Dare I ask?

[Atgxtg]

The only thing I didn't care for was free INT, since it make a wizard's power tied directly to the non-changeable INT score and if/when he got a familiar or some other spell storing device.

I like Sandy's rule of 10% per Intensity a lot better. Seems less artificial and gives sorcerers room to grow.


BTW, we've probably strayed off target enough to either warrant a back to topic memo or split the sorcery stuff into a new thread.

[deleriad]

Originally Posted by Rurik

I beleive now that Sorcery was released with unforseen consequences, namely because people who know the designers keep telling me so. But back in 1983 or whenever (I bought RQ3 probably within the first week of its' release) I'd just assumed it was working as designed. Long term boosts were a feature, not a bug, so to speak.

I was exactly the same back in the day. I ran an Ars Magica style "troupe" campaign in Jonatela which started with basic sorcery rules then after going to, I think, the first convulsion, got gradually modded based on a late night discussion with Sandy Petersen (I even posted it in an old, old RQDigest).

I played in a Dwarf campaign adapted from the ICE Moria sourcebooks where our use of sorcery broke the campaign. Effectively perpetual damage boost and damage resistance plus Skin of Life and a lot of armoring and strengthening enchantments meant that dwarfs just marched underwater. The GM had not thought through just what sorcery would do. I also ran Griffen Island and had great fun with Halcyon. After a while, I realised that real sorcerors were, basically, best as NPCs.

If you liked bookeeping and downtime, RQ3 sorcery was great fun as long as you didn't actually let competent PC sorcerors anywhere near a scenario. On the other hand, MRQ sorcery is, amazingly, playable as long as you know how to deal with smart players using Smother.

[Lord Twig]

Of all the magic systems in MRQ, sorcery is probably the least broken. That said I just don't like the way it is played. I liked pumping tons of magic points into a spell to get a powerful result. Or using few magic points to get off a quick spell. The thought that you would always cast your spells at maximum power, quickly, for one magic point just doesn't feel right.

The funny thing about MRQ divine magic is that it could be great with one simple fix. Just allow Dedicated Power to be separate from the character's personal power.

So if you have 20 power and sacrifice 5 points for 5 points of Divine magic you now have 15 power and 5 points of dedicated power. Keep track of these separately. Your power can go back up to 20 if you get enough experience checks because your dedicated power doesn't effect your regular power at all. If you use your divine magic you skill have 5 points of dedicated power to use on divine spells, you just have to go and pray for new spells at a temple and don't need to sacrifice more power if you don't want to.

Don't even get me started about spirit magic/combat and shamans in MRQ. It is a blight on the world of RPGs.

As for powerful sorcerers in RQ3. We found the best way to deal with them was to hit them with a sword. Preferably with a Truesword and bladesharp, backed with a Strength spell. If you had a sorcerer of your own, a little Damage Boost goes a long way. Usually it could do enough to overcome the sorcerer's Damage Resistance, and if it wasn't a critical hit would finish him. (Or just about anyone else for that matter.)

The massive range on sorcery spells wasn't useful unless you could somehow see the target. So you cast Sight Projection. The problem there is that a simple detect spell let you know it was there. Long duration Mystic Vision usually covered that, but if someone suddenly started choking for no reason Detect Magic, or better yet, Find Enemy was the first spell cast. Then a quick magic attack at the sensor went directly to the head of the offending sorcerer.

Oh, I guess one house rule we had helped with things. You could add additional magic points for defeating Counterspell, Spell Resistance, Shield and such at no extra time. So if said Smother spell was directed at a Sword of Humakt the sorcerer could expect a Sever Spirit backed with a crap ton of magic points to come flying his way almost immediately.

It would work something like, Surprise Round cast Smother. Round two Strike Rank 1, Sword's allied spirit casts Find Enemy, Strike Rank 2, Sword cast Sever Spirit backed by 30 or 40 magic points. This would usually have a 50/50 chance of killing the sorcerer outright. If the Smother had too much Intensity for the Sword's Dismiss Magic to overcome, there was always a DI. It should be noted that sorcerers, godless heathens that they are, do not get to DI.

[TRose]

Originally Posted by Lord Twig

Of all the magic systems in MRQ, sorcery is probably the least broken. That said I just don't like the way it is played. I liked pumping tons of magic points into a spell to get a powerful result. Or using few magic points to get off a quick spell. The thought that you would always cast your spells at maximum power, quickly, for one magic point just doesn't feel right.

The funny thing about MRQ divine magic is that it could be great with one simple fix. Just allow Dedicated Power to be separate from the character's personal power.

So if you have 20 power and sacrifice 5 points for 5 points of Divine magic you now have 15 power and 5 points of dedicated power. Keep track of these separately. Your power can go back up to 20 if you get enough experience checks because your dedicated power doesn't effect your regular power at all. If you use your divine magic you skill have 5 points of dedicated power to use on divine spells, you just have to go and pray for new spells at a temple and don't need to sacrifice more power if you don't want to.

Think there are as many 'fixes' to MRQ divine magic as there are GMs. I allow Priest/Runelords to spend hero points to buy a pool for divine magic spells. You spend x hero points and the priest then can have that many points of divine magic.
As far as Shaman go, Well I bought Cults 2 when it came out and I am still trying to figure out the rules in it. Its a shame cause I have always like Shaman in RQ . I wonder did anyone try to read it befor it was printed or was it a rush job. I feel it needs to be totally rewritten.
And for spell range. I fell in love with White bear/Red moon befor Rq was around so I want my caster to be some how be able to attack those people 5 hexes away some how.

