From: David Cake (davidc@cs.uwa.edu.au)
Date: Thu 12 Aug 1993 - 10:25:01 EEST
If RQ4 is to be a companion rather than a full second edition, what
does this mean about the rules? Most importantly, it means that the amount
of change to existing stats should definately be minimised, so that people
who do not have it can still play.
Things that are additions to the game system rather than changes
are obviously things that are fine to add. Into this category come Combat
Special Options, New Skills that don't supersed old ones, the character
creation system, and a few other things.
These things go against the seemingly very popular RQ Lite
movement, but hey, I like 'em all.
It is probably fine to include changes to the core rules that change
gameplay significantly, but that don't change characteristics. This makes
RQ4 into a hefty change to the rules - we get new combat actions rules,
changes to damage and healing, Easy/Medium/Hard skills.
and then there are rules changes that will require changes to
existing characters, but only small number of them - this includes some
of the new skills, but mostly means Magic, shamanism and sorcery.
Then there are changes which change a few things on each character -
basically maneouver, and Spirit Combat. I like these as well (especially
Spirit Combat) but they might be problematic, as the decision will have to
be made as to wether new supplements will support these changes.
Lastly, comes major changes which change the characteristics of
everything, in several places. The only thing that I can think of is the
new damage bonus/ armour system. It is unreasonable to suggest a new system
if new supplements wil not support it, it is impossible to make it the
standard system if it is only in a supplement, not a new edition of the
rules, and it is very ugly to give two versions of statistics.
SO the question of the 'status' of the new version makes quite a
bit of difference. Can we still make the RQ4 changes to the magic system if
they will be unsupported? Can we produce a 'magic companion' and from then
on expect people to have it? (plausible, FASA expect you to have their
Grimoire supplement, for example).
What changes can we have in the new format?
Cheers
Dave Cake
0,,
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Sat 05 Jul 2003 - 20:28:43 EEST