From: owner-rq-rules-digest To: rq-rules-digest@hops.wharton.upenn.edu Subject: RQ Rules Digest: V2 #269 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, 3 June 1996 Volume 02 : Number 269 TABLE OF CONTENTS David Dunham death & sorcery Loren Miller exponential stats, standoffs, etc Allan Henderson Resistance Table follow up Bruce Lionel Mason Combat style (was spirit combat) Frederic Moulin death & sorcery Jim Bickmeyer The Fudge Factor Jim Bickmeyer Memorable Combat ian i. gorlick exponentials RULES OF THE ROAD 1. Do not include large sections of a message in your reply. Especially not to add "Yeah, I agree" or "No, I disagree." Or be excoriated. If someone writes something good and you want to say "good show" please do. But don't include the whole message you praise. 2. Use an appropriate Subject line. 3. Learn the art of paraphrasing: Don't just quote and comment on a point-by-point basis. When paraphrasing you demonstrate exactly how well you understand the point someone was trying to make. 4. There is no number 4. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: dunham@pensee.com (David Dunham) Date: Sun, 2 Jun 1996 22:21:37 -0700 Subject: Re: death & sorcery Simon Phipp wrote > Even worse, the fact that it takes 10 SR to die in RQ3 meant that even if > PCs/NPCs were killed on General Hit Points, a Heal Body or similar spell > would bring them back. This meant that it was very difficult to kill an NPC > and almost impossible to kill a PC. (Not that this is a bad thing, but part > of RQ combat is the danger of death). I think this is backwards. 10 SR is an incredibly short time! Pendragon may have it too far the other way (mortally wounded characters die at midnight), but it is almost impossible to save anyone in RQ3 (remember that it requires a change in statement of intent). Furthermore, I think you have the rule wrong. You die at the end of the same melee round in which you were killed [p.43]. I ignore this and allow healing within a reasonable amount of time. If you want a roll, oppose CON against the number of rounds you were negative. > We also play that dead means dead - no healing back to positive hit points. > Having said that, we also play that 0 HP is not dead, but - HP is. Oh, you're so generous :-) The tiny range of unconsciousness in RQ is another problem, in my opinion, and increasing this by one point doesn't really help. Look, if I get my head cut off, I'm dead. But if I get my leg cut off, and go unconscious, I probably faint right away but my heart is going to pump blood for a while and if magic really does heal wounds quickly, I ought to be able to be saved. 3 SR (an average blow is on SR 7 and you die after SR 10) is simply not that much of a difference. > how many people run multi-generational games? RuneQuest > in particular, and Glorantha in general, is about the making of individual > heroes, not the stories of families/clans. RQ in particular is, because as I said, it's not suited to family/clan games. But Glorantha is perfectly suited for the stories of families/clans (there are currently three separate campaigns in Seattle which are clan-based). Furthermore, individual heroes often influence events for more than a couple game years -- read any Icelandic saga. Back in the early days of RQ3, we were trying to run games which could skip weeks at a time, which the rules are particularly ill-suited for (especially compared to RQ2, which doesn't provide any support but at least doesn't hinder with a training sytem that requires lots of die rolls and/or calculation). > However, if playing with experienced players > who have their tactics worked out beforehand, RQ is no slower than AD&D or > Traveller, for instance. Why not just play a simple system like Tunnels and > Trolls? I've never seen this to be true, and if T&T were realistic as well as fast, I might use it (I believe Pendragon gains its simplicity by abstraction, not unrealism). D&D isn't fast because you get so many hit points (which also makes it unrealistic). Traveller is amazingly fast simply because the weapons are so deadly (realism has its price). RQ is both realistic and relatively simple, but a player coudl have to roll four times per round, and the GM has to do a lot of bookkeeping. I really don't care about the player, but the GM has to make the same 4 rolls for each NPC, and that plus keeping track of everything makes the game much slower than Pendragon. > If people want to discuss how best to > tinker with a bad rule, rather than replacing it with a good one or ignoring > the rule completely I don't really see much difference -- these are points on a continuum. Whether you come up with ways to make Fatigue work with the FP in published scenarios, come up with a new system, or ignore it are all rules-related discussion. > Still, I'll stick with it for a bit anyway. Good. David Cake complains about the bookkeeping of sorcery. Oddly enough (after just having complained about bookkeeping), I don't see this as a problem. The GM doesn't have to do it! At any time you encounter a sorcerer, all his spells are in force. (You do have to somehow figure out which spells those would be, but this is amenable to fudging.) It is