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Why so few monsters published for 7th edition.


General Ork

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11 hours ago, EpicureanDM said:

This is perhaps true in the abstract, but Chaosium has published little guidance to help GMs actually run battles of this complexity. It's no surprise that newcomers can't grasp this sort of nuance when the game's publishers don't support it.

I’ve published guidance re: how I GM RuneQuest in my Gloranthan Manifesto, but maybe it doesn’t work for you? That’s fine, find something that works better for you and do it that way instead. Or wait for an official book, if that’s how you roll.

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6 hours ago, Professor Chaos said:

But it is now a highly tactical game where combat run by the book needs to be avoided not just because it is deadly but because it takes forever.

The thing is, done properly, RQ;G combat is at least as fast, arguably faster, than, say, D&D 5e.  Slower individual combat rounds, but fewer of them.  It is just that 'done properly' isn't explained anywhere more accessible than some long-lost back issue of a 90s fanzine.

4 hours ago, GMKen said:

While the Jonstown Compendium is nice, few of the the publications make it to print status.

There are over 30 JC titles that are available as POD, which i think is more than have ever been simultaneously in print for any previous edition of RQ at any time.

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8 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

I’ve published guidance re: how I GM RuneQuest in my Gloranthan Manifesto, but maybe it doesn’t work for you? That’s fine, find something that works better for you and do it that way instead. Or wait for an official book, if that’s how you roll.

I've read almost everything you've published, including your old blog. It was reading Black Spear that helped me understand that many RQ veterans run the game like Heroquest. Your guidance in the Manifesto also applies almost entirely to running Heroquest, diluting its value as guidance for running RuneQuest, except, I suppose, in the parts where you tell the GM to ignore the rules of RuneQuest. You disdain people who have questions about how the game's published rules might be combined to have fun at the table:

Quote

And it’s probably anathema to wargamey sim-people who populate munchkin threads, compare the cost-effectiveness of different cults and cultures, work out efficient strategies for boosting offensive spells, or analyse new spell lists for discrepancies.

How do you expect new RuneQuest GMs to both "[take on] a Dark Troll warrior who’s a Death Lord of Zorak Zoran, with the full panoply of Rune spells, enchanted lead armour, zombie and skeleton hordes, etc., and a clan or warband backing them up (with specialists, healers, trained battle-insects, allies, and the like)" and also understand which of the rules in the 400+ page rulebook they just bought should be ignored when running this fight at the table? You're giving new RQ GMs advice on how to draw an owl. 

EDIT: It doesn't bother me that you play RuneQuest as if it was Heroquest. What bothers me is that you give advice to newcomers for a style of play that you dislike and don't use. You're disingenuous about it. Your responses to the OP disguise how you would handle their problem at your table. And that's a shame because you're one of the most effective communicators about Glorantha I've found. You're just not reliable about RuneQuest.

Edited by EpicureanDM
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Why wasn't this part of your response to @General Ork, @Nick Brooke? This is right out of your Manifesto.

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Generic Opponents

Don’t obsess over detailed statblocks: learn not to need them. Your players don’t get to audit your bad guys’ stats!

  • A weak or non-combatant opponent has 10-12 hit points, 4 hit points per location (+1 chest / –1 arms), weak armour (1-2 points of light or tough leather?) and no damage bonus. Lower skills than your adventurers, one Strike Rank slower.

  • An average opponent has 13-15 hit points, 5 per location (+1 chest / –1 arms), better armour (3 point linen or 4 point light scale?) and a +1D4 bonus. Similar skills and Strike Rank to your adventurers.

  • A tough opponent has 16-18 hit points, 6 per location (+1 chest / –1 arms), best available armour (5 point heavy scale or 6 point plate?), and a +1D6 bonus. Higher skills than your adventurers, one Strike Rank quicker.

    Job done. Those are all the generic bandit, guard, soldier, warrior statblocks you will ever need. Season with a mix of functional and distinctive magic and they are good to go.

 

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48 minutes ago, EpicureanDM said:

Why wasn't this part of your response to @General Ork, @Nick Brooke? This is right out of your Manifesto.

