Runequest 3, house rules, Borderlands and questions

[HreshtIronBorne]

We had characters that eventually survived the attrition and made it to Priest or Lord status. When we ran the Argrath saga the whole group ended up with dozens of points of spells apiece. For the most part though new characters had to invest a LOT of in play development time until they could reliably use most of their cults 'special' features and magic. 

[Atgxtg]

55 minutes ago, HreshtIronBorne said:

I would probably agree that the rune magic system never really jived with how i imagined glorantha or how it is portrayed in other media, like KoDP for example.

I agree, when I first picked up RQ I had the  idea of people questing for Runes and learning how to use them to work effects somehow. Instead, what i got was a a magic system where runes were more stage dressing and team branding.

Edited November 15, 2019 by Atgxtg

[Akhôrahil]

2 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Uh, the Rune Magic system worked before. People might prefer the new one, but the old one worked.This thread is the first place that I've read someone ever claiming it didn't. 

Really? Old Rune Magic system was “sacrifice for Rune Magic, absolutely don’t use it, hope that this is the character who makes it to Rune Levels (where if you do, it’s an massive power-up instead)”.

So under the assumption that “works” includes “is reasonable to at all use for a decent percentage of the PCs”, it absolutely didn’t work. Given the amount of fatalities in RQ and the low-powered start, I don’t expect that the majority of Rune Cult PCs ever cast a Rune spell. 

(I cast a total of one point of Rune spells over three characters in RQ3.)

This probably explains much of the popularity of Humakt and Yelmalio - at least your starting PC got something from his cult!

Edited November 16, 2019 by Akhôrahil

[Glorion]

3 hours ago, soltakss said:

Ah, you've got me there!

It could certainly have done with a lookover by someone who knew RQ2 and RQ3 and knew the differences between the rules, to stop, for example, both RQ2 and RQ3 Species Maximums being used in different places.

RQG has sold better than any other version of RQ, or so I am led to believe, so it is certainly getting there.

The RQG rules are quite serviceable. many of the percieved problems are due to the mix of RQ2 and RQ3-style rules sometimes being done without as much care and attention as might have been. I find that if you look at them with an RQ2 or RQ3 hat on, most of the problems go away, as we solved those issues in both versions, as Players and GMs.

Of course, you can port all of the best bits of RQG into RQ3, then you'd end up with something that looks like RQG.

Passions came from what Greg Stafford wanted to put into RQ3 but didn't have the space for, or so I am told, so he put them into Pendragon. Some version of Passions were in Griffin Mountain and in Dragonewts, both for RQ2.

Personally, I played RQ3 almost as soon as it came out, probably in 1986, having bought it in 1985. I played it, with some RQ2 things, until I started adding bits and bobs from Hero Wars, HeroQuest, Mongoose RQs and RQ6, so it became RQ3+, but still held on to it as my main game system, albeit houseruled. RQG was the closest thing to an official RQ that suited the House Rules that I had been using, so it suited me fine.

I am sure that other RQ3 fans would hate some of the things in RQG, though. What people like is very personal to them.

 

I am somewhat bewildered by anyone wanting to go back to RQ3. Speaking as a longtime player of RQ2, RQ3, the briefly existing RQ4 of the late '80s and early '90s, which I GM'ed, and a house ruleset my group came up with as we couldn't stand either 3 or 4 anymore, all I have to say is that there are reasons why RQ3 died, it was highly problematic. The two worst things were runespells being one use for initiates, which turned using runespells into an ordeal, and the godawful, horrendous RQ3 sorcery system. RQG is IMHO a vast improvement in every way, especially in that the name "runequest" actually means something now. The sorcery system still needs more work, it really isn't very workable as it stands IMHO, but at least it's a big improvement over RQ3. Small fixes, like the one I advocate of only spirit not sorcery spells subtracting from your Free INT, could make it playable as well as interesting. Which it already is, unlike the RQ3 sorcery fiasco.

[Atgxtg]

33 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

Really?

Yes really. People used it for years, including those playing non-Priests.

33 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

Old Rune Magic system was “sacrifice for Rune Magic, absolutely don’t use it, hope that this is the character who makes it to Rune Levels (where if you do, it’s an massive power-up instead)”.

Actually it was sacrifice for it, don't uses it unless you need to, and hope it doesn't take too long to get your POW back. In old RQ POW vs POW (or MP vs MP) rolls were common and POW went up fairly often, so Rune MAgic was viewed as back up  spelles. It worked out fine becuase everybone who knew Rune Magic also knew Battle Magic.

 

33 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

So under the assumption that “works” includes “is reasonable to at all use for a decent percentage of the PCs”,

What's a decent percentage. In most RPGs the fact that it works for the priests would be considered a reasonable percentage. RQ broke the trend by letting it work for the non_priest too. 

33 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

it absolutely didn’t work. Given the amount of fatalities in RQ and the low-powered start, I don’t expect that the majority of Rune Cult PCs ever cast a Rune spell. 

