steven@qubix.UUCP (Steven Maurer) (10/16/84)
[+++] REVIEW OF FLAWS IN RUNEQUEST 3 (Chapter 1) FOREWORD A few weeks ago, in response to an article praising Runequest 3, I replied to that message by saying that the new Runequest "sucked". Now, while I hold it to be my prerogative to hold any opinion I want on a game, I should have qualified my opinion with what I found objectionable to it. My only excuse for not doing so is that when I made my initial comment, I didn't have time to even begin listing the varied and numerous problems with RQ 3. Now I do. As a final note, before going into this review, let me state that I am both an experienced player, referee, play tester, and game designer, who has had much experience with Chaosium games. If my review of Runequest 3 seems biased, it is because I am looking at it from the perspective of a Runequest 2 player who expected old bugs to be fixed, not new ones introduced. Even under the new rules, Runequest 3 is not all that much worse than AD&D. It can still be fun, if (as in AD&D) you try to ignore rules problems, or invent variant rules which fix them. The attitude that rules don't need to be good because people will naturally fix them, seems common in the gaming industry, but would hardly be sanctioned in our own profession ("This software works, just as long as you fix all the bugs in it"). Of course, I'm not much of a fan of AD&D either. In all the following review areas, a five grade listing is given. These are: Very Good, Good, Ok, Poor, and Very Poor. Following this, is usually a note explaining why the grade was given. The areas are grouped together under area titles, which usually correspond to one of the books in the box. Also, at this time, I would like to give thanks to all the people who helped me write this review, and pointed out bugs to me. Particularly helpful were, Steven Barnes, Ricky Taylor, Jeremy Higdon, Robert Mace (and other SCA fighters), and innumerable numbers of convention goers and RQ 3 play testers. RUNEQUEST 3 GENERAL COMMENTS Game Considered Overall -- Poor to Very Poor Particulars follow. Speed of Publication -- Poor The Chaosium has a reputation for being late in everything. However, in Runequest 3 they were especially late. More than a year went by without any support for Runequest in any form, because of the slowness of the change over. Backwards Compatibility -- Very Poor 1] Played by the book, Runequest 3 is entirely incompatible with Runequest 2. This means that an investment of up to 100 dollars in Scenario packs, play aids, and cult descriptions, are now worthless. The last time I talked to Greg Stafford about this, he indicated that the Chaosium's plan was to re-release the old SP's in the new system (making you pay all over again, for the old materiel). Aside from the basic obnoxiousness of this plan, it has another fatal flaw: the Chaosium's lateness. By the original schedule, Glorontha Pack should have been out 1/3 year ago, and new materiel would start appearing in 1986. As you may or may not know, Glorontha Pack will (as best) hit the store shelves by the end of the year. This implies that the new materiel will actually come out by the earliest, in 1987 -- that is, if the schedule is kept. 2] There is nothing on the front cover of Runequest 3 which says that it is a new game system, and separate from its other releases. Thus a customer who is ignorant of the actual state of affairs of the game, may pick up a new Runequest 3 and buy any number of old incompatible Runequest 2 scenario packs, still unsold in stores. I almost saw this happen once, but the game store owner was too moral a fellow to let it slip by. 3] Both as a player, and as a referee, I am forced to perform many hours worth of labor converting my characters into the new system. Even if the method of conversion was a piece of flawless elegance, (which it is not by any means), I still do not like having to perform such a laborious task, for essentially no reason. Runequest characters are not like AD&D characters, who can be summerized in 6 characteristics, class, level, HP, race, and magic items; each skill, and its accordant percentage, is individually listed and must be rewritten on a new character sheet. Cover Art -- Very Good Aside from minor technical and esthetic flaws in the drawing -- the woman wearing gems, not a helm; the mans kneepads drawn as part of his boots; the picture of the man disjoint from the rest of the drawing (look closely, his feet look as if both of them are slipping off the stairs); -- aside from that, a very pretty picture. Someone has finally found out that a pretty cover helps along a bad rules system, better than any amount of advertizing does (an old trick learned by TSR a long time ago). Price -- Very Poor At 38 bucks a shot, the new Runequest is no small investment. It would not be so bad if the new rules actually made a playable game, or if