RQIII Sorcery: What Are/Were Your Gripes?

[BMonroe]

Just curious. Some folks loved the old RQIII Sorcery rules, some hated them. I remember when I was first playing RQIII, I just couldn't figure them out, but they made perfect sense to me when I returned to the game many years later.

So, I'm curious, what about the RQIII Sorcery didn't you like?

[Pete Nash]

Three things made me eventually dislike RQ3 sorcery. Individual Spell skills, Free INT and Duration.

Starting out with beginning level sorcerers meant that your spell skills were so low they were useless when cast under pressure. Such unreliable casting chances made a sorcerer a sitting duck in combat, and offensive spells were useless unless combined with the ritual skill and cast at range. As skills they took forever to advance, and I was green with envy reading NPC sorcerers in RQ scenarios, somehow managing to learn dozens of spells and the manipulation skills to competent levels when my Adept PC came nowhere close after three years of progression (gaming every week).

Free INT buggered sorcerers since they were penalised for keeping spells in memory. Thus the only effective casters were ones with access to spell matrices or the ability to create them.

IMO Duration was perhaps the worst aspect. Although at first it seemed fun to have spells that lasted a while, the whole system began to break down at higher levels, enabling a lone sorcerer to cast hundreds of magic points worth of spells, before needing to replace/recast them again. This not only broke the magical ecology of Glorantha for me, but it also led to massive power escalation as sorcerers began casting Damage Boosting and Enhanced Characteristics on everyone in the party.

In addition spell costs were expensive. If you lacked a sympathetic GM who lobbed a few MP storage crystals your way, you were buggered as a spellcaster. You just need to look at the Mage in Griffin Island to see the extremes scenario writers came up with to make sorcerers flexible.

Of course when I started out I thought the Sorcery system was wonderful. Only after playing with it a while, and then GMing it at high levels did it begin to rub me the wrong way.

[Agentorange]

I rather liked sorcery, but Pete's comments about it's flaws are well observed. I must admit I started using Sandy Petersons revised rules when they came out as they addressed a good few of those flaws

Edited September 23, 2010 by Agentorange
typo

[RosenMcStern]

First of all, remember to use the Sorcery rules from the official errata, or the ones in the GW edition, not the ones in the Deluxe box.

There are several reasons why the original rules for RQ3 rules needed to be upgraded. They are, in order of importance:

1) Free INT -> it makes your magician thoroughly dependent on items; this rule is banished in every Sorcery system that was published later

2) MP usage -> it makes your magician thoroughly dependent on items; this issue is fixed in (both) Mongoose versions of the rules; MRQ1 is, strangely enough, more versatile than MRQ2 in this as you do not spend MP to cast basic spells - a rule that was criticised but worked very well in practice for me

3) Duration -> the original system is awfully mp-dependant, so it makes your PCs ultra-powerful if he has magic crystals, no matter how skilled he is; Sandy's Sorcery fixes this issue with Presence; both Mongoose rulesets simply abolished long-duration spells, but this is as satisfactory a solution as amputating a limb you do not know how to treat

4) Your spell skill does not limit your ability to manipulate spells, which is not in line with the philosophy behind sorcery. This is fixed in Sandy's rulesets and in MRQ1, but not in MRQ2, where your spell skill influences only Intensity.

5) Individual spell skills -> contrary to Pete's experience, I never experience this problem; all of my characters played very smoothly, and since they used spells every adventure, their skill went up fast by means of experience; it is just a matter of not relying too much on Palsy or Venom in combat (cast Fly + Animate + Damage Boost on a sword before combat and you are much better off). The Mongoose Rulesets, with the Grimoire skill, fix this problem, but basically IT IS NOT A PROBLEM

All in all, the real problem is that your magician is awfully item-dependent, a condition that does not add anything to character interpretation - being an effective sorcerer is all about having matrices and not about studying and having skilla. Unfortunately, no single ruleset fixes all of the above problems. But in any case, the RQ3 rules are rather fun, if you accept the additional complication of keeping track of spell durations and MP accounting. Don't believe people who tell you they are unplayable. It's skybullsh...

[NickMiddleton]

Just curious. Some folks loved the old RQIII Sorcery rules, some hated them. I remember when I was first playing RQIII, I just couldn't figure them out, but they made perfect sense to me when I returned to the game many years later.

So, I'm curious, what about the RQIII Sorcery didn't you like?

When I first read them I loathed them with a fiery passion - but it was 1984 and I was a penniless A-Level student who adored RQII and simply could not afford the £45 asking price for the AH Deluxe boxed set of RQIII, so was looking for a reason NOT to like RQIII...

Four years later, I'd grown up a bit, and Games Workshop were abandoning publishing other peoples games, so were selling off their version of RQIII cheap and I picked up all five hard back books they did (RQ, ARQ, Monsters, Griffin Island and Land of Ninja) for £25, and rapidly decided that I preferred RQIII to RQII. Twenty plus years later and I still occasionally run RQIII pretty much RAW. I haven't touched RQII since the later eighties.

So, what do Idisliek about RQIII Sorcery? Very little apart from Free INT in principle - but as a system it has a very different feel and impact to Spirit and Divine.

Free INT is just a pain, it didn't scale with anything (given that RAW INT can't be increased) and arbitrarily limited spell casting in a way that didn't seem to relate to the rest of the system particularly.

The rest of the system was OK, provided one understood that it really wasn't suited to a conventional "adventuring" character and was best suited to city bound, sedentary mages, who spent most of their time learning from a tutor or researching in old books. It did produce very good "Eviiil Wizzaard in Tower" NPC's (albeit for quite a lot of book keeping), and if one is prepared to embrace it's unique features it can make for interesting PC's, but they are far closer to Ars Magica magi in that they will spend literally months on some project unavailable for conventional adventuring, and if they are to be more interesting than a source of campaign power-ups for the other PC's, the whole campaign has to shift focus.

Cheers,

Nick

Personally I dumped Free INT and kept the rest, replacing the Free INT / manipulation limits by Skill / 5 (or 10, depending on the setting).

[RosenMcStern]

You might also want to take the rules from the Luxury SRD and use those ones with the spells described in RQ3. Don't use the SRD spells, instead: some of them are heavily bugged!

[GianniVacca]

2) MP usage -> it makes your magician thoroughly dependent on items; this issue is fixed in (both) Mongoose versions of the rules; MRQ1 is, strangely enough, more versatile than MRQ2 in this as you do not spend MP to cast basic spells - a rule that was criticised but worked very well in practice for me

It fit in well with the setting: magic-rich GodLearners!

[Redge]

Hi

Anyone got the Sandy Petersen rules mentioned in this thread? I found a few links to them by Googling but they are all dead.

[Agentorange]

There's a version here:

http://www.poppyware.com/dunham/glorantha/sorcery.html

[Mugen]

Note that there are 5 other rule sets by Sandy Petersen for RQ3. As far as I remember, those cover the following subjects :

-rituals (rules to make enchants cost less POW, also makes a difference between ritual divine spells, ritual sorcery spells and ritual spirit spells);

-grimoire (useful tricks for all spell casters);

-shaman (never read it);

-saints (for Malkioni characters : http://www.poppyware.com/dunham/glorantha/saints.html);

-mysticism (for kralori characters).

I used to have those on a Geocities account, but it is now closed...

Edited October 4, 2010 by Mugen
add a link

[PhilHibbs]

My set of Sandy's rules is back online: http://www.hibbs.me.uk/snarks/sandysorcery.html

My variant rules is here: http://www.hibbs.me.uk/snarks/meldeksorcerors.html

Edited October 4, 2010 by PhilHibbs