From: JOVANOVIC@CUCCFA.CCC.COLUMBIA.EDU
Date: Fri 21 Jan 1994 - 01:47:25 EET
I was planning to send out individual notices, but may as
well post this information here in the meantime.
First off, feel free to post any comments you may have on the
list - whether or not you have a copy of the draft - that's what
the list is there for (thanks, Loren). However, if you have a set
of comments that you want considered, please make sure you email
me a copy as well, at "jovanovic@columbia.edu" - the volume of
the RQ4 list can get high enough that we might miss comments there.
To address some other comments:
The official name of the product is currently
RuneQuest: Adventures in Glorantha (RQ:AiG for short).
Of course, other suggestions are welcome.
The distribution of this draft is somewhat limited (distribution
to a total of 50 playtest groups is planned) by time and
cost. This draft is fully laid out, which makes electronic
distribution inconvenient. The cost in time and money of xeroxing
and mailing out a 200+ page manuscript is not insignificant.
More importantly, as we're trying to get this out sometime
around the middle of this year, we simply don't have the time
to consider that many more playtest comments. As it is, we're
close to the limit, and we'd rather go over and consider our
playtester's comments carefully, rather than skim over a larger
number of comments. I wish we could do even more, but we have to
be realistic. As I mentioned before, I will try to publically
post a 5 to 10 page summary of what is in the current draft,
which should give those of you without a draft an idea as to
its contents, and better understand the playtest discussions.
For those of you that got the draft at RQ Con - I suspect I forgot
Finally, as a general topic for discussion, there are two points I would
to warn a few of you that the appendices (Character Sheet, Converting
Characters and the Index) were missing - these will go out later.
David Dunham has put together a character sheet which I recommend
in the meantime. If you have suggestions or comments on what you'd
like to see in a character sheet, feel free to send them as well.
be interested in seeing people's opinions on. The two changes we've
made to combat that probably seem the most different are switching
to a combined melee/missile hit location chart and switching to a linear
damage bonus system. We feel that these changes speed and simplify
combat significantly, but we also don't want to alienate RQ2/RQIII
players with them.
Hit locations strike me as less of a problem, because you can simply
use the RQIII melee/missile charts if you prefer. If we simply mention
this as an option in the Character Conversion, Melee or Gamemaster
sections, this seems to handle that problem.
The linear damage bonus system addresses a number of playtester's
complaints (daggers severing arms with a 1D4 damage bonus, punches
killing people), and in our playtesting to date simplifies and speeds
combat. We've found that most of our playtesters seem to prefer this
system once they've tried it. However, we are concerned that at first
glance, it may put off RQ2/RQIII players, or those concerned with
compatibility with RQIII scenario packs (though conversion can be
very simple, i.e. +1D4 is +1 or +2, each +1D6 is roughly +3). I've
even considered including the old (die based) damage bonus chart to
use as an optional rule. Any opinions, comments or suggestions here?
Thanks again,
Oliver
0,,
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Sat 05 Jul 2003 - 20:31:27 EEST