Yes it did. I was there ans saw it happen, and the majority of PCs who had Rune magic used it. 

33 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

(I cast a total of one point of Rune spells over three characters in RQ3.)

Three characters? You are saying that the Rune MAgic system didn't work becuase of your experience with three characters. I think you need a larger sample size before you can declare that. I've played many more characters than three and run more than three hundred, easily, and Rune Magic worked for the vast majority of them. 

33 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

This probably explains much of the popularity of Humakt and Yelmalio - at least your starting PC got something from his cult!

You got something from every cult. You also gave something back. It wasn't supposed to be cash & carry, but a religion. If it didn't work then people wouldn't been playing RQ, RQ2, RQ3 and so on.

 

Now if someone prefers RQG system of Rune Magic that's fine, but the old one did work.

[jajagappa]

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

I can see someone preferring the new Rune Magic rules and running with them, but that didn't make the old ones non-functional.

Yep, I agree they were functional and workable. 

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

And as far as best/consensus goes there are some people who were put off by the new Rune Magic rules.

As a GM, I find it much more fun/interesting for the players to have the flexibility to choose whether to cast an attack spell (Lightning), defensive spell (Shield), or spirit blocking magic (Spirit Block), or maybe even reserve their magic in case they need to heal, then to be looking at their character sheet and knowing that the broos are approaching and they selected Spirit Block last time they had a chance to get an extra Rune spell.  

But those are my games, and I know others' games vary and that's fine too.

[Atgxtg]

10 minutes ago, Glorion said:

I am somewhat bewildered by anyone wanting to go back to RQ3.

Some of us consider it a superior system,.

Quote

Speaking as a longtime player of RQ2, RQ3, the briefly existing RQ4 of the late '80s and early '90s, which I GM'ed, and a house ruleset my group came up with as we couldn't stand either 3 or 4 anymore, all I have to say is that there are reasons why RQ3 died,

Yes, becuase Avlaon Hill got control of it and mismanaged it. 

Quote

it was highly problematic. The two worst things were runespells being one use for initiates, which turned using runespells into an ordeal, and the godawful, horrendous RQ3 sorcery system.

Well that's your opinion. Others have usually said it was that the took Glorantha out of the game system.

Quote

RQG is IMHO a vast improvement in every way, especially in that the name "runequest" actually means something now. The sorcery system still needs more work, it really isn't very workable as it stands IMHO, but at least it's a big improvement over RQ3. Small fixes, like the one I advocate of only spirit not sorcery spells subtracting from your Free INT, could make it playable as well as interesting. Which it already is, unlike the RQ3 sorcery fiasco.

Well we disagree. I think a lot of the rules are a step backwards, some of the changes either unjustified or baffling (i.e. the change ot the critical and special chances) and some of the new rules much more complicated. 

Edited November 16, 2019 by Atgxtg

[Glorion]

On 11/10/2019 at 11:42 AM, soltakss said:

I would use RQG rather than RQ3 personally, and I say that as a massive fan of RQ3.

If not, use the good things that have come with RQG and add them to your RQ3 game.

RQG actually does it well. Runemagic Pools work well and are not overpowering. Initiates regaining Runemagic makes sense, if gained on High holy Days.

You could make Runemagic recover on Holy days for Initiates, so once per Season. However, you would need Priests to have an edge, so they can repray them faster. I can't remember the recovery rate for Priests' Runemagic, though.

It is interesting that you find RQG Runemagic too much, too soon, but want Initiates to regain Runemagic faster.

RQ3 had a different pricing mechanism to RQ2 for that very reason. The RQG rules has a Conversion Guide that covers this. Basically it says to divinde RQ2 coin by 5 and RQ3 by 2, I think. Someone will be able to look it up and correct me if I have misremembered.

I used that rule in RQ3. I think that RQG needs the blow to be 3 times the location's normal Hit Points to be severed, which makes it even harder. 

Yes, rolling POWx5 to cast a spell is just irritating.

Have a look on my website, www.soltakss.com, and search for "Mega Campaign", as I did a similar exercise and took the various campaigns from RQ2 and RQ3 and stitched them together. It formed the very loose basis of my recently finished Gloranthan Campaign.

I actually like POWx5 to cast spirit magic, keeps the players from sacrificing all their POW for rune points. (I also require Luck rolls as much as possible for the same reason. But them I'm the GM so naturally feel that way). And I let rune points be regained on seasonal holy days as well as high holy days. But then I'm coming out of our house rule set where we were so annoyed by the RQ3 rule that we made all Runespells except for certain exceptions regainable for initiates, converted some spirit magic to runespells-and abolished spirit magic altogether. The idea of all magic except sorcery and shamanism being rune magic was one we liked.

[Atgxtg]

2 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Yep, I agree they were functional and workable. 

Yea! Finally. I mean while there was always room for improvement, and everyone has thier own preferences and such, the  fact that people played the game with the rune magic system as it was from RQ up through BRP is proof that it "worked". 