 

I’m not sure how we got from asking why there aren’t more monsters in the Bestiary to here, but let’s go back to the original point of the thread. From my perspective there aren’t too few or too many critters in the bestiary. I am curious what value is gained by having more?

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4 minutes ago, Jeff said:

I’m not sure how we got from asking why there aren’t more monsters in the Bestiary to here, but let’s go back to the original point of the thread. From my perspective there aren’t too few or too many critters in the bestiary. I am curious what value is gained by having more?

We got here because the OP asked why there weren't more monsters available. The tenor of some replies was that RuneQuest doesn't necessarily need more monsters, since RQ GMs can create interesting battles using complex combinations of the published monsters. My point is that if no one can practically demonstrate how to create these battles using the game's rules, then maybe some more monsters are needed to create the variety and interest sought by the OP.

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14 minutes ago, EpicureanDM said:

We got here because the OP asked why there weren't more monsters available. The tenor of some replies was that RuneQuest doesn't necessarily need more monsters, since RQ GMs can create interesting battles using complex combinations of the published monsters. My point is that if no one can practically demonstrate how to create these battles using the game's rules, then maybe some more monsters are needed to create the variety and interest sought by the OP.

So although there is a GM book in the works to cover this (or the many posts on this on other social media, examples of play on YouTube, etc), you'd rather wait to have a second and larger Bestiary made? 

I for one don't think more species would help with that. A big book of encounters might be far more helpful, with a range of different types of encounters, from Rubble Runners to Rune Lord and Entourage.

 

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16 hours ago, EpicureanDM said:

Only veterans steeped in Glorantha and RQ2 would miss the absurdity of telling your new RQG fans that they need to read books from a 20th century edition of the game to maybe figure out how to best use the edition they bought in the 21st century.

 

It is absurd, isn't it? I think that the basic disconnect is that "RQ2" was essentially designed "at the table" and the question of just what a Rune Lord or Rune Priest (or shaman) is capable of was something people were finding out as they played the game, and then its run came to an end before the release of the promised Heroquest, (which I'll call Heroquest '80) which would have been, according to my copy of Runequest a successor game where you start as a "Rune level" and presumably quest to become a Hero. 

And then by RQ3 you have the beginnings of a play culture which sees the idea of defined stats for opponents as kind of unnecessary beyond the very basics, and so you still don't really get a sense of how to play opposing forces. And this eventually makes its way down to RQG, which even has minimal GMing advice within its main book. 

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"I just read an article in The Economist by a guy who was riding around with the Sartar rebels, I mean Taliban," -Greg Stafford, January 7th, 2010

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One would hope that by the time a gm has run a fight with each of the 180 monsters in the bestiary, they would no longer count as a new GM. After all, that would take over a year at 3 fights per week...

The issue is, at the moment, if you want to play in a combat-heavy style,you do have to mostly learn by experience. Both Nick's manifesto, and much of the official stuff, gives lots of excellent advice. But it sometimes seems to start from the assumption that you already know how to do that, and explains how and why to go 'beyond' it. 

A new gm follows the rq rules, which teaches them how Glorantha works. A journeyman gm can then use that knowledge to run Glorantha in a rule-light system like heroquest. Finally a master gm can use that knowledge to run RQ:G properly, including discarding the bits that don't serve a useful purpose in their current game.

No stage of that process is easily skippable; maybe the GM's guide will change that.

Meanwhile, the best bet is probably;

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/421217/Secrets-of-Dorastor-Personalities--Tactics?affiliate_id=187051

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Both Sides of the Table:
From the Player perspective, most of your focus is upon improving your one character. You learn new ways to be more effective in any situation or conflict because you have the benefit of what is on a few sheets of paper, possibly even just one side of a single sheet of paper to understand. While there are a LOT of possibilities for what direction you can take to improve your character and their effectiveness, it's still rather focused once you have rolled up your PC, picked a cult or two, and have various starting stats and skills to build up.

