Using the rules of the game, how are PCs expected to defeat "high-level" opponents?

[soltakss]

5 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

there are a lot of intersting thinks, but I m somewhat taken aback (thanks linguee, I don't know if I use these words  on a right way) by the  skills%

These were based on being challenging NPCs for a RQ2/RQ3 Campaign that played weekly during term-time, then just weekly after we had left University, for many years.

Personally, I think the "One Experience roll per Season" from RQG sucks and won't have it in my game.

 

[HreshtIronBorne]

I would have to strongly disagree. It might not be everyone's cup of tea but, high-level play is done. The RAW for RQG do make skill % in the several hundred range harder to achieve if you stick with the One Adventure and One Chance to Go Up per season. 

 

Combining the powers of different child and cultures can turn things up to 11 and let even relatively new characters mess with baddies that would ROFLstomp initiates in old RQ2/3 days. 

 

This combining of differenr magics is basically exactly what Argrath and everyone else is trying to do as we race towards the Hero Wars. I am sure when we get rules for HeroQuesting officially we will have a great window into how mortal men can gain the powers to defeat Gods. Without having to come up with the details yourself. 

[EpicureanDM]

Sorry for the delayed reply, @soltakss.  Affairs of state kept me busy throughout the weekend. 😉

I start by apologizing for using the term "stunt stats" to describe what you wrote. Without the context of your initial reply, I couldn't chart a course from my experience with the rules of RQ3 and RQG to what's in Secrets of Dorastor. Having reviewed Soltak Stormspear and reading about the particulars of your game, I now have a much better sense for how you intended the Personalities of Secrets to be used and, if necessary, fought.

Even though you couldn't remember the blow-by-blow, some of what you wrote points to what I'm curious about. Details like these caught my eye especially:

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Having 4 of those ganging up on you, tooled up with big Bludgeon/Bladesharp and so on was very effective. Derak attacked at SR1 with his Troll Maul and always came in first if there was a SR tie, due to a special ability. With Bludgeon and Crush, he was attacking at between 400-500%, I can't remember exactly how much. So, he would be parried first. Then Solarus Skywatch hit with a Long Spear on SR3, I think, then Brankist Farlow on SR4 and Rilldick Fairplain on about SR4 as well. All were about 200% tooled up. So, to parry all four, the NPC had to split their parry 4 ways, so needed a Parry of 400% to be sure of doing that. Ignoring one of them generally meant a short combat. [emphasis added.]

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Sometimes they uses spells like Seal Wound, to stop the NPCs from Healing.

Quite often they go the first blows in, or Teleported to attack with surprise.

They used spells such as Counter Chaos to ignore some chaotic features.

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How many rounds did you have to prep your magic?

Probably two or three rounds.

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What were your allied spirits doing during a combat round while your character did their thing?

Casting Healing, casting offensive magic such as Fear, casting spells such as Teleport, using Multispell.

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There is a difference between being Dead and Really Dead.

Divine Intervention was used a lot in that campaign.

These quotes hopefully illustrate and point to the sort of information I've been trying to unearth. These demonstrate not necessarily how PCs obtained 300% skill ratings or Heroquested Gifts making them immune to Chaos, but how familiar spells and skills present in RQG or RQ3 - available to most RQG PCs - were used to win battles. 

I've spent a lot of time recently diving into the Glorantha forum here, going back into old threads to piece together my vision of Glorantha. I often agree with your takes on various Gloranthan topics and your willingness to make the setting your own. I should have extended that understanding to Secrets of Dorastor and Secrets of Heroquesting. In hindsight of this thread, Secrets of Dorastor makes a lot more sense to me. Still valuable and still lots of fun, just better contextualized. Keep running RQ the way you do. You tell @Nick Brooke that I said that Your Glorantha Sounds Fun. 😄

[EpicureanDM]

On 4/2/2022 at 5:37 PM, Rodney Dangerduck said:

High level RQ, for better or worse (IMO, worse) often becomes a long battle of attrition of magic points and rune points.  The bad guy disables your leg, you (or a friend or ally) heal it.  They befuddle or demoralize a PC, you dismiss.  They put up Shield 4, you Dispell it, then they recast.  An unlucky crit  kills you, you D.I.  If the PCs go in loaded with MP storage, rune points, and potions, and outnumber the monsters, they might be able to grind them down over time.

Spells that ignore Countermagic or POW v POW are awesome, for both PCs and the GM.  Use them.  Some spells or monsters (Undines) attack CON or INT instead of POW.  Use them. 

Spells that benefit the whole party, like Morale, are great.  We often give our lead fighters a special heroic ability (not in the the rules, so not a real answer to your question) to boost the other fighters abilities, share spells, etc.

 

I wish I'd attended the thread a little more since the weekend, since I'd point to this as the sort of response that resonates. It doesn't contain SR-by-SR detail, but it signals the mode of thought about high-level RQ play that I'm so curious about.

On 4/2/2022 at 7:17 PM, Eff said:

I think it doesn't end up being fun, because RQ's rules are built around fragile people taking serious risks in every battle, and making the numbers big sort of turns these battles into a game of Russian roulette where the live bullet is the first critical or special result.

I think making this kind of fight fun in RQ requires going outside the existing combat rules and into something that allows for a more dynamic back-and-forth than what Strike Ranks and Statements of Intent produce.

If this is true, then why are Chaosium publishing stat blocks for characters like Leika Black Spear or Jardarin? Even if players aren't supposed to fight these characters, their stats can serve as goals to aim for. If there's consensus that RQG's combat rules stop being fun at a certain point, then what is that point? And if Leika or Jardarin or whomever is past that point, then why are the game's designers putting them in print? 

On 4/2/2022 at 7:43 PM, Eff said:

That being said, looking at Jardarin, one of the main limiting factors here is that even high-level characters don't do anything silly with spirit magic and Jardarin has no way to amp his melee attacks or defenses directly. No Bladesharp, no Protection, and no Shimmer. He has Firearrow, Multimissile, and Speedart, but the terms of the encounter make it unlikely they will come into play. He has 105%/95% with his weapon skills... but it's within reach of a starting PC to amplify themselves up to that point with their magic and starting skill %s. He does have full iron armor, but you're explicitly not going to fight him unless you make a specific decision to do so.

