From: owner-rq-rules-digest To: rq-rules-digest@hops.wharton.upenn.edu Subject: RQ Rules Digest: V1 #121 Reply-To: rq-rules Errors-To: owner-rq-rules-digest Precedence: bulk Content-Return: Prohibited Return-Path: owner-rq-rules-digest RQ Rules Digest: Thursday, 2 March 1995 Volume 01 : Number 121 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 David Cake Towards a Generic RuneQuest Guy_Robinson.sbd-e@rx.xerox. Towards a Generic RuneQuest Mike Cule Castles and RunePower owner-rq-rules@hops.wharton. DI and DIce Bryan J. Maloney Calling the Vatican a Rune? ANDOVER@delphi.com DI and Dice Bryan J. Maloney We must purge RQ of Gloranthisms Kirsten C. Jacobus Suggestions for design directions ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: davidc@cs.uwa.edu.au (David Cake) Date: Thu, 2 Mar 1995 16:52:47 +0800 Subject: Re: Towards a Generic RuneQuest >Received: by eccles.wgc.rx.xerox.com (4.1/SMI-4.0) id AA04613; Wed, 1 Mar >95 13:40:24 GMT > >As the topic has wandered away from the Great Compromise I have >changed the title in this reply to David Cake. > On an aside, is it only Guy and I who are interested in these questions? Or are the rest of you afraid of us? or are we that boring? >The reason I am keen on Runes is that they have the potential to be >flexible, fallable and differ vastly from culture to culture. I am >simply loathed to see a copy of RuneQuest throw away such a valuable >concept that be used to express the why in non-concrete terms. > Except 'Runes' are inappropriate for some cultures. I believe that runes actually make it into the rules as such only once, where it mentions writing runes as part of the enchaning process. I think even this is too much. In cultures which do not have a written form of the language, for example, they can still enchant objects. The concept of Runes, even broadened to include not only written runes, but magical iconography in general, is still often inappropriate. In some cultures enchanting is primarily the combination and consecration of unusual ingredients, with no writing of any kind involved. In some cultures magical knowledge is passed in the form of dances or songs. Now, you can simply say that all these things are 'Runes', but that broadens the concept to the point of near uselessness. More importantly, I suspect that if you try and explain this idea in the book, it is going to get pretentious and confusing. Of course, magical effects of written characters are common as well - - the Futhark, Chinese calligraphy, the Khaballa. But it is still a cultural artifact that has no place being written into a generic roleplaying game. >However I would go as far to suggest that guidelines might exist to >detail the growth and decline of cults and shamantic groups as the >MPs and Pow acquired through sacrifice and worship accumilate or >expire. This would be usefull for generic rq as it might lack a >background from which to extract examples of this from. > It would be nice. I would rather see it in even more abstract terms (ie what you can do with a supply of POW and MPs, whether the intent is worshipful or not). But it is also not an essential element. Generally, things that only become an issue to players when a campaign has significantly progressed are not essential because by that stage the GM should be able to wing it. There is also a lingering doubt that any such rules would be targetted by powergamers 'OK, I order all my slaves to pray for me', unless well written. > >As a pragmatist I would say that gods wandering the battle fields >deflecting blows while invisible and Zeus or Odin tricking people >while in another form or disguised are not good examples of divine >intervention. They are more likely to be excuses for why the gods >not not manifest so regularily. > But I think we have to agree that the Greek Gods manifest in person and cause trouble at least occasionally, and for people in some campaigns it is appropriate that they do so. >I view the Great Compromise as one of those excuses. > Sure. But it is a rule of the campaign, not the game. People are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves how often the gods turn up without help from us. I don't think that they even need suggestions. If people are working in some known world, they already know what the gods do, and if they want to make their own, hopefully they have at least this much creativity. In fact, I personally think the Great Compromise is a relatively lame version of events, and some Gloranthan cultures don't even believe in it for that matter. > >I agree that we should not be telling people. Instead a we should be >offering the rich set of conceptual tools that RuneQuest has fostered >to help people build a better world with ambigious meta-physics, or >at least the possibility of this being introduced at a later date. > In fact, I personally think the Great Compromise is a relatively lame version of events, and some Gloranthan cultures don't even believe in it for that matter. RuneQuest myth is still pretty limited in many respects compared to the complexity surrounding many real world mythologies. Even a meta-meta-physics (we are not going to define your metaphysics, but we think you should keep it ambiguous) is too much for us to say. Its more work for us, that takes up space in the game, and adds very little. I don't think GM notes about designing a meta-physics is really a high priority - the few people that really care about it are probably not going to be satisifed with it anyway. >For although the explaination that `they live over