not possible to fudge combat bookkeeping. Every time I try, a player always reminds me, "How can he attack? He's got an arrow impaled in his shoulder." As a player of a sorcerer, I found figuring out the spell regime a fun spreadsheet game (oddly enough, since I find the character creation spreadsheet game of e.g. Champions to be numbingly boring)*. In any case, this is usually done outside of normal play, so it doesn't impede the flow of the game. But I was playing a Sorcerer. I agree that players who know sorcery will gravitate towards magical disciplines that offer a better reward for the non-specialist. * It looked like the player of the Ernalda acolyte had an equally fun time figuring out the spell regime that kept our family/clan based game going. David Dunham Pensee Corporation dunham@pensee.com Voice/Fax: 206 783 7404 http://www.pensee.com/dunham/ Life is hard. Concrete is hard. Life is concrete. ------------------------------ From: "Loren Miller" Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 09:50:28 EST Subject: exponential stats, standoffs, etc jewahr@hts.calypso.net (Jesper Wahrner) writes: > The main problem as I see it is however that a spirit that is > only slightly stronger has a too large chance to win as pointed out in > the previous discussion. This depends on your seeing the POW characteristic as linear instead of exponential. If you see POW and all characteristics as exponential then a difference of +/- 5 suddenly becomes major instead of minor. > The main problem is not so much location bound spirits as > attackspirits used in combats. These usually comes with Spirit Screen > or Spirit Block cast on them and are vastly more effective than any > other kind of magic in the game. I never had a problem with these things. I suppose that's because I didn't run too many enemy shamans in my games, and those I did relied on hordes of passion spirits without any magical enhancement instead of magically enhanced spirits. > "M> 1. exponential STR, SIZ, HP, Armor, Damage, and so on. > > Maybe you would like to try to convince me with some arguments why > exponential stats are a good idea. The only one I've heard so far is > that this is the way the game is designed and it would be to much > trouble to redesign it. The basic reason I like exponential stats is that otherwise the numbers would get too big and we would need to completely rewrite the damage rules since HP would become meaningless. Say we base the SIZ stat (the only purely objective stat, so IMHO it should be used as the ruler for other stats) linearly on mass. Human male average mass is around 60kg, and that's a 13 SIZ. That means each SIZ is 5kg. A cow is 1000kg, roughly, for a SIZ of 200. A dark troll is 150kg on average, for a SIZ of 30. A mistress race troll is 250kg on average, for a SIZ of 50. A dream dragon is freaking enormous, like 50,000kg, for a SIZ of 10,000. If we continue to base hit points on SIZ then that dragon is gonna have at least 5,000 HP. You can't ever hurt it with anything that won't kill a human instantly. Hell, you can't slaughter a cow with something that won't kill a human instantly. The solution is fairly simple. Use some sort of exponential system for the SIZ stat, and since both CON and STR are combined with SIZ for other game stats, use an exponential scale for them too so that the combinations make intuitive sense. I think that it's clear from the SIZ table in the RQ3 creature's book that for most of the values between 1 and 100 that SIZ is already an exponential stat that doubles every 8 points. This was never stated explicitly for the other stats, but it is obvious because of the resistance table which requires that it be true. The resistance table isn't a perfect game device, but it's quick and easy to use. It also only works if the two stats being compared are exponential, because of things you noted earlier in your critique of it. But if the stats are exponential then you can compare STR and SIZ, or INT and APP, or POW and POW, and it all makes sense because a difference of +/- 10 really should be as overwhelming as it turns out to be in play. Simon Phipps on combat standoffs: > When we moved to RQ3, the opposite happened. High parry skills and > Dodge (ha ha!) meant that whatever the attack skill, the defender > only needed 100% parry and a good shield to make combat stalemate > immediately. The introduction of Great Parry and stackable spells > beyond 4 points made this a certainty. Not even the berserker > tactics worked. Striking to damage weapons had some effect, but a > good repair spell soon cancelled this out. Lots of ways around it. The shaman can loose some attack spirits with spirit screen on them. Team up on a weak spot in the enemy line. Or do what the heroes do in all the stories: Call a parley. Yak. Call a truce and find some honorable way out of the combat that doesn't require that one side or the other die. If you allow for this, then your NPCs will no longer need to be so evenly matched with your PCs in combat. They can be massively more powerful NPCs who could squash the PCs flat, or they can be much less powerful, but still dangerous. And now you have the chance to roleplay instead of