From the Gamemaster perspective, you usually cannot focus on NPCs to that level of detail. You have many more to potentially understand and deploy during a scenario, let alone a whole campaign. PCs learn and improve the nuances of their one character over many sessions, while the GM might only have a Zorak Zoran Rune Lord and entourage for use in one encounter/battle, so understanding every detail about them is a mighty big task. The main antagonist can be better understood if they survive longer over a story arc, but they are probably the exception. Thus, in the end, a GM can't stay on top of 20+ NPCs if they try to understand them and utilize each of them like a PC would their one character. That amount of homework would be beyond the time, and probably interest, of 99.9% of GMs. Thus, the use of shortcuts. Nick B. summarizes them quite well. 

I may very well be a lousy GM, but when I have GM'd a game of RQ, D&D, or similar I pretty much apply those shortcuts to all of those systems. I am happy if the scenario has a few basic tips, usually a sentence or two, on "the tactics of the bad guys", and that usually suffices for me. As always, that is just my style and may not be your style of GM'ing. If it is not, more power to you, and I would never want to impart the impression or judgement that you are doing anything wrong. It isn't, it's just different.

As for monsters, and how many are available in official supplements, I kind of see it as a "quantity vs. quality" situation. We have focused on fewer monsters that have more detail to them. Many of them could even be playable as PCs. Having Quantity AND Quality is not so easy to achieve, especially for a smaller game company. Every time somebody says "D&D has X so why don't you", I am mindful that WOTC has 100X the resources we do to devote to their game.

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Hope that Helps,
Rick Meints - Chaosium, Inc.

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You lost the last words of my quote, @EpicureanDM, doubtless in an unfortunate cut’n’paste accident (as I’m sure you’d hate to be disingenuous). They were: “That’s OK, they still get to play RuneQuest their way.”

I see new GMs having difficulties because they think they need to apply all of the rules of the game precisely in every situation, delivering a watchmaker’s simulation of Glorantha that always runs exactly according to the RuneQuest rules, when that isn’t necessary or (in my opinion) particularly desirable. That’s why my advice to new GMs is not to worry about that.

Your advice, apparently, is that they should worry, but that sadly there aren’t any resources to help them, and that in consequence no new GM can enjoy playing RuneQuest in Glorantha. I disagree, but I wish you luck in finding or creating the resources you think you need.

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I am an experienced GM but for RQ I find I need less detailed stat blocks than for 3rd edition D+D/Pathfinder (I don't run 5th ed).  For anything except the most basic 1st level Orc warrior I need to know a lot to use it and have to have a full stat block, for every published adventure I redo all the stats and the stat block for a high level boss encounter is huge.

For RQ I need the hit  chart , and hp distribution easy enough to do a typical human warrior will have 14 or 15 hp. Then I pick skills based on how good the opponents are meant to be so elites are 80-90% militia are 55-50% and give them appropriate weapons and armour.  Then pick a cult and give them some magic from that cult.  A leader, rune level or recurring npc will sometimes get a little bit more written down. Overall the amount of work to prep a boss fight is considerably less than for a high level D+D Wizard I can't run them on the fly.   

So my notes for a Squad of Silver shield Peltasts would be something like 

hp 14 Scale Hauberk, curiboulli greaves, 4 pt helmet. Javalins, Medium Shield, short spear and shortsword , d4 damage bonus. Mobility, Speedart, Bladesharp 2, heal 2, protection 2 13 mp . 2 runepoints Seven Mothers. 70 % skill , sergeant has 80%

The statblock for 7 5th level Orc barbarians and a squad leader would take me about half an hour to create with software longer with pen and paper the silver shields took 5 minutes

 

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1 hour ago, Jeff said:

This has already had over 2000 views, and I am always happy to record more material giving out specific advice or answering questions. 

At this point, I'd just settle for seeing you run a RuneQuest fight using the game's actual rules with minimal handwaving. Let's see you GM that Zorak Zorani Rune Lord fight, with trollkin or skeleton/zombie henchmen and an allied spirit, against a suitable group of PCs. Strike Ranks, tracking magic and Rune points, NPC allies providing magical support, paying attention to damage done to specific body locations, splitting attacks and parries, all according to Hoyle.

