From: owner-rq-rules-digest To: rq-rules-digest@hops.wharton.upenn.edu Subject: RQ Rules Digest: V1 #143 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, 13 March 1995 Volume 01 : Number 143 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. 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 Steven E Barnes Runepower: variant rules Colin Watson Character Classes. . . Loren Miller Runepower quibbles Bruce Lionel Mason Disrupting walls Bruce Lionel Mason +5%/MP; Rune Power Bryan J. Maloney The tediously complicated initial skill ta Bryan J. Maloney Hero does NOT use a simple, elegant progre SPerrin@aol.com Disrupting walls, etc SPerrin@aol.com Runepower: variant rulesQ Tim Leask RunePower SPerrin@aol.com RunePower ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: akuma@netcom.com (Steven E Barnes) Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 09:12:29 -0800 Subject: Re: Runepower: variant rules First off, I realized sometime after posting my last message, that I shouldn't speak for the rest of the advocates of Runepower. In fact, I'm not sure I've even read the original article. *I* think stacking limits are required. I don't know about everyone else. >I'm with Rose and not Barnes on runepower. By the way, Steve, since you >don't care what the rules are, why bother to comment on them? > >I note that many of the players on this line say that they all use >their own rules and make up their own scenarios. For the record, I >have almost exclusively used published rules and published scenarios, so >I do care what the rules say. I guess the problem is that the this list is serving two purposes: one is to help playtest the next edition of RQ. The other is to discuss RQ rules in general, including varients and house rules. >I see that Runepower solves the problem of Shield 20 by giving it to >everyone. (Thoigh I am tempted to return to my old line about how all >you guys get all these rune level characters through normal play! In 15 >years NONE of our characters has reached rune status: they die, they lose >things or they just die.) Stacking limits is a kludgy way of doing >something that doesn't need to be done. You could alternately make >people sacrifice fully every time they want to move up: i.e. Shield 4 >costs 4 points even if you have Shield 3. Of course that assumes no >Runepower! Does anyone REALLY think that divine magic is too weak? The RQ2 stacking limit was kludgy, in that the designers picked an arbitrary number out of a hat. RQ:AiG has sensible limits placed on battlemagic. The limit varies, depending on cult rank, and on the focus of the god. Thus Humakt worshippers are real good at casting Bladesharp, but not so good at healing. This idea can be applied to Divine magic stacking in some way. Regarding power progression: In the main campaign I've played in for a similar time period, my experiences were similar. On the other hand, different gaming groups would game intensively, and develop Rune Lords in under a year. No, they weren't munchkins either. - -steve ------------------------------ From: Colin Watson Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 18:01:14 GMT Subject: Re: Character Classes. . . __________ Kevin Rose sez: > The skill restrictions are designed to enforce what a skilled GM can do by > himself, which is to force a PC priest (or other targeted group) to not > spend his time worrying about things that are no longer his primary > concern. For example, Combat skills. Why can't the rules just present such good advice without imposing arbitrary limits? (Limits which "skilled GM" and munchkin alike are going to ignore anyway.) Why not just explicitly say that priests etc. usually have time commitments which may restrict them in training certain skills in certain cultures. Setting an arbitrary DEX*n limit is not helping anyone. If we're dealing with some notional "moronic-newbie-GM" who is incapable of judging limits for his players why don't we just explicitly point out the pitfalls to this poor unfortunate. Otherwise he's going to resent being sold a dummy when, after striving to the heady-heights of skilled-GM-hood, he discovers that DEX*n was a bollicky idea all along. If you present the limit as a cast-iron-rule then people are going to accept it as a cast-iron-rule. I know of people who have been put off by Glorantha because, having been told in good faith that Shamans cannot be Priests in RQ3 etc, they find the rules broken left, right and centre. Ok, all rules are just guidelines; but some are more guidelines than others. We should try to make this clear. And this doesn't just mean putting a waver at the beginning of the book saying "ignore any rules you don't like". Folks are paying for this stuff. > Sure it's easy to say that these are artificial limits (and they are) but > before you decide that you don't need them you need to think about what > sort of world someone will end up with if they just "Follow the rules". By Following the Rules as they currently are in RQ3 you're likely to end up with a game where players become disenchanted with playing sorcerers or priests of non-warrior cults because they are unfairly restricted. Kevin again in a later post: > Well, lets look at how much sacrificed POW the average RL will likely > have. Assume they get one check per three weeks, plus the holy days > (seems resonable to me, anyway). This is ~18 checks per year. Which skilled GM is allowing this nonsense? Time for an arbitrary rule: No more than 4 POW checks per year. ;-) But seriously... > Divine magic is near the > absolute bottom of things that neet to be tinkered with or rewritten. Here I suppose I tend to agree. ___ CW. ------------------------------ From: Loren Miller Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 14:58:35 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: Runepower quibbles > From: Kevin Rose > Well, lets look at how much sacrificed POW the average RL will likely > have. Assume they get one check per three weeks, plus the holy days Seems reasonable to Kevin, seems high to me. Do you really think that (assuming the POW check rules are reasonable) RL's go on an expedition to get a POW check once every 3 weeks? Then how come the hills aren't full of RL's questing around and slaying each other with powerful spells all the time? How come heroquests are thought of as *rare* occurrences? I'd vote for closer to one to three expeditions per *year*. RLs who go on expedition once every three weeks end up dead and/or heroes pretty darn fast. Even the animal nomads of Prax and the Wastes don't go into battle that often! > The concept of a fly 15 being used to pick up a 20+ ton rock bothers me, > not to mention the idea of one person who can teleport an entire platoon > inside a fortress. Most people now will not buy a fly 15 or teleport 30, I seem to remember that the RunePower rules covered this. You can't stack RunePower magic any higher than you have learned it. This can work several ways. Here's my favorite. There are several variants of RunePower, and the version that I prefer requires the initiate to undergo a quest to learn a divine gift which she can power with her RunePower points. Each gift quest is unique to that spell, so a Shield quest is different from a Warding quest. The obvious corrolary is that a Shield 1 quest would be different from Shield 2, and from Shield 4, and from Shield 20, and that each higher quest should be more dangerous. Further, I think the best way to balance RP divine magic with the original divine magic rules is to require initiates to sacrifice POW for the size of their RunePool *AND* for the spells they can cast. This stops Kevin's horror scenario just as well as RQ3 rules where people can sacrifice for Shield 20 or Fly 30 if they want to. AND it does the thing that RunePower was designed to do. It allows a character who knows Bless Crops 1 and Shield 20 to use up all her points of RunePower on tiny Bless Crops spells, rendering her unable to cast that ridiculously powerful spell she also sacrificed for because she's out of RunePower to cast it. Jim Chapin writes: > I see that Runepower solves the problem of Shield 20 by giving it to > everyone. Wrong. Kevin is setting up straw men and knocking them down. He misrepresents RunePower by taking the most unbalanced and unrefined version of the rules and treating that as the final version of the rules. David Cake writes: > Or to put it another way, the problem with RunePower is it requires > you to put in arbitrary limitations, like stacking limits on divine spells, > in order to not get out of hand. Under RQ3 rules divine stacking is out of hand already. Your character can sacrifice for Shield 20 right now if you want her to (or Shield 16 and Spirit Block 4 to keep the pesky lunar sorcerors off her back). RunePower just makes already existing balance problems easier to notice. > Under RunePower, gratuitous use of really high power spells is > probably the most sensible thing to do if you can. That sentence is equally true without the first clause. > We are trying to choose between various sets of variant rules for > the RQ4 project. We have to think about the bad points. As far as I know RunePower is NOT under consideration for RQ4. - -- +++++++++++++++++++++++23 Loren Miller "I don't have to practice what I preach 'cause I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to!" The Book of The Subgenius ------------------------------ From: Bruce Lionel Mason Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 16:29:29 -0330 Subject: Re: Disrupting walls On Sun, 12 Mar 1995, David Cake wrote: > > >I kind of like the idea of a "background POW radiation" of the universe... > > So do I, though I think that everything should have a POW of 0. (So > anone POW 9 or above has a 95% chance). Apart from being generally a better > number to represent a baseline, it also means that POW = magic point > regeneration capacity can be retained as a meta-rule, without having to > assume that walls, etc, have MPs. It also means you don't get to Tap POW > the furniture. > As an interesting variant, then, you could have areas of magical > importance where things don't have a POW of 0 - magic rocks with a POW of > 1/m^3, or whatever. This would work quite nicely and helps show the difference between Genertela (dead POW=0) and Pamaltela (alive POW=x). Then you get the Dead Place which has some kind of anti-POW. Also, on tapping, we play that the more you tap the more you take on the features of what you tap. It's one of these GM fiat things, anyone who abuses the spell (not that any PCs use it) gets abused by it. - ---Bruce ------------------------------ From: Bruce Lionel Mason Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 16:42:44 -0330 Subject: Re: +5%/MP; Rune Power On Mon, 13 Mar 1995, David Dunham wrote: > Bruce Mason writes > > >I've been using for a long time the simple rules > >that you can spend MPs to increase cast chance. Each extra MP gives > >+5%. > [statistics deleted] > Once again, this is a bad deal unless you're really pressed for time. > I recommend changing your house rule to +10% per MP at the very least. Funnily enough I just had but never really got the chance to playtest it. This did used to be added to the use of FPs, every +5FPs gave +5%. This was used in campaigns where we used to use lots of piddly little rules (PLRs) and worked ok. Generally PCs used to take a mixture of time MPS and FPs to make sure they got to 100%. If I was to play now I would go for a much simpler system. How about this for a personal magic system. For each point in the spell you have a 10% chance of failing. Eg disrupt fails 10% of the time, Bladesharp 4 fails 40% of the time. Personal Magic does not cost anything to use, however for each MP you spend your failure chance reduces by 10%. Eg someone spending 1MP to cast a disruption automatically succeeds. Looks on