Dare I ask?

[Kloster]

Originally Posted by Nightshade

...
Even planned fights don't always have huge amounts of lead time, however.
...

In this precise case, 5 MR were sufficient, and were given by a successful hide and scan on their part, and failed scan on our. Of course, the other party being composed of trolls had an advantage on the scan roll during the night.

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

[Kloster]

Originally Posted by Nightshade

...
Note rituals, even with ceremonies, don't have to take more than a handful of days, however; as I noted, the ceremony bonus is in hours, not days.
...

You are right. My mistake.

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

[soltakss]

Since this has become a discussion on RQ3 magic I'll add a few comments.

We played a High Level RQ3 campaign for a number of years. The campaign had house rules but was basically RQ3. All the PCs in the campaign were Priests, with the exception of a Sorcerer. Some were also shamans and all were Rune Lords, or the equivalent, except the Sorcerer.

POW Gain Rolls were liberally made at the end of scenario or logical scenario parts where a break was called in the scenario. Through HeroQuesting, the PCs had increased their Species Maximum POW to give them a fairly high POW Gain Roll.

Our PCs spent their POW on Divine Magic and Enchantments. They made many different enchantments, including Strengthening Enchantments to boost General Hit Points and Location Hit Points, Armouring Enchantments to boost the APs of main weapons and skin armour, Binding Enchantments for binding spirits (and for special effects) and Spell Matrix Enchantments. They rarely made Magic Point Enchantments because we used POW Crystals and the PCs had enough MPs to last them a lifetime. (My PC in the RQ2 camapign bought a magic item from a fellow PC with 250 points of POW Store Crystals and still had 200 points left over, Derak the Dark Troll had a leather jacket with the words "Derak the Dark Troll" picked out in POW Storage Crystals)

Everyone increased their Ceremony and Enchant skills so most people had them at 90% or above. Some increased their Summoning skill, but some didn't as it was considered a secondary skill as other priests could summon things if they were needed.

Enchantments were seen as tools in the PCs' armoury. Nobody had a problem with enchanting themselves or other people. Derak had a stange appearance as he was a Living Lead Skeleton at one stage (don't ask) so he created three Wraith Binding Enchantments on his bones and bound some wraiths with a small Area Enchantment to allow them to pop out and swarm around him and a Restriction to stop anyone else using them, so he spent, what 13 POW on enchantments just to have a cool special effect of being surrounded by wraiths.

Divine Magic was common. We had a house rule that a Priest had to sacrifice for Spell Teaching, Worship and Divination for each of the cults he belonged to (we allowed multiple cult membership within reason and anyone who qualified could become a Rune Lord or Priest in the cults he belonged to) Chief Priests had to have Divination 5 and High Priests had to have Excommunicate, so PCs had to have up to 8 points of compulsory and non-combat Divine Magic, many belonged to several cults and had 9-20 points. Most people had at least one of each of their cult special spells sacrificed for and many of the Common Divine Spells. Divine Magic was seen as another necessary thing to get.

Divine Intervention (DI) was common. We used the RQ3 1D10 Divine Intervention for Rune Lords and also the RQ2 Divine Intervention spell for Priests, with Rune Lord/Priests being able to use the Divine Intervention spell as POW for the purposes of DI. We allowed DI attempts at any time, without the 1/day or 1/week limits and PCs used it fairly often. It was never seen as a chore or a last resort.

We also had HeroQuest magic that cost POW and enabled people to gain abilities/effects based on Quests. The PCs used these but generally didn't have many spells since they were viewed as dangerous magic.

We played Sorcery strictly as written in the RQ3 rules, but eventually we used Skill / 5 as the limit to manipulations. Our sorcerer became a Shadowmage (something in our game) and awakened his Shadow, which became similar to a Fetch and he dumped POW into it. He also created several familiars including a Shade. In the end, he taught the familiars the Enchant skill and they became Enchanting Engines, making Matrices and Enchantments. He used Intellect Spirits to store his spells so he always had his full Free INT. He tended to make Spell Matrices with high Intensities which allowed him to cast high Intensity spells. Sometimes he made a High Intensity High Duration matrix that allowed him to maintain very high spells permanently. He made several Homing Circles in his strongholds and also made Homing Circles on movable items such as a cart, a ship and a couple of carpets, the idea being that a trusted servant would take a carpet somewhere, lay it out on the floor and allow the sorcerer to Teleport to the Circle. Actually, thinking about it some of the other PCs had access to sorcery but rarely used it.