56 minutes ago, Rick Meints said:

From the Gamemaster perspective, you usually cannot focus on NPCs to that level of detail. You have many more to potentially understand and deploy during a scenario, let alone a whole campaign. PCs learn and improve the nuances of their one character over many sessions, while the GM might only have a Zorak Zoran Rune Lord and entourage for use in one encounter/battle, so understanding every detail about them is a mighty big task. The main antagonist can be better understood if they survive longer over a story arc, but they are probably the exception. Thus, in the end, a GM can't stay on top of 20+ NPCs if they try to understand them and utilize each of them like a PC would their one character. That amount of homework would be beyond the time, and probably interest, of 99.9% of GMs. Thus, the use of shortcuts. Nick B. summarizes them quite well. 

You are the game's publisher! You control what the rules of the game look like and require! If you believe that 99.9% of your audience would prefer generic stat blocks like the ones Nick described, then publish rules that match the way you play the game! How does this need to be said to the people with authority over the rules themselves? Publish the shortcuts yourselves if you use them! It's ludicrous that you're telling your fans to play by rules that you don't use.

Besides, I am not suggesting that a comprehensive, one-time publication of all possible tactical rules interactions needs to be published. All that's needed is a shift from describing opponents' or NPCs' tactics abstractly and without reference to the published rules describing those foes. New RQ GMs can learn durable, broad lessons from rules examples referencing a single, specific encounter. As they run more battles -and presumably have more fun running battles that use the rules they purchased - this knowledge will accrue and become second nature. They will start to learn the mindset that will allow them to create new, rules-based challenges on their own. It's how human beings learn how to do things: by watching others. But RQ veterans and many of RQG's scenario designers are too busy drawing owls.

53 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

You lost the last words of my quote, @EpicureanDM, doubtless in an unfortunate cut’n’paste accident (as I’m sure you’d hate to be disingenuous). They were: “That’s OK, they still get to play RuneQuest their way.”

I didn't miss them. I left them out to avoid compounding your disingenuousness. Let's not pretend that "wargamey sim-people who populate munchkin threads" doesn't contain any value judgments.

1 hour ago, Nick Brooke said:

Your advice, apparently, is that they should worry, but that sadly there aren’t any resources to help them, and that in consequence no new GM can enjoy playing RuneQuest in Glorantha.

My advice is that new RQ GMs shouldn't listen to abstract advice about using the game's rules to construct interesting challenges from people who reject those rules.

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Here is what I have to say about monsters grabbed from a thread about why I like RuneQuest from another forum (note that I use RQ1 from 1978):

I like that a pretty modest bestiary (64 entries) supplemented with the Gateway Bestiary (99 entries) is more than enough monsters, maybe make up an occasional monster. Optionally, get some of those Gateway Bestiary entries with a few extras from Trollpak and other supplements. Mostly you need the sources outside the rule book for more breadth of natural animals and things like giant spiders. A workable set of bestiary entries could probably be collated into something like 100 entries, reaching beyond that only for the occasional special case. Actually, a good working set is probably some 20-30 entries that are used most of the time, most of those taken from the rule book. More or less depending on how important natural animal encounters are to you.

I would say that at least 90% of the encounters I run use monsters from that list of 64 from the core book. Sometimes I drop a Mistress Race Troll or a Giant Spider. If I am using the encounter tables from Borderlands, a few things not in the core book might show up. Sometimes a scenario has a special monster in it. I used the Vough from the Gateway Bestiary for one encounter. I made up a monster when I dropped a Roll20 freebie token onto a Dyson Logos map I was using for a scenario. I have the RQG Bestiary and have perused it, but I don't know if I've actually used anything from it yet. I also have all the RQ3 supplements except Land of Ninja but haven't used anything from there in my current campaign.

Really, as has already been mentioned in this thread, the fact that ANY monster, particularly the more humanoid and fully intelligent species, can be used as the basis for a fully detailed NPC means you need a lot fewer monsters.

I have run fantasy campaigns with even fewer monsters.