Leika similarly doesn't have any defensive magic besides Earth Shield and regular Shield. So I think that in terms of dealing with these foes (and Leika probably is meant to be beyond your PCs because she's an experienced heroquester and they're just Vasana Average) they probably should have no dynamic defenses, beyond possibly using Shield Rune Magic, giving PCs one technique for making these fights potentially interesting- PCs have survivability options (assuming you don't just have Leika Dispel Magic all their defenses away with her 78 MP- but again, Leika is an important setting NPC). And Leika tops out at 125% skill with her supernaturally empowered bow. Which is beyond a PC in a way that makes it magical but not hugely out of reach. Leika is just barely a person your PCs could see as a possible future.

This is also the sort of analysis that I'm keen on. That all makes sense to me. I still find it odd, though, that no one's replying to say, "Yes, my group of PCs has actually rolled dice and spent Rune points to defeat an opponent of similar power." To use my other analogy, it's people who've only played D&D at 5th level telling me how they think a fight at 18th level would go. I'm not trying to pick on @Eff specifically on this point! Maybe they have "played at 18th level" and are just responding to the examples I presented.

On 4/2/2022 at 9:26 PM, HreshtIronBorne said:

We played a game using the RQ3 rules that lasted about 2 and a half, maybe 3 years. It was pver a decade ago so I cannot be incredibly specific with the details. 

Like @Rodney Dangerduck, this is the sort of feedback that I'm looking for! It's detailed and grounded in the rules, showing how folks with access to lots of spells and gear use them at the table.

On 4/2/2022 at 9:26 PM, HreshtIronBorne said:

He was equipped with a mayrix he had sacrificed most of the POW for that the local Sword made for him with linked Strength + Coordination + Mobility and an MP Crystal which is a great buff spell!

This detail strikes me in particular because it's showing someone synthesizing advantages in the game by combining the game's rules. It sounds like someone who's been in the guts of the system in order to figure out how to work it. 🙂

On 4/2/2022 at 9:26 PM, HreshtIronBorne said:

Very specific example of battle for the Humakti. Cast Shield 4 on self, cast Truesword on Sword, then Shield 1 on Sword (to precent dispelling for at least 1 swing). Cast Strength, mobility, and Coordination with the Matrix. Allied spirit casts bladesharp 6 on sword, Protection 6 on Self. Orlanthi casts Leap on Humakti. Humakti leaps over battlements and proceeds to destroy entire Lunar garrison, barely slowing until he hits the leader. They have an exciting duel. This is without Sword Trance as the Humakti needed to have presence of mind to get in and out. 

Our party had a lot of passive buffs as well, like Boon of Kargan Tor from the sorcerer which is a huge buff. For really big battles we knew were coming we would use the Humakti's Morale which does a LOT to buff the party for big deal battles. Combining Humakti Morale with am Ernaldan's Bless Champion, (with say Protection 6, Earth Shield, and Shield for example) can turn one guy into an absolute fucking BEAST for a whole adventure. 

Again, gold. I emphasize the detail at the beginning (Shield 1 to counteract the enemy dispels) as another example of someone who's clearly had time in the trenches. Great stuff. 🙂

For simplicity, every response by @Rodney Dangerduck and @HreshtIronBorne is exactly what I was trying to find. I'm saving it offline in a note to refer to it later, not merely to copy but to get me in the right mindset.

More replies to come.

[Rodney Dangerduck]

On 4/2/2022 at 6:26 PM, HreshtIronBorne said:

Very specific example of battle for the Humakti. Cast Shield 4 on self, cast Truesword on Sword, then Shield 1 on Sword (to precent dispelling for at least 1 swing)

I don't see how Shield 1 prevents dispelling on the sword.  The opposition will likely put in more than 2 MP (or equivalent rune points) into the dispell.

A larger Shield on the sword is interesting and may bamboozle the opponents for a while.  And your point about the utility of Multispell is spot on.  

Edited April 4, 2022 by Rodney Dangerduck

[Eff]

15 minutes ago, EpicureanDM said:

If this is true, then why are Chaosium publishing stat blocks for characters like Leika Black Spear or Jardarin? Even if players aren't supposed to fight these characters, their stats can serve as goals to aim for. If there's consensus that RQG's combat rules stop being fun at a certain point, then what is that point? And if Leika or Jardarin or whomever is past that point, then why are the game's designers putting them in print? 

 

🤷‍♀️

Well, on the one level, there's an established assumption in conventional role-playing games that stat blocks should be full in officially published material, one which has been present in older RQ material and which, for at least part of RQ's tenure, was a marketing point- "the monsters level up with you", I think is the quote. I think that this assumption is a difficult one to justify outside of that historical context. 

But on another level, I'm going to try and do just that, if a bit weakly- the full statblocks theoretically allow you to reuse characters outside of their initial presentation, so that Jardarin or Leika can be plucked out of their initial appearances and theoretically be put in a situation that you create, or some third-party writer creates, where that Whatever% in Ride (Horse) is potentially relevant and produces a meaningful thing for player characters to interact with. I still wouldn't do this personally, because I think that it also necessarily produces limitations on the reuse of those characters- but that gets into different topics about creating opposition "on the fly". 

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This is also the sort of analysis that I'm keen on. That all makes sense to me. I still find it odd, though, that no one's replying to say, "Yes, my group of PCs has actually rolled dice and spent Rune points to defeat an opponent of similar power." To use my other analogy, it's people who've only played D&D at 5th level telling me how they think a fight at 18th level would go. I'm not trying to pick on @Eff specifically on this point! Maybe they have "played at 18th level" and are just responding to the examples I presented.

Oh, I mean, I kind of have "played at 18th level" but in the process of getting to that point- (it was actually not combat-relevant, it was attempting to figure out what the income of a character being made duchess/ducissa of a chunk of western Esrolia and also being given direct control of a little patch of land around a temple would be, and then the player and I decided that there was no point in this because the character had started out as someone who shouldn't be counting clacks, as a court jeweler for and lover to a major political figure, and now was effectively beyond counting Wheels. Now back to the main topic.) I ended up, by mutual agreement with my player, ditching the RQ rules and using mostly ad hoc experiments to handle things like a three-way naval chase between Gunda, the PCs' magical ship, and a Trowjang Amazon warship. Or direct contests between characters struggling for things. 

