From: Entropy needs no maintenance (STEVEG@ARC.UG.EDS.COM)
Date: Tue 16 Feb 1993 - 19:47:27 EET
>> My personal (God Learneresque) theory is that Orlanth is Argrath.
Obvious, I suppose when one stops and thinks about it.
As one who has found that while RQ looks nice in theory but doesn't actually satisfy my playing group in practise (and actually can say the same thing about Glorantha, which is why I prefer theorising about that too... :-) ), I've been giving some thought to the areas that seem to have caused most dissatisfaction.
Perhaps the somewhat sarcastic "negative karma" approach might actually work - any time you make a skill roll and fail (probably excluding fumbles), gain +1% to the skill. Skills > ~100% can be handled in a way dependent on whether you take RQ2 or RQ3 as your guide, but could in principle be stated as checking where in the 95-99% range would qualify as a successful roll for gain, and acting accordingly.
This would have the psychologically valuable result that all skill checks apart from fumbles would achieve some benefit. It would also remove the cumbersome "between adventures" bit, which in a continuously live campaign (as opposed to one in which the individual episodes are well separated - e.g. by years as in Pendragon) is often hard to judge.
2) "I'm not fighting that troll - it might kill me!" or "This is it, we're all going to die".
Consider a none-too-large troll with his favourite maul. 2D8+2D6 will
usually ding harmlessly off a reasonably protected fighter (calling a
good roll 6 on each of the D8s and 4 on the D6's, we have 20pts for a
good strike - but this could be faced by 12 points of shield, 6 of
armour and 4 more of magic). But if you miss your parry, you'll
typically be maimed for 10 points, and a critical will ruin your whole
day! It'll also ruin the day of the swashbuckler in light leathers
who fails his dodge.
On the other hand, against the RuneLord in full iron plate(12), Shield
IV (8), protection IV (4) and a large iron shield(24), even a maximum
crush (40) points will ding. Anything (short of criticals) that
Meanwhile, the average guy with his D8 sword or weapon will be waiting for specials or criticals, since they're the only thing that will get any damage through even the 10 points standing armour.
The brittle nature of characters - anything that will moderately wound a character in moderate armour will need to be doing ~10 points on average (and expect to ding on a parry), but will be sudden death on special hits or those who are lightly armoured - has always served to discourage players who like to leaven their gaming with some cathartic violence to work out their frustrations : and if we're going to do a low-violence campaign, we don't really need a combat system (or much of any system really). And the result is inevitable as soon as it is possible to armour up with more armour points in a location than hit points.
Some might argue that this is realistic; but in what is primarily a form of entertainment, perhaps this is a bit too much realism. A definite case of looking good in theory, but washing out in practise.
The worst news is that I don't see a fix to it; I beleive it's an inherent property of all absorptive armour systems. Whatever else one might say about D&D style armour class systems, they are capable of setting up threats which may worry the folks in heavy armour (by having a good THAC0), but which don't smear those who prefer not to play human tanks (by only doing damage in the D6-D10 range). Being amongst players who prefer D'Artagnan over Sir Lancelot as their role models, a system which makes the "DEX fighter" concept viable is a boon to me, and I've only found the one system amenable to this.
If anyone has managed to find a work-round to this problem, I'm eager to hear it.
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