Runequest 3, house rules, Borderlands and questions

[styopa]

13 hours ago, lordabdul said:

Doesn't RQG have interwoven attacks/parries/magic too? (and yes, I realize that RQG has 12 SRs instead of 10, and has different SR modifiers for DEX/SIZ and weapons and such, but AFAIK all actions take part in the SR system)

RQG has IMO funky initiative/movement changes based on "if you're in combat" unless that's been errata'd out now.

 

Oh, and re fatigue I tried one out the last session that was fairly successful in my opinion.  As my players were slogging through a vast swamp with literally no solid surface to sleep...as the day turned around 4am they all got a 'fatigue' roll: roll a d10.  Keep that die atop your character sheet at the number you rolled while we play.  Whenever you roll that number on ANY die, roll that die again and take the worse result of the two.  (ie if your number is a 4, and you roll a 54, re-roll the 4 giving you a new result of 54-59 - remember you only take the WORSE result).  Had they been out a second day, there would be a 2nd d10 roll.  Etc.

1. It's SIMPLE as hell.
2. It's a constant reminder "you're tired" just because of the inconvenience of having to move the die every time you want to look at your sheet.
3. It's die rolling.  Everyone likes rolling dice.
4. There's a gradient of "suckage" to the result so there's some variable impact between players (rationalizing how well they were rested in the first place, etc).  9 is probably the best roll.  If you roll a 9 in  a percentile, unlikely any other result will be worse, and as most damage dice are d8s, it doesn't even affect them.  0's are pretty icky, meaning unless you can reroll it again, you're probably not critting anything for a while; same with 1's and specials.  6, 7, 8 are fairly bad as that can be worse in %iles, and definitely hurts damage rolls.  It certainly makes it interesting for the players as they try to compare who's gotten the worst result.
5. It's "bad enough" to strongly encourage players to get sufficient rest, but not immediately crippling.

I picked 4am because in college I used to work 6pm-6am security shifts and that 3am-4am span was when it always hit the hardest.  In the future, if they sleep less than 8 hours in 24, I'll probably have them roll 2d4...if they roll higher than their hours of rest, they get a fatigue die for that day.  Still considering that.

I do wish I could come up with some sort of tactical fatigue system that wasn't kludgy but in my belief adrenaline makes most of those moot unless we're talking multiple days of grinding combat/lack of sleep...which the thing above basically does.

[SDLeary]

4 hours ago, prinz.slasar said:

So right from reading the Core Rules it's obvious that there's more thant the Core.

If you can thumb through a book in a FLGS, then this is true. If you are ordering from an online retailer, you can't really do this. Even in a gaming haven (SF Bay Area) FLGS are fading.

SDLeary

[Atgxtg]

9 hours ago, Jeff said:

I disagree (as did Greg). RQ3's attempt to combine RQ2's SR system with what became Ringworld's pulse system, with movement per SR, etc., was cumbersome and overly complicated. It also didn't do what it was supposed to do. 

I'll disagree with you on that one.  RQ3's impulse SR was a lot simpler and less cumbersome that RQ2;s method. With RQ3 you knew who got to a spot when and if player A could intercept Monster B before it got to PLayber B or not. In RQ2 the GM mostly had to wing it. RQ3's movement being a rating of actual movement instead of  some abract number helped a lot in terms of how long it took to get from one place to another.

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A little confession - I've played far more RQ3 than RQ2. I played RQ2 until the day RQ3 showed up, and then put it away for a good 20 years. RQ3 was my default game engine, but it had unavoidable problems. Its SR system was more complicated and cumbersome than RQ2's as it tried to be all things for all purposes.

Same as above, I still disagree. Can you give me an example of how some the SR system was more cumbersome in RQ3?

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Its ritual magic rules were a disaster.

A disaster? That's a serious amount of hyperbole. 

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Its hit point calculation system went contrary to the literary genre that it was supposed to model.

Yet were used by every other game produced by Chasoium, including games like Pendragon (yes Pendragon doubled the hit points but still used Size). 

I'd also disagree about it going  contrary t o the genre. In the genre we  never hear that someone was hard to kill becuase they are healty (a  high CON), we hear how they are hard to kill because the  are big and strong. 

 

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Having two separate hit location tables for melee and missile was just OCD.

No it was a better representation of how  missile and melee attacks work. Missile attack s tend  to  hit parts of the body with the most surface area, while melee attacks tend to hit the areas that asre more easily struck such as limbs. 

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And lets not even mention Fatigue.

No  let's  mention it. Most fights were over long before people got into negative fatigue and at -1% per point of negative , fatigue could be ignored for short fights.  

