From: owner-rq-rules-digest To: rq-rules-digest@hops.wharton.upenn.edu Subject: RQ Rules Digest: V1 #141 Reply-To: rq-rules Errors-To: owner-rq-rules-digest Precedence: bulk Content-Return: Prohibited Return-Path: owner-rq-rules-digest RQ Rules Digest: Sunday, 12 March 1995 Volume 01 : Number 141 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 SnitaII@aol.com The Definative Sorcerer Hugh Foster RQ Rules Digest: V1 #139 Hugh Foster RQ Rules Digest: V1 #139 Hugh Foster RQ Rules Digest: V1 #139 Hugh Foster RQ Rules Digest: V1 #140 Steven E Barnes POW gain Bruce Lionel Mason MP-less magic/skill-less magic Kevin Rose Who's a Sorcerer and Runepower problems Steven E Barnes Who's a Sorcerer and Runepower problems ANDOVER@delphi.com Runepower: variant rules David Cake Who's a Sorcerer and Runepower problems David Cake Disrupting walls David Cake Inventing spells ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: SnitaII@aol.com Date: Sun, 12 Mar 1995 12:44:37 -0500 Subject: The Definative Sorcerer >>Notice that most divine cults have the "Cannot be a sorcerer" limit on >>initiates (Chaosium failed to define "Sorcerer" in the rules however) >No they didn't. "A proficient apprentice who successfully creates a >familiar becomes an adept -- the normal sorcerer." [RQ3 MB.38] Also, in a Griffin Island and a few other sources, "sorcerer" was generally defined (especially with respect to spells that operated automatically) as an character who knew a sorcery skills other than Intensity. - - Steve ------------------------------ From: Hugh Foster <100326.446@compuserve.com> Date: 12 Mar 95 12:45:24 EST Subject: RQ Rules Digest: V1 #139 >> So 3pts could find an elephant, elf or human, 4pts an enemy and you need 5pts for this rodent called Nigel. << I like this. A lot. I can feel a house rule writeup coming on! ------------------------------ From: Hugh Foster <100326.446@compuserve.com> Date: 12 Mar 95 12:45:21 EST Subject: RQ Rules Digest: V1 #139 >> Here's a corny idea: we could have anti-ticks. Normally skills increase by experience if you get a skill-check during play. We could turn this around and say if you *don't* get a skill-check on any 75%+ skill during the game (ie. if you haven't used the skill recently) then you have to roll under it or it *decreases* by 1d6%! << Mechanically a reasonable idea for gracefully degrading skills, but IMHO almost certain to relly worsen the skill check frenzy problem; "I'm fighting this troll and I've got to identify that moss or I'll lose d6% in Plant Lore!" Uh, maybe not... Hugh Foster [100326,446] "Barbarism is the natural state of mankind ... Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph." (R.E. Howard 1906-1936) ------------------------------ From: Hugh Foster <100326.446@compuserve.com> Date: 12 Mar 95 12:45:27 EST Subject: RQ Rules Digest: V1 #139 >> Would POW training be completely unreasonable? << Nope. Call it "studying meditation under the philosophers of Squidge". ------------------------------ From: Hugh Foster <100326.446@compuserve.com> Date: 12 Mar 95 12:45:37 EST Subject: RQ Rules Digest: V1 #140 >> Unfortunatly, I am opposed to POW checks in general. << OK I can go with this. However, what would you use instead ? Assuming people can improve POW at all ? ------------------------------ From: akuma@netcom.com (Steven E Barnes) Date: Sun, 12 Mar 1995 12:17:25 -0800 Subject: POW gain %>> Unfortunatly, I am opposed to POW checks in general. << % %OK I can go with this. However, what would you use instead %? Assuming people can improve POW at all ? I'm using rather vague rules at the moment. I explained them before, but will recap. I'll try not to use the "W" word... 1) POW gain, and all checks in general, must not be based on use in "stressful situations" (i.e. combat). This leads to skill check frenzy. It should also not require the use of offensive magic, or spirit combat. 2) The upper limit on POW, if any, must be higher than 21. This is to avoid an attitude of "use it or lose it". In standard RQ, you have to sacrifice POW, or eventually, you will reach species max, and no longer benefit from POW checks. 3) The gain roll must not be dependant on your current POW. This punishes people with high POW, and encourages them to lower their POW drastically, in order to min-max their chance of gaining more POW. This becomes a greater problem if the primary source of POW checks is no longer combat. What I do is to separate Power into two stats: one represents your willpower and effective ability in magical combat. The other is the source of MPs, and the spiritual currency used when sacrificing "Power". I call these Will and Power, but to avoid the howls of protest last time I said this, we can call them "Power and Presence" or maybe "Power and MPs". I tend to fudge character advancement in general, but here is what I would use: characters get a certain number of Power gain rolls, based on magical activity (like in RQ:AiG). Perhaps 5-10 per year for priests. The roll is a "Willpower" x 5% roll. Perhaps you get one point when successful, 2 on a special, and 3 on a critical... Of course, these changes can cause ripple effects through the RQ rules. This is because many areas of the magic system are "balanced" by