We generally didn't add restrictions on binding enchantments because the bound creatures were contained within the items and they were generally hidden from sight. We played that a magic user would have to use Second Sight, Soul Sight or Mystic Vision to see the creature and he could only see what he could see, so something hidden would be unseeable. Of course, Detect Magic would show things up, but with our PCs anyone casting Detect magic would be blinded by the light (RQ2) or would spend an hour for the spell to point to every magic item or enchantment on the PCs (RQ3).

We found that the shamans were virtually immune to POW vs POW rolls, so could keep their POW artificially low and allowed them to gain more Divine Magic or Enchantments. They could summon spirits and elementals and could travel the Spirit Plane, but we found they generally preferred to summon cult spirits rather than seek spirits out. In fact, they very rarely went Discorporate, even though they had at least Spirit Block 8 as a backup.

I can't remember having to houserule many sorcery spells. We said that Strengthening Enchantments (SEs) could only double the area enchanted, so a General Hit Points SE could only double General HPs, a Location SE could only double the HP of a location. Armouring Enchantments (AEs) could double the APs of an item or piece of Armour, but skin armour could be increased indefinitely.

When PCs summoned spirits or elementals, they did so in the safety of their own temples and had a lot of backup in case things went wrong. They summoned a spirit, if it was too weak, they threw it away or gave it to another person in the temple, so they had good spirits. Sometimes they would wait until they got the 10% chance of a powerful spirit to get superior spirits. Generally, they had enough MPs available that they didn't really need Power Spirits, although Power Spirits enabled them to refill their MP Matcrices/POW Crystals faster. Magic Spirits were preferred as they could cast spells for and on the PCs, quite often they combined Magic Spirits with Healing Enchantments, MP Storage Matrices and Conditions to cast healing if a location was reduced to negative HPs.

All the PCs had Alied Spirits, except the Sorcerer who had Familiars. These could cast spells on the PCs and they ensured they had spells such as Heal Wound or Heal Body in case things got bad.

I completely houseruled shamans so that my shamans are nothing like the ones in RQ3. But shamans weren't that important in my campaign. Our shamans tended to store spirits in their Fetch temporarily, make a Binding Enchantment and then put the spirit in the Binding Enchantment. They also did thetrick of summoning an Intellect Spirit, keeping it in a fetch, then summoning another one then another one and so on, making sure they kept the lowest POW spirits in their fetch. That way, they could learn many spells without tying up their Fetch's POW. It also meant that their spells couldn't be taken away from them. One of the shamans was an ancestor worshipper with bucketloads of summon ancestor spells and also had befriended a number of powerful priest ancestors who he could summon as Spirit Teachers (?) and who could hang around for a day casting exotic spells for him.


All of our PCs had Shield, except for the Sorcerer, and they had anything from Shield 20 to Shield 50. They very rarely cast all their Shield at once, preferring to keep a lot of it back for further encounters. Derak also had Crush 40 but never cast it all at once. I houseruled that Sunspear and Thunderbolt could be stacked against the same opponent and our Yelmalio Hero had Sunspear 10 and our Orlanthi hero had Thunderbolt 10, they had both Quested so that they were the Sun or the Storm and could cast the spells originating from themselves as they embodied the Sun/Storm which made them quite powerful. Everyone had Dismiss Magic 10 and had high Dispel Magic. In RQ2, we often had Multispell 3 combined with Dispel Magic 8 to allow 4 Dispel Magic 8s to be cast at once, which would bring down most 4 point stackable spells. That wasn't the case in RQ3 as the Multispell Divine Spell was scrapped. I'd probably bring it back.

[soltakss]

Split into two parts because of the size restriction .......


I now houserule that spells such as Strength/Vigour/Co-ordination/Glamour and Enhance (Characteristic) only increase the chaeacteristic to Species Maximum and Divine Spells such as Earthmight or Sea Strength can boost characteristics above Species Max and that all these spells were incompatible with similar spells, over and above the Strength/Vigour incompatibility. So, Enhance Strength couldn't be used with Strength or Sea Strength - actually they could be used together but the most powerful spell took effect - so a human with STR 15 casting Sea Strength and Strength 3 increased to STR 30, just casting Strength 10 or Enhance Strength 20 increased STR to 21, but the higher point spells were harder to Dispel so they are sometimes worth the cost.

We also played that Multispell allowed incompatible spells to be cast together, so a Multispelled Enhance Strength and Enhance Constitution would add to both, this made sorcery more useful than Spirit Magic. It also meant that people could have their stats permanently boosted if a sorcerer cast the spells every week or so, but that wasn't really a problem for us.

We didn't restrict spell knowledge to sorcery cults, although we probably should have, but we played that a sorcerer could only teach the spells he knew, so a sorcerer had to find a friendly sorcerer to learn a spell or find a grimoire or spellbook which were fairly rare. I could keep a lid on the spells by listing the spells that friendly sorcerers had.