2 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

As a GM, I find it much more fun/interesting for the players to have the flexibility to choose whether to cast an attack spell (Lightning), defensive spell (Shield), or spirit blocking magic (Spirit Block), or maybe even reserve their magic in case they need to heal, then to be looking at their character sheet and knowing that the broos are approaching and they selected Spirit Block last time they had a chance to get an extra Rune spell.  

And that is quite valid. My complaint was with the statement made by some that it didn't work. That is just silly.

[Glorion]

Atgxtg: actually one area I totally agree with you is that the biggest thing wrong with RQ3, worse than anything else, worse than everything else combined, was trying to take it out of Glorantha, for which Avalon Hill has some but not all of the blame. We all hated that so much that in posting here, I managed to forget that. Well, that is fixed in RQG!

 

[Atgxtg]

14 minutes ago, Glorion said:

Atgxtg: actually one area I totally agree with you is that the biggest thing wrong with RQ3, worse than anything else, worse than everything else combined, was trying to take it out of Glorantha, for which Avalon Hill has some but not all of the blame. We all hated that so much that in posting here, I managed to forget that. Well, that is fixed in RQG!

 

LOL! Slight misunderstanding. I said that was what other had said. Personally I liked the separation between the rules and the setting. If it had been up to me, not that I was involved with Chasoium in any way, I would have preferred a core set of rules and setting books that adapted the rules to each setting so that RQ could have been used for soemthing other than Glorantha.

For me what I liked the least about RQ3 was that we stopped getting RQ2 style material that made the game really stand out from other FRPGs. No more long form cult write ups. No more boxed set style settings with mutiple adventures (for Glorantha, anyway). Most of what we did get were rehashes of RQ2 stuff with updated rules, non Chaosium stuff that I don't want to even look up to see that I got the name right (Eldorad) and, by the time we started to get stuff similar to the old RQ2 supplements (i.e. Sun Country) the lead designer got caught with a minor and RQ3 suffered from guilt by association, as back then RPGs were still be called "tools of the devil" by certain religious people and parts of the media. 

BTW, I'm not saying that I think it is wrong for people to prefer any or all the RQG rules over any of the earlier editions, just that there are reason why  some of us still prefer RQ3 to any version of RQ that came after it. To me the only version of RQ  that gives RQ3 a serious run for it's money is RQ2. I think RQ3 had better game mechanics, overall, but RQ2 had a few things I still miss and occasion consider using for RQ3 (Twelves Strike Ranks).

 

Oh, and since you brought up Sorcery, yeah RQ3 Sorcery was problematic. It worked, but it worked poorly. Not that it would have been used in Dragon Pass Glorantha campaign back then. 

Edited November 16, 2019 by Atgxtg

[Glorion]

On 11/10/2019 at 9:33 PM, Crel said:

Yep. Speaking as a GM using, more or less, RQG's magic rules as written, it can be a right pain in the arse. I've printed out the one-page calendar from the PDF in the GM's Screen Pack for each player, and that does help them keep track of their holy days, somewhat.

The other challenge is that if an adventurer is trying to optimize their access to and use of Rune magic, then the "one adventure per season" paradigm RQG encourages breaks down. For example, I can't just narrate "Weeks pass, and it grows hot as the world turns to Fire Season, when a mysterious courier comes to Pavis..." because my Issaries merchant player will go "hang on hang on hang on! I've got weekly holy days, and I want to be poking around each week to see if there's any new opportunities to Spell Trade with my bonus 1D6 Rune points on those weeks!"

So my game process at-table has instead become something more like "Death Week, anyone doing something? Okay, moving to Harmony Week," etc. between adventures.

@weasel fierce My old RQ3 game didn't really use much Rune magic—I was a sorcerer-knight, and we had a couple other sorcerers and a shaman for support, plus one lonely theist—but I'd say the play experience of using Rune points is really fun. It's both strong and flexible. However, I do agree that something a bit more slow and granular than RQG would best fit my taste, both in terms of starting skills as well as in terms of magic access.

In hindsight, if I were to re-start a campaign with new rules & norms, I'd really like to try implementing some of @soltakss's suggestions above. Probably have adventurers start without "free" Rune points, but eligible to become initiates if they meet the skill requirements. Probably have to buy the common spells (maybe each cult would have one or two for free, instead of the whole gamut), and initiates only able to replenish their Rune points on a seasonal holy day.

Fortunately, if you like the RQ3 engine better (and I do as well in several places) IMHO it's not too difficult to tack RQG's Rune magic and cults on top. I'm not quite convinced that D100 games are as modular as some folks claim they are, but in this case it seems pretty cut-and-paste to me. If, of course, that would suit your table and Your Glorantha.