the customers were assured that it was a one shot deal. This is not to be. The SP's for the new Runequest will be similarly priced. (25$ for the Referee's rules, is a particularly bad deal, since the only really usable book in it is the creatures descriptions). Paper Quality -- Poor The books themselves are more tender than a soft bound book; the cover is made of the same paper as the internal pages. Already, the RQ 3 that I borrowed, is beginning to show signs of wear. It is not yet 1 month old, and hasn't been treated any worse than any standard book. Perhaps I may be surprised, but I doubt that these books will have half the lifetime of the RQ 2 books (or 1/10th the lifetime of a hard bound AD&D Players Handbook). I also do not like Avalon Hill's decision to make Runequest into a "Bookshelf Game" (i.e. to put it in a box). As the people at Avalon Hill, may or may not know, FRP games are not usually played off the bookshelf. Rather, students and other adherents to FRP, carry the games around with them for quick reference -- most often in a backpack or some such. In this environment, a box disintegrates within a period of 3 months. It cracks at the bindings, and becomes completely unusable. Large boxes are particularly susceptible to this, so most RQ 3's should begin falling apart by the next convention. Layout -- Good Avalon Hill, or Chaosium, or both, did a good job on this one. The pictures are clear, the type is readable, the colors draw attention but do not interfere with reading. The one thing that I didn't like about the Layout, is the way that the previous experience charts are spread out all through the beginning of the book. This makes the tables hard to find, in addition to interrupting the continuity of the initial rules. (Other general comments can be found at the end of this review, listed under the title "Summary Comments") OVERALL GAME Clarity -- Good As in all Chaosium games, the writing style is clear and simple. Sometimes too simple. There are a number of ambiguities in the text, which should be resolved. For instance, "Jump" says that a character must make the jump roll to jump "twice his height horizontally, or up to his height vertically with a running start". But it does not say what roll to make (if any) for distances less than that. (Remember: running is is series of small jumps). World View -- Poor A World View of a game system, is the world which the game writers imply. For example, the world view of AD&D is monster infested wilderness interspersed with "dungeons" containing fabulous treasure and magic; Chivalry and Sorcery's world view is medieval Europe in all its gory detail; Tunnels and Trolls has a world view in which whimsical gods toy with the adventurers, giving fabulous power, and then taking it away. Some games are tied only to a genre (a set of world views). D&D, Champions, Arms Law, Justice Inc., all fall into this wide spread category. Some games are not only tied to a specific world view, but are tied to a specific world. Call of Cthuluhu, Paranoia, Elfquest, EPT, Stormbringer, fall into this one. Each approach has its own strengths: a general system can be adapted to any number of different campaigns, a specific system has more time to explore its own particular world. Runequest has always been a specific system. Its world is Glorontha. The designers of Runequest, attempted to write a more generalized version of Runequest. This attempt failed badly. Instead of generalizing Runequest, the new world view attempts to Glorontha-ize fantasy. We find no Cyclopses and Medusa in Fantasy Europe, but Broos and Gloronthan Trolls instead. The religions are barely disguised Glorontha cults -- not even general enough to handle the Stormbringer pantheon (another Chaosium FRP game). Though many references are made to Tolkien (and presumably his creations), we find that elves "are tied to their forests in ways not understandable by men" -- a reference straight out of Glorontha. Through out the rest of the review, I will be pointing out these Glorontha-isms. They are subtly pervasive throughout the game, concentrating mainly in the magic book. This alone is not enough to give the World View of RQ 3 a Poor rating. Glorontha is, when viewed with a forgiving eye, an interesting world with a fascinating cosmology. It's easy to settle a campaign there, provided you only pay attention to its gods, continents, and empires. The problem with RQ 3, is that it allows no support for world views other than Glorontha -- though a "Viking Pack" is supposed to come out, the societies, gods, money, and motivations will all still be Gloronthan. "Fantasy Europe" already resembles Glorontha much more than any authentic earth mythology; it will no doubt only end up like the defunct Questworld: A place to put all the scenarios that "aren't good enough" for Glorontha. Game System -- Very Poor "A roleplaying game's system is