the surface to be fairly simple. - ---Bruce PS knowing my luck someone's probably already written a 30page thesis on this idea, in which case sorry but I don't have time to read everything written in the last two years. ------------------------------ From: jacobus@sonata.cc.purdue.edu (Bryan J. Maloney) Date: Mon, 13 Mar 95 15:21:57 -0500 Subject: The tediously complicated initial skill table I would not use the tediously complicated training skill table proposed on this list because I greatly prefer the simpler, elegant method already extant in the RQ:AiG draft. I stopped playing GURPS in part because I was sick of spreadsheeted characters. The method proposed on the list simply screams "use a spreadsheet" and "be an accountant". It improves on RQIII, but it doesn't improve on RQ:AiG. ------------------------------ From: jacobus@sonata.cc.purdue.edu (Bryan J. Maloney) Date: Mon, 13 Mar 95 15:24:48 -0500 Subject: Hero does NOT use a simple, elegant progression Hero does not use an elegant progression. It's actually a real mess if you ever try to relate damage to real-world physics. It may be simple, but it isn't elegant. ------------------------------ From: SPerrin@aol.com Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 16:02:46 -0500 Subject: Re: Disrupting walls, etc Loren says that he thinks that the world should have a much bigger POW than 3. As I understand his reasoning, it makes sense that the entire world, being a single Gaea entity (by some theories) and at least the sum of all its parts would have an incredible POW. This makes an interesting limit on a magic system. The ability to manipulate the world depends on how much of it you are trying to manipulate. World changing spells need an incredible amount of POW, but taking one little part of it, such as a swordblade, and enchanting it needs hardly any POW at all because it is such a small part of the world. In this way we have: Individual inanimate items in the world have a POW of 0 (to use some suggestions) and living non-sentient items (plants, insects[?]) might have a 1, but attempting to do something like divert a river means overcoming an aggregate POW of perhaps 40 or 50. Breaking the Spike (to use a Glorantha analogy) would take a POW in the hundreds, at least. This would be a good arena for Jeorg's yen for massed sorcerers/ priests! And of course, I'm a sucker for anyone who liked Magic World. Steve Perrin ------------------------------ From: SPerrin@aol.com Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 16:03:22 -0500 Subject: Re: Runepower: variant rulesQ Steve Barnes writes, on the discussion of how characters get from beginning characters to Rune Lords... >Regarding power progression: In the main campaign I've played in for a similar time period, my experiences were similar. On the other hand, different gaming groups would game intensively, and develop Rune Lords in under a year. No, they weren't munchkins either.< And then, of course, there's the campaign for people who want to play movers and shakers, so they start at Rune Level. With the new character gen system in RQ4, characters who start very close to mastery are very possible, depending on what level of campaign the GM is running. For RQ1, Bill Keyes, author of RuneMasters, rolled up a character as I watched who was 18 and 17 in most attributes. Johnathan Trollsbane (who may be part of RuneMasters, I'm not sure) became a Humakt Rune Lord in about a month--among other things, he had to wait until we wrote the Rune Lord rules. While we were playtesting it at DunDraCon 3 (the playtests that Steve Barnes disdained), one player played in each playtest (there were about 4) and had a Rune Lord by the end of the con. It's like D&D. Some campaigns never get beyond 4th level because characters are killed or otherwise retired before they can get any further. Others have 10th level characters in no time. The GM style is key. Steve Perrin ------------------------------ From: Tim Leask Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 10:12:28 +1100 (EST) Subject: Re: RunePower Another nice feature of RunePower is that it more easily facilitates the concept of magicians working in concert. All you need is to combine there RunePower Pools into one enourmous Pool. You could thus introduce huge ritual spells like: Summon Crimson Bat a 2000pt Rune Spell known by the High Priest of the Crimson Bat cult. Meteor Shower 1500pt Rune Spell known by the Crater Makers. Summon Really Big Storm 200pt Rune Spell known by High Priest of Orlanth. Clearly these spells would be uncastable by a lone individual but many powerful priests or initiates working in concert could. Just a thought, Tim ================================================================================ Department of Computer Science /*\__/\ "Anyone can hold the helm when University of Melbourne < \ the sea is calm." Parkville, Vic., 3052, AUSTRALIA \ _ _/ -- Publilius Syrus Phone: +61 3 282 2439 \| -- e-mail: tsl@cs.mu.oz.au ================================================================================ ------------------------------ From: SPerrin@aol.com Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 19:11:01 -0500 Subject: Re: RunePower Alternately to using RunePower for large combinations of magicians, as Tim Leask suggests, we could use Loren's concept of the summoners having to combine POW (through a ritual--not something to be done easily) to overcome the POW of "natural forces" like a Giant Storm, a Meteor Swarm or the Crimson Bat... Or, of course, we could use both. Maybe only the POW in a Pool could be used for such spells. Which brings up the concept of using Pools with sorcery and spirit magic--or is that already taken up with familiars and fetches... Steve Perrin ------------------------------ End of RQ Rules Digest: V1 #143 ******************************* This is the bottom of the RuneQuest Rules Digest. 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