I love the calendar of holy days, exactly as it makes time and place important and something for the players to think about. It does mean that you don't want to do the old RQ2 and RQ3 thing of having parties assembled out of bunches of different cults and backgrounds who really all ought to hate each other instead of adventure together, but that's all to the good. A Sartarite party for example really ought to be made up solely or almost solely of characters from the Orlanth/Ernalda pantheon, with most of the characters being Orlanth or Ernalda, which both simplifies everything and is very realistic. Relatedly, we handle seasons a bit differently, as the one area where I see the RQG rules as definitely broken is as to training, which the RQG ruleset makes far too difficult, indeed downright impossible unless everyone in the party wants to train at the same time. I've worked up a complex variant which I will not bore you all with, but let it be said that in my game, training, research, acquiring spells, various things to roleplay that don't necessarily involved combat or a quest as such but are more freeform, do take place in the off weeks of seasons. (And no, I don't mechanically count off the weeks necessarily.) I don't make training as foolishly easy as it is in other systems, but not as virtually impossible as in RQG. Realistically, training in the Bronze Age rarely took the form of trainer and student doing nothing else but train and be trained for an entire season. (The "once a week at the temple for POW training" is a rare moment of common sense in the current ruleset.) I've tried to come up with more realistic training rules.

[Glorion]

Atgxtg: Yeah, the failure to put out what the players wanted, with everything in the sun coming out *except* what everyone wanted, namely Dragon Pass material, was probably the single thing which killed RQ3. And then there was that lousy artwork... That was actually fixed more or less in the Hero Wars era (does anyone still play that thing?). A lot of the Hero Wars material is usable one way or another, and RQG did understand just what to publish first. Was RQ3 playable? Sure it was, I played it, GM'ed it occasionally, and enjoyed it, though not as much as RQ2. Sure a lot better than crap like D&D!

[weasel fierce]

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

Really? Old Rune Magic system was “sacrifice for Rune Magic, absolutely don’t use it, hope that this is the character who makes it to Rune Levels (where if you do, it’s an massive power-up instead)”.

So under the assumption that “works” includes “is reasonable to at all use for a decent percentage of the PCs”, it absolutely didn’t work. Given the amount of fatalities in RQ and the low-powered start, I don’t expect that the majority of Rune Cult PCs ever cast a Rune spell. 

(I cast a total of one point of Rune spells over three characters in RQ3.)

This probably explains much of the popularity of Humakt and Yelmalio - at least your starting PC got something from his cult!

"Rune levels" is nothing, honestly. 

To be a full-blown priest, all you need is 4 skills at 50, plus 50 points of ritual magic. 

You don't even need to commit to priesthood. Acolytes get re-usable rune magic as well. 

If you use the freeform character creation, you can easily start off at that rank and even if you don't, if the campaign is such a meat grinder that getting four skills to 50 is literally impossible, the problem is not the system but the GM.

 

 

Like, everyone understands that the priest rules in 2 and 3 are different right? 

 

Edited November 16, 2019 by weasel fierce

[weasel fierce]

And if the answer is "well, we didn't use that options", that's fair but there's only two methods for generating starting skills in the book.

If you specifically chose the one that makes it harder for a player to become an acolyte and then complain it's too hard to be an acolyte...that ain't nothing any rulebook can save you from

But even without it, training goes fast enough and is cheap. Chaosium is saying now that Runequest should be one adventure per season, right?

So 50 hours of training every week for a year and you'd be there in no time!

[Atgxtg]

28 minutes ago, Glorion said:

Atgxtg: Yeah, the failure to put out what the players wanted, with everything in the sun coming out *except* what everyone wanted, namely Dragon Pass material, was probably the single thing which killed RQ3.

Yeah, that was pretty much what I saw.

28 minutes ago, Glorion said:

And then there was that lousy artwork...

Mnn, that kin da varied from book to book. Trollpak had decnet art. The stable bound, paper covered books didn't help, especially with the pricing. AH tended to prices things a bit more than the competion, and the product quality looked cheap. Where everyone else was improving the production quality, RQ lowered the production quality and raised the prices. 

28 minutes ago, Glorion said:

That was actually fixed more or less in the Hero Wars era (does anyone still play that thing?).

Not quite fair. We are talking about differernt companies. So it's not so much that somebody finally got a clue and fixed stuff, but that the  people with a clue were in charge.

I think most HeroWards fans moved onto HeroQuest, and, supposedly, HeroQuest still handles Glorantha better than RuneQuest. Or so that was the claim.

28 minutes ago, Glorion said:

A lot of the Hero Wars material is usable one way or another,

Yes HeroWars supplements did do a good job of detailing the setting, especially compared to some companies. Despite any misgiving or felling I might have about the decisions made for RQG, I'll give the folks behind it credit for knowing Glorantha and tailoring the system towards it. It's not like with early MRQ where I wondered if these people knew anything about RuneQuest or Glorantha (Orlanth has the Chaos rune !!!???), it more a case of their zigging when I wished they had zagged. 

 

28 minutes ago, Glorion said:

and RQG did understand just what to publish first.

Compared to Avalon Hill almost anybody does. Not that the order of products for RQG has been bad, just that AH set the bar pretty low, and Mongoose shifting to another Age didn't raise it any.