the invisible support from which the game world must hang". True enough. However it is also true that a game system must derive itself somehow from reality. This was always the concept which set Runequest 2 apart from other game systems. While a high level fighter in AD&D had more hit points than his shield, a RQ 2 character was always realistic. This is no longer necessarily true, since the Chaosium has decided the TSR approach to game design, which is to "play balance" all approaches to combat regardless of realism. What's worse, is that many of these game flaws are not simply bugs which have an easy fix. The flaws are built so deeply into the system that removing them is equivalent to redesigning it; if you want your average healthy Cimmerian to have a much greater stamina than an under exercized game designer, you have to rebuild the Fatigue system from scratch. In the following text, such errors will be pointed out as "Design Errors". This is not to say that Runequest 3 is unplayable under all circumstances. Far from it, if you only run average humans, and kill them off before they become too skilled, you will find that the system mimics reality to a tolerable degree. But this is also true of almost every other system on the market, including some real loosers like Tunnels and Trolls. The acid test of a GOOD system, is how it handles powerful characters, non-humans, and exotics. Again, Runequest 3 fails miserably. The rules repeatedly encourage characters to do things which are unrealistic in a fantasy setting. To a certain extent, such flaws can exist in the system without destroying the world. Players are supposed to be more interested in "character conception" then that. But after a while, this will break down if the holes are too blatant, and run across too often. Players quickly learn that a dead character makes a very uninteresting concept. In the following text, rules which are unrealistic, or promote unrealistic behavior, will be pointed out as "Reality Flaws". Game Examples -- Ok "Cormac the Pict" is a good idea to give examples with. But it was a better idea with Rurik the Restless. Why, do you ask? Well because such examples also serve as the indication of the style of the campaign. Rurik in RQ 2, started out a beginning adventurer, suffered a major setback, but eventually made it to rune lord. Cormac in RQ 3, is beaten up, suffers serious disease, is thrown in jail on the whim of a nobleman, is knocked over by wind, and turned down by a Shaman. His only success is to repeatedly avoid being killed, by managing to hide. He also learns a few basic battle magic spells. If the designers of RQ 3 seriously want a referee to run their games in such a ritual sacrifice fashion, (which they do: "These personalities ... reveal how some more or less ordinary adventurers progress (or don't progress) in actual situations") then I don't want anything to do with it as a player. Suffering repeated "Roll your 52% Hide, or die when the enemy tribe finds you", is not what I call fun; this should NOT be "Call of Runequest", despite what Sandy Peterson might believe. PLAYERS RULES Characteristics -- Good I always liked RQ 2 characteristics, and am glad that they didn't delete or seriously mung with any of them. They still give silly numbers, (Size has nothing to do with Strength, and vice versa), but this is true of all 3d6 systems. Characteristic Increases -- Very Poor RQ 2 had a concept called "Species Maximum". The idea was that there was a limit to how high you could train your characteristics, which depended upon your race. The Reality Flaw with this system, was that at the highest levels, everybody began to look the same. POW 18, DEX 21, CHA 21, STR/SIZ/CON equal, and INT usually 17 or 18 (if you wanted a character who progressed quickly). There was also a Reality Flaw with STR/CON/SIZ, which hasn't been fixed. RQ 3 does away with "Species Maximum", without substituting any good alternate, and thus makes everything worse. To the old STR/CON/SIZ Reality Flaw, RQ 3 adds a Design Error. The old Reality Flaw has not been fixed: Large and/or strong creatures can become incredibly more healthy (resistant to disease, etc), and naturally healthy creatures can become incredibly strong. But all this cross training WAS limited by Species Maximum, and so things did not get out of hand (except for Dragonnewts). Now, since there IS no species maximum, we find that an average Halfling can train his STR up to 17. Particularly healthy ones can eventually become much stronger than trolls. An intelligent Manticore, being naturally strong, can train both his health (and therefore his venom) up to amazing levels. For the old DEX/APP Reality Flaw, RQ 3 substitutes a new one. Both DEX and APP are now limited by half again the original roll. What this means is that one of every 72 people, will be able to attain a Dexterity like unto the gods (26), whereas the low 1 of 72, will never be better than a klutz (6). Such variation will inevitably lead to DEX inflation (starting out with the highest DEX possible), since any high DEX character has a much better chance of survival. POW now has a wonderful Design Error, where it had none before. The Species Maximum characteristic used to be one sixth again the maximum rollable. This meant that an Elf (2d6+6 POW) would have an 18 + 1/6 x 18 = 21 Species Maximum. Humans likewise. Now, RQ 3 makes you add the minimum rollable plus the maximum, so an Elf now has a 8 + 18 = 26 Species Max. A Dryad (2d6+16) near Species Max, handily defeats the Bad Man in spirit combat, and I don't even want to THINK about Hags. The repercussions in the areas of Magic are considerable, since higher Species Max means easier POW gain rolls. This in turn gives more POW for spells, magic items, and binding spirits. Non-human Shamans are amazingly gross. Hit Points -- Good Much of the old Reality Flaw from RQ 2 has been removed. Good. This is somewhat offset by the botching of training up STR and CON, however. Damage Modifier -- Ok The same old Damage Modifier is being used, with its enormous breakpoint effect. For a normal human, 1 additional point in STR or SIZ can suddenly add about half again to the damage of all weapons he uses. Some sort of increasing die roll (1d1, 1d2, 1d3, etc) would have been better. (Could have even been substituted on the old RQ 2 character sheets). Number of Strike Ranks -- Ok For no obvious reason, RQ 3 now has 10 Strike Ranks instead of 12. All the tables have been adjusted accordingly, but there didn't seem to be an overwhelming need for a change. Perhaps the game designers wanted to make clear than SR's, had nothing to do with seconds of time, by removing the (apparent) one-to-one correspondence. Actually, Strike Ranks are themselves kludges. They have little to do with the progress of blows in an authentic mele. Since there is no easy alternate, it can do. Previous Experience -- Very Good Previous Experience is an exceedingly well done piece of work. It allows players to build reasonable backgrounds for their characters, and allows a reasonable amount of previous experience, without getting gross. The only real problem with it, is that it contains a large number of Glorontha-isms ("Healer, Civilized: 01-75 Your adventurer's parents worship the earth goddess...."). Quick Experience System -- Very Good For its limited scope, this works very well. Simple Skills -- Ok The old skills are unchanged. The 05 success, 95 failure is still kept. This still has its old Reality Flaw wrong with it. Get 20 people to try something, and almost always one of them can. It isn't noticeable usually, unless you ask a giant to jump. (Because of his size, the giant will fall over most of the time, but take off to the moon on a 01-05). Skill vs Skill -- Poor It does not explicitly state if a skill which has been modified to negative ADDS to the opponents chance of making the skill roll. Also, the Skill vs Skill algorithm is not transitive -- i.e. it matters greatly which skill is designated the "attacking" skill, and which one the "defending" skill. Consider two characters who are 90% in Tracking: one who is looking for a trail, and one trying not to leave one. Both characters have a 85% total chance of success, if theirs is the roll considered "passive". The "active" wielder can only hope the "passive" user blows his roll. For 5 to 45 percent range, the percentages are reversed... the "active" wielder gets the better deal, since the Skill vs Skill roll assumes automatic success if your opponent blows his roll. Skills Categories -- Poor Improvements in this one: no more break points. Alas, it is offset by the ill definition of most categories. We find that good Boating and Throwing depend heavily upon being very small. A Miss America contestant can speak foreign languages much better than a plain girl. Great Trolls make wonderful pick pockets. This could possibly be fixed by rules alterations. Negative skills should be secondarily negative (1 for 2, not 1 for 1). Throw and Boat should be Manipulation based skills, and Manipulation should not have STR in the calculation at all. Sing & Speak Foreign Language should have no APP modifier, and Sleight should have a Negative SIZ modifier. Experience Gain Rolls -- Very Poor The old Reality Flaw "you learn only during a stressful situation" is still around, as expected. ("Gosh, I learned to play the piano twice as quickly as my friend, because I only play when the trolls are attacking!"). This can be explained away in the interest of getting players to go out in the field, and is perfectly fine. Experience Gain Rolls suffer from being tied to skill modifier bonuses, because all the silliness of the Skills Categories becomes magnified. Not only do people who are very lucky (high POW) rather noticeable, but