roll dice. - -- +++++++++++++++++++++++23 Loren Miller Life at the water's edge is the real life for men and women, and penguins ------------------------------ From: Allan Henderson Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 15:56:00 +0100 Subject: Resistance Table follow up ian (i.) gorlick asks: >Please clarify: with a 10 point POW difference the lower value had absolutely >no victories in 1 million trials, or had less than 0.05% victories so it >rounded off to 0.0. No victoires in 1,000,000 trials were recorded for any combad in which one of the combatants started with a 10 point advantage. Jesper Wahrner : > It would be quite interesting to see your program work out the > probabilities for a few combats where the difference in POW gradually > increases. Such as 13 POW vs 14 POW, 13 POW vs 15 POW, 13 POW vs 16 POW etc. Your wish is my command : Spirit Spirit Wins for Wins for Draws Average A B A B rounds of Combat 11 12 32.3 65.8 1.9 8.25 11 13 18.1 80.5 1.4 8.08 11 14 9.8 89.4 0.8 7.68 11 15 4.5 95.1 0.3 7.26 12 13 32.7 65.9 1.4 8.84 12 14 19.8 79.1 1.0 8.63 12 15 9.7 89.8 0.5 8.27 13 14 32.4 66.3 1.4 9.43 13 15 20.0 78.9 1.0 9.20 14 15 33.3 65.5 1.2 10.03 Michael Cyr says : > One of the things I found most shocking was the fact that the chance > for a POW X spirit to beat a POW X+1 spirit tends to be about 1 in 3. The above table bears this out. This fact certainly freaks me out. I always go into a comabat with a 1 point differnece saying, well a first lucky hit and I've got this sewn up. Little did I know... Allan ------------------------------ From: Bruce Lionel Mason Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 13:52:41 -0230 (NDT) Subject: Re: Combat style (was re: spirit combat) About memorable combat. I wholeheartedly agree that making combat memorable relies on the people who play it. The writing style in RQ3 tends to encourage rules lawyers who like to give hefty minuses to anything which isn't a roll d100 to hit d100 to parry. I've always enjoyed playing characters who do unpredictable things and have been lucky to have similarly inclined GMs. Possibly my favourite was a marginally insane apprentice shaman troll in a campaign based around Lord Bloggity Blogg's mansion from Questworld. At somepoint this troll had gained mastery over a fire spirit and liked to use a dagger (i.e he had fireblade). Probably the highlight of his short-lived career was jumping off a cliff onto some type of relatively small chaos giant with a firebladed dagger in hand. He managed to miss various important rolls and was onjly saved when he managed to get his dagger entangled in the giant's loincloth. Spent the rest of the combat hanging precariously from a burning loincloth until he managed to impale the giant in the right buttock. He escaped a fate worse than death narrowly when the giant finally realised that sitting down might help :-) There is a point to this... I think one of RQs biggest weaknesses was that the game gave you very little idea about how to play a rpg. The rules were written so dryly that they tended to discourage creativity. Not everyone wants to play heroic, swashbuckling combat but I do and I thnk any modern RPG really needs "genre rules" that can be used to encourage certain styles of play. So in a campaign with larger than life heroes you probably need "fudge" rules that allow heroes and villains to cheat death. In a grim low-life campaign you probably want very nasty combat modifications so that characters always run away from anything that might be a fight and use crossbows at 50m. - ---Bruce ------------------------------ From: Frederic Moulin Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 15:45:35 -0400 Subject: Re: death & sorcery At 10:21 PM 6/2/96 -0700, you wrote: >Simon Phipp wrote >> Even worse, the fact that it takes 10 SR to die in RQ3 meant that even if >> PCs/NPCs were killed on General Hit Points, a Heal Body or similar spell >> would bring them back. This meant that it was very difficult to kill an NPC >> and almost impossible to kill a PC. (Not that this is a bad thing, but part >> of RQ combat is the danger of death). Ha, ha, ha... This has to be a joke ! And a great one ! I cannot believe that any sane player or RM find RQ rules not deadly enough ;-) I have to cheat to keep my players alive. >Furthermore, I think you have the rule wrong. You die at the end of the >same melee round in which you were killed [p.43]. Yes, the 10 SR after passing under 0 HP is a commonly used rule, but not an official one. It is mostly used to decrease the number of death in the game. Use the standard rules (death at the end of the round were your PC was at 0 HP) and have your NPCs aim at a specific location: The blow comes at SR 10, if it send the PC at 0 HP, he/she is dead! Sure it will reduce the NPC attack chances by 50%, but where is the problem: As the RM, you have as many NPCs as you want! I also have a hard time believing that your players have so many "heal body" spells: 3 points of POW and 3 days of prayer is no small thing. >Look, if I get my head cut off, I'm dead. But if I get my leg cut off, and >go unconscious, I probably faint right away but my heart is going to pump >blood for a while and if magic really does heal wounds quickly, I ought to >be able to be saved. 