From: Richard McAllister (Richard.McAllister@Eng.Sun.COM)
Date: Wed 20 Nov 1991 - 09:56:33 EET
> 2. Magic Point rate recovery
> People feel that (spirit & sorcerous) magic is cheap. Since I usually run
> "life experience" campaigns rather than "dungeon runs" the action usually
> takes place on a day-to-day, week-to-week, or year-to-year basis. This means
> that for every fight people cast their magic freely, rather than having to
> make a tactical decision along the lines of "use mana now or save it for
> later?" Also generally there are sufficient MP's left to Heal all damage,
> and since they are back the next day we rarely see anyone wounded at the
> beginning of a fight. Thus to fit in with the time scales I like to work
> with, I'd like to see a slower recovery rate of some sort.
It's easy to fix this one without fiddling with the rules; just have
two fights in one day. For example, bring out a random encounter (hungry
beast, etc.) to fool people into using up their MPs and then hit them
with the real fight later in the same game-time day. Remember, MPs
don't come back while "on the move".
This is one of the reasons Gloranthan trolls make such great bad guys
-- the obvious Troll way of attacking is to send in a bunch of trollkin
to spook the PCs into using up their spells, then send in the second
wave of real trolls to win. Of course, the trollkin in the first wave
all get wiped out, but who cares about trollkin? Certainly not
trolls...
Of course, you can't do this ALL the time, since then the players learn
never to use up all the MPs on the first fight -- so sometimes the
first fight should be the real one!
Now, we did change MP recharge to 1 MP per hour instead of the nominal
1/4 POW per 6 hour rate. This isn't much of a change (even a POW 21
character still gets all MP back in one day of rest) but it's a lot
easier to calculate (party can just say "we rest after lunch for 1
hour; everybody put back a MP") and it somewhat lessens the pain of
being a low POW character (the dreariest part of RQ is trying to get
those first few POW checks after having to do an initiate DI...)
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