they are made incapable of learning how to be less so. Manticores can learn to Play Instruments much more quickly, because they are so strong. Giants can learn how to Track much more easily, because they are very healthy. More to the point, we find out that high skill modifiers aid characters in learning in an astounding way. A human and a giant, with an equal INT and DEX, at 100% Sleight, will find that the giant learns his skill 10% more quickly than the human can; getting 100 checks, a character over 100%, with a 20% skills modifier will go up an average of 70%, while a character with a 5% skills bonus will go up 14%; under 100%, the ratio is even more extreme, since skill level affects the chance to even get the check in the first place. This all is just begging for characteristic inflation. It encourages the 17 DEX character to train his DEX up to 26, since this will mean an automatic +9% chance to learn how to use half the skills in the book. In addition, any character who has a +1 Skills Modifier can train all those skills above 100%, but characters with a 0 bonus cannot. In short, RQ 3 took the old RQ 2 Reality Flaw, and magnified it. While RQ 2 encouraged INT inflation (rolling intelligent characters), this was more palletable for several reasons. One, most of the enormous fighting machines {Minotaur, Manticore, Great Troll} were rather dumb. So, a player had to choose between being powerful to start out with, or having a better future ahead. Two, strength and smallness have little to do with learning, only intelligence does. (In fact, the DEFINITION of intelligence, is the ability to learn. Look it up, if you don't believe me.) Finally, since you want to encourage people to play intelligently anyway, it did not hurt to encourage them to play intelligent characters. Fatigue -- Very Poor The first point to ask about Fatigue, is why is it necessary? Certainly people get tired, but Conan never seems to (even when he is wearing plate). Many SCA fighters have told me that when in top shape, they can fight for almost half an hour before getting really pooped. Real fighting includes pacing, and looking for openings, which allow characters to rest even when "attacking" an opponent. Especially under the adrenaline of combat, people "die" long before they are seriously hampered from fatigue. RQ 2 seems to work just fine without it, so would have RQ 3. Alas, things are not that easy. You cannot even do away with the whole system, since the game designers offer no other, and Fatigue is enmeshed so thoroughly with Encumbrance, that they are almost inseparable. In short, it is one big Design Error, interspaced with Reality Flaws. To wit: "Cormac is still being pursued by enemy tribesmen. Though he is a strong runner, he still hears their calls and jeers behind him. He is now -3 fatigue points -- all the fatigue points (including zero) on his fatigue tally have been checked off, and he has lost three more besides. In this melee round, his player must therefore subtract 3 from any skill, resistance, or characteristic roll he makes for Cormac. What the author failed to mention, is that Cormac, an unencumbered healthy primative hunter, has been jogging for at most 4 minutes. In another 3, according to the RQ 3 system of Fatigue, he will faint. But this is not all! Assuming Cormac was the healthiest and the strongest a human can be, and he was jogging entirely naked, he would skill keel over from exhaustion in less than 15 minutes. Whatever inhuman levels of Constitution a modern day jogger must have in RQ 3 is left up to the readers imagination. The problem of Fatigue actually goes much deeper than this. It really has to do with the designers attempt to simulate multiple types of exhaustion with one simplified system. For instance, we find that prolonged hiking or riding over several hours, reduces a characters Fatigue (as it should), but this Fatigue loss is measured in the same units that sprinting around the block is. Thus, to rest from a entire days exertion, one need only to recover the Fatigue points through a 1 minute rest. Doing so at the end of each hour of hiking, insures that a character is never down more than 1 to 2 points of Fatigue. The game designers make loss of sleep (sleeping in armor) cost Fatigue points as well. They use a bad example, since sleeping in most armor (without a helm on) is actually quite comfortable. Aside from that, of the type of Fatigue being lost is again, obviously, the wrong one. It leads to the humorous Reality Flaw of a character who is sleeping in armor, asking to be woken up every hour or so, so that he can rest to recover his lost Fatigue. In fact, the only "_p_e_r_m_a_n_e_n_t" Fatigue loss springs from ENC; this turns out to be exactly the wrong application of permanent Fatigue, since it leads to a linear relationship between the weight that the character is carrying, and the strenuousness