MRQ's magic

[Daxos232]

I got MRQ2 and I like how they handle the different systems of magic. Some of it seems OP to me though, like some of the Divine magic spells. I was thinking about tweaking all of them. I'm sure lots of other people on this site have tweaked the magic systems in previous RQ's and I wondered what is is they changed.

[RosenMcStern]

Why overpowered? It is rather hard to gain them, and you can only cast them once per adventure until you become a full priest. It is natural that they are more powerful than simple Common Magic. Basically, all the tweaks we used to apply to Chaosium's RQ made it more similar to Mongoose's second edition.

[Daxos232]

Basically, all the tweaks we used to apply to Chaosium's RQ made it more similar to Mongoose's second edition.

In that case I will use them as is.

[Rurik]

I have a fear that MRQ magic may have upset character balance some. In MRQ2 there are 2 generalizations that can be made about the higher magics compared to MRQ1 and earlier editions. First that magic is more powerful as a whole in MRQ2. Second is that the amount of skills (and therefore skill points) to get good at magic has been reduced.

RQ always had pretty good balance among starting characters in that characters that focused on Magic weren't overpowered compared to characters that didn't. I'm not so sure this is the case in MRQ2. In light of the two points I brought up characters who do pursue one of the advanced magics seem to be at a distinct advantage over characters that do not. The Magic types can still be quite formidable fighters as well as casters right out of the box.

[GianniVacca]

I think we can only tell if magic using characters are too powerful after we've played several months...

[deleriad]

Certainly more powerful than any prior version of RQ. Magic is dangerous in the extreme. That said, Befuddle is probably still the quickest way to take someone out of a fight. Also, going up against a sorcerer or spirit magic user with no defences of your own is pretty analogous to taking one someone wielding a greatsword with your bare hands in your underwear.

I would actually say that MRQ1 magic was the low point of magic strength in RQ. The lack of general HPs meant that it was nigh on impossible to kill someone outright with magic and sorcery still required multiple skills while Improvement Rolls meant that you could only improve a fairly narrow range of skills. The different subsystems in MRQ1 didn't join up and one of the results was that magic was pretty nerfed.

I do think there is an adjustment phase where people who have been playing MRQ1 or older versions first run into MRQII magic and get marmalised. It's probably not dissimilar to the way that non-BRP players feel when they try it out and charge the guy with the loaded crossbow.

If playing MRQII in a magic-prevalent world like Glorantha, you have to have some sort of magic defences. That's probably no bad thing.

[lawrence.whitaker]

I have a fear that MRQ magic may have upset character balance some. In MRQ2 there are 2 generalizations that can be made about the higher magics compared to MRQ1 and earlier editions. First that magic is more powerful as a whole in MRQ2. Second is that the amount of skills (and therefore skill points) to get good at magic has been reduced.

RQ always had pretty good balance among starting characters in that characters that focused on Magic weren't overpowered compared to characters that didn't. I'm not so sure this is the case in MRQ2. In light of the two points I brought up characters who do pursue one of the advanced magics seem to be at a distinct advantage over characters that do not. The Magic types can still be quite formidable fighters as well as casters right out of the box.

There was a detailed design philosophy behind RQII's magic which went kind of like this:

1. How to support all Glorantha's magical traditions?

2. How to represent, mechanically, what a specific magical tradition is about?

3. How to integrate magic, culture and the above

4. How to allow players to achieve a certain degree of power without waiting until pensionable age.

Pause for a second or two to consider what the higher magical forms are about:

Divine - becoming like your god and channelling divine power

Sorcery - manipulating the raw fabric of the universe and hacking its cheat codes

Spirit - bargaining and controlling spirits and ancestors who have transcended or changed, to work magic through you or on your behalf

If any of these are to be successfully and satisfactorily represented - and be flexible enough for both Glorantha and other settings - then the way magic works and the powers achievable through it must be ramped up from previous editions. Your sorcerer should be able to sit in his tower and smite foes a few miles away. Your Rune Lord should be able to heroform his god to take on an advancing army (or tower-bound smiting sorcerers). Your shaman should be able to command his bound spirits to rip your soul free of this mortal coil and beat it to buggery on the spirit plane.

But what we did with RQ magic was a sea-change. We knew it would be and playtested it as carefully as we could, as well as combing the way it works mechanically to ensure that, although powerful, each higher magical tradition is reasonably balanced against the others and, whilst working slightly different mechanically, are all based on a similar structure (all higher magic uses two skills and one of those skills provides a check and balance on the level of power commanded).

The proof's in playing it through. My own group, playing in Glorantha, has a shaman and a Zorak Zoran Death Lord: both command some quite powerful magic between them, but almost got their arses mulched by two spirits and a vampire recently. And, in a group melee, even a Berserking Dark Troll can be taken-down with some tactically used Common Magic and a decent spear thrust.