28 minutes ago, Glorion said:

Was RQ3 playable? Sure it was, I played it, GM'ed it occasionally, and enjoyed it, though not as much as RQ2. Sure a lot better than crap like D&D!

I think RQ3 was better if you wanted to use it for something other than Glorantha. For Glorantha RQ2 still ruled, except, maybe, once HeroWars/HeroQuest came out.

[weasel fierce]

26 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

 

I think RQ3 was better if you wanted to use it for something other than Glorantha. For Glorantha RQ2 still ruled, except, maybe, once HeroWars/HeroQuest came out.

Crucible of the hero wars, Elder secrets of glorantha and Gods of glorantha is a lot more material for Glorantha than we ever got for 2. 

I'll agree the cult write ups in Gods was pretty lame, but on the upside, we also got material that 2 never even dreamed of.

[Atgxtg]

2 minutes ago, weasel fierce said:

Crucible of the hero wars, Elder secrets of glorantha and Gods of glorantha is a lot more material for Glorantha than we ever got for 2. 

I don't think so. Pavis, Big Rubble, Trollpak, Griffin Mountain, Cults of Prax, Cults of Terror, Borderlands, Snakepipe Hollow, Apple Lane, plus some more stuff I don't recall off the top of my head.

Also the style and usefulness of the material was different.

Cults of Prax gave you a lot more info for running a campaign set in Dragon Pass  that Glods of Glorantha did for running a campaign anywhere. CoP covered a small region and gave it a lot of detail that was RQ2 strength. GoG gave you a little info and game mechanics to cover alot more places, but lacked the detail to make any of those places as fleshed out as Dragon Pass was in RQ2. The Glorantha boxed set didn't  improve the situation much. It was a interesting read but it wasn't enough to run a campaign anywhere in  Gklorantha with the sme level of detail and depth that you could run a Dragon Pass/Prax/Pavis campaign in RQ2. Not even close.

Why they never re-released cults of Prax for RQ3 is still mystery to me. We used to pull it out so people could read up on their cult, and then use RQ3 rules. So the other cutls in GoG were like basic profression in old Traveller. There but why take them with you got the  expanded version?

2 minutes ago, weasel fierce said:

I'll agree the cult write ups in Gods was pretty lame, but on the upside, we also got material that 2 never even dreamed of.

But which wasn't all that useful. Take for example what IMO consider to be the best of the lot Elder Secrets. Nice, except that knowing Elder Secrets but not knowing stuff that should have been common knowledge is a problem for anyone who is trying to game in that setting. We knew more about the Aldyrmi that we did about the Praxians or the Lunars. 

IMO the best RQ3 stuff was probably the non-Gloranthan stuff, such as Vikings. Probably because it was the RQ3 playtest campaign.

[Atgxtg]

51 minutes ago, weasel fierce said:

And if the answer is "well, we didn't use that options", that's fair but there's only two methods for generating starting skills in the book.

If you specifically chose the one that makes it harder for a player to become an acolyte and then complain it's too hard to be an acolyte...that ain't nothing any rulebook can save you from

Yeah.

51 minutes ago, weasel fierce said:

But even without it, training goes fast enough and is cheap. Chaosium is saying now that Runequest should be one adventure per season, right?

So 50 hours of training every week for a year and you'd be there in no time!

LOL! I'm going out on a limb here as I don't own RQG, but I think that's more like in Pendragon, where you only get so much training time and improvement between adventures. So it's not like RQ3 where someone can train for six weeks and get 300 hours worth of training and go from 25% to 55%, mastering a weapon over the course of a year.

[Lordabdul]

2 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

some of the changes either unjustified or baffling (i.e. the change ot the critical and special chances)

What do you mean here? I checked RQ3 and critical/special successes are like in RQG, at 1/20th and 1/5th of the base chance. Am I missing something?

Quote

As for Passions Pendragon still does them better

@Atgxtg can you elaborate about what you think Pendragon does better? From what I can tell, the system is pretty much similar (albeit being D20 instead of RQG's D100), and the main differences are that the bonuses/penalties seem to be bigger in Pendragon (I think they're just right in RQG), and Pendragon has more stuff, like the really cool secondary states like Shock (when you fail something you were Inspired for), or Melancholic/Maddened. I think these extra rules in Pendragon really fit the setting well (as Knights tend to be very moody and dramatic), but I probably wouldn't want those in RQG since I'm pretty sure 80% of people play RQG as a more standard FRPG rather than an emulation of epic tales (there's HQG for that). 

Quote

The Resistance Table is better than before

That's from @soltakss -- hasn't the Resistance Table been virtually the same in all versions of BRP games? What changed?