Because RQ doesn't have an 18th level and isn't the genre of game where you can naturally become someone who can stare Gunda down. So once my game moved into a domain where this was a desired plot feature, of being a mover and shaker on that level, then I just ditched the inappropriate system. 

But I still have an interest in RQ because the genre it does do is potentially an enjoyable one for me.  

[soltakss]

59 minutes ago, EpicureanDM said:

You tell @Nick Brooke that I said that Your Glorantha Sounds Fun. 😄

Oh, it was definitely fun!

[Dragon]

Not quite the same, but my character in RQ2 got pretty experienced. In that game, the GM allowed an additional skill gain after 5 additional successes and that roll was only for an improvement of 1. Remember the first skill gain is for 5 skill in RQ2.

Hence, my character after nearly 4 years in the Real World, was 215 skill in bastard sword and 201 in composite bow. She had an special magic item that was treated mostly like an additional allied spirit. So she had 2 allied spirits, 3 bound spirits, a POW Enhancing crystal, a bunch of matrices, and some other things. She had dozens of Rune Spells, but only Shield and Arrow Trance were particularly useful in combat. With one round of preparation, she fired that composite bow with Multimissile 8 on the first arrow, Firearrow on the second, and Multimissile 4 on the last one. Since those were attacking at 402 skill with Arrow Trance, one target was usually dead with 1 in 5 ignoring armor, even if some couldn't impale. If the enemy didn't close, those two allied spirits kept putting more spells on my arrows...

Then the GM found some draft rules on Heroquesting and she was given the option to go along with the Storm Bulls and Babeestor Gors for Berserkergang. She needed to find an Issaries to trade for the Berserker spell to qualify. On the HQ. she succeeded well and even drank three special draughts. As the player, who did not have those rules, the GM asked me how many Will points to expend for each. At this point, I should mention, she was something of a polymath and had something like 19 skills at mastery (only the 2 above were over 200, but she had a few in the 120-150 range), which gave her significant Will and she expended about 100. A reasonable number more than the other party members. Long story short, from then on, she gained 102 STR, 106 CON, and optionally 39 SIZ every time she went into 'combat'. So 9d6 or 11d6 damage bonus. At that point, she could have fought and destroyed some, but not all, of the creatures in Dorastor, Land of Doom (RQ3 publication used for comparison). And the rest of her party were no slouches either. For comparison, the Mostali Lhankor Mhy had a battle axe that normally did 3d8+2 damage and ignored all magical protection (no more spoilers). The Wind Lord had the Windsword. The Axe Sister and the Storm Khan were running around after the HQ with 3 to 5d6 damage bonus in combat and very hard to kill. And even then, we sometimes needed divine intervention.

So, that party, even without the first heroquest that GM ran, could rip Leika or Kallyr apart, though they would have no desire to do so. Though I have not seen any stats for Harrek or Jar-eel, we never thought we could compare to them. Or the Crimson Bat. At least a few more heroquests before that.

So there you go, a minor change to RQ2 rules, and we had a party that could challenge. Not exactly RAW or RQ:G, but close. Is that what you wanted to hear?

[Soccercalle]

A related question. The rules state that you need to have been an initiate for 5 years before you reach rune level. I guess that players that aim high (like in this thread) and start with younger characters may reach rune level skills before that age. Do you see the 5 year rule as something to follow? I guess that it really must be up to the god and/or the chief priest.

And I guess that Londra was a Sword of Humakt long before she was 20.

Edited April 5, 2022 by Soccercalle

[g33k]

59 minutes ago, Soccercalle said:

A related question. The rules state that you need to have been an initiate for 5 years before you reach rune level. I guess that players that aim high (like in this thread) and start with younger characters may reach rune level skills before that age. Do you see the 5 year rule as something to follow? I guess that it really must be up to the god and/or the chief priest.

And I guess that Londra was a Sword of Humakt long before she was 20.

Note that PC's often Initiate in the mid-late teens... 16/17/18ish.  So by default RQG starting-age 21, they are quite close to (or even at!) that "5 year rule."  Obviously, they still need to meet all the other requirements...

Edited April 5, 2022 by g33k

[Soccercalle]

7 minutes ago, g33k said:

Note that PC's often Initiate in the mid-late teens... 16/17/18ish.  So by default RQG starting-age 21, they are quite close to (or even at!) that "5 year rule."  Obviously, they still need to meet all the other requirements...

True. But I play the Six Seasons in Sartar and starts with 15 yo olds. They are not yet at Rune level but will probably reach it much before the 5 year rule.

[HreshtIronBorne]

I had never even noticed the 5 year rule. Our PCs took something like 7 or so years to get all of the stat and skill requirements to go out for Priesthood and/or Rune-Lordship. We also were playing Six Seasons in Sartar at the time. I will keep spoilers to a minimum. 

[icebrand]

14 hours ago, Eff said:

🤷‍♀️Because RQ doesn't have an 18th level and isn't the genre of game where you can naturally become someone who can stare Gunda down. 

Then I'd argue the Gunda stat block is wrong.

Why can't you become just like her? Like, it's pretty easy actually, RQG characters gain around 5 POW / 3 years as adventuring runelords, and around 5 to 10% in the skills they use a lot.

If gunda has super duper hero quest powers, id guess the BGB (or super world lol) is near 100% compatible and can simulate pretty much anything outside the normal rules.

Now, if your 40-year old gunda has 200 pow gain rolls and 300% skill levels + several spirits that are in minor god range, that's gonna make me raise an earbrow.

There's already rules for magic and super powers in brp... I dislike many fan conversions where the NPC is grossly overpowered and all the rules were ignored in creating them.

I say not only you can stare down gunda, but you can also run a spear through her head. Her stats (at least in my games) won't be rule-breaking.

Edited April 5, 2022 by icebrand

[Eff]

4 hours ago, icebrand said:

Then I'd argue the Gunda stat block is wrong.

Why can't you become just like her? Like, it's pretty easy actually, RQG characters gain around 5 POW / 3 years as adventuring runelords, and around 5 to 10% in the skills they use a lot.

If gunda has super duper hero quest powers, id guess the BGB (or super world lol) is near 100% compatible and can simulate pretty much anything outside the normal rules.

Now, if your 40-year old gunda has 200 pow gain rolls and 300% skill levels + several spirits that are in minor god range, that's gonna make me raise an earbrow.

There's already rules for magic and super powers in brp... I dislike many fan conversions where the NPC is grossly overpowered and all the rules were ignored in creating them.

