Sword Trance et all beats shields?

[soltakss]

On 3/5/2020 at 8:30 AM, Thaz said:

On 3/4/2020 at 8:57 PM, Glorion said:

 and you can visit that big battle between Argrath and Jar-Eel and kill both of 'em without breaking a sweat. 

Except these two will be running levels of munchkinry which will make your ears bleed and your eyes burn.

Argrath has the backing of the White Bull Society. In effect his allied spirit could be the Society Wyter. Which means it may have a POW of hundreds or thousands. As just one wrinkle I could use. And that's before he founds his own magical millitary units.

Jar-Eel is a demi-goddess and is semi-divine. 

They can both throw _serious_ amounts of mojo about and your couple of hundred MP aint gunna scratch them. 

In my Glorantha, Jar-Eel wields two Moon Swords, which do 4D8+1 on the Full Moon. Jar-Eel is a personal Glowspot, so she is always at the Full Moon. She also has Truesword and slashes quite often. so, she does a lot of damage, twice if she attacks twice. I would also play that she is affected by Sword Trance when she dances in combat, her hypnotic movement makes it hard to hit her, giving her an effective Shimmer Defence. Argrath is good, but not that good.

I get the point that Sword Trance as it is means that someone like Jar-Eel is potentially easy to kill, but she has her own powers and I would guess that her Sword Trance is going to be as good or better than a PC's Sword Trance.

19 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

@davecakeRead how Dismiss works.  You must "magically discern", or otherwise guess, the target spell, else it will hit defensive spells first.  Depending how the GM wants to play things, Sword Trance may be tricky, especially if the target also has Protection, Bladesharp, etc.

Sorry, but if I face someone who seems to be in a trance and has a huge skill with a sword, I am going to Dispel the Sword Trance, probably using Multispell and getting several goes at it.

We used to play that you could target Offensive or Defensive spells, rather than naming spells. Normally, we hit Offensive spells first, as that meant they had a lower chance of killing us, allowing us to kill them first. However, in one memorable combat, Soltak Stormspear was steaming in with Berserker and two Truesworded Bastard Swords, with Bladepower (meaning he was attacking at +46 damage and no odds in combat), so he was doing an awful lot of damage, backed up with Shield 4, Protection 4, the works, when the opponents "Dispelled him down to his undies", leaving him Berserk and at their mercy. 

[soltakss]

10 hours ago, Thaz said:

Not to mention 100 Trollkin with slingshots. Quantity has a Quality all of its own. 

See the final scene of the film "Hero" for a demonstration with arrows.

Spoilered in case BTB chips in.

4 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

RQG: "The total points of the spell must be eliminated to destroy the spell. Thus [...] to dispel a 1-point Shield (a Rune spell) requires 2 points". That is, the countermagic from the Shield doesn't in fact act as countermagic for the Dispel attempt against the Shield itself. This would also indicate that if you have Shield 4 + Countermagic 4, you still only need 8 points of dispelling to take out the Shield.

Sure, Dismiss Magic 2 takes down a 2 point Runespell, such as Shield 2, but Shield 2 blocks a 2 point Runespell. You need to back the Dismiss with MPs to take down the Shield. That's how we played it in the past and it makes sense.

 

[soltakss]

12 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

No.  It equates to a 20% Sword Attack vs. a 100% Sword Parry.

You are very lucky to parry the entranced Humakti, AND you are very lucky to hit them.

I suppose so, but we tend to play it like RQ2, which resolved the skills slightly differently.

In any case, the higher-skilled swordsperson normally wins, which is the desired effect.

[Rodney Dangerduck]

2 minutes ago, soltakss said:

Sorry, but if I face someone who seems to be in a trance and has a huge skill with a sword

And how do you tell this?  As somebody else pointed out, they are probably wearing a full helm.  You are pretty busy yourself casting protective magics, screaming at a companion to look out for the archers in the flank, and the actual fighting.  Sure, you will notice, but it takes some time.

How do you know if they have "a huge skill"?  For a round or two, it may just be luck.  My very first RQ battle, 40+ years ago, a trollkin impaled me 3 straight rounds, and I parried with large shield all three times.  All at <50% chance.  Apparently we had cast Trances on ourselves?

I agree with you , in a few rounds it should be pretty obvious what is happening.  But that's a few rounds of an opponent completely negating your melee fighters - your doughty Orlanthi and Trolls at ~100%, who normally do pretty well, are all 0% for a few rounds.  And a couple go down.

Taking out two enemy front line fighters for 1 Rune Point and 10MP is a very good deal.

And, when the entranced player is a PC, making fellow PC Orlanthi and Troll etc. feel like feeble children is also a problem in play balance.

[soltakss]

21 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

And how do you tell this?  As somebody else pointed out, they are probably wearing a full helm.  You are pretty busy yourself casting protective magics, screaming at a companion to look out for the archers in the flank, and the actual fighting.  Sure, you will notice, but it takes some time.