The history of lots of monsters arises primarily from early D&D. First off, you needed the "humanoid of the week" because Orcs were 1 HD. Second, in the early days, there was a lot of angst about players knowing the monster stats, so GMs were constantly on the prowl for new monsters. I think that a different early mindset would have resulted in supplemental bestiaries being less popular. But now we have that culture, and game systems that don't provide get a ding from some folks. There's also a stronger desire for "universal" systems, so folks are looking for variety so they can match some particular setting.

And as is mentioned, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating additional bestiaries so long as they don't copy something they don't have permission for...

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5 minutes ago, ffilz said:

And as is mentioned, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating additional bestiaries so long as they don't copy something they don't have permission for...

I suspect that the broad stopping point for many people when it comes to this is simply not being confident in what constitutes a fair challenge, what the ranges of characteristics and AP and the like are for a given opponent for a given set of PCs. And there, of course, all too often the answer to requests for clarification is that there is no guideline for this, that RQ "isn't balanced", and that, by implication, you simply cannot create your own foes that people can fight fairly without playing vast quantities of RQ and learning by doing. 

Now, I've read RQ1/2 and a few other 70s-vintage games closely, so I know that's wrong, but there are several layers of failed communication going on making dissemination of this more difficult. 

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5 minutes ago, Eff said:

I suspect that the broad stopping point for many people when it comes to this is simply not being confident in what constitutes a fair challenge, what the ranges of characteristics and AP and the like are for a given opponent for a given set of PCs. And there, of course, all too often the answer to requests for clarification is that there is no guideline for this, that RQ "isn't balanced", and that, by implication, you simply cannot create your own foes that people can fight fairly without playing vast quantities of RQ and learning by doing. 

Now, I've read RQ1/2 and a few other 70s-vintage games closely, so I know that's wrong, but there are several layers of failed communication going on making dissemination of this more difficult. 

Write up a new monster, and when it kills all the PCs, say "oops" and have the players roll up new PCs. Now they know there's a creature out there they can strive to get what it takes to be able to fight it... 🙂

No, I get the need to understand balance, but for that, in RuneQuest, you need more than a bestiary. You need sample scenarios that give some idea where on the PC power curve they are. Note that that wasn't done back in the day, well, maybe Borderlands was a bit tailored towards beginning characters, and Apple Lane was also reasonably suitable for beginning characters.

RQ players should also remember that surrender is meaningful in the setting. Ransoms can get paid. Oh and ask Dave about Resurrection... Poor Dave, his PC died of fright enveloped by a Shade in his first session. His PC died I think twice more... Fortunately they were in the Big Rubble and Chalana Arroy healers were handy (and I was generous). Eventually his PC was the one whose butterfly net "invention" (wielded by another PC) bagged the floating skull Thanatar priest that had summoned the shade, his axe smashed the now trapped skull... After more than a year of play... We play mostly every other week for 2 hours. The skull had fled the Rubble for Dyskund caverns, connecting with the Thanatar temple there). Oh, and yea, I probably didn't run two Rune Priests and numerous Initiates to their full potential as pointed out, a GM will never gain the familiarity with his NPCs that players have with their PCs. Oh, and the skull was another made up "monster" created from a Roll20 freebie token... Cults of Terror doesn't mention anything like it, but it seemed like a fun thing that maybe a Thanatar Priest could achieve...

As to GM advice, yea, it would be cool if we could collect some GMs ways of running things. I'm sure my way is different from others, and I don't know that I could manage to get my way of running down on paper, but over nearly 45 years of running RuneQuest (RQ is the ONLY RPG I have run EVERY decade since I first bought it sometime in 1978, even counting all editions of D&D, I didn't run any D&D in the 1990s), I have definitely developed my own techniques.

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9 minutes ago, ffilz said:

Write up a new monster, and when it kills all the PCs, say "oops" and have the players roll up new PCs. Now they know there's a creature out there they can strive to get what it takes to be able to fight it... 🙂

This is actually not the worst idea! Especially if you're running RQ '78/RQ '80 "by the book" and thinking of it as a sword-and-sorcery kind of play experience where most characters will die ignominiously- on a tavern floor, in the gutters of the Big Rubble, knifed by a trollkin or baboon... If the monster kills off half the party, the other half tells the guild or cult they were doing this job for "no dice unless we get more help", or the players end up going deeper into debt with the free sages to figure out a way to defeat this horrible monster, or they try to reason with it if it's intelligent- there's a lot of room for creative play in that space. 

