From: Sandy Petersen (sandyp@idcube.idsoftware.com)
Date: Thu 07 Jul 1994 - 10:03:22 EEST
David Baur asks:
>Sandy, does your campaing have visual spell effects? And if so, to
>what extent?
I play by the "official" rules which are that just about every spell has both visible and audible effect. Plus you can usually feel them, too. If you fire a Disrupt, a thin pencil of light zaps the target; Bladesharp makes your sword glint and ring momentarily; etc. This doesn't mean that all spells are easy to spot -- stuff like Mindspeech or Absorption might be very subtle indeed. I play that if you're being watched by guards and you cast a subtle spell, the guard needs a perception roll to notice. If the guard's watching you very carefully, he can see you do it for sure, tho. If the guards are busy playing cards or something, they'd only notice if you cast something like an attack spell.
This opinion has been mocked by certain other Digest folks, so I haven't bothered to defend it verbosely. The main objection seems to be that it makes certain spells less useful if the enemy can see you cast them. My response is that no one on Earth gets to cast any spells at all and we get by okay. Even if spells are visible, a Gloranthan is still better off having them than not.
Now, an overtly underhanded spell like Lie probably has no vislble component. And there's probably a few other such indetectible spells. But I feel that Detect Enemies is obvious when cast, and most others.
Devin wonders:
> is the Slow spell MP vs MP on an unwilling target?
It was so intended.
>it is the only Mp vs MP spell for Wahas and Erithans
Except that they can get any spell they want from shamans.
>The average person who gets terminal Shakes loses 2 Dex points in 2
>minutes and then shakes off the disease.
Okay. Two Important Points. First off, the RQ rules are remiss in not stating that once you catch the "terminal" form of the disease, you don't keep making your CON rolls. Instead, you just keep losing stats till you die, just like in RQ II. That's an error which I apologize for on behalf of the RQ II author who was responsible for the mistake (not me).
The rules ALSO state that "particularly tenacious" disease may require a roll of CONx4, CONx3, right on down to CONx1. If you always give your players a CONx5 roll to shake off disease, then OF COURSE they'll never get seriously ill! Try some of the less-mild diseases, and see how your players do.
By my calculations (admittedly using the RQ II rule that failing your CON roll 4 times in a row kills you automatically) catching a "normal" (CONx5) disease is fatal 9% of the time for the population at large. Here are the rest of my results:
CONx5 disease = 9% fatalities CONx4 disease = 14% fatalities CONx3 disease = 25% fatalities CONx2 disease = 41% fatalities CONx1 disease = 66% fatalities And of course, the survivors are largely weakened by disease,so a second occurrence is MUCH likelier to kill them.
For some time you've been talking about the disease rules in RuneQuest and how undeadly they are. These rules may be "broken" in the sense that they don't reproduce actual real-world mechanics for infectious and other diseases. I happen to know quite a lot about parasitic and infectious diseases (and once had to be physically restrained from writing a supplement on same for the BRP system), and the bottom line is that they're not particularly fun to roleplay out. If you give a player malaria, so that every few month or so he has to suffer a relapse and be incapable of adventuring, and might die, how does that add to your campaign? What fun is it to run a character who's lost his eyesight to River Blindness?
The advantage of RQ disease as written is that it is scary to PCs (it destroys your stats! a prospect horrifying to any PC), and is loathsome, while not necessarily murderous. YOUR player characters might "shake off" losing 2 points of DEX, but that's considered a catastrophe in my parts.
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