there` might be >the surface version, if we look at religions that exist now the >myths and reasons that account for seperation of gods and men are >complex as any decent theologian will be able to explain. > In some they are, in some they are pretty simple. More complex religions have more complex theologies, but you can't generalise about such things. Religions without fulltime theologians tend to be a lot simpler! >Surely it is better to allow the GM to retain the religious ambiguity >of RuneQuest and suggest something richer than Dieties and Demigods? Certainly. We are always going to 'allow' it. I am just saying that we should let them have unambiguous religious truth too, if they would rather, and we shouldn't waste space telling them what we like. Generic means giving people rules, and as a lesser campaign priority some campaign building blocks to use or ignore. IMHO this particular set of building blocks is at a very low priority next to things like far more complete creature lists, or equipment lists, or primers on medieval economics - precisely because most GMs will have a perfectly working metaphysics anyway unless you actually encourage them to do the wrong thing (by, say, giving them a big book full of gods statistics, with almost no information about their worship). Cheers Dave ------------------------------ From: Guy_Robinson.sbd-e@rx.xerox.com Date: Thu, 2 Mar 1995 03:26:47 PST Subject: Re: Towards a Generic RuneQuest Received: by eccles.wgc.rx.xerox.com (4.1/SMI-4.0) id AA05537; Thu, 2 Mar 95 11:26:17 GMT The fearsome David Cake wrote in reply to my terrifying post: >The concept of Runes, even broadened to include not only written >runes, but magical iconography in general, is still often >inappropriate. In some cultures enchanting is primarily the >combination and consecration of unusual ingredients, with no >writing of any kind involved. In some cultures magical knowledge >is passed in the form of dances or songs. Missing out Runes in generic RuneQuest would be like missing out the Eternal Champion in a generic Eternal Champion game. The game needs them to avoid confusion over why the game has such a name. They are also usefull concepts that generic RQ4 looks like they will be able to inherit. Pending, of course, the whims of the Crimson Greg. What the Runes represent to me is not the specific Glorantha set that are used in Dragon Pass but a graphic means of showing a division of reality that appears to shape the reality it describes. Just as the classic divison of the elements into earth, wind, fire and water shaped our opinions of matter and played a part in the medieaval practicises of alchemy. Alchemy was also shaped by Christian ideas of redemption, greek and roman mysticism and astrology. I think Runes are a pretty good fit to Western mythology and how the gods are viewed. They are not perfect but they are good enough. In the real world we tend to say a god of fertilty, in RQ we say a god associated with the fertility rune. I use fertility as it is a common legend used to describe gods in comparative studies of ancient religions. If the game we were talking about was a hypothetical Mythic FUDGE then you would be right to suggest that there should be no special status as Runes except in cultures that value them specifically, or a least I would agree with you. But what we are talking about is not FUDGE nor GURPS but it is RuneQuest. We might as well use the Runes rather than demote them to a foot note or a remark in a margin. Sorry I did not have the time for a fuller reply on the other subjects you raised and commented on, Guy Robinson ------------------------------ From: Mike Cule Date: Thu, 02 Mar 95 12:56:15 GMT Subject: Castles and RunePower To make myself less ambiguous: I meant in my Priestly Qualifications post that priests should have some level of 'pre-sacrificed' POW which would become reusable after they are consecrated. And on Castles: I would assume that in GLorantha (and other worlds where sorcery is a concomitant of civilisation) that their design would change to take full advantage of the capabilities of wizards. See the socerer's tower in Strangers in Prax for an example. Mike Cule ------------------------------ From: owner-rq-rules@hops.wharton.upenn.edu Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 15:37:41 -0500 Subject: Re: DI and DIce > The GM should put himself in the god's > shoes and simply decide if the player deserves help or not, and then, if > the DI is granted, extract whatever compensation from the player the the > god deems appropriate. To me it just doesn't make any sense for god's to > be dependant on dice rolls A strong argument for the rolled DI is that it keeps hard feelings to a minimum. Does you favorite character teleport to safety or is he consumed by the cacodaemon. An 85, too bad, you die, a 22 congrats you live! What you are suggesting would, IMHO, result in automatically successful DI for low-power effects and tough choices for the high power ones. I am not disagree ing with you, but your suggestion would certainly increase the effects of the gods in the world. We could break the decision into two parts, one where a die roll is made by the PC for the success of the DI, and two, where the god decides how to aid the PC and what that will cost him. One tweak might be that the PC can state the number of POW points he/she sacrifices in the DI, and this would effect the DIe roll & results. ------------------------------ From: jacobus@sonata.cc.purdue.edu (Bryan J. Maloney) Date: Thu, 2 Mar 95 12:28:54 -0500 Subject: Calling the Vatican a Rune? No matter how hard I try, I just cannot seriously consider the statue of Christ at Rio de Janiero [sic] a "rune". A crucifix is not a "rune", either, unless you want to stretch "rune" so far as to make it meaningless. A cross or a chi-rho is a "rune", and I'm happy to consider them as such. Just because the game is called "RuneQuest" doesn't mean that we have to cram the vast richness of all religious iconography into runes and thus defenestrate this bounty. This is not to say that I advocate abandoning runes. After all, runes do have the following function: They act as the simplest representation of the symbology of a religion and/or a system of mysticism. They are the most easily reproduced of an iconography's elements. They are the most easily combined of an iconography's elements. This is why they are so widely used. They are the "entry way" as it were, into a symbolic language, but they are not the end-all and be-all of that language. Evidently, people seem to believe that my discomfort at making runes the end-all and be-all of a symbolic language is equal to advocating that runes be eliminated altogether. I'm not a binary digital thinker, thank you very much. I'll post a longer essay as to how "runes" can fit into a general NON-GLORANTHA system a little later. ------------------------------ From: ANDOVER@delphi.com Date: Thu, 02 Mar 1995 12:39:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: DI and Dice The point about a GM decision as to what the God would decide is that it is TOO arbitrary. OK, now I decide whether your character lives or dies! BOOM! Can't think of anything better designed to disrupt a campaign! Also, the ways of the Gods are SUPPOSED to be mysterious: ideally, even to the GM! The best way to reflect this mystery is chance. Gee, why did the God decide to save Ivar the Dirty but not Helga the Pious: there must be SOME reAson behind it, but not one obvious to mere mortals! POW is a good measure to base it on, because it is the stat that measures your connection to the universe and the Gods. I would add some bonus effect if wanted: AD & D (chuckle) gives a bonus to people who are on a mission for their God! Jim Chapin ------------------------------ From: jacobus@sonata.cc.purdue.edu (Bryan J. Maloney) Date: Thu, 2 Mar 95 12:43:02 -0500 Subject: We must purge RQ of Gloranthisms Listen, a decision needs to be made (and it will be made by people not regularly posting to this list): Will RQ4 really be a widely useful fantasy game or will it be another RQ3, only superficially generic but shot through with Gloranthan assumptions (the "cult" of individual gods defining all religions--all religions are just parallel monotheisms, an innate hostility written into sorcery for spirit magic and divine magic, an innate hostility written into divine magic for sorcery, etc.) I don't care that Runes as they appear in Glorantha are shot through with Christian mysticism and Platonism. What if I don't want to have a Platonic world? I'm SICK of Platonic assumptions underlying ALL fantasy games on the market. What's wrong with having a game that PERMITS Platonism but doesn't REQUIRE it? Why not have RuneQuest have rules to PERMIT the extensive use of "runes" and to FACILITATE this use? Why make them mandatory? After all, even Dungeons and Dragons is not written so that you are required to have dragons and scoot around in dungeons. I've played in unmodified, by the book AD&D campaigns in which there was not one dragon nor one dungeon. Yes, the rules are there to FACILITATE the use of these "title elements" but the game is not written so that you are REQUIRED to use the "title elements". I recall that I was one of the loudest voices on the playtest list against the release of RQ4 as a "generic" fantasy game. This is because I was of the opinion that it was liketly to be a halfway-measure--a botch job that would do a mediocre Glorantha and do everything else poorly. Now that a setting-independent RuneQuest is required by outside forces, I will do my utmost to make sure that it is done right, because if it isn't, RQ will go down. If RQ isn't done right, if it isn't a game that can be readily transported BY STARTING GAMEMASTERS WHO HAVE MUCH LESS SKILL AND CONFIDENCE THAN THE FOLKS ON THIS LIST to a plethora of settings, I doubt it will sell well enough to stay on the market. I like the idea of rules that FACILITATE the use of "runes". I heartily dislike the idea of rules that end up REQUIRING the use of "runes". I also dislike false optionality even more. What is false optionality? The hacks at White Wolf did a perfect job of this: They claim that their "Archetypes" for character personalities are absolutely "optional". Then, they make those very same "optional" archetypes the ONLY means by which a character can regain the "willpower" attribute during play. They may have fixed this, but that level of incompetence was simply too much for me. ------------------------------ From: jacobus@sonata.cc.purdue.edu (Kirsten C. Jacobus) Date: Thu, 2 Mar 95 14:29:46 -0500 Subject: Suggestions for design directions Let us look at the situation that now exists for the future of commercial RuneQuest. RuneQuest is planned to be released as two books. The first, RuneQuest, is to be the actual rules of the game. The second, Adventures in Glorantha, is to be the Glorantha setting for use with RuneQuest. On the surface, this seems simple enough, but it covers some basic design decisions that must be addressed. The Chinese crisis, as it were, that this provides us