Now, a lot of people aren't looking for that experience, of course, and it does become its own problem if the "gigafrog" I made up is sitting in the way of The Plot or whatever. But you know, just throwing that whole thing out there.  

Quote

No, I get the need to understand balance, but for that, in RuneQuest, you need more than a bestiary. You need sample scenarios that give some idea where on the PC power curve they are. Note that that wasn't done back in the day, well, maybe Borderlands was a bit tailored towards beginning characters, and Apple Lane was also reasonably suitable for beginning characters.

RQ players should also remember that surrender is meaningful in the setting. Ransoms can get paid. Oh and ask Dave about Resurrection... Poor Dave, his PC died of fright enveloped by a Shade in his first session. His PC died I think twice more... Fortunately they were in the Big Rubble and Chalana Arroy healers were handy (and I was generous). Eventually his PC was the one whose butterfly net "invention" (wielded by another PC) bagged the floating skull Thanatar priest that had summoned the shade, his axe smashed the now trapped skull... After more than a year of play... We play mostly every other week for 2 hours. The skull had fled the Rubble for Dyskund caverns, connecting with the Thanatar temple there). Oh, and yea, I probably didn't run two Rune Priests and numerous Initiates to their full potential as pointed out, a GM will never gain the familiarity with his NPCs that players have with their PCs. Oh, and the skull was another made up "monster" created from a Roll20 freebie token... Cults of Terror doesn't mention anything like it, but it seemed like a fun thing that maybe a Thanatar Priest could achieve...

As to GM advice, yea, it would be cool if we could collect some GMs ways of running things. I'm sure my way is different from others, and I don't know that I could manage to get my way of running down on paper, but over nearly 45 years of running RuneQuest (RQ is the ONLY RPG I have run EVERY decade since I first bought it sometime in 1978, even counting all editions of D&D, I didn't run any D&D in the 1990s), I have definitely developed my own techniques.

I think some kind of project to collect these different play cultures for RQ '78/RQ '80 would be very interesting both in "academic" terms and in practical play terms- people have been exploring the space of what that little book and whatever addons they could find for it allowed, enabled, and encouraged for decades and I'm pretty sure they've found and made some really exciting and interesting things! 

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1 hour ago, Eff said:

I suspect that the broad stopping point for many people when it comes to this is simply not being confident in what constitutes a fair challenge, what the ranges of characteristics and AP and the like are for a given opponent for a given set of PCs. And there, of course, all too often the answer to requests for clarification is that there is no guideline for this, that RQ "isn't balanced", and that, by implication, you simply cannot create your own foes that people can fight fairly without playing vast quantities of RQ and learning by doing. 

This seems like one of those player vs character experience/knowledge issues. One possible solution is to allow the characters to make an INT check if they encounter something they've (especially the players) haven't seen before. I see no reason why characters trained in fighting (or who are just plain smart) couldn't make a quick observation to size up the opposition (at least on a superficial level.) Hell, even if the players don't think to ask, maybe just tell one of them to make the INT check. Those with a combat or Battle skill better than 60% (just to throw out a figure) get an INT x5 check, while the more civilian types roll vs INT x3. And, of course, anyone with the Second Sight spell is going to be able to assess the magical capabilities of an opponent. (In my game, Vishi Dunn's use of Second Sight on the big baddie in the Rainbow Mounds led to the party promptly retreating to get more help.) My point being that there are in-game means that players can use to assess the relative strength of an opponent. And while that's not perfect ("How was I supposed to know that baby goat could spit acid!"), it's better than nothing and puts more agency in the players' hands (and potentially creates fun, dramatic moments (e.g., when herding said baby goats turns into a fight for survival or when the aggressive, drunk beggar turns out to be a shamed, impoverished Rune Lord in exile.)

