From: owner-rq-rules-digest To: rq-rules-digest@hops.wharton.upenn.edu Subject: RQ Rules Digest: V1 #13 Reply-To: rq-rules Errors-To: owner-rq-rules-digest Precedence: bulk Content-Return: Prohibited Return-Path: owner-rq-rules-digest RQ Rules Digest: Monday, 14 November 1994 Volume 01 : Number 013 RULES OF THE ROAD 1. Do not include large sections of a message in your reply. Especially not to say "Yeah, I agree." Those who do will be lynched. 2. Use an appropriate Subject line. RQR: will be prepended to it. 3. Do not engage in a point-by-point analysis or rebuttal of another person's message. It is too confusing for others to follow, qualifies as nit-picking, and it usually leads to flame wars. 4. There is no number 4. TABLE OF CONTENTS RQR: TAP spells. Re: RQR: TAP spells. RQR: Replies about Spirits, mainly ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: PAUL POFANDT Date: Mon, 14 Nov 94 10:28:57 +1000 Subject: RQR: TAP spells. G'day I don't recall any recent discussion on the series of TAP sorcery spells but ... I guess I'm probably not alone in thinking that the TAP spells are largely overpowered. Simply making the spells moraly wrong or rare doesn't cut it in my book. Other GMs may find things different but I know that my players would want the spells no mater what the moral implications are (If I let them have it). Just a suggestion, but to tone down the power of the spells, I'd suggest the following: Characteristic loss from the TAP spell last only for as long as the duration of the spell. Death only occurs if a charateristic is tapped down to 0 before the spell expires. When the spell expires, charateristics are fully regained with the exception of one point. This would make it simmilar to the spell REDUCE CHAR. but with imoral overtones. Repeated use of TAPPING the characteristics that define a persons spirit (INT,POW) could cause a form of Vampirism (loss of your own POW) in people. I would suggest that items that rely on tapping, gain a form of sentience after years (decades, centuries) of absorbing other peoples POW and INT. Any comments? Paul. ------------------------------ From: Graeme A Lindsell Date: Mon, 14 Nov 1994 13:19:20 +1100 (EST) Subject: Re: RQR: TAP spells. Paul Pofandt writes >I guess I'm probably not alone in thinking that the TAP spells are largely >overpowered. Simply making the spells moraly wrong or rare doesn't cut it in my book. I believe they are meant to be very powerful. If they are simply immoral then I agree with you; however, a section of Griffin Mountain implies that use of Tap taints the user with chaos. In Glorantha (though perhaps not in other worlds) this is more than simply immoral: it means large sections of society are now dedicated to the user's death. >Just a suggestion, but to tone down the power of the spells, I'd suggest the >following: >Characteristic loss from the TAP spell last only for as long as the duration >of the spell. Death only occurs if a charateristic is tapped down to 0 >before the spell expires. When the spell expires, charateristics are fully >regained with the exception of one point. This doesn't make the spell very much weaker IMO. The great power of Tap isn't that you can destroy other people's characteristics (as a touch-range spell thisis pretty useless in combat) but that you can increase your current MP to double your POW, making you next to immune to magic attacks from people of your POW range. What you've just done is make it morally easier to do that. The big disadvantage of Tap IMO is that you have to waste a lost of characteristics to reap the big rewards, and your suggestion removes that. I thought that the current rules are that a characteristic can't be Tapped beneath 1, so that you can't kill someone directly with Tap. Is your suggestion that it now can meant to be a change in the rules for Tap, or have I got this wrong? I tend to think Sorcery should be completely rebuilt rather than just tweaked; as I'm inclined towards Paul Reilly's Presence system I'd like to see Tap built into that. Perhaps a spell that allows you to use other peoples POW as extra Presence, at the cost of slowing destroying their POW. Graeme Lindsell ------------------------------ From: Graeme A Lindsell Date: Mon, 14 Nov 1994 16:08:21 +1100 (EST) Subject: RQR: Replies about Spirits, mainly Brandon Brylawski writes: >Perhaps the rule should use POW in all cases, rather than MPs. and goes on to suggest: >Spirit Combat is performed like regular combat, except that one's attack is >equal to POW x 5%, and one's defense is equal to POW x 5%. >A character being attacked who does not actively defend uses half this >percentage. Having low magic points decreases your skills: for every full >POW/4 mps cast/lost, attack and defense skill are at -10%. Why have any penalty for MP loss at all? As you said yourself, there is no reduction in combat skills for overall HP loss. It's certainly easier to keep have a single value instead of keeping track of MP loss, and I think having low MP is dangerous enough, with the extra MP loss you propose. Bryan J. Maloney writes: >my first reaction to seeing spirit >combat. When I found out that it was ten times as fast as melee combat in >the old RQ rules, I immediately thought--AHA! It's just like psionic combat >from D&D. Thinking about this, I decided that I would prefer spirit combat to be much _slower_ than ordinary combat, taking hours or days rather than seconds. This combat would appear to the character as dreams, odd and bizzare emotional reactions, visions etc, that the GM could have fun describing. This would require a few changes (ie no MP recovery during the combat itself, the spells would have to change as their current duration is much shorter than the length of these combats), but I like the feel of this more, making things a bit more stately, and turning spirits into things used to curse people rather than to blow them away in combat. It would also give players time to seek aid. and says re: Spirit Magic >They're these undefined thingies that do stuff for you, and >you either have one or you don't You can't copy it to give to somebody else. I though that the RQ3 rules were that once you knew the name of a spell spirit you could use it to teach any number of people that spell - as long as they could defeat it in spirit combat. Graeme Lindsell ------------------------------ End of RQ Rules Digest: V1 #13 ****************************** This is the bottom of the RuneQuest Rules Digest. RuneQuest is a trademark of Avalon Hill, and Glorantha is a trademark of Chaosium. With the exception of previously copyrighted material, unless specified otherwise all text in this digest is copyright by the author or authors, with rights granted to copy for personal use, to excerpt in reviews and replies, and to archive unchanged for electronic retrieval. 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