[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by RMS

While I accept that Sorcery definitely had it's issues (mostly to do with being too much accounting IMO), I disagree about this point. Divine Magic still trumps it on the top end, at least for overall power at "the point of attack". Sorcery has the advantage of being up long term, but it's upper end is nowhere near what a loaded up Divine user can get with unlimited Shields, Spirit Blocks, Dispel Magics, Extensions (negating the longterm advantages), and especially infinitely stackable damage boosting spells, like Slash and Crush. Of course, none of it balances out completely, but RQ is that way across the board, which is one of its charms IMO.

There are two problems with this:

1. Most divine magic users didn't actually have the range of spells to be able to manage close to the boost output of a sorcerer; Slash and Crush weren't things everyone had available, for example, nor the divine attribute boosting spells.

2. It was unlikely any of them had _enough_ of these to be able to produce the equivelent results on the equivelent targets, even _with_ Extension, because that just required a bloody awful lot of Divine Magic. The fact that it stacked with spirit magic didn't help much because one way or another, you couldn't typically have the spell up and recover it to the same degree a sorcerer could.

In practice it might have been possible to match or exceed the sorcerer, but it probably was only possible to an incredibly dedicated practioner of some specific cult with just the right combination of spells, and I'm not even sure such a cult existed in any published work (maybe one of the Gloranthan Lunar cults; I wouldn't want to say for sure). Even if it did, how often can you throw that sort of opponent at someone before it becomes obvious you've had to distort hell out of what opposition is available just to have a credible threat?

[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by Rurik

And honestly I've held that belief until a few weeks ago, when due to this interweb thingy people started telling me it was all borked up. But the fact is I played with it, and used it, and calculated costs and strike ranks and durations, and even liked it. I schemed to abuse it as a player, and worked hard as a GM to challenge players who got good at it, but I'd accepted that was how it was. I know people griped about it (too complex, too weak then powerful), but always dealt with it, and it never broke any games - though in the end it did make them a bit of a chore (but hey, that is roleplaying a sorcerer for you - numbers and logic and study and preperation, all work and no play...).

Well, I have to point out that part of that is that you don't seem to consider having to bend over backwards to deal with it breaking a game. That's almost the definition of it, to me.

[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

BTW, we've probably strayed off target enough to either warrant a back to topic memo or split the sorcery stuff into a new thread.

That's probably true, and I apologize to the original poster for contributing to that.

[frogspawner]

Originally Posted by TRose

And for spell range. I fell in love with White bear/Red moon befor Rq was around so I want my caster to be some how be able to attack those people 5 hexes away some how.

With 6 points of Discorporation out of good ol' RQ2, you'd be up and zapping...

[frogspawner]

(Re, straying off-topic...)

Originally Posted by Nightshade

That's probably true, and I apologize to the original poster for contributing to that.

I'd say you don't need to - it's relevant. Now he should know that with BRP he may need a fix for the old RQ3 Sorcery until the new book comes out - but with MRQ he'd need to fix everything else...

[raymond_turney]

Since I was there, let me note that RQ had a number of design objectives:

a) to adopt a simple, reasonably simple rule mechanic, in which people thought of skills, not "character classes", to replace the arbitrary character class system.

b) to create a combat system where the SCAers {I wasn't in the SCA, but the other three had all been king of the Northern California region at some point} could actually visualize combat. That was what led to the relatively complex system of strike ranks and hit locations

c) to bring monsters into the same system as humans, so they could be played

d) to create a system with multiple magic systems, so that choice of magic system would devolve to the player not the GM, and to let everyone run a magic user {everyone I ever knew wanted to play a magic user, this made for unbalanced parties, I just wanted to give people what they seemed to want}. This objective was important to me, but I doubt it was important to the others.

e) To write a set of rules which were well enough written so that people from different groups who got together at conventions would not have to spend an hour learning the rules set the GM used. In the early D&D days, there were an amaing number of interoperability problems created by the fact that 1st edition D&D was a great idea, but it was so badly written that people from different groups were likely to be in effect playing different games. This was a big deal to Steve Perrin and the DunDracon committee, if only because they ended up hearing complaints from frustrated players about this problem, who assumed that the DM's reading of the rules was wrong and their character should not have been killed:-).

f) To give Greg the set of rules he wanted, since Glorantha had very little Tolkien influence the rules needed to be different from traditional High Fantasy.

These objectives had little to do with rolling D100 instead of D20; in fact I'm convinced that rolling one die rather than two speeds up the game, so going to D100 was probably a mistake. I now think the best compromise between minimizing the number of dice you have to roll and read and maximizing granularity is probably D30; but my house system Fire and Sword {available as a PDF on this site, which I encourage people to look at} uses D20 most of the time. D100 vs D20 in a system was a relatively minor issue then, and I'm inclined to think it is not a big deal now.

The current version of AD&D is an interesting offering, in some ways closer to RQ I than to D&D first edition. It might not be what you want, but some of the design objectives of RQ I are in my view met by 3,5 D&D and Forgotten Realms; possibly better than they were met in RQ I.

- Ray

Originally Posted by Enpeze

Well, maybe you are right, but was the intention to create RQ not because of beeing unsatisfied with the D&D rule system? And after RQ release Perrin and his companions abandoned D&D completely, no?

AFAIK Mongoose has never been stated to be unsatisfied with d20. And I am sure a lot of them are still favoring this awful rule system for their private games. Thats why I said the Mongoose guys are coming from a "different roleplaying culture" than RQ and are still embraced by it.