[Rurik]

I would actually say that MRQ1 magic was the low point of magic strength in RQ. The lack of general HPs meant that it was nigh on impossible to kill someone outright with magic and sorcery still required multiple skills while Improvement Rolls meant that you could only improve a fairly narrow range of skills. The different subsystems in MRQ1 didn't join up and one of the results was that magic was pretty nerfed.

I mostly agree with that. Rune Magic was about the same power level as battle/spirit but much more difficult to learn and so not as common. Divine Magic was definitely nerfed. Sorcery, though, I found was actually a bit more powerful for starting characters, though it had it's ceiling limited. The sorcery power curve was lessened so to speak. But a starting sorcerer in MRQ1 was a more effective caster than a starting sorcerer in RQ3. Spirit Magic in MRQ1 was such a mess as to be unusable as written.

I do think there is an adjustment phase where people who have been playing MRQ1 or older versions first run into MRQII magic and get marmalised. It's probably not dissimilar to the way that non-BRP players feel when they try it out and charge the guy with the loaded crossbow.

My point is not necessarily about how magic works or it's power level in and of itself. On first reading I realised it was going to take some actual play to get a good handle on it. It is almost a disadvantage being familiar with earlier editions as you bring in preconceptions. It is a pretty radical re-working.

If playing MRQII in a magic-prevalent world like Glorantha, you have to have some sort of magic defences. That's probably no bad thing.

Except by the book the only culture that has access to common magic countermagic is Civilised.

There was a detailed design philosophy behind RQII's magic which went kind of like this:

1. How to support all Glorantha's magical traditions?

2. How to represent, mechanically, what a specific magical tradition is about?

3. How to integrate magic, culture and the above

4. How to allow players to achieve a certain degree of power without waiting until pensionable age.

Pause for a second or two to consider what the higher magical forms are about:

Divine - becoming like your god and channelling divine power

Sorcery - manipulating the raw fabric of the universe and hacking its cheat codes

Spirit - bargaining and controlling spirits and ancestors who have transcended or changed, to work magic through you or on your behalf

If any of these are to be successfully and satisfactorily works and the powers achievable through it must be ramped up frorepresented - and be flexible enough for both Glorantha and other settings - then the way magic m previous editions.

I agree wholeheartedly with the fact that MRQ2 magic represents Glorantha and that the mechanics represent how magic works better than any previous edition. I think I like MRQ2 magic a lot (the proof will be in the play as you say). But...

... although powerful, each higher magical tradition is reasonably balanced against the others and, whilst working slightly different mechanically, are all based on a similar structure (all higher magic uses two skills...

My point was exactly that. Higher magic is more powerful, and only requires 2 skills. Meaning there is very high return on investment for becoming a practitioner of higher magic during chargen. And this is an observation from my first game group. The characters who developed higher magic in chargen are at a distinct advantage over those who did not. To the point of frustration for some of the players. Previous editions did not have as noticeable a gap between characters who focused on magic and those who did not.

[RosenMcStern]

Your sorcerer should be able to sit in his tower and smite foes a few miles away. Your Rune Lord should be able to heroform his god to take on an advancing army (or tower-bound smiting sorcerers).

....

(all higher magic uses two skills and one of those skills provides a check and balance on the level of power commanded).

But a starting sorcerer in MRQ1 was a more effective caster than a starting sorcerer in RQ3.

My point was exactly that. Higher magic is more powerful, and only requires 2 skills. Meaning there is very high return on investment for becoming a practitioner of higher magic during chargen. And this is an observation from my first game group. The characters who developed higher magic in chargen are at a distinct advantage over those who did not. To the point of frustration for some of the players. Previous editions did not have as noticeable a gap between characters who focused on magic and those who did not.

Alas, this is what is, IMO, the big weak spot of MRQ2 magic. Loz and Pete worked on the assumption that having all traditions work on two skills was a Good Thing, but I doubt this is true. Especially with Sorcery. In old versions your Sorcerer was still able to kick arse with magic (don't listen to the gossip, he was, both in RQ3 and in MRQ1), but at the cost of using all of his skill improvement opportunities to learn magic. Theist magicians , and in addition to this they had more spells like Truesword or Great Parry that were totally useless if not coupled with high skill. Now, since all magicians need to go up with two skills - leaving one IR usable for weapons skills per session, if you go up by 3 IRs per session - it is very common to have your Sorcerer as good as swordfighting as your Rune Lord - and this does provide some imbalance: remember, a Priest has the problem of renewing his spell, even at high level. a sorcerer does not! This becomes a problem if this situation can be exploited even at chargen, as Rurik noticed.