We have always played that you can tell if someone is very skilful, just by watching them fight.

If you move like you are in a trance, it should be easy to tell. your movements are fluid and not jerky, you don't react to other things in the same way. experienced fighters recognise Sword Trance and Berserker, at least they do in my Glorantha.

23 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

How do you know if they have "a huge skill"?  For a round or two, it may just be luck.  My very first RQ battle, 40+ years ago, a trollkin impaled me 3 straight rounds, and I parried with large shield all three times.  All at <50% chance.  Apparently we had cast Trances on ourselves?

Experts know if someone is being lucky or skilful. At least, that is how we always assumed it worked.

[PhilHibbs]

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

No - the shield's CM 10 effect will prevent the Dismiss 5 from taking effect, you need that extra point for the magic to manifest at all. Any 10 MP spell will fail against Shield 5. Any 11 MP spell will succeed.

You need a 12 point spell to get past Shield 5.

You're correct.

Edited March 6, 2020 by PhilHibbs

[PhilHibbs]

43 minutes ago, soltakss said:

I would also play that she is affected by Sword Trance when she dances in combat, her hypnotic movement makes it hard to hit her, giving her an effective Shimmer Defence. Argrath is good, but not that good.

In older rules, Shimmer was probably right. Now that high sword skill makes you effectively unhitable, the Shimmer effect is probably not needed. Useful against arrows, though, so might be worth keeping it.

9 minutes ago, soltakss said:

Experts know if someone is being lucky or skilful. At least, that is how we always assumed it worked.

I had a trickster who had a reasonable sword attack, but had a separate "bluff combat" skill that added to his skill for the purposes of other people figuring out how good he was. So he only had 75% chance to hit and somewhere around the same parry (RQ3, separate skills), but his 50% Bluff skill made anyone watching him conclude that he had 125% skill. And yes, it did get him into a LOT of trouble!

Edited March 6, 2020 by PhilHibbs

[Joerg]

5 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

You need a 12 point spell to get past Shield 5.

No, an 11 point spell will suffice. Shield doesn't have the +1/-1 fuzzy border that Countermagic has. Complicated as hell, but RAW.

[gochie]

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

Any 10 MP spell will fail against Shield 5.

Any except dispelling spells.

Dispelling spells explicitly work when they match or surpass the points of the targeted spell.

Edited March 6, 2020 by gochie

[soltakss]

6 minutes ago, gochie said:

Any except dispelling spells.

Dispelling spells explicitly work when they match or surpass the points of the targeted spell.

But, the Countermagic of the Shield blocks the Dispel, as Dispel is just another Runespell until it has an effect. The Countermagic blocks it before it has an effect.

You need to boost it with MPs to allow it to get through the Countermagic.

[gochie]

Just now, soltakss said:

But, the Countermagic of the Shield blocks the Dispel, as Dispel is just another Runespell until it has an effect. The Countermagic blocks it before it has an effect.

You need to boost it with MPs to allow it to get through the Countermagic.

It doesn't need to get through, it literally targets the Shield/Countermagic itself . 

You're right in that to pierce through the countermagic it needs an extra point, but not to dispel it. 

[Akhôrahil]

15 minutes ago, gochie said:

It doesn't need to get through, it literally targets the Shield/Countermagic itself . 

You're right in that to pierce through the countermagic it needs an extra point, but not to dispel it. 

I completely agree with this. It doesn't have to be this way - it could have been written differently -  but RQG text supports it.

[PhilHibbs]

2 hours ago, gochie said:

It doesn't need to get through, it literally targets the Shield/Countermagic itself . 

You're right in that to pierce through the countermagic it needs an extra point, but not to dispel it. 

Agreed.

[davecake]

16 hours ago, Joerg said:

which a Sword Trance boosted with nine magic points would provide just as readily as a Dismiss with a 9 points boost.

That’s an assumption - not an unreasonable one, but nowhere is it said that spells boosted for other effects also count as boosting for getting through Countermagic. It seems equally plausible that’s increasing Intensity directly, or that it is more like Extension or a sorcerous manipulation that improves the spell but without increasing Intensity for penetration purposes. 
I don’t this has ever been clarified. 

[Joerg]

Then, for those of you who think one can target Shield directly without accounting for the Coutnermagic effect, how do you use Dismiss Magic to Dismiss a Shield 3 that has been stacked with Countermagic 3?

And is it possible to Dismiss both Shield and CM in one go?

[davecake]

10 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Shimmer was probably right. Now that high sword skill makes you effectively unhitable, the Shimmer effect is probably not needed. Useful against arrows, though, so might be worth keeping it.

I don’t think Jar-Eel in her warfare mode is going to be easy to hit with a missile weapon for sure. But maybe she has learnt how to parry missiles, maybe even spells? I wouldn’t be surprised if, in her collection of advanced mystic HeroQuest powers, she can do something like the dragonnewt power of Deflection using her Moonswords? 