I say not only you can stare down gunda, but you can also run a spear through her head. Her stats (at least in my games) won't be rule-breaking.

I'm not talking about stat blocks. There is no Gunda the Guilty stat block for Runequest. I am talking about the genre of Runequest as a game, which is not one where you're expected to continually grow in power to the limits of the setting. And Gunda does have a stat block on her chit in Dragon Pass/White Bear & Red Moon, which makes her a one-woman battalion, if not quite a one-woman army, someone who can conceivably contend with hundreds of people at once with only her groupies at her side. Which is not what a Runequest character can conceivably do within the existing Runequest rules, and I doubt the planned expansions of those rules would make that a playable option. 

Now, you could make Gunda someone who simply dies to a single spear with ease, but I kind of doubt that that's synchronous with her little WBRM chit. 

[Darius West]

On 4/2/2022 at 6:03 AM, EpicureanDM said:

Reading the Personalities section of @soltakss's excellent Secrets of Dorastor, I found creatures and opponents with eye-watering stats...

Stats like those in Secrets of Dorastor (and in other sources throughout RQ's published history) seem unapproachable, almost ludicrous. They strike me the same way as someone telling me that this ancient red dragon in D&D has AC 100, not AC 22 (in 5e terms) or AC -1 (in 1e terms). The numbers for high-level RQ opponents feel like they're off by an order of magnitude, even if they aren't off by the strict definition of that term.

This is deliberate.  Dorastor is a terrible place.  It is worse than hellish, and it is supposed to be.  Dorastor is designed to kill Rune Level characters and even challenge heroes.  Dorastor is deliberately created as a place where you can send power gamers to die.

Sometimes characters need to have the common sense to know when they are outmatched and run away.

That being said, you need to familiarize yourself with how a 300% skill is divided according to strike rank. 

Also, player characters who are of high rune-level should have realized that they need to maximize damage whenever they can, and thus have nice big weapons that they can buff beyond reason if they are planning on an extended visit to Dorastor. 

One of the best ways to survive Dorastor is to invest in a big strong mount with plenty of Damage Bonus, max out your lance and charge-charge-charge.  Few of the encounters occur in enclosed spaces, so go with the 3Bs (Buy Bigger Bison).

[icebrand]

42 minutes ago, Eff said:

I'm not talking about stat blocks. There is no Gunda the Guilty stat block for Runequest. I am talking about the genre of Runequest as a game, which is not one where you're expected to continually grow in power to the limits of the setting. And Gunda does have a stat block on her chit in Dragon Pass/White Bear & Red Moon, which makes her a one-woman battalion, if not quite a one-woman army, someone who can conceivably contend with hundreds of people at once with only her groupies at her side. Which is not what a Runequest character can conceivably do within the existing Runequest rules, and I doubt the planned expansions of those rules would make that a playable option. 

Now, you could make Gunda someone who simply dies to a single spear with ease, but I kind of doubt that that's synchronous with her little WBRM chit. 

What are gundas feats? Because my dungeons and dragons character can also solo a regiment *and* a dragon and i still have a magic horse and lay on hands, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't be able to do that if i converted to RQ.

I mean, this ain't something an RQ character can't do, i agree, so i expect you to NOT put a character that does it without a damn good excuse, and if i hear about it I assume it's just stories and if i find her and I'm at rune+priest level i expect to be able to fight her and if she has 1000% bEcAuSE sHeS a HeRo then i want to play a hero too... Idk how to explain it better

And YES she totally dies if someone puts a spear through her head, same as harrek or jar eel or blueface or anything else, even most chaos monsters die in that scenario!

 

Edited April 5, 2022 by icebrand

[Eff]

Just now, icebrand said:

What are gundas feats? Because my dungeons and dragons character can also solo a regiment *and* a dragon and i still have a magic horse and lay on hands, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't be able to do that if i converted to RQ.

I mean, this ain't something an RQ character can't do, i agree, so i expect you to NOT put a character that does it without a damn good excuse, and if i hear about it I assume it's just stories and if i find her and I'm at rune+priest level i expect to be able to fight her and if she has 1000% bEcAuSE sHeS a HeRo then i want to play a hero too... Idk how to explain it better

And YES she totally dies if someone puts a spear through her head, same as everything else, even most chaos monsters die in that scenario

 

Yes. What I am arguing is that Runequest is not a game where this kind of thing is playable, and you just can't make Gunda as an NPC or PC in Runequest and have her play entirely by the rules (because eventually a critical would get through all of her armor or whatever), and if you want to play on her level, you need a different game with a different set of genre assumptions going on. 

[g33k]

5 hours ago, icebrand said:

...

I say not only you can stare down gunda, but you can also run a spear through her head. Her stats (at least in my games) won't be rule-breaking.

As a minor issue, I'd like to point out that "self-ressurection" (coming back from Death on your own recognizance, without other people doing a Resurrect spell or a LBQ or etc, on your behalf) looks likely to be one of the most-common Heroquest rewards (obviously not for Humakti); so (depending on whether Gunda (still?) follows Humakt (it's unclear to me if H. was her "grim Death God" or not) "run a spear through her head" may or may not be the end of the matter...  But really, that's beside the point.  (apologies for all the parentheses there!)

Ever since TSR produced statblocks for Demogorgon & Orcus &c, and Dieties&Demigods, there has been the notion of "if you publish a statblock, the players will figure out how to kill it," but -- depending on the mythology you're embracing -- some entities should be entirely un-killable by mortal agency.

Now, I don't think Glorantha is meant to be such a world... Harrek killed (or maybe "killed") his own White Bear God (who maybe just discovered that "dying" and possessing a worthy follower was the correct way to enter Time and come to grips with Sedenya-within-Time aka Jar-Eel), and we know the Argrath is gonna kill gods too.

But it really doesn't follow on from an NPC being published that they automatically become a viable target for the PCs...

Edited April 5, 2022 by g33k
Big H.