of the exertion. For example, a character can jog with a full pack, about 1/2 as long as he can jog totally unencumbered. This makes characters able to run with inhumanly large amounts of ENC for a relatively long time, but fall over when totally unencumbered after a relatively short time (relative, that is, to reality). Because the Fatigue system all works off of one attribute in a very simplistic fashion, it can only be tuned to be realistic on one setting. This setting seems to be a an unencumbered human, with average STR and CON, and who is very very out of shape. Nikkelos the Sorcerer looks perfect under the Fatigue system, as does, incidentally, Steve Perrin (or even myself). It does not work for the average adventurer. To try to patch up the system for other races and sizes, a completely separate Fatigue table is given, which occasionally leads to the correct results. (The table seems to have been designed for horses). I talked to Steve Perrin about this, and he mentioned in response that Fatigue was in "melee rounds only", i.e. don't count fatigue unless the referee is asking for statements of intent. The first problem with this is that it is a obvious and stupid Reality Flaw; some people claim they are already researching a spell to put others in "melee rounds" to make them tire out. It may even be more simple than that: in the example, Cormac hears "calls and jeers behind him", which forces him into melee rounds -- so much for "...and names will never hurt me". Secondly, only counting Fatigue in battle allows characters to perform inhuman feats of endurance outside of it. ("Run for an hour carrying my horse? Sure, no problem, just make sure I don't go into combat"). Swimming also uses Fatigue, tell me does the Chaosium really only mean Swimming while in combat? Another incidental Reality Flaw is that the designers went overboard on reducing percentiles for being Fatigued. Athletes, we find, are particularly vulnerable to disease because they are fatigued so often. In addition, when tired, not only is your strength effectively reduced by a large amount, but you also are less Lucky. A Storm Bull after having slaughtered 100 Broos, finds the god unwilling to respond to a tired worshiper (Divine Intervention -- POW x 1 characteristic roll). If he does make the roll (by some miracle), then he has lost a huge amount of additional permanent POW, because of the Fatigue loss. Encumbrance -- Very Poor Encumbrance is inexorably intertwined with Fatigue, but it has other problems as well. Since the ENC of armor increases as a multiple of Size, but Fatigue increases as an average, we find that a large strong people (who have high STR relative to CON) have fewer rounds to fight than small weak people when wearing equivalent sets of armor. This means that Pixies and Halflings can all wear Plate without a worry about fatigue loss, but Trolls cannot. Particularly large trolls are even in worse condition. A Size 21 two legged creature uses the size equivalency chart. This means he has 28 Fatigue points to start out with, regardless of his STR or CON. Dress the troll in Plate, give him small clothes, a Troll Maul, and nothing else, he will start out at -16 Fatigue. It is quite possible for an average well equipped large Dark Troll to faint if he accidentally goes into melee rounds. If the troll feels bad, he should talk to the newlywed husband. The strong and healthy guy (13 STR/13 CON) tries to lift his lithe (SIZ 9) wife through the doorway, when someone "called and jeered" at him, and he went into melee rounds. Figuring out his current Fatigue (since this is what you do when you start into melee rounds), we find he has 26 total. A respectable number, until you realize that his wife weighs (9 SIZ x 6 ENC/SIZ =) 54 ENC, which makes him faint dead away. How embarrassing. The Design Error lying behind all this is not all that difficult to spot: Fatigue and Encumbrance are calculated in exactly the same way: you compute the number of melee rounds you can exert yourself in exactly the same say as you compute what you can carry. So it is impossible in RQ 3 to have a character who can carry a great deal, but tires quickly (high STR/low CON), and impossible to have a character who cannot carry much, but can do so for a very long time (low STR/high CON). No one, for instance, expects a high STR Sumo wrestler to be able to jog twice as far as the normal man, but this is what RQ 3 implies. Can a Halfling carry more ENC than a human? Due to the Halfling's high Con, the RQ 3 system says yes. This is reminiscent of the D&D concept of mixing high Dexterity (ability to avoid a blow), and Armor Class (ability to absorb damage); the RQ 3 Fatigue/ENC system takes two related, but entirely separate world elements, and tries to mix them together. The resulting system is so unnatural, it has to depend upon such artificialities as "melee rounds", and