Speculating about what JarEel can do, though, is fun but not that useful. She is an incarnation of a goddess. She has the Infinity Rune, and potentially total control of the magic around her. We slaughtering huge numbers of lesser opponents is something she regards as an easy task, and of minimal significance. 
I even have her sometimes appearing as an NPC in my current campaign from time to time - and I don’t need to really know her effectiveness in combat, beyond knowing there is only one other person who has any real chance of doing more than irritating her, and anyone so foolish as to initiate combat with her will be trivially defeated unless they are a Hero. 
We don’t yet have rules for heroquesting, and Jar-Eel is at least a couple of levels of magnitude beyond that, we don’t even have a good idea in what manner her core abilities would be expressed. 

[davecake]

10 hours ago, soltakss said:

We have always played that you can tell if someone is very skilful, just by watching them fight.

Yes. Some sort of perception roll if you want to make it difficult. A skilled fighter can generally assess the ability of another (loosely, not exactly) pretty quickly if seeing them fight. Estimating how fast, strong, skilled your opponent is is a thing that is part of combat, you do it all the time to choose between micro-tactics. 
There are possible cases that are interesting there (someone trying deliberately to appear worse than they are, two people trying to look skilled by using a practiced routine, etc) but we also have skills like Act or Intimidate. We don’t need set rules, just it is certainly a thing that a skilled combatant might normally be able to tell, and we can improvise using other rules rest  of the time. 
 

[davecake]

11 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Taking out two enemy front line fighters for 1 Rune Point and 10MP is a very good deal.

If you know someone is Tranced, good organised opponents can also use it against you. If they can stay out of melee range of you (even a Mobility spell, or being mounted, might be able to manage that) then they know you have no ability to dodge or cast any useful magic or attack them. If they do manage to seriously injure you, you can’t heal.

Like Berserk, it’s a tactic that is very potent, but also opens up vulnerabilities, that can potentially be a problem if someone uses them intelligently against you to try to take you down. And smart opponents who know about Trance (eg Yanafals rune lords, Zorak Zoran, even Oranthi) will have thought about counter tactics.

[davecake]

13 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

My big concern is trivially skill-tanking a T-Rex, a giant, a dragon or something. Bringing a dinosaur or a giant down to 5% is utterly trivial.

I consider that a feature, not a bug. Such monsters are still hard to defeat quickly (you may be having to do 30+ points to take down a location, so you’ll usually have to survive several attacks), and assuming that 5% will never hit is foolhardy - cool thing for a PC to do heroically, but not something you’d want to rely on very often. And if it does hit,  a normal parry + armour probably won’t save the location. 
So something that allows a PC to realistically take on such huge monsters now and then at some significant risk is fine by me. 
Not that that will be enough to take on a dream dragon, of course - they have other tricks as well. 
 

[davecake]

22 hours ago, Joerg said:And while 110% is an insanely high boost, it is nowhere near the "plus 240%" effects that have been made the strawman here. There are characters who can get into this region with Fanaticism, a one point spirit spell.

I ran the first half of The Cradle on the weekend, adapting it to RQG stats and rules and adding and a changing a few spell e, and there was one entire regiment that were all attacking at over 100% due to Morale. 

[gochie]

5 hours ago, Joerg said:

Then, for those of you who think one can target Shield directly without accounting for the Coutnermagic effect, how do you use Dismiss Magic to Dismiss a Shield 3 that has been stacked with Countermagic 3?

And is it possible to Dismiss both Shield and CM in one go?

Countermagic is automatically destroyed if a spell pierced it by 2+ mps, so for Dispel 6 for example, it goes right through (and destroys) countermagic 3 and dispels Shield 3.

[PhilHibbs]

7 hours ago, Joerg said:

Then, for those of you who think one can target Shield directly without accounting for the Coutnermagic effect, how do you use Dismiss Magic to Dismiss a Shield 3 that has been stacked with Countermagic 3?

And is it possible to Dismiss both Shield and CM in one go?

I think you hit the Shield first, it's the largest defensive spell after all.

Shield and Countermagic protect the person, not "the person and all the spells on that person including each other".

[gochie]

7 hours ago, Joerg said:

 

As a sidenote, under the Dispel Magic spell it actually says "to dispel
a 1-point Shield (a Rune spell) requires 2 points".

19 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

I think you hit the Shield first

Under the Shield spell description is says: "If cast on a target already protected by Countermagic, the Countermagic would be Dispelled before the Shield, if possible.", which is why I placed countermagic on the "outermost" layer. 

[PhilHibbs]

12 minutes ago, gochie said:

Under the Shield spell description is says: "If cast on a target already protected by Countermagic, the Countermagic would be Dispelled before the Shield, if possible.", which is why I placed countermagic on the "outermost" layer. 

Oh yes I forgot that.

[Akhôrahil]

[Delete]

Edited March 7, 2020 by Akhôrahil