From: owner-rq-rules-digest To: rq-rules-digest@hops.wharton.upenn.edu Subject: RQ Rules Digest: V1 #145 Reply-To: rq-rules Errors-To: owner-rq-rules-digest Precedence: bulk Content-Return: Prohibited Return-Path: owner-rq-rules-digest RQ Rules Digest: Tuesday, 14 March 1995 Volume 01 : Number 145 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 David Cheng Cultural limits on RunePower David Dunham via RadioMail world.POW; simple personal magic; opposed David Cake Disrupting walls David Cake Cultural limits on RunePower Kevin Rose Frequency of checks, etc. Nigel Smith Runepower problems Malcolm Cohen Opposed rolls Colin Watson The tediously complicated initial skill ta ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Cheng Date: Tue, 14 Mar 95 1:05:00 EST Subject: Cultural limits on RunePower I'd like to say how much gleeful satisfaction it brings me, seeing how the RunePower idea can still be contentious after all this time. It's been around for years! I'm with Loren: three POW checks per year sounds a lot more reasonable to me than one per three weeks. More importantly, all the discussion here on the list has focussed on the minmaxing potential of RunePower. Folks here seem to have forgotten all the _cultural_ limitations. They're all there in the original article. SOME OTHER REASONS WHY A RUNEMASTER SHOULDN'T CAST A 20-POINT SHIELD/FLY/WHATEVER... 1) You're a RuneMaster because your society recognizes you as such. They support you, both financially and socially. You owe a debt to them. This includes providing magical support. Remember the 90% rule: 90% of income & time goes to the temple, which generally means serving the flock. This ought to mean 90% of your RunePoints too. To blow all your RP points needlessly is selfish, and will be punished, by your deity if not by your culture. - "What to you mean, you used up all your magic squishing the broo under a big rock?!? Why couldn't you have used your sword like any other good warrior? I need you to talk to Orlanth about the trouble I've been having with my brother, and you tell me you've used up all your magic?!?" 2) RunePower points are regained through prayer (if you're not using the 'renew only on holy days' variant). "Prayer" doesn't just mean getting on your knees and mumbling gibberish, it means telling your deity (aka the GameMaster) what you did with His divine energy. If He's not pleased (i.e. the GM thinks it was silly or stupid), the worshipper is punished. Who would tell their deity this?: - "Well, I could tell it was the end of the adventure, and I had all this divine power left over, so I really let that last broo have it with a huge Lightning Bolt. It seemed a shame to waste all those unused points, right Orlanth?" - "What to you mean, you used up all your magic squishing the broo under a big rock?!? Why couldn't you have used your sword like any other good warrior? I need you to tell me about the trouble Olaf has been having with his brother. Now you tell me you couldn't do it because you had to lift a big rock, just to kill one lousy broo?!? You think I'm going to grant you more miracles later, do you..." Now, there are times for 15-point Lightning Bolts. If that Scimitar of Yanafal Tarnils keeps cutting your men down, no matter what you throw at him, then go ahead and show him the full Glory of Orlanth, roast his red ass. Your flock back home will have a party in your honor when you bring back is iron armor and weapons as trophies (at least until the Lunars hunt you down and kill all your relatives as retribution). They'll understand that you had to burn all your Divine Favor; it was for the good of the community that the Lunar villian die. When you pray to Orlanth, telling him how you invoked His glory to slay the Lunar foe, He too will congratulate you for a job well done. As GM, you should not hesitate to punish players who abuse and minmax the rules. If someone abuses and minmaxes the favor of the gods, shouldn't the gods, and the people who worship those gods, be offended? I think so. RUNEPOWER AS OFFICIAL RULES The last I heard, OJ & Mike are considering having RunePower as a suggested variant for "high magic" game worlds and campaigns. Remember, the core rulebook has to be genericized (is that a word?) again. I'll be offline until the 22nd, so I'm sorry if I can't see and respond to any of your responses until then. * David Cheng drcheng@sales.stern.nyu.edu cheng@io.com (212) 472-7752 [before midnight EST] ------------------------------ From: David Dunham (via RadioMail) Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 22:05:06 -0800 Subject: Re: world.POW; simple personal magic; opposed rolls on the edge The problem with innate POW is that Pamaltela, being alive, would have a higher POW than Genertela. But I'd expect