Overall, could RQ use more stock monsters? Maybe. There are large portions of Glorantha that haven't been fleshed out all that much beyond the Guide. It might be fun to introduce a couple of endemic races or critters (snake people!), but I suspect that the majority of new monsters in Glorantha would/should be one-offs, such as embodied spirits that are tied to particular areas or unique Chaos mutations. Will characters be able to handle them? That's up to the GM fashioning said enemies and what the GM is trying to achieve. Fairness? Well, give 'players/characters a chance to figure that out for themselves, as outlined above. 

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4 minutes ago, Beoferret said:

This seems like one of those player vs character experience/knowledge issues. One possible solution is to allow the characters to make an INT check if they encounter something they've (especially the players) haven't seen before. I see no reason why characters trained in fighting (or who are just plain smart) couldn't make a quick observation to size up the opposition (at least on a superficial level.) Hell, even if the players don't think to ask, maybe just tell one of them to make the INT check. Those with a combat or Battle skill better than 60% (just to throw out a figure) get an INT x5 check, while the more civilian types roll vs INT x3. And, of course, anyone with the Second Sight spell is going to be able to assess the magical capabilities of an opponent. (In my game, Vishi Dunn's use of Second Sight on the big baddie in the Rainbow Mounds led to the party promptly retreating to get more help.) My point being that there are in-game means that players can use to assess the relative strength of an opponent. And while that's not perfect ("How was I supposed to know that baby goat could spit acid!"), it's better than nothing and puts more agency in the players' hands (and potentially creates fun, dramatic moments (e.g., when herding said baby goats turns into a fight for survival or when the aggressive, drunk beggar turns out to be a shamed, impoverished Rune Lord in exile.)

Overall, could RQ use more stock monsters? Maybe. There are large portions of Glorantha that haven't been fleshed out all that much beyond the Guide. It might be fun to introduce a couple of endemic races or critters (snake people!), but I suspect that the majority of new monsters in Glorantha would/should be one-offs, such as embodied spirits that are tied to particular areas or unique Chaos mutations. Will characters be able to handle them? That's up to the GM fashioning said enemies and what the GM is trying to achieve. Fairness? Well, give 'players/characters a chance to figure that out for themselves, as outlined above. 

I think you may misunderstand me- the problem that I am outlining there is that the GM doesn't know, or feel confident about knowing, how powerful the monster is, and so doesn't know whether the players should feel confident or afraid or unsure when sizing up the monster. And they don't have particularly good sources of advice on how to make monsters available to them. This is itself more of a problem for RQG than for RQ1/2 because RQG characters take longer to make and are presented as much less expendable, so the instinct is to be less risky with them and killing them off due to a misapprehension means more inconvenience for everyone, putting more pressure on the GM to get the opposition right... or start pulling out the railroading playbook. 

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1 minute ago, Eff said:

I think you may misunderstand me- the problem that I am outlining there is that the GM doesn't know, or feel confident about knowing, how powerful the monster is, and so doesn't know whether the players should feel confident or afraid or unsure when sizing up the monster. And they don't have particularly good sources of advice on how to make monsters available to them. This is itself more of a problem for RQG than for RQ1/2 because RQG characters take longer to make and are presented as much less expendable, so the instinct is to be less risky with them and killing them off due to a misapprehension means more inconvenience for everyone, putting more pressure on the GM to get the opposition right... or start pulling out the railroading playbook. 

Funnily this is exactly why I feel a lot more comfortable creating a RuneQuest opponent on the fly than creating a HeroQuest or Questlines opponent on the fly. With RuneQuest I have a good sense of the probabilities which allow the player characters to hit or be hit, and how much damage to expect, and whether or not to be able to deal with the consequences, by having these steps in segments. With the opposed rolls of the narrative system, I have much less an idea how often the opposition will wipe the floor with the player characters (or rather force me to deal with die results that derail the story, rather than player decisions).

The most deadly encounter of my career GMing RuneQuest in scenarios of my own was two people trying to hunt a small herd of bisons from the front. One dead, one successful DI costing all but 2 POW, outside of the prepared scope of the scenario.

