[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by RMS

Except there's always that Saving Throw and it's unaffected by the caster's power. (OK, if I'm wrong there, let me know.

Depends on what you mean by the caster's power (among other things there's a big difference here between 3.0 and prior editions); and honestly if it works (and it often does if you pick the target right) most people simply don't care whether the caster's power matters or not.

That's as I recall D&D from way back. I didn't think the magic system had changed significantly in the latest incarnation.) We've had a character running around in our campaign that can pretty much call in a single kill on the other side's most powerful character with a pretty good chance of succeeding. In D&D, it's generally impossible to instant kill another like-leveled PC. You can do lots of collateral damage, kill off lower level and

Not that hard, honestly; there's some issues with save gusting and so forth, but there's also ways to ramp up save difficulty pretty obnoxiously. Its not certain, certainly, but then, if you're up against a target with a high POW, you can't reliably do it in RQ either, usually.

nonlevel PCs with impunity, but the game is carefully balanced so you specifically can't oneshot other experienced PCs and NPCs.

Well, as of 3.5 that's true to some extent because its also damage capped, but the numbers are high enough that's only safe for some classes of opponents (enemy mages are still quite vulnerable to things like Disintegrate, for example).

It really depends on the world you run in I suspect. Those of us running Glorantha campaigns with lots of magic floating around everywhere tend to see this possibility where others who've run in lower magic worlds (or lower magic takes on Glorantha even) have a different view. That's all a good thing too because RQ handles both pretty darn well - one of it's charms IMO.

I really have trouble picturing any but pretty extreme campaigns providing more magic than mine did; if nothing else, the simple mechanics of power gain are a limiting factor here.

My position is that the differences are cosmetic and appearances rather than actual fact. Everything you mention is very deadly to low level creatures*, but not to powerful characters in D&D. In D&D low level characters are

Fireballs are not harmless to compareable characters when you get them; in fact, its not particularly hard for a given arcane spellcaster to be killed by a fireball equivelent to his own. That's true of most of the others, too. There are, obviously, some issues created by the durability differences present in D&D classes as compared to RQ and other BRP characters, but even when accounting for that, there are simply areas where the magic does better; there are very few things that _do_ deal with slightly weaker opponents en masse in RQ for example, but that's certainly not true in D&D (and not the emphasis on _slightly_ here).

essentially background, so spells like you mention above take lots of those out and look impressive to some people's eyes. However, they have far less

They'll also take out quite a few only slightly weaker characters, however. A large number of 3rd level D&D fighters is normally still a significant problem to a party of 6th level D&D characters, and a Fireball will likely take out most of them; there's no equivelent I can think of that will effect a group of somewhat weaker, but still threatening opponents in RQ.

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chance of taking out powerful adversaries (ie. the meat of the conflict) than RQ spells have of doing similar. That's my position.

* Low level is obviously relative to the level of the campaign here.

Luckily I read your whole post before responding to this part. I do have a PC running around in my game with plenty of divine magic to both fill the skys with clouds and call down multiple Thunderbolts. It's true that he can't send them all on one opponent, but he can easily bring two down per round on one opponent doing an average of 21 hp damage which can't be defended against in any way. Sure it's a lot of points, but as I've pointed out before it's very easy to have RQ3 character with 50, 75, even 100+ points of reusable divine magic floating around. Priests can easily get multiple POW increases per year

I have to conclude our experiences are far too different to have this discussion then, because I don't recall _ever_ seeing an RQ character with more than about 40 points of reusable divine magic. I'm puzzled how it can even occur unless one is running campaigns of _particularly_ long duration, given the manditory minimum POW priests must maintain and the mechanics of power gain. Even with multiple checks, at 25-30% chances per check, the gain isn't particularly speedy.