spells to be EASIER to cast in Pamaltela, precisely because of its vitality. Bruce Mason recovers from my shredding of his +5%/MP rule with >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. This sounds nice, though I'm not sure about the costs. All attackers from surprise would cast their largest Bladesharp for free, not caring how long it took; once everyone was ready, they'd attack. I'd either say that failure costs MP, or say that spell use costs MP. He later proposes ditching the Resistance Table, which I've never been a fan of. >Using stats is quite simple: to compare stats you roll stat*5% vs >stat*5%. Eg the good old arm wrestling contest between Burly >Bob STR 18 (90%) vs Cormac the feeble STR 11 (55%) is a roll of 90% vs >55%. I'm not a great statistician but this works out that Bob wins >something like 5 matches out of 6. Using my Pendragon spreadsheet, the 18 STR wins 71.8% of the time, the 11 STR wins 21.0% (the rest of the time nobody wins). If they keep rolling until someone wins, the 18 STR should win 77% of the time. This may be slightly different than Bruce's system since Pendragon criticals are different and ties are more likely. He also presents an "Edge" system, which I think I'd put in the Steve Perrin category of interesting system that's not RuneQuest. >As an idea you might drop SRs and say that the >highest rating goes first This is what I did in my cyberpunk game; firearms had a speed rating which was the average of your DEX and your skill (this was in Pendragon, so the two averaged well). I think it worked fairly well. And probably matters more in firearm combats than melee, but I've sung that song before. ------------------------------ From: davidc@cs.uwa.edu.au (David Cake) Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 14:03:35 +0800 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. I figured that Genertela just had less POW, not none. After all, only Genert died, not all the Land goddesses and other land spirits. > >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. > I play that this is commonly believed (by those who know something of Tapping i.e. not Sartarites), but it is not reliably true (i.e. it is a religious belief, not a rule). This is because the Rokari believe that Tapping does make you take on attributes of the thing Tapped (they call the Borists 'squids' accordingly), and the Borists do not (I presume, or else they would certainly not Tap chaotics). As there are religious differences on the question, the rules shouldn't actually define it either way. Possibly the (apostate) Rokari Taps work differently to Boristi Tap spells. Cheers David >---Bruce ------------------------------ From: davidc@cs.uwa.edu.au (David Cake) Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 15:21:10 +0800 Subject: Re: Cultural limits on RunePower >I'm with Loren: three POW checks per year sounds a lot >more reasonable to me than one per three weeks. > To me, the old shamans with their 1 point a year for 40 years are more of an annoyance. >More importantly, all the discussion here on the list >has focussed on the minmaxing potential of RunePower. >Folks here seem to have forgotten all the _cultural_ >limitations. They're all there in the original article. > No, I haven't forgotten them at all. I think that the cultural limitations are weakened under RunePower, which is part of why I dislike it so much. A good GM can make any system work. A good system makes it easier for him to do so. RunePower can work with a good GM, I am sure, but it does make it harder for them. All this applies to the original RunePowr idea, BTW. The curent RunePower plus learned learned spell point ideas I simply find has the problems of most compromises - >SOME OTHER REASONS WHY A RUNEMASTER SHOULDN'T CAST >A 20-POINT SHIELD/FLY/WHATEVER... > All these things apply to RQ3 Divine magic, more strongly. A good GM should be aware of them, and stress them when his players choose Divine magic. With RunePower, however, he has to keep these things in mind, and make sure his players do, whenever they USE divine magic. >1) You're a RuneMaster because your society recognizes > you as such. They support you, both financially and > socially. You owe a debt to them. This includes > providing magical support. Remember the 90% rule: > 90% of income & time goes to the temple, which > generally means serving the flock. This ought to > mean 90% of your RunePoints too. To blow all > your RP points needlessly is selfish, and will be > punished, by your deity if not by your culture. > But with RunePower, you can do all the things your society requires, like Worship spells and Bless Crops or whatever, and if given a few days to regain all your magic, you are still able to cast your Shield 20. With RunePower, the