Quote:
Originally Posted by Rurik
The free int loophole involved storing all your spells in bound spirits so you had massive ammounts of free int, therefore being able to to cast spells with huge durations and magnitudes - usually to cast powerful buffs on the entire party that lasted months or years.
I just had a long discussion about this a few weeks back - I think on RPG net - about RQ3 Sorcery. I was holding it wasn't broken - I'd always assumed that it was working as designed. Someone who actually gamed with and did some work for Chaosium back in the 80's swears that the designers and playtesters let it slip through testing and it was broken - they never actaully envisioned people having enough Free Int to do what I've described.
I still have a hard time believing a game designer can write a table that has something like: Duration 20+ years and NOT realise people are going use sorcery in that way.
|
It wasn't that they thought it'd never occur at all; its that they thought it would, in practice, need your old greybearded tower mage who wasn't going to upset balance much and just be a plot device. In part, I think they simply didn't see the implications of Intelligence Spirits and/or enchantments on the process.
But the net effect was that sorcery was completely lobsided, in the same way that original D&D magic was, and unlike either of the other two RQ3 magic systems; at the bottom end it was next to useless and at the top end it was such a generic force multiplier that it mattered more than almost anything anyone else in the party could do.