[EpicureanDM]

On 4/3/2022 at 3:52 AM, soltakss said:

However, some things need to be taken into account: 

• High Level Characters have more Runemagic, and probably multiple Rune Pools, which means they spend Rune Points more freely
• High Level Characters with Heroic Casting use their personal Magic Points to cast some, or all, Runespells, so spend them even more freely
• High Level Characters are often Rune Lords with D10 Divine Intervention, so can come back from the dead
• High Level Characters often have better Spirit Magic, with lots of bound spirits, so can cast larger variable spells
• RQ3 had things like Strengthening Enchantments, that could increase General and Locational Hit Points, making them harder to disable/kill in combat
• What is important to a Low Level Character could be unimportant to a High Level Character
• High Level Characters are likely to be involved in politics, the future of Kingdoms and the direction of cults
• Multispell with lots of stored Magic Points, is a game-changer

On 4/3/2022 at 3:52 AM, soltakss said:

To be honest, the tactics are pretty much the same as you would see in any RQG game.

• First  round, your Allied Spirit casts Multispell 2, maybe, as you cast Shield on yourself.
• Second round, your Allied Spirit casts massive spells on you and your weapons, Protection 8, Bladesharp 8, Mobility. You cast Truesword on your sword.
• Third round, you might use Hate (Chaos) or Death Rune to give you a bonus to combat, then close for combat and your Allied Spirit casts Dispel Magic 8 three times, against your opponent's defensive magic.
• Fourth round, your Allied Spirit casts Demoralise 3 times, or Disruption 3 to shatter a limb.
• After that, you attack and parry, or attack and dodge, hoping to hit them and do enough damage to overcome their armour. Your Allied Spirit keeps healing and Dispel Magic in readiness, in case it is needed. Sometimes, your Allied Spirit casts Runemagic on friends or enemies, as needed.

I'm glad you posted both of these lists because they illustrate part of what has frustrated me in the past. The first quote is accurate, but too broad and abstract for someone who wants to use RQ's rules. I can tell that you did use the rules, but you aren't being specific. In the second quote, though, we're in the details. We've got spell names, how many times they're stacked, different Multispell techniques, etc. (I'm starting to get a sense of how much folks leaned on Multispell back in the day.) Someone reading RQG today can look at those spell names and draw direct connections to what's in the book they're holding. They can try to pull off those same feats or get inspired to create their own.

I suspect that the folks who know this stuff don't recognize what it is they know. It's a style of play that's largely unknown these days, but it's suddenly relevant again with the success of RQG. If you know this stuff, it's because you spent years acquiring this knowledge through actual use of rules that are largely the same as those in RQG. It seems a shame to me for that knowledge to be lost. It feels like I'm trying to preserve a language that only a couple dozen people on Earth remember how to speak. 🙂

On 4/3/2022 at 3:52 AM, soltakss said:

I think we need to differentiate between HeroQuesting and High-Level Play.

What EpicureanDM is questioning is how High Level NPCs work in High-Level Play, not how HeroQuesting works.

That's right. It ties into something @Eff said, which I'll tackle in a moment.

[EpicureanDM]

21 hours ago, Eff said:

But on another level, I'm going to try and do just that, if a bit weakly- the full statblocks theoretically allow you to reuse characters outside of their initial presentation, so that Jardarin or Leika can be plucked out of their initial appearances and theoretically be put in a situation that you create, or some third-party writer creates, where that Whatever% in Ride (Horse) is potentially relevant and produces a meaningful thing for player characters to interact with. I still wouldn't do this personally, because I think that it also necessarily produces limitations on the reuse of those characters- but that gets into different topics about creating opposition "on the fly". 

Definitely. I'm a big fan of reskinning NPCs and monsters. It seems a waste to me, though, if I've got a big NPC stat block full of Rune spells and allied spirits, but I don't know how to make use of all the bells and whistles. If fighting Leika or whomever feels the same as fighting Rubble bandits - because I don't know how to fully deploy Leika's advantages - then her stat block feels a little...superfluous? Indulgent? (I'm using some hyperbole in that comparison, so grant me a little latitude.)

21 hours ago, Eff said:

Oh, I mean, I kind of have "played at 18th level" but in the process of getting to that point...

We all seem to be on roughly on the same page of my "18th level" metaphor, but I sometimes wish I hadn't used it. No, that's not true. It's done its job, but can distract a little. One of the things that I like about RQ is that there aren't defined character levels or defined power levels like there are in D&D. I used it to try and get people thinking about high-level play, as @soltakss said. In hindsight, I should have perhaps said, "Rune-Lord-play." Examples by @HreshtIronBorne and @Dragon have provided good examples of the power level I was trying to point to. 😉

17 hours ago, Dragon said:

Not quite the same, but my character in RQ2 got pretty experienced. In that game, the GM allowed an additional skill gain after 5 additional successes and that roll was only for an improvement of 1. Remember the first skill gain is for 5 skill in RQ2.

Speaking of @Dragon, that's all valuable stuff to me, too. What's been interesting to note is that many folks report that their GM somehow needed to introduce homebrew Heroquesting at some point if their game reached a certain point. The rewards and advancement provided in RQ2/3 were inadequate for the sorts of Gloranthan stories people wanted to tell.

9 hours ago, HreshtIronBorne said:

I had never even noticed the 5 year rule. Our PCs took something like 7 or so years to get all of the stat and skill requirements to go out for Priesthood and/or Rune-Lordship. We also were playing Six Seasons in Sartar at the time. I will keep spoilers to a minimum. 

Also new to me and I thought I'd gone through RQG's text fairly closely.

I'm 

2 hours ago, Eff said:

I'm not talking about stat blocks. There is no Gunda the Guilty stat block for Runequest. I am talking about the genre of Runequest as a game, which is not one where you're expected to continually grow in power to the limits of the setting. And Gunda does have a stat block on her chit in Dragon Pass/White Bear & Red Moon, which makes her a one-woman battalion, if not quite a one-woman army, someone who can conceivably contend with hundreds of people at once with only her groupies at her side. Which is not what a Runequest character can conceivably do within the existing Runequest rules, and I doubt the planned expansions of those rules would make that a playable option. 

I'm sympathetic to both @Eff and @icebrand on this one. If there's a stat block for Gunda or any other Hero (Harrek, Beat Pot, Ralzakark, whomever), then there should be a clearly recognizable path through RQ's rules for PCs to obtain the same numbers on their character sheets. But if there are no stat blocks published, then I don't think the players are supposed to interact with those NPCs through the game's rules. 

I see this tripping up RQ/Glorantha folks quite a bit. As soon as someone invokes a Named Person from Glorantha, the discussion can get sidetracked with the abstract stuff such as discussion over whether Named Person gone on Heroquests or other Glorantha-related lore. People stop talking about the rules themselves.