having to support your society part is only a limitation on what you can do if the GM keeps starting adventures with half your points already used. Another big problem is that what your culture wants and what the GM wants are seldom the same. From your cultural point of view, having one priest spend a lot of his magic incinerating Chaos Beasties (thus eliminating the danger that the beastie could actually kill a valuable RuneMaster, not to mention sundry risks like disease) probably makes a lot of sense. However, as a GM it certainly makes combat against said beastie a lot less interesting. Similarly, having your players spend all their magic on fighting magic generally makes no sense. But if your RuneLord is preparing to fight some big cultural foe, hoarding his RunePower points and spending them all on Shield and Lightning makes perfect sense. >2) RunePower points are regained through prayer > (if you're not using the 'renew only on holy > days' variant). "Prayer" doesn't just mean > getting on your knees and mumbling gibberish, > it means telling your deity (aka the GameMaster) > what you did with His divine energy. If > He's not pleased (i.e. the GM thinks it was > silly or stupid), the worshipper is punished. But what about if the GM thinks it was actually pretty sensible, it just completely ruined all the dramatic tension of his game? The GM is not the Gods. The Gods might think that toasted chaos sounds mighty fine. And what about if the players where genuinely more scared than the situation warranted? Or cases of mistaken identity? Or whatever? Basically, as soon as someone gets > > >Now, there are times for 15-point Lightning Bolts. >If that Scimitar of Yanafal Tarnils keeps cutting >your men down, no matter what you throw at him, then >go ahead and show him the full Glory of Orlanth, >roast his red ass. Scratch one major villain. Certainly a lot less fun than the duel I was planning! > Your flock back home will have >a party in your honor when you bring back is iron >armor and weapons as trophies (at least until the >Lunars hunt you down and kill all your relatives >as retribution). They'll understand that you had >to burn all your Divine Favor; it was for the good >of the community that the Lunar villian die. When >you pray to Orlanth, telling him how you invoked >His glory to slay the Lunar foe, He too will >congratulate you for a job well done. > But the combat was very dull! >As GM, you should not hesitate to punish players >who abuse and minmax the rules. If someone abuses >and minmaxes the favor of the gods, shouldn't the >gods, and the people who worship those gods, be >offended? I think so. > I am not worried about 'minimaxers' as such. My basic problem with RunePower is that it gives PCs a lot more divine magic access. This means that Divine magic like Shield and Lightning starts to take over the game a lot quicker than it did before. Formerly if you had 15 points of divine magic, you probably had around 4 points of Shield. With RunePower, you might use 10 points. After all, its a crucial battle, and you still have a few in reserve. Also, with RunePower the PCs are much more likely to have that one spell that ruins your day. The Orlanthi are much more likely to Fly when they need to, and Teleport out of capture. They Command that elemental. They only have Thunderbolt on the cloudy days. The only good thing I can see about RunePower is that it supports more use of the really obscure spells. I would rather do this with temple pressure or whatever, or by making them useful. >RUNEPOWER AS OFFICIAL RULES >The last I heard, OJ & Mike are considering >having RunePower as a suggested variant for >"high magic" game worlds and campaigns. >Remember, the core rulebook has to be >genericized (is that a word?) again. > This is fine. As long as people realise that Runepower will mean more big magic. Cheers Dave > >* David Cheng drcheng@sales.stern.nyu.edu cheng@io.com > (212) 472-7752 [before midnight EST] ------------------------------ From: Kevin Rose Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 01:28:12 -0600 (CST) Subject: Re: Frequency of checks, etc. At 3 checks per year lots of things stop being a problem. For example, playable rules for RL or RPs. Skills increase at maybe 4% per year (60% skill:.4*3.5*3=4.2) at this rate. At starting skills of maybe 60% it will take at least 5 years game time to reach 90% (particularly due to the training restrictions). I've played in games that met once a month or so and ones that met 3 times a week. The rates of progression were somewhat different. . . Anyway, back to beating on Runepower The simpler versions sound a lot like the AD&D "Spell point" systems that kept cropping up in various games that I was around. The overall effect was, to put it