 

My 2 cents on the general topic is that I never played RQ3 so I have zero nostalgia or affection for it, but I remember checking it out a couple years ago for my general education on RPG systems, and I disliked many aspects: the split of attack/parry skills, the super harsh magic rules (one-use spells that you had to sacrifice stuff for? come on!), the weird opposed roll rules, and the seemingly poor ability to scale up to expert (>100%) levels. Of course, that's only based on my reading of the rules so I may very well be missing some stuff, but I really don't care since that system is dead anyway. I totally understand the desire to run it for people who have run it in the old days though! I similarly get a fuzzy feeling thinking about running a game with The Dark Eye rules (although that one is surprisingly not dead, go figure).

All in all, I'm very happy with RQG compared to the previous editions I was able to read through. As mentioned before by various people, it's gorgeous, finally lives up to the "Rune" in "RuneQuest", I love how the system feels integrated with the setting, I love the Runes & Passions system, the character background creation, etc...  But yes, I agree that it has a few rough edges on the purely mechanical & wording side of things, and that it would be reaaaaally nice if Chaosium was more proactive releasing errata and corrections in a timely and, more importantly, well advertised manner (there are resources here and here and more importantly here that I'm sure only a few forum regulars know about).

 

Edited November 16, 2019 by lordabdul

[Atgxtg]

11 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

What do you mean here? I checked RQ3 and critical/special successes are like in RQG, at 1/20th and 1/5th of the base chance. Am I missing something?

Possibly. I only have the Quickstart and it has the same tables, but I've heard some poeple post that they round the values differently. The rule for BRP games was always that everything rounded to the nearest, with one exception. I've heard that isn't the case in RQG. They either round up or down, or maybe both. But it was one of those things that wasn't broken and didn't need to be fixed, and just hurt that backwards compatibility that the game was supposed to have as a priority. No one (yet) has every said that RQ3 biggest flaw was the way it rounded off numbers.

11 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

@Atgxtg can you elaborate about what you think Pendragon does better? From what I can tell, the system is pretty much similar (albeit being D20 instead of RQG's D100), and the main differences are that the bonuses/penalties seem to be bigger in Pendragon (I think they're just right in RQG), and Pendragon has more stuff, like the really cool secondary states like Shock (when you fail something you were Inspired for), or Melancholic/Maddened.

Sure, although I think you touched upon most of it.

First off Pendragon d20 mechanic handles opposed rolls better, which happened a lot when Knights were pulled in different directions by different passions.  From what I've read in RQG opposed rolls can really bog down into a series of rolls. Secondly the bonuses and penalties are bigger, but they also fit the genre. Things like shock, melancholy,. and madness, make the passions something more than just rolling for a bonus. 

11 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

I think these extra rules in Pendragon really fit the setting well (as Knights tend to be very moody and dramatic), but I probably wouldn't want those in RQG since I'm pretty sure 80% of people play RQG as a more standard FRPG rather than an emulation of epic tales (there's HQG for that). 

Which is why I  wouldn't want Passions in RQ in the first place.

11 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

That's from @soltakss -- hasn't the Resistance Table been virtually the same in all versions of BRP games? What changed?

I only got the Quickstart, but they replaced every after the first 95 with a dash, so it looks like you don't get a roll, yet the rules state:

RQG Quickstart page 6 " As usual, a roll of 01–05 always succeeds,and a roll of 96–00 always fails."

So that would mean  no change. Although old RQ had a rule that if your POW was 10 points higher than an opponent you could ignore them in Spirit Combat.

 

N ow there was a couple of spot on the RQ3 table were the attacker got a "01" or a "99" but the automatic success and failure rules would have overode that anyway.

 

 

11 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

My 2 cents on the general topic is that I never played RQ3 so I have zero nostalgia or affection for it, but I remember checking it out a couple years ago for my general education on RPG systems, and I disliked many aspects: the split of attack/parry skills, the super harsh magic rules (one-use spells that you had to sacrifice stuff for? come on!), the weird opposed roll rules, and the seemingly poor ability to scale up to expert (>100%) levels. Of course, that's only based on my reading of the rules so I may very well be missing some stuff,

Okay not problem with your take although there were things about split attack and parry that were nice , such as making it harder for larger people to parry, and the sacrifice for magic wasn't as bad as it looked. POW was not really a fixed score in RQ and would go up frequently. So frequently that POW got taken out of most of the category modifiers so that they didn't need to be recalculated every other week.

11 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

but I really don't care since that system is dead anyway.

??? . So if they discontinued RQG tomorrow you'd drop it like a rock?

11 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

I totally understand the desire to run it for people who have run it in the old days though! I similarly get a fuzzy feeling thinking about running a game with The Dark Eye rules (although that one is surprisingly not dead, go figure).

It's not just nostalgia but also game mechanics. For instance RQ3 switched from having hit points based mostly on CON with SIZ apply a slight modifier, to the average of SIZ and CON, which has been the basic formula for every BRP game since. IMO that's better. It doesn't matter how healthy someone is as far as being able to decipate them with a sword or  kill them by stabbing them in the heart. SIZ does. Likewise RQ3 capped the category modifier for secondary stats so big creatures no longer got huge attack skill bonuses just because they were strong. RQ3 have areal movement system as opposed to the abstract one from RQ2, BRP BGB,  and RQG. I don't like RQG weapon breakge rules.