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When Greg and I first talked about reviving RQ for Chaosium (this would have been in 2015), he was emphatic that RQ2 was a much better base to build off than RQ3. There were components of RQ3 that were originally designed as fixes to problems or limitations in RQ2 which he advised using and which we did. But Greg strongly believed RQ2 provided the best base platform to build RQG from - and I wholeheartedly agree with him. 

Okay, but that is your option and, apparently Gregs.  Thart doesn't mean you are correct. Even Greg can make mistakes and change his mind. Back when I was working on the Book  of Castles with Greg there were a few things that Greg believed that I disagreed with, and   most  of those things that I objected to, got dropped since, so Greg must have change his mind about them. 

Likewise according  to Greg, RQ didn't reflect Gloratha all that well and HQ did a better job of it.  Now I've read you say that the passion rules were the differen ce, but HQ doesn't really have Passions, and I never read anything from Greg stating that the situation had changed.

 

But basically this is a pointless argument. You and other feel that RQ2 was a better  game, I and other think RQ3 was. It's mostly subjective. We can compare a specific rule and maybe come to an objective comparison, but even most of that is subjective.

 

One thing i will  complain about though is that if the  RQ thread is going to cover RQ3 as well as RQG then can't people talk about RQ3 stuff without people jumping in to turn it into a contest between the two games? The OP  just wanted to houserule a RQ3 game, but everybody keeps telling him that he should run RQG instead.

 

 

Edited November 25, 2019 by Atgxtg

[Atgxtg]

28 minutes ago, SDLeary said:

If you can thumb through a book in a FLGS, then this is true. If you are ordering from an online retailer, you can't really do this. Even in a gaming haven (SF Bay Area) FLGS are fading.

SDLeary

Yeah, and previews on sites like Drivethru can be nearly useless. I don't know how many times I've looked at a preview of a game only to see the cover,  credits,  table of contents and the OGL license. A preview should really reveal something about the actual game.

[SDLeary]

14 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Quote

Having two separate hit location tables for melee and missile was just OCD.

No it was a better representation of how  missile and melee attacks work. Missile attack s tend  to  hit parts of the body with the most surface area, while melee attacks tend to hit the areas that asre more easily struck such as limbs. 

Yes! When learning to shoot in a combat capacity, you are taught to aim at center mass... which in RQ/BRP terms is Chest and Abdomen. I actually modified the BRP location numbers a bit to more represent this.

SDLeary

[Atgxtg]

7 minutes ago, SDLeary said:

Yes! When learning to shoot in a combat capacity, you are taught to aim at center mass... which in RQ/BRP terms is Chest and Abdomen. I actually modified the BRP location numbers a bit to more represent this.

SDLeary

Exactly. In RQ2 chest only got hit on a 12. It actually  made sense not to wear heavy armor on the chest, since it didn't get hit that often, and instead wear as much as you could over your abdomen (the  most likely spot to die from).

If someone absolutely had to ditch one o f the hit location tables,  they should have dumped the melee one and kept the missile. It still would be a step down, but parries mitigate that somewhat. 

[Lordabdul]

1 hour ago, styopa said:

RQG has IMO funky initiative/movement changes based on "if you're in combat" unless that's been errata'd out now.

Oh I see, this is about the whole thing about "Multiple Activities Outside/Within Melee" rules? Yeah I'm not a big fan of arbitrary limitations like these, although what bothers me more is how, when you're engaged in melee, you have no movement options until you disengage -- this feels like it would make melee combat very static (both combatants stay in the same spot and hit each other), and so you can't force an opponent back in a corner to get the advantage over him, for instance. What does RQ3 have to fix this? I had actually some notes for potential house rules for this, but I'm not satisfied with them yet.

38 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

RQ3's movement being a rating of actual movement instead of  some abract number helped a lot in terms of how long it took to get from one place to another.

What do you mean here? It seemed to me RQ3 was same as RQG in that regard: 3 meters per SR.

38 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

In the genre we  never hear that someone was hard to kill becuase they are healty (a  high CON), we hear how they are hard to kill because the  are big and strong. 

It's tricky because it depends on what we think hit points and damage actually represent. When you get struck by a mace for 7 points of damage, does that represent how much bones and tissue were damaged, which can then be "resisted" differently by different people because they handle pain differently for example? Or is that person's body resistance already factored in and this is what they actually "feel"? In one case, I would actually argue that STR would play a big role, as it measures how much muscle mass you have to cover and protect your organs. In the other case, you might even argue that it's a matter of CON and POW, as it measures how much you body and mind can resist stress (CON isn't just about being healthy). So I could argue equally in favour of at least 4 different formulas for HP if I wanted.... as a result, I don't care too much

38 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

but HQ doesn't really have Passions

That's because it doesn't need to. Any trait can effectively be a Passion -- and they generally are. If you look at the example PCs in HQG, a good chunk of their traits read like Passions.