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

This is deliberate.  Dorastor is a terrible place.  It is worse than hellish, and it is supposed to be.  Dorastor is designed to kill Rune Level characters and even challenge heroes.  Dorastor is deliberately created as a place where you can send power gamers to die.

Sometimes characters need to have the common sense to know when they are outmatched and run away.

That being said, you need to familiarize yourself with how a 300% skill is divided according to strike rank. 

Another combination of too-abstract followed by a glimpse of hard-won rules knowledge. I can't recall RQG's rules for dividing 300% skill across SR. Can you fill me in or point to the right page?

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

Also, player characters who are of high rune-level should have realized that they need to maximize damage whenever they can, and thus have nice big weapons that they can buff beyond reason if they are planning on an extended visit to Dorastor. 

One of the best ways to survive Dorastor is to invest in a big strong mount with plenty of Damage Bonus, max out your lance and charge-charge-charge.  Few of the encounters occur in enclosed spaces, so go with the 3Bs (Buy Bigger Bison).

Again, abstract enough to be accurate, but without the same granular detail we get from @HreshtIronBorne, @Rodney Dangerduck, or @Dragon. I don't mean to pick on you either, Darius. Whenever I lurk in the Glorantha forum, your takes on different topics are great grist. 😉

58 minutes ago, g33k said:

Ever since TSR produced statblocks for Demogorgon & Orcus &c, and Dieties&Demigods, there has been the notion of "if you publish a statblock, the players will figure out how to kill it," but -- depending on the mythology you're embracing -- some entities should be entirely un-killable by mortal agency.

I wondered if this would come up! I suppose my stance is that if you publish a stat block, the players should be able to kill it using the published rules of your game (no home-brew Heroquesting). Allowances can be made, I suppose, for stuff like The Crimson Bat if you specifically call out that those stats are "stunt stats", as Chaosium does in the Bestiary. 

This sort of ties into a point I (hopefully) made earlier: it's one thing to publish those Rune Lord stat blocks and another for players to understand how to use the rules to defeat those Rune Lord stat blocks. Lots of trial and error and dead PCs (and NPCs and monsters) will eventually build that knowledge in your local group. But variations exist between groups. I've got several years of RQ3 experience from back in the day and my group didn't come close to discovering the l33t rules hacks that some folks have described in this thread. I would have enjoyed knowing some of that stuff back when I played because it would have made the game more fun.

EDIT: It's not that I expect my PCs to defeat the Leika, but I hope they'll defeat someone as powerful. So I'm keen to understand how to use the rules to have fun fighting someone that powerful.

Edited April 5, 2022 by EpicureanDM

[EpicureanDM]

49 minutes ago, g33k said:

But it really doesn't follow on from an NPC being published that they automatically become a viable target for the PCs...

I want to emphasize this point (again?). I only pointed to certain published NPCs to have some concrete rules and numbers to point to. I think I mentioned that I don't care that the particular stat block I pointed to is called "Leika Black Spear." Make her Generic Wind Lord #3, just a bundle of stats for an X-Men-style Danger Room hypothetical.

[Austin]

I've played some RQ3/RQ3-ish (lotsa house rules), and more recently RQG (with varying levels of house-ruling; currently attempting to play "Rules as Intended" for good or ill).

Some things are genre/setting/GM expectations. That's the whole "can you kill Gunda/Harrek/Rurik Runespear?" debate. Personally, I'm soundly in the "Yep, take the fight to 'em" camp. Doesn't mean it'll be easy. I generally tell my players, "the meta-plot of King of Sartar is going to happen, unless YOU do something about it." I don't see much point playing a game where you can't impact the world - and one way players like to impact the world is by being utter bastards.

For the most part, I'm interested in keeping skill%s under 200. Without magic mods, anyway. I think you can do lots of cool SuperRuneQuest stuff without them, and also without saying God Plane/Hero World is "skill / 5" or whatever. I think the big factors in getting skills that high, from what I've read in this thread, are:

• How often are you playing? an 8 hour session once per week gets a hell of a lot more done than a 4 hour session once a month.
• How many experience checks can be gained at once?
• How often do you roll experience checks? Sometimes, it's relevant to have an "intermission" in the plot where the adventurers have a few days of rest, because they've all gained experience in their relevant skills. This incentivizes them to go out and do more risky things to gain experience, instead of trying to resolve the adventure in a "safe" way.

My games have gone from low to mid-power. Our previous RQG campaign ended around mid-power. I have a friend who has played a very long RQ3-ish campaign, still ongoing, which is definitely a high-power game.

RQ combat is fun when it requires tactics and/or strategy. Tactics being in-the-moment decisions using what magic you have on hand, and strategy being how you and the other players make broader choices about skills & magic learned in order to keep yourself alive.

The more magic you have, the more fun RQ combat is. Magic is what gives you a variety of things to do. High-level combat is fun because you have a lot of choices you can make, giving you many ways to tackle dangerous situations.

Getting an attack percentage into the hundreds temporarily is hard, but not impossible. Easiest way is to borrow the entire party's POW Storing crystals/Magic Point Enchantments, and cast one huge Sword Trance. In my last campaign, the Humakti broke 1000% this way - over 100 MPs spent. I described it as being roughly like "grinding up the Death God and snorting him like coke." It was a life-changing experience, but very very effective.

A way to defeat or survive high-POW entities is by augmenting the POW v. POW resistance table roll. My players defeated Gloomwillow (TPP) that way, with a special augment using one of their Runes when she cast a big spell at them (exact spell excised because spoilers). If you're POW 18 against POW 30, a successful augment effectively increases your POW by 4 points (+20%). A crit, by +10 points. This isn't a sure-fire guarantee, but it's another tip which helps mid-game adventurers start reaching their late-game options (like frequent DI, heroquest boons, and so on).

Don't underestimate Earth Shield. Earth Shield is huge, especially against Kaiju-type enemies. 15D6 dinosaur attack bonus? Bonk. Sorry, I cast Earth Shield this morning. I'm not sure what RQG's rules are, but in our RQ3-ish game, big foes could still deal damage through Earth Shield via knockback - basically, no damage goes through, but you're still knocked around like a bowling ball because that giant was really, really big. My friend basically went questing for a heroquest boon just to be immune to knockback, because it was one of his few weaknesses.