11 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

All in all, I'm very happy with RQG compared to the previous editions I was able to read through. As mentioned before by various people, it's gorgeous, finally lives up to the "Rune" in "RuneQuest", I love how the system feels integrated with the setting, I love the Runes & Passions system, the character background creation, etc...  But yes, I agree that it has a few rough edges on the purely mechanical & wording side of things, and that it would be reaaaaally nice if Chaosium was more proactive releasing errata and corrections in a timely and, more importantly, well advertised manner (there are resources here and here and more importantly here that I'm sure only a few forum regulars know about).

Great. But the thread was about somebody who preferred sticking with RQ3 and using it as the base system, which is just as valid an option. I doubt I'll every play RQG, every time I go into the Rule clarification thread and see something that got changed that used to work fine, without any reason for the change, I shake my head and stick with what works. . I'm not ll that fond of the Runes as skills or the general power up that starting character get across the board. I'm not wowed by the Passion and background system, both work better in Pendragon. Art is nice, but not essential, and good game mechanics and clear concise rules trump good art. To me RQ3 is the better game.

[Lordabdul]

2 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

The rule for BRP games was always that everything rounded to the nearest,

RQG is always "round in favour of players" (I would probably replace that with "always round up", it's easier for me). Call of Cthulhu, because it's got the whole bleak cosmic horror thing, is "always round down". I don't think it's very important either way

2 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

From what I've read in RQG opposed rolls can really bog down into a series of rolls.

There was a thread about that yeah, and since then I learned to make sure ties in opposed rolls lead to attrition of some resource/stat. It actually ended up being quite satisfying because it can lead to a situation where 2 somewhat evenly matched opponents might have one of them back down even after a couple ties just because they realize the other one will tire them out. But if you want things to be resolved in a single roll, you might want to look at HQG, which resolves around that.

2 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

I only got the Quickstart, but they replaced every after the first 95 with a dash, so it looks like you don't get a roll

Odd indeed. In the full RQG book you get numbers past that, going over 100. So probably either a mistake, or something they fixed by the time the rulebook came out but they forgot to fix the Quickstart Rules.

2 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

So if they discontinued RQG tomorrow you'd drop it like a rock?

Not necessarily (is it abandoned? replaced by a new edition?). But that's a different situation. I said I don't care much about RQ3 rules (apart from a purely game design history aspect) because I came on board the Gloranthan train only last year. Naturally, I picked the latest edition. It doesn't make much sense for me to start with the 1984 version, nor would learning more or caring about it bring me any value except for getting even more confused about rules edge cases But like I said, I totally understand running old games from your library. Your situation is different -- you used to play RQ3, and, I imagine, you just never upgraded (MRQ/MRQ2 or RQG) because you're happy with RQ3. There's plenty of people who still play D&D 3.x and are happy too, that's not unusual. It gets even more complicated (and justified) with RQ because of its infamously convoluted history, where, from one version to the next, it can almost be a totally different game. But like I said I'm a RQ newbie so I avoided all that stuff by arriving late to the party. And besides I'm not particularly picky about rules... there's only a couple games I'm aware of that I wouldn't GM because of the rules. Otherwise, I'm fine (with a house rule here and there), and I've never regretted upgrading to a newer edition in any game.

2 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

But the thread was about somebody who preferred sticking with RQ3 and using it as the base system, which is just as valid an option.

True! Sorry about the derailing.

 

 

 

 

Edited November 16, 2019 by lordabdul

[Atgxtg]

1 hour ago, lordabdul said:

RQG is always "round in favour of players" (I would probably replace that with "always round up", it's easier for me). Call of Cthulhu, because it's got the whole bleak cosmic horror thing, is "always round down". I don't think it's very important either way

Do you mean CoC7? The rule has always been round to  the nearest in all Chasoium RPGs. Much easier to remember as it was the same for everything. 

1 hour ago, lordabdul said:

There was a thread about that yeah, and since then I learned to make sure ties in opposed rolls lead to attrition of some resource/stat. It actually ended up being quite satisfying because it can lead to a situation where 2 somewhat evenly matched opponents might have one of them back down even after a couple ties just because they realize the other one will tire them out. But if you want things to be resolved in a single roll, you might want to look at HQG, which resolves around that.

Or not use opposed rolls in RQ.  The game was not designed for them. Comparing special success chances on  the resistance table would work fast, too. 

1 hour ago, lordabdul said:

Odd indeed. In the full RQG book you get numbers past that, going over 100. So probably either a mistake, or something they fixed by the time the rulebook came out but they forgot to fix the Quickstart Rules.

It's  not a fix, but a change, and a bad one. 

If rolling normally then 96+ is still a failure.        

If adding success level, then the Active party can get multiple degrees of success but the Resistant party cannot. Okay for spirit combat, but sucks for everything  else the resistance table  was used for, b ut wait they now do  that with opposed rolls...that can take forever. Tell me again how RQG is better?  