The only limit to this is keeping Grimoires small (and not tweaking spells, like the OP suggested), so that your all-powerful sorcerer is forced to learn another skill in order to expand his spell list. But an unexperienced GM can easily fall into the trap of allowing too wide Grimoires. Not to mention the fact that the Book of Abiding and most GL grimoires are meant to be very comprehensive.

[Daxos232]

I want to thank everyone who replied to my post. All this insight from different views and opinions is helpful. When I first got into RQ I had the MRQ1 core rule book. It did not explain any of the other magic systems like Divine magic. It just talked about common magic.

So when my friends wanted me to make a home brew setting for our games, I didn't have any other magic systems to go off of. I still wanted to give variety, so one player who becomes a priest of this god, is different from the player who joins the sorcery guild.

What I did was I just make every spell like a Rune magic spell, each spell being its own skill. There is a pool of very common spells that everyone has access to. For instance, every cult, temple, or whatever could teach you the Heal spell, 1 MP for every 1HP healed. But if you wanted to get a better spell, you would have had to join a group, lets say the cult of the healing god, who could teach you the Greater Heal spell, which heals 1 hit location up to full HP for only 3 MP. Again, each spell is it's own separate skill. And each cult or guild would offer spells that you might not find in a different one.

I thought this might make magic more balanced with everything else. I later got MRQ2 and I liked their ideas, but some seemed OP to me. One divine spell, (I can't remember what its called, i don't have the book on me at the moment) could do 3D6! That's a lot! Also I wasn't sure if I wanted to have the idea of Sorcerer's being able to afflict people with their spells from miles away. All that POWx4, POWx5 was giving them some serious range.

I kinda wanted my setting to be a bit of a low magic setting, where magic is there but it takes some time to be a powerful magic user who can smite people with the flick of his finger.

Edited May 5, 2010 by Daxos232

[Rurik]

I thought this might make magic more balanced with everything else. I later got MRQ2 and I liked their ideas, but some seemed OP to me. One divine spell, (I can't remember what its called, i don't have the book on me at the moment) could do 3D6! That's a lot! Also I wasn't sure if I wanted to have the idea of Sorcerer's being able to afflict people with their spells from miles away. All that POWx4, POWx5 was giving them some serious range.

I kinda wanted my setting to be a bit of a low magic setting, where magic is there but it takes some time to be a powerful magic user who can smite people with the flick of his finger.

Well I hate to call a magic system Over Powered per se - magic is supposed to be powerful. Different games have different power levels for magic, and MRQ2 has powerful magic for sure. Stormbringer 1 (an early BRP game) made absolutely no effort to balance magic, sorcerers were the shit and that was that. I've had many a good time with SB1 back in the day. In MRQ2 my concern isn't so much with magic being OP, but with magic using starting characters being OP compared to other starting characters. But on to the useful stuff:

You can download the MRQ SRD right from this site. It is the MRQ1 SRD wonderfully formatted in a pdf that is searchable and indexed - actually much easier to use than the actual books/pdf's. MRQ1 SRD is still open content, and MRQ1 sorcery could be used with MRQ2 without much effort. MRQ1 Sorcery may be more what you are looking for: Each Spell is a skill, and each Manipulation (magnitude, duration, range, etc) is a skill, it takes a lot of time to become a really powerful sorcerer. Starting Sorcerers are able to have a couple to three spells they can cast reasonably, and have to be kind of specialized (Magnitude is a must, but do I focus on range, or targets, or duration?). It takes a huge investment of experience to reach the level of a wizard who can do it all. Beware the wizard who manages this.

Lankhmar has it's own sorcery rules that include corruption that might also be worth a look. Finally you can limit access to magic in your game. If a PC isn't allowed to spend chargen skill points on Magic and have to learn the skills in game (hence starting at base percentages) you will get the effect I think you are looking for - not too powerful to start, but gradually growing so over time.

[deleriad]

The only limit to this is keeping Grimoires small (and not tweaking spells, like the OP suggested), so that your all-powerful sorcerer is forced to learn another skill in order to expand his spell list. But an unexperienced GM can easily fall into the trap of allowing too wide Grimoires. Not to mention the fact that the Book of Abiding and most GL grimoires are meant to be very comprehensive.

When it comes to sorcery that's the key in my opinion. I do think that one failing of presentation of RQII was in giving concrete examples of how things might work. The cults chapter makes a start but for a generic rulebook where the balance has to be in the rules rather than an appeal to the setting, you need something firmer. Conversely, you can probably mandate that a sorcerer needs supporting skills. Mastery of an arcane language is an obvious one and every sorcerer needs high Persistence. The thing as ever is if players build one-dimensional PCs is to challenge their weaknesses.

There's also the specific example of higher magic gained during char gen. Currently it's basically a freebie. It probably ought not to be.

