From: Loren Miller (LOREN@marketing.wharton.upenn.edu)
Date: Tue 08 Jun 1993 - 02:43:26 EEST
Here's the third lot of them, and I think the last one of this gang.
PROPOSAL, FIRST AID
I'd like to propose a change in the way first aid works, so that you
can no longer cure damage with the first aid skill, and so that
failed rolls are neither unimportant nor assured death. Here goes.
First Aid: The rough and ready art, often practiced by soldiers, of field
medicine. This allows one to stop a wound from bleeding, to splint
a broken limb, or to fashion a rough sling. A successful roll will
stop a wound from bleeding in one round, and splint a broken limb
or fashion a sling within five minutes. A failed roll will require
four rounds to stop a wound from bleeding, and twenty minutes to
splint a broken limb or make a sling, and the patient must make a
CONx5 roll or pass out from pain because of rough treatment. A
fumbled roll will not stop bleeding, the patient will bleed to
death unless helped magically before that time, and will not
fashion a useful splint or sling, and the patient must roll CONx3
or less or fall unconcious from incompetent and painful treatment.
A Special stops blood loss in 1 rnd, heals 1 pt after 5 min, will
stop bleeding as a result of a fumbled First Aid. A Critical
success is as a special success, but heals 1d3 HP after 5 minutes.
Unless it succeeds specially or critically, First Aid will not
restore hit points of damage, prevent infection, or otherwise heal
wounds. It will only stop them from getting worse quickly.
The reason for the First Aid change is threefold:
under RQ2 first aid would not restore hit points lost, though it would
stop bleeding. RQ3 changed this, and IMHO it negatively affected the
feel of damage, made it not quite as serious.
the RQ3 death and dying rules effectively double character hit points.
instead of dying at 0 hp characters die at -1xHP.
and thirdly, the rules for non-lethal attacks make combat even easier on
people who get hurt, as long as the attacker is trying to KO the
defender instead of kill it.
given these changes I think we can afford to clamp down on first aid.
CHANGE TO HEALING SPELL, HEALSHARP
Perhaps the healing spells can be modified to become "healsharp" type
spells at the same time, which assume the healer is applying magical
herbs and add +5% to first aid and +1 HP healing to first aid attempts.
Actually, I have adopted this rule in my campaign and it works well. It
also gives the healer in the party an incentive to learn First Aid,
which wasn't the case before.
LOCATION OF CULTURAL SKILLS
put the cultural skills first, before the professions
FURTHER EXPLANATION OF LANGUAGE AND SCRIPT SKILLS AND THE REASON FOR THE
CHANGE IN TERMINOLOGY
Language is the skill you have at speaking your own language, getting
your meaning across and understanding the meaning of what others say.
Obviously, it's only rolled for in extraordinary situations, most often
being used only to indicate how properly a character speaks. Script is
the ability to read and write the alphabet that is most common with your
language, for instance Latin script would be used with English or French
or Spanish or Italian. Since alphabets and spelling weren't standardized
until the advent of the printing press Script is a lot harder than we
moderns would think.
LEVELS OF MASTERY
If I can get the authors to agree with me, RQ4 will have mechanisms so
that craftsmen with different skills produce different quality work,
even if they both succeed. This would be tied to an index of the skill,
something like 30%=apprentice, 60%=journeyman, 75%=expert, 90%=master
(for the critical part of the scale), so that an apprentice, someone who
had passed the apprentice level of the skill, could produce apprentice
quality goods with a normal success, journeyman with a special, and
expert with a critical. With various levels of failure an apprentice
could produce something useless, or even with a fumble something
dangerous to the user. I'd like to expand this beyond craft skills, to
other macro skills (not combat, which is handled with micro skills), but
haven't yet figured out what the mechanism could be. I'm open for
suggestions if anybody else likes the idea.
VARIOUS OPTIONS FOR SIMPLIFYING THE SKILL DIFFICULTY RULES
Since you are revising the system so thoroughly, it's time to simplify
the RQ skill system. Currently it's very complicated, with four levels
of skill difficulty and skill defaults that bear no relationship to
those levels of difficulty. Also, the cultural skills are at many
different default levels. Although all this may make the game slightly
more realistic than a uniform system, it makes it so much more
complicated that I don't think the increased realism is worth the
effort, or the corresponding loss in elegance and playability.
Here are a few solutions, any one of which would be simpler than the
present system.
1. Keep easy, medium, hard, and very hard categories for skills.
Defaults for them are as below:
Easy 40% or 30%
Medium 20% 10%
Hard 10% 5%
V Hard 5% 0%
Cultural skills, which would be determined by culture or cult, are
emphasized by the culture and the character would have them at an
increased beginning chance. This should be fairly high to encourage
players to use and develop cultural skills.
Cultural 50% or 40%
Leave skill improvement rules as presently written.
2. Keep easy, medium, hard, and very hard categories. Rather than
computing skill bonuses by summing the stats-10, compute skill bases
for a category of skill (attack, defense, knowledge) by averaging the
stats involved. For negative influence, use 21-stat instead of the
stat.
Easy skill base x 2
Medium x 1
Hard x 0.5
V Hard x 0.25
For skill increases, add the default skill to the roll. This should
penalize V Hard skills compared to Easy ones. Since this makes
advancement generally easier, compensate somewhere else to make it
hard, such as with your experience point system (which I still hate,
by the way).
Cultural skills are listed as in option one, but instead of using a
straight percentage, are also computed from skill base.
Cultural skill default = skill base x 3
This also makes the various levels of skill more unique for different
characters. Trained level would be SBx3, Standard would be SBx4,
Expert would be SBx5, Master would be SBx6, and so on.