19 minutes ago, SDLeary said:

When learning to shoot in a combat capacity, you are taught to aim at center mass... which in RQ/BRP terms is Chest and Abdomen.

Makes sense to me. But I'm not sure that intent (i.e. biasing towards center mass while shooting) translates to effect (i.e. that the arrow or spear point hits the chest/abdomen significantly more often). If stats about gun fights showed me anything, it's that the latter (effect) has very unintuitive reality checks. The other thing is that I'm not sure I would want the added complexity of 2 location tables for this. If RQG was doing optional rules, that could definitely be one. But RQG doesn't seem to want to do optional rules.

Edited November 25, 2019 by lordabdul

[Kloster]

15 hours ago, lordabdul said:

Doesn't RQG have interwoven attacks/parries/magic too? (and yes, I realize that RQG has 12 SRs instead of 10, and has different SR modifiers for DEX/SIZ and weapons and such, but AFAIK all actions take part in the SR system)

No, you can't move once you're engaged. You can not anymore push, nor close up the range. You can only move up to the point you are engaged in the order of the SR, instead of having a move SR by SR for all the characters. Once engaged, you can only fight or break the combat.

[SDLeary]

42 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Exactly. In RQ2 chest only got hit on a 12. It actually  made sense not to wear heavy armor on the chest, since it didn't get hit that often, and instead wear as much as you could over your abdomen (the  most likely spot to die from).

If someone absolutely had to ditch one o f the hit location tables,  they should have dumped the melee one and kept the missile. It still would be a step down, but parries mitigate that somewhat. 

And they have gone back to this in RQG... even back to the single location table. 

SDLeary

[Atgxtg]

37 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

That's because it doesn't need to. Any trait can effectively be a Passion -- and they generally are. If you look at the example PCs in HQG, a good chunk of their traits read like Passions.

But they are not passions as in RQ. Basically if passion were the only reason why RQ wasn't good for Glorantha I think they just would have ported passions over to RQ rather than write a whole new RPG.

[Jeff]

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

2 minutes ago, SDLeary said:

And they have gone back to this in RQG... even back to the single location table. 

SDLeary

Yep. We wanted to keep a hit location table but concluded that the separate missile table was unnecessary. That got dropped pretty early in the process by unanimous consent.

[Lordabdul]

35 minutes ago, Kloster said:

No, you can't move once you're engaged. You can not anymore push, nor close up the range. You can only move up to the point you are engaged in the order of the SR, instead of having a move SR by SR for all the characters. Once engaged, you can only fight or break the combat.

Yeah I talked a bit about this in a more recent reply. I've been quickly going over the RQ3 combat rules and yes I would agree that, at least on the surface, RQ3 seems better at making the SR system into an action-allowance system than RQG, where it's a good initiative system but things break down after the first action IMHO. Thankfully it's probably going to be easy to bring those rules back onto RQG... although my next RQG game will include a couple people that are fairly new to RPGs so I'll probably go the other way and completely simplify combat, using SRs only for initiative, and limiting everyone to only one action (I think Jeff and Jason did something like that when they ran intro adventures on Twitch a year or two ago, where they barely mentioned/used SRs at all).

I also spotted some rules for long vs short weapons/close combat/etc. in RQ3, which is very welcome -- I might steal those too!  (I was under the impression that RQ3 didn't have that based on other threads on previous RQ editions, but I must have misunderstood... this is another area where my grognard/crunchy-loving players might complain with the existing RQG rules).

Edited November 25, 2019 by lordabdul

[Atgxtg]

3 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Yep. We wanted to keep a hit location table but concluded that the separate missile table was unnecessary. That got dropped pretty early in the process by unanimous consent.

And many of us RQ3 fans consider that to be a mistake, unanimous or otherwise.

Edited November 25, 2019 by Atgxtg

[Jeff]

1 minute ago, Atgxtg said:

But they are not passions as in RQ. Basically if passion were the only reason why RQ wasn't good for Glorantha I think they just would have ported passions over to RQ rather than write a whole new RPG.

I have 30+ years of Greg's notes on trying to make RQ and later HQ work for Glorantha. I know exactly why Greg didn't think RQ could model Glorantha - I have the file cabinets of attempts to make it work. The biggest problem was that RQ3 definitely did not work for Greg's vision of Glorantha. Nor did the aborted "RQ IV". Nor did Pendragon Pass (although it came closest). Really it wasn't until I paired Nephilim with RuneQuest2+Pendragon and work in a way that all of Greg's unpublished work on the RQ Campaign (which was the genesis of Pendragon's mechanics), the Epic System, and Glorantha: the Game could all work back into RQ - did Greg and I think this would really work. That was some time in late 2015 if I recall - after it became clear that we were going to have to do this in-house.