Off the top of my head I would probably say for sorcery that the first spell in the grimoire is free, the second costs 10 free skill points, third costs 20, fourth costs 30 and so on That way starting with 4 spells would cost 60 free skill points. The cost is a reflection of the time and effort needed to transcribe and master the spells. I would probably say the same for Divine Magic. For spirit magicians, each intensity of spirit might cost 10 free skill points.

[RosenMcStern]

Well, nothing is perfect. Even with these problems, MRQ2's magic is an improvement over MRQ1, and is a good magic system.

[Mugen]

Off the top of my head I would probably say for sorcery that the first spell in the grimoire is free, the second costs 10 free skill points, third costs 20, fourth costs 30 and so on That way starting with 4 spells would cost 60 free skill points. The cost is a reflection of the time and effort needed to transcribe and master the spells. I would probably say the same for Divine Magic. For spirit magicians, each intensity of spirit might cost 10 free skill points.

I wholeheartedly agree with this, though I would certainly assign the same cost for each sorcery spell beyond the first.

This would also solve a problem with the experienced characters creation rules, where "master" Sorcerers or priests begin with the same number of spells as a newbie...

[lawrence.whitaker]

I wholeheartedly agree with this, though I would certainly assign the same cost for each sorcery spell beyond the first.

This would also solve a problem with the experienced characters creation rules, where "master" Sorcerers or priests begin with the same number of spells as a newbie...

I agree. Its quite a neat way of handling things.

[Redstone]

I have picked up the RQII core core book and overall like the system. Does anyone have recommendations on how many spells a grimoire should hold?

[deleriad]

I have picked up the RQII core core book and overall like the system. Does anyone have recommendations on how many spells a grimoire should hold?

The general guideline is that a grimoire should have about 6 spells. A major, important order of sorcery will have a few more, a minor order a few less.

[Rurik]

I have picked up the RQII core core book and overall like the system. Does anyone have recommendations on how many spells a grimoire should hold?

I wholeheartedly agree with this, though I would certainly assign the same cost for each sorcery spell beyond the first.

This would also solve a problem with the experienced characters creation rules, where "master" Sorcerers or priests begin with the same number of spells as a newbie...

The general guideline is that a grimoire should have about 6 spells. A major, important order of sorcery will have a few more, a minor order a few less.

In my experience it is not always clear to players that the Grimoire Skill does not automatically mean all spells in the Grimoire are learned. The Character creation chapter is not clear on this, though the Improving Adventurers section of the Game System chapter is. Loz cleared up over at the Mongoose boards the intent was that starting Sorcerers are intended to get up to 4 spells from their Grimoire(s) for free. So even if a Grimoire has 6 or more spells, a new character does not know how to cast all of them.

After chargen learning a new spell takes study equivalent to learning a new advanced skill (though once learned it is cast with the Grimoire skill), so I think I am going to simply charge 10 skill points per spell at chargen in future games, same as any other advanced skill, and see how that works. The 40 points for learning 4 spells is a significant chunk, but not debilitating.

[lawrence.whitaker]

Loz cleared up over at the Mongoose boards the intent was that starting Sorcerers are intended to get up to 4 spells from their Grimoire(s) for free. So even if a Grimoire has 6 or more spells, a new character does not know how to cast all of them.

The Grimoire skill covers all spells contained in that grimoire. It is true that some grimoires will have differing numbers of spells and its also true that beginning sorcerers will not have access to all spells in a particular grimoire (plus there are INT limits for holding spells in memory). But once a spell is known, its cast at the Grimoire's skill level.

[Daxos232]

ok heres an idea me and my friend just discussed. We have the idea that instead of a sorceror having to spend only 1 Manipulation point to make his spell anywhere from a range of POWx1 to POWx10, or whatever it is in the book. For every feature of the spell you have to use a magic point, so if you increase the range and the duration, that would cost 3 magic points on top of the 1 it already takes to cast the spell in the first place.

However for every increase in a feature of the spell, like for instance I want to make the magnitude of the spell level 3, then you would have to use 2 Manipulation points to get it to magnitude 3, because you already start at magnitude 1 without spending any manipulation points. It would still cost only 1 additional magic point to affect that feature.

This way you can still have sorcery be flexible, and you would still have to be really skilled to be powerful sorcerer. What do you guys think of this?

[Nightshade]

Just a side comment: even in RQ2 and 3, at least divine mages tended to kick the ass of someone who hadn't invested in them after a while anyway. Sorcery was a more complicated case (but Duration tended to be the gift that kept on giving) and since the advanced version of spirit magic was vested in shamans (who were to one degree or another broken in every version I saw) you didn't see them much.

But if the complaint is that those with powerful magic beat those without, that was always true, and training time and such never made up the difference much because that got into diminishing returns after a while anyway, where piling more power sacrifices on divine magic kept on going more or less in a linear fashion. The only question I'd look at is the speed of the slope.