mildly, unbalancing. But the proponents were always very sincere in pointing out how it sped up game play and removed those pesky memorization rules. Oddly, they always seemed to be powergamers playing magicians, but I'm sure that was just a coincidence. The more complex system suggested by Loren seems reasonable in terms of power, but it sounds like it gets very messy in terms of record keeping. Particularly with some of the issues for how to deal with associate cult magics and such. If it can be done without turning the game into LedgerQuest I'd be interested. The old RQ2 system for total point of battle magic seems very simple and clean, but it proved sufficently difficult to use that they changed it to remove the concept of temporarily supressed spells. People kept "Forgetting" which spells were which. Kevin ------------------------------ From: ns10005@hermes.cam.ac.uk (Nigel Smith) Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 09:44:48 +0000 Subject: Re: Runepower problems Steve Barnes replied to Kevin Rose's good points about highly-stacked Divine spell using runepower: >I assume that most Runepower advocates also believe the RQ2 >stacking limits or something similar should be reinstated. In which case you would also have to place a limit on spirit magic and sorcery, or else the Divine magic users would find themselves out-gunned. Perhaps runepowered Divine magic should work somewhat like spirit magic - you contribute points to the pool, which you can use towards the spells you have 'learnt' (sacrificed for?), up to the limit you have learnt. So if you want to stack to Shield 4, you must have sacked 4 points _specifically_ for the Shield spell. If you have 8 pts in your RP pool, you could use them to cast Shield 4 twice, or any other spells you have sacrificed for, as per the usual RP system. Just a thought, Nigel ------------------------------ From: Malcolm Cohen Date: Tue, 14 Mar 95 10:28:58 WET Subject: Re: Opposed rolls Bruce Mason writes: > The basic premise is to remove the resistance table and replace it with > opposed rolls, a la Pendragon. The reasons are two-fold: a) I find the Case 1: Passive resistance (e.g. STR vs rock.SIZ); I have a philosophical objection to giving the passive object an opposed roll. It does not feel right. Neither does the alternative of having the SIZ 12 rock described as a "-10% adjustment to STR*5%" rock. Case 2: Active resistance (e.g. spell overcoming target) No philosophical objection, but changing one roll into two rolls is not, I feel, going to speed things up noticeably. If no ties are allowed, it is definitely not an improvement. (If ties are allowed, things will take longer in game time as well as real time, but at least it is simpler). I have no great love for the resistance table but like the idea of additional die rolls even less. - -- ...........................Malcolm Cohen, NAG Ltd., Oxford, U.K. (malcolm@nag.co.uk) ------------------------------ From: Colin Watson Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 12:12:35 GMT Subject: Re: The tediously complicated initial skill table ________________ Bryan J. Maloney has the gaul to reject my wonderful skill table;-) > I greatly prefer the simpler, elegant method already extant in > the RQ:AiG draft. I'd like to see a summary of this. Sounds good. > The method proposed on the list simply screams "use a > spreadsheet" and "be an accountant". I'm sorry to hear you think this. My intention was precicely the reverse. Firstly: the only person who might need a spreadsheet is the one generating the table in the first place - that's the point of making it a table. The table makes it fast and easy rather than tedious and complicated. Secondly: accountants exploit loopholes. The point of my proposed system is that it has no significant loopholes. It's not possible to optimise your character's skills when you generate him because the method of generating starting skills is based on the same system used later to increase them during play. Being an accountant doesn't help. _______________ Steven E Barnes: > What I do is just give out checks, for both experience and training. > The check mechanism has diminishing returns built into it, and it > completely eliminates the need for any table look up. A great idea. How long do you spend training to get a check? One per week? The problem still remains of generating initial skills for starting characters. You can hardly say "take 200 skill checks and distribute them as you like". Unless you like the sound of rolling dice. A table could average out all this dice-rolling for the purposes of generating starting skills. ___ CW. ------------------------------ End of RQ Rules Digest: V1 #145 ******************************* 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.