1 hour ago, lordabdul said:

Not necessarily (is it abandoned? replaced by a new edition?). But that's a different situation. I said I don't care much about RQ3 rules (apart from a purely game design history aspect) because I came on board the Gloranthan train only last year. Naturally, I picked the latest edition. It doesn't make much sense for me to start with the 1984 version, nor would learning more or caring about it bring me any value except for getting even more confused about rules edge cases

Yeah I can see how anew player would graviate to the latest version. I don;t expect a new D&D player do go looking for the White Box.  I was just wondering about your not playing RQ3 becuase it was "dead", I run alot of dead games. Pendragon was  dead for decades, but it got better. 

1 hour ago, lordabdul said:

But like I said, I totally understand running old games from your library. Your situation is different -- you used to play RQ3, and, I imagine, you just never upgraded (MRQ/MRQ2 or RQG) because you're happy with RQ3.

Yes and no. I bought MRQ but hardly considered it an upgrade. I was quite clear about that on the Mongoose forums, so much so that I had a few people really peeved, usually those who loved the game buy hadn't tried to play it as intended by Mongoose, which wasn't not how it was written. Still I never got banned unlike the guy who runs this site. Well pays for it.  The MRQ rules were so mesed up that they kept rewriting them in errata to fix what they messed up in the previous errata. They didn't seem to understand that RQ game mechanics were interconnected in ways that D&D aren't. For instance their solution to the greatly reduced effect on weapons brought on from changing the damage system by add a Resilience skill and dumping general Hit points was to up the weapon damage, which then made armor kinda useless.  

I didn't  buy MRQ2, although it was definitely an improvement over MRQ.

1 hour ago, lordabdul said:

There's plenty of people who still play D&D 3.x and are happy too, that's not unusual. It gets even more complicated (and justified) with RQ because of its infamously convoluted history, where, from one version to the next, it can almost be a totally different game.

Plus the fact that since RQ was a dead game for  so long people were used to and  happy wit h  the rules they had. 

1 hour ago, lordabdul said:

But like I said I'm a RQ newbie so I avoided all that stuff by arriving late to the party. And besides I'm not particularly picky about rules... there's only a couple games I'm aware of that I wouldn't GM because of the rules. Otherwise, I'm fine (with a house rule here and there), and I've never regretted upgrading to a newer edition in any game.

I'm very picky about rules. they are really what determines how the game plays out. Them and what the GM does. The setting does't really matter  if rules don't emulate it well. For instance look at something like D&D. Now you could use it to run a old west campaign, there are D&D books out there that do that. But  if you run a high noon style show down and the hero and villian s qaure off and draw the  pistols,  shoot each other a half dozen times, and then stop to reload...does that feel like a Western, or like D&D.  You can do things in RQ,  with it's assortment  that you really can't do that well in say 13th Age, which pretty much reduces skills into a flat bonus. 

1 hour ago, lordabdul said:

True! Sorry about the derailing.

I'd be more to blame for that that you. I  just wanted  to defend the OPs choice when people wonder how someone could possibly prefer RQ3 over RQG. I can think of quite a few reasons.  As far as fans of RQG go, enjoy and have fun. They bought the game, why can't they enjoy it?

[Akhôrahil]

7 hours ago, weasel fierce said:

"Rune levels" is nothing, honestly. 

To be a full-blown priest, all you need is 4 skills at 50, plus 50 points of ritual magic. 

You don't even need to commit to priesthood. Acolytes get re-usable rune magic as well. 

I do agree that acolyte was the way to go, but far from all cults had them. And Priest... for most cults, being a priest wasn’t really compatible with being an adventurer. Being a priest meant you had a full-time job.

[Joerg]

20 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

And Priest... for most cults, being a priest wasn’t really compatible with being an adventurer. Being a priest meant you had a full-time job.

Being an adventurer isn't a job, it is temporary leave from your normal job - at least that's how I have always played rpgs. It helps if your normal job has an able lieutenant or partner (e.g. wife or sibling) who can cover for your absences.

Playing a priest adventurer just meant that you usually had to make your temple involved in the adventure somehow and participate as part of your cult duties. But then, have you seen the mercenary company contracts in Pavis or Borderlands? Joining a spirit cult is a lot less commitment than those contracts.

The 90% time commitment of a RQ3 priest also translates into a 90% magic commitment to the cult - you are expected to cast your magic in the name of your cult, to keep the income comng that finances your life in style as a priest  That's healing, Spell Teaching, and other such demands.

RQ3 had the priest spend a day in personal worship for regaining a rune spell point. Probably not the entire day in meditation, but in other cult activities as well, which happen to cover some of the other priestly duties your priest character had to fulfill anyway. That meant that under optimal conditions, a priest under RQ3 rules could cast 294 points worth of rune spells in a Gloranthan year, regardless how many spells he had. An adventuring priest might be able to cast up to 30 rune points on his personal whims, and some more on temple-sponsored adventuring activity.