making assumptions about how fast characters gain POW. This doesn't concern me, because I already consider such rules to be broken already; they get crazy when you bring in non-humans with higher species max limits. Sorry to ramble; maybe I'll rant some more later... - -steve ------------------------------ From: Bruce Lionel Mason Date: Sun, 12 Mar 1995 17:20:19 -0330 Subject: Re: MP-less magic/skill-less magic On Wed, 8 Mar 1995, Joerg Baumgartner wrote: > [nifty ideas deleted] > If the character wanted to increase his chance of casting, he could > spend MP for the spell. Each MP spent would add to the chance of > success, but be detracted after the attempt to cast the magic. (The > idea was to guarantee one success per day, since MP were regained fully > within a day.) This is a good idea. 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%. I like the idea of combining this with the idea of not having to spend MPs in personal magic although I'm not too sure about how exactly to work it. > What I miss in RQ magic rules are ceremonial castings of several > magicians coordinating their efforts. Apart from effect-poor Worship > deity and Humakt's Oath there is no ritual where MPs from several > donors are pooled. There are sort of: matricew. The Yelmalio temple in Sun County is a good example of what happens when magicians pool their efforts. That said, a generic RQ, ought to have rituals requiring cooperation to cast. - ---Bruce ------------------------------ From: Kevin Rose Date: Sun, 12 Mar 1995 16:32:36 -0600 (CST) Subject: Who's a Sorcerer and Runepower problems David No, you are a "sorcerer" for the purpose of joining a spirit or divine cult when you know any sorcery skill other than intensity. At least that was what Charlie Krank and Sandy Peterson told me when I asked about it in 1985. Having a familiar is of little use to the average sorcerer in RQ3, and is not universally done. And siginificantly before this amount of skill is reached you have become unacceptable to most cults. > > >Notice that most divine cults have the "Cannot be a sorcerer" limit on > >initiates (Chaosium failed to define "Sorcerer" in the rules however) > > No they didn't. "A proficient apprentice who successfully creates a > familiar becomes an adept -- the normal sorcerer." [RQ3 MB.38] > > ------------------------------ And now Steve Barnes attacks me for not understanding Runepower 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. The average increase per check is .3 per (at 15 POW) so the average amount per year is 1+5.4 or 6.4 pts per year. Not bad, but it's gets pretty messy after 5 or 6 years. By then he has free and unlimited access to all the special and most useful common spells. 36 points of all the attack and defense spells is a whole lot of firepower. But it is not just these sort of straight forward things that bother me. 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, as it is 99% of the time going to be a waste of a very limited amount of resorces. But with Runepower, it is easy and fun to abuse the game system. Sure, you can rewrite the entire Divine magic system, AGAIN, to fix this little problem, but why bother? Divine magic is near the absolute bottom of things that neet to be tinkered with or rewritten. Kevin >The only thing "getting deep" is the misrepresentation of Rune Power > in your statement. > > Rune Power still requires the sacrifice of POW. Regarding the use > by Initiates, this is a separate but related issue. There are a > number of proposals for allowing Initiates limited reusability for > their Divine spells, but Rune Power can work just fine with out them. > > - -steve > ------------------------------ From: akuma@netcom.com (Steven E Barnes) Date: Sun, 12 Mar 1995 16:12:55 -0800 Subject: Re: Who's a Sorcerer and Runepower problems Kevin Rose : >And now Steve Barnes attacks me for not understanding Runepower Well, the attitude of your message annoyed me. >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, >as it is 99% of the time going to be a waste of a very limited amount of >resorces. But with Runepower, it is easy and fun to abuse the game >system. Sure, you can rewrite the entire Divine magic system, AGAIN, to >fix this little problem, but why bother? Divine magic is near the >absolute bottom of things that neet to be tinkered with or rewritten. The problem with Fly 15, and other such abuses is that there are no stacking limits on divine spells. Sure, no rune lord is likely to get 15 points of Fly (which, if I understand RQ3 correctly, is reusable for Lords, but one-use for priests). However, the potential exists right now in RQ3. A more likely cantidate for abuse is Shield, which is useful in almost all combat situations. This resulted in convention horror stories from friends, encountering RQ3 games where everyone was going around with Protection 10 plus Shield 20, and the like... I assume that most Runepower advocates also believe the RQ2 stacking limits or something similar should be reinstated. Even if RQ3 divine magic really worked, continuing to attack peoples varient rules as "why bother to re-write this?" is counter productive. Both Nephilihm and Call of Cthulhu are, IMHO RQ varients, yet neither toe the line on RQ magic rules. I don't care what the published RQ rules are, I'm making my own system borrowing from various editions of RQ, Nephilihm, Elric!, Hero, and anything else I like. - -steve ------------------------------ From: ANDOVER@delphi.com Date: Sun, 12 Mar 1995 20:17:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: Runepower: variant rules 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. Otherwise I am reminded of Greg Costikyan's rpg rules of 15 years ago: something to the effect of: roll random numbers of dice and assign random characteristics to them, then do whatever you please with them. Now There's a universal system! 