How are Traits and Passions Working Out for People?

[creativehum]

A big addition to RQG from plain old RQ is the addition of Adventurers having runes out of the gate, and those runes being tagged with Personality Traits. And if an Adventurer has a high value in a rune, the Trait is often serves, per the rules, to drive behavior or put the character into moment of crisis that test an Adventurer's Trait, and thus test the runes.

Also, Passions have been added to the game, which can serve to inspire, but also demoralize an Adventurer.

Both of these features have been ported over from King Arthur Pendragon -- but altered to tie them to runes. I'm familiar how Passions and Traits in KAP (it is one of my top three favorite RPGs) and I think they work very well in that game.

I'm curious how they are working in play for people with RQG. How are they being used? Are they working straight out of the box or being tweaked? Are there any memorable moments anyone can share? Any thoughts in general about using them effectively? 

Thanks so much!

 

Edited December 10, 2018 by creativehum
found a typo

[womble]

My biggest problem with KAP Passions was the character-killing consequences of failure to succeed at Inspiration. RAW, RQG goes some way to reducing this, by making failure 'just' a mid-sized negative, with fumbles needed to really mess your day up. I'm personally still not comfortable with that level, and have toned down the consequences of failure a bit. The players seem to have grokked that high Passions and Runes have an effect on their Character's character, and are so far playing 'to type' (near breach of Hospitality when someone spoke dismissively of the 80 Loyalty Character's Tribe), and one of the players extremely conscious of potential divided Loyalties coming up.

I'm also expecting to be much more liberal than the RAW says with frequency of Rune and Passion, and especially Skill Augments.

[HreshtIronBorne]

I really love the whole passions and augments system. Like you have said I would like them to be applied a little more liberally than the RAW. That being said, the 'cooldowns' do sort of encourage players to use diverse skills, runes, and passions to augment themselves throughout a season's adventuring. 

[HreshtIronBorne]

I completely agree. Players in our group have a much better understanding of character motivations at a glance and and up roleplaying much more than in RQ3 days, most of the time. 

Edited December 10, 2018 by HreshtIronBorne

[g33k]

So far , I haven't gotten my main group to launch onto my RQG campaign (we have had one single game SESSION since I got the book, and used it for a standalone Ars Magica 1-shot game).

From playing the Broken Tower quickstart with the pre-gen PC's, feedback from the players has been overwhelmingly positive on these rules.  Some haven't mentioned it in feedback, but many have and of those mentioning Runes/Passions & Augments, they have ALL liked them and said things like (paraphrasing):  "I really like how much they help figure out WHO the character is, not just WHAT they are as a game-mechanical playing-piece."

[jajagappa]

On ‎12‎/‎10‎/‎2018 at 11:51 AM, creativehum said:

I'm curious how they are working in play for people with RQG. How are they being used? Are they working straight out of the box or being tweaked? Are there any memorable moments anyone can share? Any thoughts in general about using them effectively? 

Working very well!  We're using straight out of the box.

First memorable moment was in the Broken Tower scenario when Danakos appeared and Harmast recognized him as a Greydog, triggering a Hate(Greydog) roll (player made that decision without my prodding), and went into a killing frenzy that quickly brought down that foe.

Had a good conflict of Loyalties with one character recently, a Balazaring mercenary working for the Colymar, where he had to choose between Devotion(Yelmalio) and upholding his mercenary duties in the manner of his god (i.e. continue with the rest of the party) and his newfound Devotion(the Star Lady Surisiba).  Devotion to Yelmalio clearly won out.

But my favorite so far was when the same Balazaring, confronted by the horrors of Chaos, rolled a 1 on his Fear (Chaotic Features) passion.  In good CoC fashion, I had that trigger the equivalent result on the Madness rune spell table (i.e. went Insane) though I ended up rolling for an effect from the Pulp Cthulhu Bout of Madness table rather than the Insanity table in RQG.  The result was an Alter Ego emerging who thinks of himself as Bijiif the Ash (i.e. Yelm in the Underworld) - and who actually has Fire powers and can only speak/understand Firespeech!  

[Rob Darvall]

They work wonderfully. I've house ruled that if the piper (bagpipes) succeeds everyone gets +5%  on their first strike. So now the party accompanies any frontal charge with piping (and I get to haul out my bagpipe cds).

[davecake]

I like them. I like to keep the Passions pretty fluid - a lot of the time they go up or down by more than a skill roll would (certainly major events get you bumps up and down like Reputation does), and it is pretty easy to gain a new passion from a significant event. 

I have a few quibbles - Man and Beast being opposed doesn't really work for me well, and sometimes you need to note that an elemental Rune is really a sub-rune - but mostly the Runes work very well. 

[Darius West]

All I have seen of passions so far was when in a tournament, our Lhankor Mhy character tried to use her loyalty to the tribe to improve her Identify Runes Sorcery spell (she was bad at the spell, but felt the results were important to the tribe as they could reveal a criminal).  The roll failed and she went from having a 25% chance to cast the spell to a 5% chance, which she also failed.  Thankfully our hunter was able to determine the malefactor with a divination.

The mechanics of passions are easy to understand and use, and I personally think the whole Rune based mechanics are a great addition to the game, as what could be wrong about making RuneQuest more about sorta questing, you know... for runes?

Edited December 21, 2018 by Darius West