From: owner-rq-rules-digest To: rq-rules-digest@hops.wharton.upenn.edu Subject: RQ Rules Digest: V2 #181 Reply-To: rq-rules Errors-To: owner-rq-rules-digest Precedence: bulk Content-Return: Prohibited Return-Path: owner-rq-rules-digest RQ Rules Digest: Friday, 9 February 1996 Volume 02 : Number 181 TABLE OF CONTENTS ANDOVER@delphi.com Sky-High Percentages John Leske Sky-High Percentages OR Dying the thousand Trent Smith Skill levels in respect to age ANDOVER@delphi.com Skill levels in respect to age Trent Smith Skill levels in respect to age Corey Spillis Skill levels in respect to age Corey Spillis Skill levels in respect to age Sandy Petersen Multimissiled Thrown Warriors ANDOVER@delphi.com Skill levels in respect to age 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: ANDOVER@delphi.com Date: Fri, 09 Feb 1996 00:07:23 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: Sky-High Percentages Actually, we had characters with POWs of two and four, after DIs. They hid out in the back, casting Disrupts for about a year (thank the Gods for crystals already attuned!) I guess your Humakti is busy doing that, too! ------------------------------ From: John Leske Date: Fri, 9 Feb 1996 15:39:01 +1030 Subject: Re: Sky-High Percentages OR Dying the thousand deaths Steve Lieb told the story of: >If it makes you feel better my Humakti had a rolled POW of 8, and got a >successful DI (him & 3 unconscious characters against 5 scorpion men) by >rolling a 07. AAAAGH. POW 1. Nice. Ever try going into a decent combat >with a POW of ONE? Any butthead trollkin with Befuddle screws with ya. And >spirits? EEEK! That is exactly what killed one of the near original characters in our campaign: POW 4 after a DI. The next time we hit spirits he was soul-toasted (RQII rules where spirits disintegrate if they run out of MPs - I think of it as they loose the force to hold their personalities together, and the winds and ripples of the spirit plane dissipate them before they can regenerate). A particularly Nasty way to go for a righteous God worshipper! A physical death and the God collects the spirit. The body of course soon died as the posessing spirit wasn't too friendly either. I guess that's also why, despite 11 years of this campaign, there are no Rune levels yet - given that the players are called on to perform feats of heroism, there are times when the luck just runs out, or the plan wasn't good enough, or there simply _was_ no hope of winning. But being heroic they try anyway. And then they live or die by the DI roll. Which means that sometimes the Gods decide that the player has done enough on Material plane and it's time to do it on the God plane. (My shamanic apprentice had soul-sight up when an Orlanthi rolled his POW on DI. So I got to talk to Orlanth briefly. Very Briefly) Of course the other factor is that the tougher, more experienced characters take the lead, and hence the brunt of the fight. So they get hit the worst when things go wrong too. Finally, though one player has now met the critieria for RuneLord, Orlanth Priests are pretty thin on the ground in occupied Heortland in the 1620's. But it's fun! John ------------------------------ From: Trent Smith Date: Thu, 08 Feb 1996 21:43:58 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Skill levels in respect to age The previous experience system in RQ3 is clearly broken once the numbers get sufficiently large (hmm, this seems to be a common theme). I'm very much in favor of a system where the amount of skill-experience that a character has is directly related to his age (like "Traveller") but such systems invariably run into trouble. "Traveller" addressed the problem of older characters becoming super-skilled by making the player roll dice to avoid getting killed during char-gen (which satisfied no one). What is probably needed is some sort of a system where, past a certain point (10 years or so) characters begin to get progressively less improvement: for instance, in the "weeks of training" system I use, "normal" previous experience is 15 weeks/year, but perhaps after x years of training it would begin to drop: 14 weeks, 13, etc. Of course, the process is already slowed by the training system itself, but this only really comes into effect when the skills are already at a high level and doesn't really address the problem that every 50-year old goatherd is going to have several skills in the 90+ range. Oh well, I seem to be rambling without coming any closer to a real solution, so I won't go on any further. All I really wanted to say was that any age-based experience system is going to have problems, but I'd rather try to solve those problems than change to a different system, where you can have a 20 year-old with more "experience" than a 40 year-old before play ever starts. Trent Smith ------------------------------ From: ANDOVER@delphi.com Date: Fri, 09 Feb 1996 00:53:29 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: Skill levels in respect to age Actually, a 50-year old goatherd would have several skills in the 90% plus range, such as "goat herding, goat birthing" and the like (Animal lore). It is just that he would not have 90% with ANY weapon. Maybe the solution here is to list two skills for each profession that rise regardless of age. In no profession would your physical skill improve after age 30 or so, however. Jim Chapin ------------------------------ From: Trent Smith Date: Fri, 09 Feb 1996 00:31:12 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Skill levels in respect to age Jim Chapin suggested picking a couple of skills per Occ. that can be increased without limit, but with physical skills not being able to increase at all after age 30: While I like the direction of this suggestion, and think that it could give adequate results with NPCs, it creates a problem for "real" characters, namely, what happens when your PC turns 30? Is he no longer allowed to accumulate checks in certain skills? If that's not the case (which I'm assuming it wouldn't be) then you've got a rules consistency problem that places PCs above the ret of the world by virtue of nothing other than being PCs. While I know that many (most?) other games have rules constructs like that, and there's a strong belief among many players that PCs ARE better than "normal" people (started, as far as I can tell, by 1st ed. D&D), I've always liked the fact that in RQ the same rules apply to everybody the same way; after all, if I feel like it as GM, I can always choose to ignore the rules and give the PCs extra bonuses anyway. Trent Smith ------------------------------ From: quantumk@foothill.net (Corey Spillis) Date: Fri, 9 Feb 1996 10:27:00 -0800 Subject: Re: Skill levels in respect to age I've been following the discussions, for a couple of days now and feel I need to add my $.02 to this one. It seems to me that the best limiting factor on skills due to age is the same one that PC's are forced to follow. Try just using the skill maximum is 100% + the catgory modifier. If there is some reason that this is unrealistic let me know. Corey ------------------------------ From: quantumk@foothill.net (Corey Spillis) Date: Fri, 9 Feb 1996 10:26:58 -0800 Subject: Re: Skill levels in respect to age I've been following the discussions, for a couple of days now and feel I need to add my $.02 to this one. It seems to me that the best limiting factor on skills due to age is the same one that PC's are forced to follow. Try just using the skill maximum is 100% + the catgory modifier. If there is some reason that this is unrealistic let me know. Corey ------------------------------ From: Sandy Petersen Date: Fri, 9 Feb 96 14:10:51 -0600 Subject: Re: Multimissiled Thrown Warriors Will Johnson >Does this mean that a giant who knows Multimissile 9 can cast it on one of the >player characters that he has picked up and throw four flailing warriors at one >of their teammates The image of this occurrence is so charming that I'm powerfully tempted to approve it as wholeheartedly as possible. But in the end, I suspect that if your campaign is so weird that you need an actual rule to prevent this kind of thing, you may as well add one more rule to MultiMissile: "it takes 1 point of Multimissile for each die of damage done by the missile OR for each ENC the missile weighs, whichever is greater." reasoning that the extra Multimissile points are supposed to be needed because the missile is bigger. An ENC is a _huge_ missile (a kg-sized arrow?), so this extra rule would only come into play when abnormal things are being thrown, like flailing warriors. Since a typical flailing warrior weighs around 60 ENC, you'd need a Multimissile 60 to pull off this trick. A chair weighing 10 ENC would also be tough to Multimissile. Sandy> ------------------------------ From: ANDOVER@delphi.com Date: Fri, 09 Feb 1996 23:13:57 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: Skill levels in respect to age Thinking some more about this business of physical skills, it seems to me that there ought to be some maximum that diminishes after age 30 or so. Frex, atmy age, I could still learn something about sword fighting, since I know nothing, it is just that I could neverget that good. So that someone who reaches, say, 250% in their weapon would be squeezed down slowly after age 30 (assuming he is mortal, of course!) in physical skills only. Jim Chapin ------------------------------ End of RQ Rules Digest: V2 #181 ******************************* This is the bottom of the RuneQuest Rules Digest. RuneQuest is a trademark of Avalon Hill, and Glorantha is a trademark of Chaosium. 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