[Jeff]

3 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

And many of us RQ3 fans consider that to be a mistake, unanimous or otherwise.

That's perfectly fine - you are certainly right for yourself. If you want, post your house rules that you use. But we are unlikely to add missile hit locations in the future, since we don't think dropping them was a mistake.

[SDLeary]

48 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

Makes sense to me. But I'm not sure that intent (i.e. biasing towards center mass while shooting) translates to effect (i.e. that the arrow or spear point hits the chest/abdomen significantly more often). If stats about gun fights showed me anything, it's that the latter (effect) has very unintuitive reality checks. The other thing is that I'm not sure I would want the added complexity of 2 location tables for this. If RQG was doing optional rules, that could definitely be one. But RQG doesn't seem to want to do optional rules.

The effect would be that you would have more chest hits and fewer limb hits than is currently represented in the game. You would have variability because of combat and mental conditions, of course. Thats why you have a table to begin with. 

SDLeary

[Lordabdul]

7 minutes ago, Jeff said:

If you want, post your house rules that you use.

I would definitely prefer if we focused the discussion on "here are the rules I like, and here's how they work" rather than unproductive back and forths of "it was wrong to remove this" and "it was wrong to add this"  

By the way, are optional rules OK as content for the Jonstown Compendium? I would assume it is, since the 7th Sea community program does contain such content (I frankly wouldn't run 7th Sea without the optional naval combat rules from there!)

Edited November 25, 2019 by lordabdul

[Jeff]

3 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

I would definitely prefer if we focused the discussion on "here are the rules I like, and here's how they work" rather than unproductive back and forths of "it was wrong to remove this" and "it was wrong to add this"  

By the way, are optional rules OK as content for the Jonstown Compendium? I would assume it is, since the 7th Sea community program does contain such content (I frankly wouldn't run 7th Sea without the optional naval combat rules from there!)

What rules can I use in my product for the Jonstown Compendium?

Your work can use any rules and setting materials from the books and materials published by Chaosium

• RuneQuest Roleplaying in Glorantha
• RuneQuest Classic
• HeroQuest Glorantha
• QuestWorlds SRD

Can I create and sell content for previous editions of the RuneQuest or HeroQuest Roleplaying Games?

• The Jonstown Compendium accepts content designed for RuneQuest Roleplaying in Glorantha, RuneQuest Classic (RuneQuest 2^nd Edition), HeroQuest Glorantha, and QuestWorlds. If you have created something yourself for a different edition that you want to use with a Jonstown Compendium product, you must update it to one of these approved rulesets.

  The Jonstown Compendium does not permit creators to update or convert scenarios, cults, or stat blocks from works published by Chaosium – we advise you to email us about such things as a pitch via the Chaosium submisions page. However, a sequel (or even a prequel) would be possible, provided it has more original content than content referenced.

Edited November 25, 2019 by Jeff

[SDLeary]

5 minutes ago, Jeff said:

That's perfectly fine - you are certainly right for yourself. If you want, post your house rules that you use. But we are unlikely to add missile hit locations in the future, since we don't think dropping them was a mistake.

Its not just the dropping of the missile table though. Its the fact that you are using the RQ2 table in general. The chest is MUCH easier to hit than represented, missile or melee. What makes the chest (and abdomen) less likely to be injured is defense, whether that be a shield or sword parry, or armor. After the head, the torso was the most common area to be protected (pectorals, breast/back plates and skirts, cuirass'). 

Now of course, tis easy swap. But its another of the little things that contributes to the perception of the whole.

SDLeary

[Bill the barbarian]

42 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

Oh I see, this is about the whole thing about "Multiple Activities Outside/Within Melee" rules? Yeah I'm not a big fan of arbitrary limitations like these, although what bothers me more is how, when you're engaged in melee, you have no movement options until you disengage -- this feels like it would make melee combat very static (both combatants stay in the same spot and hit each other), and so you can't force an opponent back in a corner to get the advantage over him, for instance. What does RQ3 have to fix this? I had actually some notes for potential house rules for this, but I'm not satisfied with them yet.

 

See, ˆ tol’ ya someone would have a more functional brain than me today, I think a ground slug might have a more functional brain than I today. Does that help extrapolate some meaning from the pudding of an explanation I tried earlier.

 

52 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

But RQG doesn't seem to want to do optional rules.

