Subject: RQ Discussions 21 First Distribution: July 9, 1991 ====================================================================== From: walters@Metaphor.COM (Tim Walters) Subject: Message for discussion article I have just moved to the San Francisco Bay area and would like to get involved in a RuneQuest campaign. I am an experienced player, going back to RQ I, but I haven't played for several years. If anyone is running a campaign and could use another player, please let me know. Tim walters@metaphor.com (415) 961-3600 x462 (daytime) [As should be obvious by now, I have no aversion to putting RQ "personals" into discussion articles, so if you're looking for a campaign or for players, submit away...--ACB] ====================================================================== From: paul@minerva.phyast.pitt.edu (Paul Reilly) Subject: Re: RQ discussion 19 I very much liked the "Byzantine RQ" by Patrick Waterson & Michael O'Brien; they really seem to have a handle on Byzantine culture. I think that the best way to get people into the culture being simulated is for the game- system to be driven by things valuable to that culture; the "Byz. Pack" rules for religion seem to do this. Other examples of this are the games Pendragon (perhaps the best example) and to some extent RQ II's cults system. Runic Sorcery: I also composed a Runic Sorcery system for my game; it was not as extensive and also not as powerful. But in any case more use of the Runes tends to give a more Gloranthan feel to the magic system, all to the good. User/Target Conditions (question by Andrew Bell): This is a toughie, and I tend to wish that either this had not been included or had been more spelled out. In my campaign I tend to make people "spell out" the condition using Gloranthan Runes and a reasonable explanation of how they are to be interpreted. User conditions are less of a problem and can be pretty explicit. Also one can make good use of the laws of Similarity and Contagion. We haven't used Target Conditions much (even for NPC-created items) and thus haven't explored this area enough. Using the Runic system though, one could build up a device that triggered occasionally quite wrongly; for example one to Glow when "anyone who would like the Red Moon Goddess and the Lunar armies defeated" might be built of Moon, Illusion, Death, and Disorder and wind up triggering when a drunken Lunar soldier ready for brawling comes by. Basically the Targets that I would allow for clear use would be things like "Initiates of a Death cult" or "People of the bloodline of the person whose hair is contained in the hilt of this sword", etc. Things like the target's state of mind should be impossible to detect unless the state of mind has a terribly strong Runic affinity, e.g., "People who are Berserking". ====================================================================== From: Andrew Bell (bell@cs.unc.edu) Subject: Ken McKinney's Sorcery It seems to me that there are two fundamental _game_balance_ problems with the default sorcery system, and your system mainly addresses one of them. First, there is no difference in difficulty between casting a weak spell and a powerful one, so beginning sorcerers will be as incompetent at casting damage boost 1 as damage boost 18. Thus, the DB 18 is a viable option for any sorcerer who can garner the necessary MPs. Your system addresses this issue to some extent, by limiting the size of spells by one's runic skill. Some sort of minus to the skill for larger spells might be a little "smoother", as there wouldn't be this magical threshold beyond which a character can't cast a spell but below which any level of casting is easy. A way to do this might be to replace: A sorcerer may put as many points of Law into a spell as his Law percentage divided by 5. with: A sorcerer may put as many points of Law into a spell as his Law percentage divided by 10 without casting penalty. Each additional point of Law reduces the casting chance by 5% (10%?). The second major problem is that if you can cast a powerful spell, there's little that prevents you from doing so lots of times. For example, if you can cast one damage boost 5 with duration 10, every ally you have will soon have that spell on every weapon. I don't see how your system addresses that beyond making it impossible for beginning sorcerers to behave in this fashion by limiting how powerful a spell they can cast. My feeling is that the best approach to the latter is to make long duration spells difficult to cast by requiring something "expensive" driving them, be it some sort of power-created item, a bound spirit with the appropriate runic associations, a (very) large number of magic points, a long ritual, or something of that nature. Otherwise, you will always be seeing this threshold of the sorcerer either can't cast the spell at all, or can cast it for everyone. Don't misinterpret my remarks -- I think there's a lot of good ideas in your system, and I'd like to see it developed. I may start a campaign soon using a lot of the ideas there. I'd also be interested in seeing rules for casting spells of less than 10 minutes duration -- allowing a caster to trade some duration for some intensity or range. ====================================================================== The RuneQuest(tm) mailing list is a courtesy of Andrew Bell. All opinions and material above are the responsibility of the originator, and copyrights are held by them. Unless specified in the specific article, all RQ Digest material is freely redistributable on a not-for-profit basis as long as author credit is included. RuneQuest is a trademark of Chaosium, Inc. Send submissions, mailing list changes, requests for old article lists, etc. to: bell@cs.unc.edu ...!mcnc!unc!bell Request old articles by volume number and issue number.