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Originally Posted by RMS
Wow! I've never bothered with tracking everything like that. PCs track their own MP. NPCs have whatever MP they need to power whatever they should logical have. Magic wears off when it makes sense to wear off. I'm certianly not clicking off melee rounds to 5/10/15 minute points. For one thing, it's magic, so I assume that it's not mechanistic at all. That 5 minutes is an approximation IMO, so magic goes down whenever it seems reasonable that it's gone down.
Now, that doesn't mean that my players haven't used the short duration of magic in RQ tactically. Over the years, different groups at various times have suckered their foes into throwing up magic, only to run away or stay at missile range until the foe's magic has gone down. Then the PC's turn, power up and fight. Orlanthi equipped with Mobility can really be nasty with this type of tactic.
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Ideally I woundn't have to track it for the PCs either. Unfortunately, few of my RQ players ever got the "knack" for battle magic. On multiple occasions the group spoiled an attack when a couple guys stopped moving to cast battle magic. Since I could handle it and the players couldn't, I sort of had to walk them though it a bit until they got up to speed. For the most part, despite having most foes beat "on paper" the group inability to use their battle magic put them at a disadvantage. In the end, I ended up running a low-magic campaign, as only one or two players ever got good enough with battle magic to use it. One guy was even starting to get clever with it.
Plus that was 20 years ago, when a more, "by the numbers" approach was more common with RPGs in general, and my style in particular. Part of RQ strategy was trying to time things so that the other's guys fireblade was down. At one I I recall running an epic battle with 70 characters or so, round by round, Strike Rank by Strike Rank, over the course of several sessions.
Nowaday's I'd run thing differently, and use a few more shortcuts.