3. Get rid of redundant skills (such as bargain=bribe+fasttalk) and
difficulty levels. Choose all skills so that they cover an equal amount
of game time, using the "campaign utility" model (Hero system) to select
them rather than the "effort to learn" (GURPS) model. Every skill should
be about as easy to crock as every other skill. This makes the
easy-medium-hard-v.hard scale unneccessary, irrelevant, immaterial, and
incompetent. (thanx to Perry Mason :-) You can keep the present default
system, or use one of the simplified ones above. Use this skill set as
the base RQ skill set and use it in the chapter on how to run RQ in a
non-gloranthan setting. Make sure to publish a character sheet with
these choices. Then make the changes that need to be made to the game to
let it fit in Glorantha, such as splitting up the medical skills and
adding mystic skills like sense chaos and sense assassin, and any other
skill mods that you have to do to make RQ work with Glorantha. Make the
Glorantha version the main character sheet, but do not make the other
one less useful or otherwise inferior.
You may wish to combine some of these methods. The key is to look for
things in the current system that we can simplify without losing the
good RQ feel.
TRAINING AND RESEARCH, SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY
Included are some comments from a player. Our last session included a
long hiatus, three years of game time, and at the end I handed out 400
hours for training in common skills (cult skills count as common) or
research in anything else. Computing progress took up a lot of game
time, 30 to 45 minutes. Though I usually dislike tables, when they
would reduce work I think they're a good idea. Can we simplify the
training and research rules either by tabulating them or by vastly
simplifying them?
Andy Skinner writes his opinion carefully and clearly. Here it is.
> I wonder whether there is a better way to figure up the training. If
> you just take the 1 point intead of rolling 1d6-2, the cost to take a
> skill at S up N points is:
>
> S*N + N*(N-1)/2
>
> I think in the future I'll just do that--it is too frustrating to spend
> those points and watch your skill go down or stay the same several times
> in a row.
>
> When we spend time doing bookkeeping, whether creating or improving
> characters, we usually spend a lot of time doing bookkeeping.
Book-keeping in RQ4 takes too much time. We have to cut down the
complexity and accuracy of it to make it fun.
SORCERY
[Many of these suggestions have been adopted for the Sorcery draft
rules, v 1.0. --LJM]
The intensity required for effective use of many sorcery spells must be
reduced because under RQ3 rules they require intensities of 15 or higher
to be effective, but in the revised rules you would need to have an
intensity and spell skill over 150% to cast such a spell. This is far
too steep a requirement for a spell such as dominate ghost. Perhaps the
sorcery spells should undergo a wholesale revision...
For example, venom is an effective spell under either version,
especially with the corrected multispell skill use, but palsy, which is
a less radical magical effect (imho), requires a high intensity to be
effective (6 or 7+ against human size opponents) which means that only
sorceror types who begin the game with 60% or higher in the spell will
be able to use it.
LATER COMMENTS ON SORCERY
As two characters out of three in the campaign use sorcery I need to
make some preliminary rulings about sorcery use and so came up with the
following guidelines on the power of sorcery spells.
10 points of a sorcery spell (requires 100% or higher in spell and takes
a round to cast) should be enough to do the following things: kill a
tough human without magical protection between 20 and 80% of the time;
bind 95% of all encountered ghosts and ancestor spirits; give a 95%
chance of an illusion fooling the target; add 50% to a specific skill
chance.
Lesser expenditure should be proportionately less powerful.
In general, each 1 intensity should be equivalent to about 1 tenth of
one of the characteristics of a skillful or tough human. One tenth the
weight. One tenth the skill. Etc.
I applied these off-the-cuff guidelines in the most recent game session
as follows:
palsy. fine as is, with one change. instead of intensity > location hp
being required, it should be intensity >= location hp, because I think
that a palsy with intensity 6 and multispell 3 cast by a 17 POW sorceror
should be able to paralyze more than the arms of a 14 HP opponent.
phantom <sense>. if used to conceal a person, phantom sight should have
a 10% chance of successfully hiding somebody who is behind it, used just
like a hide skill roll that requires mp expenditure. if used to assist
hide skill, simply add 5% per intensity to the hide skill of anybody
behind it. if they are no good at hiding, they'd do better to stay close
behind the phantom. IMHO, there's no good reason for phantom sight to be
as restricted as it was in the RQ3 rules anyway.
Those were the guidelines I came up with. I'd like to hear your reaction
to them.
RULES ORGANIZATION
One of the nicest things about RQ2 when compared to RQ3 was that you
could learn the rules by reading them. RQ3 was nowhere near as well
organized as RQ2 was, and rather than follow the organization of RQ3 for
RQ4 I'd prefer if the rules followed a new scheme, much as the new CoC
rules have reorganized the previous edition's clutter.
HARDBACK AND SEWN BINDING
I also think RQ4 should be printed in a hardback book with sewn
binding that is intended to last a while (like AD&D, the market
leader). Of course this assumes that AH doesn't intend a massive
second rewrite of the rules in another year. Given the flimsy crap we
were sold for $45 in 1984 money in the RQ3 rules box this is probably
a touchy subject for most old time RQ players. At that time, for the
same money you could get the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's
Guide, and the Monster Manual for AD&D and still have some money left
for an adventure or two. So the rules sucked, big deal? Sorcery and
Fatigue weren't all that useful either. Compare the binding quality
of the two products, and what you got for your money, and it is to
laugh. We RQ players really got ripped off. Remedy this insulting
error, please.
--
+++++++++++++++++++++++23
Loren Miller LOREN@wmkt.wharton.upenn.edu
There's a thin line between TQM and Mutiny
0,,
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