should not be wasted. I see too much short-sightedness in the advice on this list. I understand the origin of it, but I do not agree with it. If one looks at the structure now imposed on the release of RQ4, one can see a great opportunity for exploiting two different design philosophies to their best potential. Oliver et cie. are now required to produce a RuneQuest that is not tied to Glorantha. They should take this opportunity to produce a RuneQuest that does not _need_ to be tied to Glorantha to be viable. That is, they should produce a game of which RuneQuest+Adventures in Glorantha is a viable subset but is not the _defining subset_. What does this mean in terms of design philsophy? _RuneQuest_ must be an *enabling* work. It will be the job of _Adventures in Glorantha_ to be the *restricting* work. One example of where this design philosophy was not followed in RQIII is the area of shamans vs. priests vs. sorcerers. In the RQIII rules, we are told that shamans cannot be priests. This is an absolute restriction. We are told that sorcerers cannot become initiates, another absolute restriction. Then we get to Glorantha products and we’re tossed cults with shamans as priests and sorcerers as initiates--Whathafah? If the design philosophy I advocate had been followed, the core RQ rules would have given a SYSTEMATIC treatment of the possibilities of interaction vis-a-vis the three types of magical practitioners and noted that it in some worlds it might not be common for there to be much mixing. Then the Glorantha products would state the generally more restrictive rule that applies to Glorantha. In a nutshell, RuneQuest should be the enabling product. It should present possible choices for a gamemaster in designing and running his own world. Some restrictions are necessary within the framework of the rules, but the assumptions underlying them should both be minimized and made explicit. This will make it easier for a gamemaster to alter the rules while avoiding unforseen repercussions. The vast majority of games have a “that’s how it is, tough shit” presentation. They never bother to explain their assumptions. What should this RuneQuest have? First, it needs to do “the usual”, the persona descriptor language, the persona generation functions, the persona alteration functions, and the environmental interaction functions. (Those are “character rules”, “experience”, and “everything else”.) The Olivians are competent enough at that, and the RQ version of BRP is fairly solid on those points. Those are also the boring parts of the game, the ones for which design choices are fairly easy. They aren’t what makes RuneQuest unique. What makes RQ unique? Is it runes? Is it Glorantha? If it’s either of these, then RQ is doomed, let’s have a funeral. I say that it isn’t, nor need it be. What makes it unique, through its current manifestation of Glorantha, is the way that it interacts with a world. That is, RuneQuest addresses basic metaphysical questions of a world and makes those questions an important part of ordinary play. The new RuneQuest needs to _explicitly_ do what it had only heretofore been _implicitly_ doing. RuneQuest must include a way of walking a gamemaster through the creation of the metaphysics of his own world, answering--or choosing not to answer-- basic questions of existence for his setting. Part of this will, of course, be design of religious structures. Part of that will, of course, be iconography, part of iconography is runes. RuneQuest needs to give the gamemaster guides for how to have his OWN metaphysical decisions be reflected in ordinary game play. RQ also needs to address questions of culture, society, history, and ecology in this manner. That is what the _RuneQuest_ book should do. It doesn’t need to be exhaustive. It doesn’t need to be a textbook (although a short bibliography in those topics would be a great aid to many gamemasters). What it needs to to is walk a gamemaster through the fundamental questions of his world in many spheres and give a way to apply the generic rules to specific settings. It is the job of specific worldbooks, like Adventures in Glorantha, to restrict these choices to a single interpretation. That is, AiG would present a world for which the metaphysical, cultural, historical, ecological, etc. choices had already been made, and it will have the special restrictions on the general RuneQuest rules that are a result of these decisions. However, I must warn the designers that if they rely only on RQ+AiG to rope in zillions of new folks, they’re doomed. They need another venue, one that is more accessible (and with lots of uncopyrighted source material). This is one reason why I’m such a heavy advocate of Fantasy Earth. Thus, RQ by itself would be a great tool for an experienced GM. RQ+AiG would be great for the people who want to get into Glorantha. RQ+Fantasy Earth would be a great venue for people who want a solid game system and a setting with a much flatter learning curve than Glorantha has. Let’s face it, when you try to explain what a “Praxian” is, you have to get into all kinds of details before you get even a flicker of understanding. Say “Viking” or “Roman”, on the other hand, and most USA gamers will immediately have SOME kind of handle on the situation. Then there’s the question of AH’s marketing of the whole deal, and I am nervous... ------------------------------ End of RQ Rules Digest: V1 #121 ******************************* 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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