3 SR (an average blow is on SR 7 and you die after SR >10) is simply not that much of a difference. Well, actually if I cut your brachial artery (you know, the big vessel that pass in your arm-pit and irrigate your arm) or your femoral artery (the vessel that you can feel on the internal part of your thigh), your heart will probably pump less than 10 times before it stop for lack of venous return. I have seen it a few times on animals: It's very graphic. The blood reaches the ceiling maybe 3 times, and then the arterial pressure is so low that you cannot feel any pulse, and the heart stop pumping efficiently. I would say that if your leg is properly severed, you have 10 to 15 seconds to live! About 10 SRs. Now it is totally different if your arm/leg is destroyed by crushing. In that case, the blow may seal the large vessels, protecting the vital circulation in the head and the thorax. But if you section one of the major vessels, it does'nt really matter if it is in the arm or the neck: You're dead... As a matter of facts, studies following beheading (at the time were the French were still using the Guillotine) suggest that you may still live (be conscious) 10 to 20 seconds after having your head severed from your body, if the blow did not crush the lower part of the brain but really cut the neck below the atlas and axis vertebrae. It's just about the time for the neurons to consume all the food/oxygen left in the blood that remains in the brain microvasculature and start dying. That's why I play the slashing special a lot more deadly than a simple little knock-back. Frederic "PC bane" Moulin ------------------------------ From: "Jim Bickmeyer" Date: Tue, 4 Jun 96 00:49:17 UT Subject: The Fudge Factor OK so the rules allow for powerful spirits to stomp weak players. There is one solution to this. DO NOT throw powerful spirits at your players unless you want to stomp them. You may think it is a wimp out to weaken powerful spirits that players engage. I consider it - keeping things interesting. If a weak player is the first one to run into a spirit and the spirit isn't there to trash the blazes out of the players then I quickly and quietly adjust the spirit to make the conflict interesting. This can also goes both ways. I have been known to bump up the strength of an opponent to make the conflict interesting. Yes there are times when players were out matched and got beat or possessed. Just because a book, or the dice has the power at a certain level, does not mean I will keep it there when the players encounter it. Jim Bickmeyer "It's a Chaos plot" ------------------------------ From: "Jim Bickmeyer" Date: Tue, 4 Jun 96 00:50:07 UT Subject: Memorable Combat Memorable combat is as David Cake explained. The actions of the combatants is what makes a combat. Attack/Parry/Attack/Parry is not combat. Add movement and long weapons to get first attack. When Players do stunts that work out or almost work and add flavor and fun to the combat praise and encourage them. In the last combat my players were in they felt they had to attack a slaver ship that was pulling off the beach. Two warriors rode their horse to get to the ship fast. The slavers used a scorpion to shoot one horse out from under a warrior. This warrior quickly judged distances and ran back and grabbed the nearest party members horse. It happened to be the mount of the Duck Trickster who until that time was supply an overwatch cover with a light cross bow. The Trickster grabbed a spare horse and chased after the warrior on his yelling COME BACK HERE YOUR HORSE THIEF!!! Memorable event? Yes. The Duck Trickster now refers to the warrior as the Horse Thief when in public and civilized areas. To make a combat memorable the GM must do more that give opponent and roll dice himself. He has to help the players be creative at times. As the GM I planted the Horse Thief idea in the duck players head. Jim Bickmeyer "It's a Chaos plot" ------------------------------ From: "ian (i.) gorlick" Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 17:56:00 -0400 Subject: exponentials Jesper: You ask for reasons why exponential stats are a good thing, here's my favourite: Because it is mathematically elegant. As a physicist and engineer, with a good lay grounding in biology, I assure you that exponential systems are the correct way to attempt to model large ranges. It goes along with the desire to try to put every possible constant in the form of a dimensionless number. For anyone interested in a good book, I recommend 'Life's Devices' by Vogel. It gives a wonderful insight into how physics and math relate to biology. I'd say it is required reading for anyone wanting to model life-forms (which is part of what a rules system is trying to do). ------------------------------ End of RQ Rules Digest: V2 #269 ******************************* 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. Send electronic mail to Majordomo@hops.wharton.upenn.edu with "help" in the body of the message for subscription information on this and other mailing lists. 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