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? Jim Chapin ------------------------------ From: davidc@cs.uwa.edu.au (David Cake) Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 09:58:19 +0800 Subject: Re: Who's a Sorcerer and Runepower problems >> But with Runepower, it is easy and fun to abuse the game >>system. Sure, you can rewrite the entire Divine magic system, AGAIN, to >>fix this little problem, but why bother? Divine magic is near the >>absolute bottom of things that neet to be tinkered with or rewritten. > >The problem with Fly 15, and other such abuses is that there are no >stacking limits on divine spells. 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. Sure, no rune lord is likely to >get 15 points of Fly (which, if I understand RQ3 correctly, is reusable >for Lords, but one-use for priests). However, the potential exists >right now in RQ3. And it doesn't particularly bother me if they can. If someone in my game was silly enough to put all their magic into fly, they would probably end up dieing pretty quick, when they ran into some contingency that they couldn't handle (like, say, a dozen lunar spirits sent to eat their head, as soon as some Lunar magician works out how dangerous they are). So most people spread their magic around, so that they can handle most contingencies. Spirit Block and the Teleport spells are examples of the sort of thing that many of my players seem to rate pretty highly. However in RunePower, I can not only see Fly 15 type abuses happening, I can't really see any reason why they shouldn't. My PCs will get to the end of an encounter, realise that they have used very little Rune magic, and that they will probably not face anything dangerous after they have killed the last remaining foe, so they will cast Lightning 15 or something. Under RunePower, gratuitous use of really high power spells is probably the most sensible thing to do if you can. > A more likely cantidate for abuse is Shield, which is >useful in almost all combat situations. This resulted in convention horror >stories from friends, encountering RQ3 games where everyone was going >around with Protection 10 plus Shield 20, and the like... > And at least in the normal Divine magic system I can give good reasons why people shouldn't do this. Under RunePower, I can see very few reasons why they wouldn't do this sort of thing (especially as you could get hit by Lightning 8 or a 10 ton rock!). > >Even if RQ3 divine magic really worked, continuing to attack peoples >varient rules as "why bother to re-write this?" is counter productive. We are trying to choose between various sets of variant rules for the RQ4 project. We have to think about the bad points. ' Cheers David >-steve ------------------------------ From: davidc@cs.uwa.edu.au (David Cake) Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 10:36:36 +0800 Subject: Re: Disrupting walls >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. These would be vulnerable to Tap POW (though if you did it you end up with a grey unfertile washed out landscape), and also might be useable as a magic resource by appropriate beings, or using appropriate ritual - ie the naiad might be able to draw on the MPs of the magic spring. For physicist type purists offended at the duality of most thing being POW 0, and others being higher, just assume that the POW 0 things actually just have a very low POW density, enough that they don't add up to 1 unless you have tons of it. ------------------------------ From: davidc@cs.uwa.edu.au (David Cake) Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 10:47:00 +0800 Subject: Re: Inventing spells In Glorantha, I assumed that inventing a sorcery spell was a HeroQuest. A different sort of heroquest - the sorcerers generally want to learn something, rather than just obtain a power, so they probably want to meet someone who knows the magic and learn from them, or witness the use of a power, or something like that. But a HeroQuest. Definately something I want to investigate once I get a set of HeroQuest rules I like, actually - sorcerous HeroQuests based on a Seeker or Sage model rather than a Warrior path, to learn the secrets of the Universe. It is much more interesting for play purposes than a simple set of spell research rules, and more Gloranthan. Whether this is a good generic RQ explanation I do not know. Cheers David ------------------------------ End of RQ Rules Digest: V1 #141 ******************************* 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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