As far as Power Levels were concerned, the sorcerer was not more powerful than the others. He started off quite a lot weaker and was originally a third-string PC, but quickly became more powerful and could compete with the rest. Combatwise, the Rune Lords were pretty much equally matched and nobody really stood out, although Derak was more heroic than the rest and once took out a Hydra with a Golden Dagger. Nobody dominated the game, although each had their own strengths and weaknesses.

So, in my experience, sorcerers do not mess up a High Level Game. They can hold their own but that's about it. I can imagine that a focussed sorcerer could affect the balance of a low or medium powered game, but the GM has enough control over which spells are available or which sorcery schools are around that sorcerers can be controlled better than other magic using characters.



As for sticking with what is in the RQ3 Rulebook/Box - what a load of rubbish.

Most people I know used the spells from Gods of Glorantha even in other worlds. We used them in a Vikings campaign. Everyone writes their own spells up and the ones in Cults of Prax, Cults of Terror, Trollpack and Gods of Glorantha were really useful.

RQ is one of those games where there are a lot of rules in other supplements. So, to simply restrict yourself to just the RQ3 rulebook is cutting out 70% or so of published rules and spells. You could do it, but what's the point?

[Triff]

Originally Posted by soltakss

Split into two parts because of the size restriction .......

Yeah, yeah, I'll get to it Ye Master of Abnormally Long Posts.

SGl.

[Trifletraxor]

Originally Posted by Triff

Yeah, yeah, I'll get to it Ye Master of Abnormally Long Posts.

SGl.

Done. Now you can write twice as long posts! Take it as a challenge!

SGL.

[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by Kloster

RQ III Magic book p57:
Control spells automatically works against creatures while they are bound in items.
Also, a control spell supercedes the innate control held over a creature bound into an item. An enchanter who does not use conditions to restrict the use of his items may find his bound creatures stolen from him or turned against him by crafty opponents using the proper control spells. Anyone who can use the object can also cast spells on the creature trapped inside, and he does not need to be in physical contact with the item to affect the creature by spells. He must use magical means of seeing on the mundane plane (Mystic vision, 2nd sight or soul sight) to target spells against a bound creature.

I think my GM just has read the rules.

I stand quite corrected. I don't recall ever noticing that paragraph before (though I will note against a standard opponent, its still not clear to me, barring use of one of the magical Sights that there's any way to identify the spirit involved). That said, definitely one for your argument.

[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by RMS

I've never shown anything beyond good natured and friendly, and yet somehow you've misconstrued that to be an "attitude". However, I really do find it humorous to be accused of having an attitude about something as superfluous as an RPG discussion for some bizarre reason.

If in your neck of the woods accusing someone of goalpost moving and putting scare quotes around the word courtesy translates into friendly, we have vastly different definitions of the term.

Picking and choosing what spells, creatures, equipment, cultures, etc. are part of the world is surely one of the prime GM decisions in any game, so yes

I don't consider removing standard spells from the rules part of basic GM decision making at all, but houseruling. If you do, then your definition is sufficiently different as to make discussion of the subject useless.

[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by soltakss

As for sticking with what is in the RQ3 Rulebook/Box - what a load of rubbish.

Most people I know used the spells from Gods of Glorantha even in other worlds. We used them in a Vikings campaign. Everyone writes their own spells up and the ones in Cults of Prax, Cults of Terror, Trollpack and Gods of Glorantha were really useful.

RQ is one of those games where there are a lot of rules in other supplements. So, to simply restrict yourself to just the RQ3 rulebook is cutting out 70% or so of published rules and spells. You could do it, but what's the point?

Because if you don't in a discussion of the rules, you aren't talking about the same rules, in essence. Its pointless to talk about the RQ3 sorcerer and problems therein if effectively, one set of people is talking about the rules in the boxed set, and someone else is talking about add-ons from Gods of Glorantha. In practice, they might as well not be talking about the same game because there's all kinds of things in Gods of Glorantha that tilt the power equation, almost always away from Sorcery, because you have all sorts of divine elements that don't exist in the core rules, from allied spirits to spells that have no core book equivelent. All these change the equation in ways someone using just the core book, or even not using just the specific elements being referenced don't have as balancers, and _expecting_ them to be present is, bluntly, unreasonable, especially given its a book for a game world not everyone used. You might as well be talking about two separate but related games.

[Trifletraxor]

This thread have convinced me to introduce a new smiley - the "beating a dead horse"-smiley!



So even if you can't agree with each other, you have at least accomplished something!

SGL.