I wonder if this will change with the GM book... @Kloster touches on some that I liked from the day just above this post,

 

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

One thing i will  complain about though is that if the  RQ thread is going to cover RQ3 as well as RQG then can't people talk about RQ3 stuff without people jumping in to turn it into a contest between the two games? The OP  just wanted to houserule a RQ3 game, but everybody keeps telling him that he should run RQG instead.

Seems fair when you put it that way, once again,  sorry @weasel fierce!

 

1 hour ago, SDLeary said:

Yes! When learning to shoot in a combat capacity, you are taught to aim at center mass... which in RQ/BRP terms is Chest and Abdomen. I actually modified the BRP location numbers a bit to more represent this.

Indeed! That was one of the  things that  sold me on RQ 3 over RQ 2

 

2 hours ago, styopa said:

o be clear, it was 2 separate hit location tables for each creature-type in the game, one for melee attacks (which we also used for falling damage) and the other for missile AND THRUSTING weapons. 

Interesting. That will require a bit o’ thought.

[Atgxtg]

1 hour ago, Jeff said:

That's perfectly fine - you are certainly right for yourself. If you want, post your house rules that you use. But we are unlikely to add missile hit locations in the future, since we don't think dropping them was a mistake.

That's okay. I didn't ask you too. People were just explaining why they would rather go with RQ3 over RQG, and vice versa.

Edited November 25, 2019 by Atgxtg

[Atgxtg]

1 hour ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Seems fair when you put it that way, once again,  sorry @weasel fierce!

It's a forest  for the trees sort of situation. I jumped in this thread because it was a RQ3 thread and the OP wanted to port over the RQG stuff that he liked.  Then it got turned into a debate about the relative merits of RQG vs. RQ3, and we all kind of jumped in an backed our favorite horse for the win. It's just that the OP wasn't running a race between the two.  And we proba bly need someone wiser than  I to step in and tell us to go debate elsewhere and leave this thread for the OPs original purpose.

[Kloster]

2 hours ago, lordabdul said:

What does RQ3 have to fix this? I had actually some notes for potential house rules for this, but I'm not satisfied with them yet.

A lot of maneuvers: Attack on the run, closing in, pushing, disarm, striking the weapon,

[Kloster]

13 hours ago, Jeff said:

I disagree (as did Greg). RQ3's attempt to combine RQ2's SR system with what became Ringworld's pulse system, with movement per SR, etc., was cumbersome and overly complicated. It also didn't do what it was supposed to do.

I think more elegant and simple to have everybody move per segment to have somebody do his full move at his SR (and thus move later because he switches from sword to dagger). You differ, Greg differed, Jason differ and you are the author so RQG is your way. This is OK for me but does not change my mind.

13 hours ago, Jeff said:

Its hit point calculation system went contrary to the literary genre that it was supposed to model. Having two separate hit location tables for melee and missile was just OCD. And lets not even mention Fatigue.

I think that in literature, a big monster is easier to strike but harder to kill. Having external target is easier to hit than internal one in melee, but having larger easier to hit than smaller than at a distance seems natural to me, so the dual location table was a gain. Fatigue worked but was too much bookkeeping.

13 hours ago, Jeff said:

When Greg and I first talked about reviving RQ for Chaosium (this would have been in 2015), he was emphatic that RQ2 was a much better base to build off than RQ3. There were components of RQ3 that were originally designed as fixes to problems or limitations in RQ2 which he advised using and which we did. But Greg strongly believed RQ2 provided the best base platform to build RQG from - and I wholeheartedly agree with him. 

Jeff

See first part of my answer.

Edited November 25, 2019 by Kloster

[Bill the barbarian]

23 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

It's a forest  for the trees sort of situation. I jumped in this thread because it was a RQ3 thread and the OP wanted to port over the RQG stuff that he liked.  Then it got turned into a debate about the relative merits of RQG vs. RQ3, and we all kind of jumped in an backed our favorite horse for the win. It's just that the OP wasn't running a race between the two.  And we proba bly need someone wiser than  I to step in and tell us to go debate elsewhere and leave this thread for the OPs original purpose.

No, so far—with a lot of drift—we have handled this to a greater degree for ourselves, you  got the drift when I mentioned it... others of the community have stepped up and said in very polite tone, uhh guys drifting... There have been a few knuckle draggers that could not figure this out (like me, is this a bit of drift?... oops, shit, oops) but the moderators have snuck in and asked them to “knock it off” so... Always worth mentioning, when someone says "time for a change” and even if everyone agrees, It will still take a few posts to filter down through the email response hierarchy.

It could be woise!

—Miracle Max