The attrition game becomes more fun when the players have partial control. Time to recover magic points, to rest up, needs to have consequences. What happens during the adventure while the adventurers are recovering from their most recent ordeal? What happens to the McGuffin, for example. The players need to know their choices have consequences.

The attrition game also becomes fun when roleplaying is added to it. Getting that feeling of being worn down, out of resources, trapped, scared, and desperate. Of course, that's true for any RPG. I think it's worth reiterating here, because at all levels of RQ combat resource attrition is relevant.

If you want to test-drive mid-game combat, I suggest running a one-shot (BWT's Stone and Bone would actually be great for this, it has a combat I think would work well) with "old" new RQG adventurers. There's a sidebar where new adventurers start with additional skills and - importantly - Rune points. Testing it out is a good way to get a feel for how the game plays.

Elementals are super scary, especially for weak opponents. A medium or large air or earth elemental typically one-shots non-Rune Master opponents (and can definitely give them a run for their money). Large earth elemental deals a ton of damage to all of a normal human's hit locations, simultaneously. And if they survive that, they start suffocating underground. Fun stuff.

If you're an aspiring Rune Master, get your elemental into a Binding Enchantment or POW Storing crystal as soon as possible. It significantly reduces the Rune point cost to summon it. Plus, elementals are a decent source of MPs, because when summoned they don't really use the magic points. Trouble with a big elemental with big POW? Summon it, then ask your local priest (POW 18) to use Command Cult Spirit to stick it in the binding. 2-point spell, 40 L. The priest can use an hour or so of ritual practices to add +30-+50 to their roll, without all that much time increase. This is something every single player I've had, who has access to elementals, has prioritized.

At most levels, RQ combat is really swingy. The attrition especially comes in from multiple combats, not really as often from long fights. Experience players are paranoid. Fuck with them, strange sounds, illusions, being purposefully vague, etc. Encourage paranoia - it keeps players alive.

The "Teleports behind you" tactic is popular in my milieu. My friend has a special ability to do so I believe 1/day, and reserves it to open boss fights.

Stack your spells, then ambush and try to erase someone. Preferably multiple someones. I've used a Multimissile'd Javelin exactly once, and whoo boy, that was fun. Absolutely obliterated my target. Felt bad for my GM. Spirit magic buffs are hard in RQG compared to RQ3, because they last 2 minutes (10 rounds) instead of 5 minutes.

When I played RQ3-ish, my character was a Knight-Sorcerer. During combat, I thought about who the strongest opponent was, who I had to prioritize. We spent a lot of time thinking about movement, thinking about flanking. Ganging up on someone, while seeing who could hold off others. Sorcery buffs cast beforehand helped a lot. In RQG, Boon of Kargan Tor fills this roll, as Hresht mentioned.

Disrupt and Befuddle are very cheap, and very important. Demoralize too. Pretty much everyone in groups I GM gets their hands on one of the above. Often Disruption + one of the others. Befuddle takes someone out of the fight. Disruption's important because that's how you bypass heavily armored foes. Lots of little pings, if you don't want to wait for a crit or call down some Rune magic.

You have to think about what you can do, and what your friends can do. A shaman with Distraction is really helpful, because spirit combat is a reliable way to get rid of many warrior-types. As a front-line warrior, I focused on killing the dude in front of me, and calling out how I needed support. Sometimes that was healing my broken leg; other times, that was telling the Yelmalion to stop shooting me in the goddamn back.

An important strategic aspect of mid-to-high level RQ is how you spend your POW. POW is a resource, and if possible, you want to stay relatively low so you can earn it more easily. 13's the sweet spot in RQG, because then you get +5% to a bunch of skill categories, and a 40% chance to improve your POW on a POW Gain check (if I'm not screwing up the math - I'm getting pretty sleepy haha). Early on, spend it on Rune points. Rune points are your "awesomeness pool." It's important that each adventurer has a spirit magic spell which lets them try to fish for a POW Gain check, even if they're not a super magical character. Enchantments after, if you're buddies with a priest willing to cast them. It's a big bonus in RQG that someone else can offer a lot of the POW, and that not all the POW needs to be sacrificed at once. Linked enchantments help flexibility. Linked enchantment + Multispell lets you put that short-term spirit magic on the whole party, easing up your buff-and-charge time.

By the by, the types of stuff my friend's group plays through now is usually D&D/AD&D long adventures. Some highlights include Tomb of Horrors and Tomb of Annihilation; they're starting Storm King's Thunder soon. When he GM'd our RQ3-ish game, we ran a lot of similar stuff.

Dungeon-crawls in RuneQuest are a blast. They aren't the gameplay style currently being pushed by Chaosium's publications, but I think people should try it. Really fun stuff, scary and dangerous, but that's what makes the game exciting. I suggest browsing the D&D 5E collection Tales from the Yawning Portal. It's got a lot of good stuff, and I've survived several of those adventures in RQ. Starting point for conversions is Modifier × 5 = percentage.

Some house rules we've used, which I think are cool and honestly we really struggle to play without:

• Multiple experience checks: You get checks based on your highest success during an adventure: 1 for normal, 2 for special, 3 for a crit. I haven't been playing with this rule (and I think it's offset somewhat by how huge an RQG skill category modifier can get compared to RQ3), but my players constantly ask for it back. I think I'll re-introduce it during the next campaign year. Or, perhaps during heroquests as a treat. This is multiple experience checks during the same adventure.
• Hero Points: Basically, extra lives. You get less and less, the more skilled the adventurer becomes. This was helpful with RQ3-ish, but I haven't really felt the need for them in RQG. They were nice in RQ3 because the starting point was much lower. Currently, I've decided to give my group as a whole (rather than each adventurer individually) a small number of hero points, because the adventure I'm playing has some Phippian (parallel to Lovecraftian) tier stuff.
• Magic Point replenishment: You recover 1 MP per hour, instead of your POW over 24 hours. Just a quality-of-life improvement, really. I don't know that it impacts the game that desperately, just makes MP replenishment less fiddly.

[PhilHibbs]

If you want to defeat the powerful enemies in Simon's Secrets of Dorastor book, then why not try using some of the material from Simon's Secrets of Heroquesting book? I suspect that he put the former out purely to create demand for the latter...

