQ3) and never really gotten much interest - a few sessions, maybe, before petering out. Part of this was that I didn't really know Glorantha well enough to convey my love for it accurately to the players (which RQG does make a fair bit easier - that family history stuff is great for building that sense of being a living world, and the fact that Runes actually are a thing is great too - I say this because I bag on the new rules a fair bit, and will doubtless continue to do so, but I am happy that there is a version of RuneQuest in print in 2020!), but a large part of it was that some of my players felt that their characters didn't change much from session to session - four or five sessions in they were still essentially playing what they'd started with, only a few extra percentage points in a couple of skills to the difference. Secondly, I decided to start my game in 1615 instead of 1625 mostly because IMG none of the "canonical" events by big name Elminsters (a term I use for pet NPCs, here referring to such individuals as Kallyr but mainly Argrath) will necessarily occur, or at least will not necessarily occur as written. Ideally I'd like the PCs to be at least involved with the liberation of Sartar, if not actually doing it themselves. If it works out, I'd like to run the Cradle scenario and have the PCs at least included when it goes into Magasta's Pool for the Hero Quest, possibly without even having Argrath (sorry, "Garrath Sharpsword") there at all. To do that, the PCs need to get to at least Rune level and arguably Coder level in 10 years of game time, and while I don't regard 50 seasons worth of improvement rolls to be necessarily too short for that, I also don't have a problem if they get there in 5 years, or 2 years, because it's not as if the NPCs in the game are going to complain that I'm being too generous to their opposition. I do need to figure out a way to get them to accept the value of training though; they have a certain resistance to down time. We're wrapping up River of Cradles probably on Saturday; I'm aiming to continue with the Borderlands scenarios and have them skip a bit of time as retainers of the Duke.

Ah right. Yeah, it's not really clear how one is supposed to do that with weapons that can be used either one or two handed; the most generous interpretation would suggest if you have (say) 60% in Battle Axe then you have 30% in all other axes (1H or 2H) as Battle Axe is both. I would say that interpretation is wrong, but RAW could certainly be read that way.

Well, you get half your percentage in the off hand. And few people are truly ambidextrous. So I think that's already covered.