The most deadly scene I had when running a scenario as written was with RQG, applying night visibilty and slippery ground penalties in a hamlet plagued by a weird monster leaving crushed bodies behind, including a third of the party, caught by a whip (a weapon that only became available to players with the W&E Guide). I knew that monster was TPK bad news and inexperienced monster design when I saw its stats, but running a scenario from the text was a test.

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Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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On 2/19/2023 at 8:45 PM, General Ork said:

I like Glorantha, but honestly, cannot see myself ever rigorously following the game world, and game world, as I love adapting any game world significantly. So it will be in my game a parallel / multiverse version of Glorantha with Gateways into other fantasy worlds and even this Earth's ancient past.

Few of us follow the world view rigidly.

On 2/19/2023 at 8:45 PM, General Ork said:

This may horrify a Glorantha purist, but they will not be playing in my campaign and my players will have no issue.

In my last Gloranthan Campaign, a Baboon (Mello Yello) became the Golden Dragon Emperor of Dara Happa, so does that make me a Glorantha purist?

 

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2 hours ago, Andrew M said:

I am an experienced GM but for RQ I find I need less detailed stat blocks than for 3rd edition D+D/Pathfinder (I don't run 5th ed).  For anything except the most basic 1st level Orc warrior I need to know a lot to use it and have to have a full stat block, for every published adventure I redo all the stats and the stat block for a high level boss encounter is huge.

I do want to echo this, because coming from other trad games with features like defined power curves, experience levels, and HP scaling, designing enemies in RQG is both easier and more intuitive. I do wish the various tools and guidelines like "what does somebody's skill percentage in a weapon represent" were better organized and maybe even repeated in helpful locations, but then, organization is one of my biggest criticisms of RQG in general.

 

1 hour ago, Eff said:

I suspect that the broad stopping point for many people when it comes to this is simply not being confident in what constitutes a fair challenge, what the ranges of characteristics and AP and the like are for a given opponent for a given set of PCs. And there, of course, all too often the answer to requests for clarification is that there is no guideline for this, that RQ "isn't balanced", and that, by implication, you simply cannot create your own foes that people can fight fairly without playing vast quantities of RQ and learning by doing.

I understand and empathize with that lack of confidence and nervousness about putting your own work out on the table, and there's plenty to be said about how damaging it is that the trad space largely gave up on teaching new players straight from the book and instead adopted the "older cousin" model. But ultimately, people making their own content in a pen & paper game are taking up the role of game designers, and are going to have to get used to messing with numerical buttons and dials because that's part of the process. Everyone's going to break things, the most well-thought-out designs never survive first contact with players, and that's all OK.

And if you really fuck something up, the events of your game aren't inviolable. If your combat encounter kills somebody instantly and you suddenly realize it's mathematically absurd and borderline unwinnable, you can just say "my bad guys, let's roll back the clock a bit" and adjust things on the spot. I've been there and I've done that, it works out fine.

(I would still love to see some guidelines for RQG combat design and agree "just don't worry about it RQG isn't supposed to be balanced" isn't helpful. I just don't think it's a replacement for convincing people that they're just playing pretend with their friends, and it doesn't really matter if the pretend fight in the pretend game isn't perfectly tuned.)

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6 hours ago, EpicureanDM said:

..... My point is that if no one can practically demonstrate how to create these battles using the game's rules, ...

As several more distinguished people have written,

That is a separate subject from monster count and deserves its own thread,  which I will start shortly. 

I note that you seem to be asking for advice to the GM about how to balance battles and also how to  efficiently organize battles.

It is very possible that the forthcoming GM book will do that, since the old RQ2 book has "treasure factors" for balance and in the back is a "squad sheet" among several worksheets.

I have little advice on balance.  Maybe I don't even believe in balance. I do recommend mercy:  try not to doom the Adventurers and especially don't intentionally do Total Party Kills, which are not MGF.  Not very profound.

For efficient GMing, I value Andrew L. Montgomery's and Nick Brooke's advice, which I interpret as saying that each of a platoon of mooks does not need his own page in the GM's notes, while major NPCs should get more extensive detail.  It seems to work for me.  Some specifics in a while.

Edited by Squaredeal Sten
Typing; then linked to my thread.
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