[EpicureanDM]

2 hours ago, Crel said:

I've played some RQ3/RQ3-ish (lotsa house rules), and more recently RQG (with varying levels of house-ruling; currently attempting to play "Rules as Intended" for good or ill).

Great stuff. I've added it to my offline notes. 🙂

 

[davecake]

On 4/3/2022 at 12:05 AM, EpicureanDM said:

I can read a few pages in Rune Masters - a book that's almost 40 years old - about what high-level combat is like, but can't find any modern players who can describe having done it themselves.

I’ve got an ongoing, but irregular, campaign of what I consider high-level play, though by that I mean RuneMasters kind of stuff, not soltakss or Dorastor kind of stuff. The PCs were converted from a very old RQ3 era campaign, are all Rune Lords or Priests, and heroquesting in some form is now a regular feature. Not all are that powerful as combatants (one is a Sage of Lhankor Mhy, for example), but some are (one is Sword of Humakt who now is fully kitted out in iron gear).

I revived my old game initially with two goals - I specifically wanted to try high level battle in RQG, and i wanted to, at least once, to have run infamous scenario The Cradle, which was more or less the defining high level scenario for RQ2 and a notorious ‘Rune Lord killer’. I beefed it up a fair bit, in particular by turning ‘big fight against a bunch of troops’ encounters into ‘big fights against a bunch of troops and several tough rune lords’, which also made it more fun as the enemy rune lords were mostly ones the PCs had history with, such as the Coders, Radak the Iron Centurion, Invictus in Sun County, etc. My PCs all survived, though there were a couple of successful DIs needed. The Cradle took quite a few long sessions. 

I’m trying to keep it to what I think is fairly RQG RAW (apart from not having heroquest rules so having to improvise a little, but trying to be fairly compatible with what we are told the rules will likely be). 

I have a few house rules, but not many. One is that Axe/Sword Trance has a maximum effect of doubling your base skill. No one has done that yet. But we have still had the Sword throwing around effective attack% of 200%+, once they are fully revved up with Bladesharp 5, Runic inspiration, etc. And damage rolls have made it into the 30+ level now and then. There are a couple of other spell tweaks, and a few other little rules changes, but nothing that seems to drastically change play - for example, I often use the RQ3 missile hit location tables. 

The RQG rules for abilities over 100% is one of the most significant changes between editions for high level play. Remember a 200% skill level means if you are fighting a ‘starting’ weapon master such as a newly qualified Rune Lord, with 100% skill, you subtract 100% from their skills, so they are about as dangerous as a toddler, with 5% chances vs your 100%. It definitely feels like high level play! And it means RQG skills work similarly to HeroQuestWorlds levels of mastery - it’s a logarithmic scale, not a linear one. And effective skills levels over 100% are not difficult at all to happen - a starting character with Fanaticism is there. 

One interesting thing with The Cradle was how shield wall tactics are a really good idea against high powered opponents (The Cradle has a lot of fights against ranks of soldiers, especially hoplites). A parry would often be reduced to very low levels by their high attack, so passively shielding most locations was much better, and then that leaves them free to go Fanatic or similar, at which point their attack skill was high enough to be a worry. My PCs eventually took to just accepting that they’d have to take a hit or two, and doing aimed blows to the head at the end of round. 

Not as much dispelling goes on as you’d think, and also not much boosting to get past defences. Sometimes smart PCs would target anyone who is taking a very long time to cast a spell because they are boosting it with magic. Allied spirits helping shore up magical defences and heal awhile there ally fights one are very valuable. But while having an allied spirit that is an elemental (added in RQG) sounds very cool, usually it’s an incredibly bad idea, they are very vulnerable. Same with materialising a fetch. There is definitely a different feel to ‘Rune level’ play that is more than just the numbers getting bigger - the extra actions from spirits, lots more magic points to spend, lots more magic options available. And often damage is higher so that one good blow can decide a combat - but healing options grow as well, and becomes a crucial part of teamwork. 

There also seems to be a bit of a natural point at which those things will hit some barriers and start to hit the level above that. A few are nearing the point at which they have maxed out their rune magic from a single cult. There are relatively few ways to have a POW above about species max for spell casting purposes (though easier defensively). Few multitarget or area effect spells. Things like heroquest abilities, big enchantments, and access to a wyter or other powerful spirit are starting to look like they will be more important. I think a lot of how that next level works is going to be really open up with the Gamemaster book, which I hope is coming next year.

I think the answer for how do you have a character. who can beat the opponents in soltakss Dorastor books using the standard HQG is you mostly shouldn’t expect to. They are created assuming the very different rules in his heroquesting etc books, which has very different assumptions about both how the numbers work, and what style of play is the goal. 

But RQG RAW high powered play is real, it has been big fun to play, and I think we are heading towards a version of the game that will support pretty high powered play well if you want to do that. 

I also am very much looking forward to heroquest rules that, while heroquesting continues to be an important part of high powered play, aren’t simply about bigger numbers. Things like the support of your community (which might give you the aid of a wyter), or making choices about which Passions you are willing to maintain at a high level and how that might limit you, or which taboos you are willing to accept for the help of a particular spirit, or which ‘foreign’ powers you will accept help from, that’s going to be more vital to a high powered game than just numbers getting bigger. I hope that’s what we’ll be getting. 
 

As an aside, my PCs don’t include any shamans or sorcerers. So I’m just speculating about them, really. My feeling is that shamans will be interesting for high powered play, but we probably won’t see too many shamans with huge fetches - the marginal value and fun of putting their POW gains into rune points (even just from random spirit cults, but definitely from shamanic cults like Daka Fal), shamanic abilities, even enchantments (especially spirit bindings) is going to be higher than just making the fetch bigger. I don’t think they will be overwhelming or unbalanced though. 
High powered sorcerers I still despair of somewhat, it seems like a design goal of sorcery is to make it less fun to play a sorcerer. And it seems like we’ve only got half the rules. It does seem that even if they are made significantly more fun, that the most effective high powered sorcerers will inevitably end up being a lot less focussed on using sorcery - for example bound/allied spirits, especially ones that know spirit magic, are incredibly useful to a sorcerer. 
And we will get our first taste of mysticism in RQG with Illumination rules - and I’m pleased to say that the primary role it will have in high powered play will be to take all the interesting choices you have to make around cults, Passions, Runes, community, and add more options while making it all messy and complex.