being tuned to work correctly for one specific archetype. This type is (not surprisingly) for average size armor worn by out of shape humans. Because it is a system which is unrealistic, fixing the Fatigue or Encumbrance numbers so that characters could carry one another in combat, as in the movie Uncommon Valor, helps not a bit. It only would make the formula silly elsewhere (perhaps allowing people to jog carrying their horses for half a minute). If you want an effective ENC system in RQ 3, you have to design it yourself. ENC also is supposed to subtract directly from both ability to cast magic, and Dodge ability. I am not too concerned about the latter, since Dodge is such an asinine idea anyway, that it doesn't make any difference if ENC affects it or not. About the former, I can only wonder what the designers were thinking about when they made this rule up.... to add insult to injury, we now find that the Size 21 troll in Plate now has a -55 percent chance to cast his spells, while the STR 2 Halfling in Plate is discomfited by no more than -15. A Giant can't cast spells, not because no one taught him, but rather because his belt buckle weighs too much. (After all, he only has a 125 STR to lift it). These Reality Flaws are really humorous, until you realize you paid 38 dollars for them. Training -- Ok Some parts of Training have been improved, although I do find it strange that "Experience" is more useful than having someone teach you correct technique. Is this why the Chaosium felt the need to invent "Martial Arts", to explain away the fact that people who are taught ancient, well thought out combat methods, are better than street fighters? Well, other than that, and the artificial 75% limit (which was always there), I like this section. Particularly good are the paragraphs explaining just where all that money goes to, and the time involved in learning. Incidentally, the 1d6-2 roll, is just like saying you get 2 plus an optional 1d6-4. From this perspective, only a fool would take the roll. Strange how, in a later Cormac's saga, it shows Cormac rolling average (20 & 21 total on 6 dice) and the text calls this luck "uninspiring". It is his player's intelligence that is uninspiring. Research -- Poor Having problems with all those skills at 0 percent? Have no fear! Research is here! From the formulas given, we find that you take no time at all to learn a skill from the base 0 percent. Throw a man in a French library, and before you know it, he'll be writing his first faltering words ("Parlez vous ...."). Everybody should learn his first 1d6-2 Martial Arts easy.... just make like Bruce Lee. Its not that Research is not a good idea, you just have to add a few more ideas like experience bonuses for knowing what you're looking for, previous experience in the field being researched, and innate predilection toward the skill in question. The system presented is much too simplistic, and assumes that all skills become predictably more difficult to learn, after you easily got the knack of them in the first place. The rules are better than nothing, but not much. Characteristic Increase -- Poor Having the cost and time of characteristic training depending upon an arbitrary game value is silly. Why should a Halfling doubling his strength take half the time doing it that a Troll doing the same thing does? The real cost associated with raising strength should have to do with how much you have raised it already, or how much is normal for your species, not based on arbitrary values. Since we have already discussed the lack of species maximum for characteristics, I will not rehash those Reality Flaws. Characteristic Decrease -- Very Poor RQ 3 promotes the idea that characteristics are not an abstraction, indicating a wide range of personal aspects, such as DEX being a combination of hand-eye coordination, musculature, and flexibility. No. Characteristics are treated as some form of elixir, which every character has, but some have more than others; which can, in turn, be squeezed out of a person like blood from a turnip. For example, Appearance (not at all in the eye of the beholder), has a particular Magic Point value for each character, which a sufficiently skilled sorcerer can Tap. Rock Hudson is a veritable storehouse of magical power, (no doubt found somewhere in his classic jaw line), while you or I have almost nothing. An athlete who dies, can be resurrected twice as long after you or I, because he has so much more STR in him than we do. A juggler who gets the Shakes, will survive much longer than anybody else, because he has more DEX in him to begin with. While Runequest 2 had some of the same ideas, at least they did not pursue them with the same fervor that RQ 3 has. The idea was holed up in the back of the book, listed under optional "Disease" rules. This is no longer the case, as Characteristic Drain is now the method of aging, inaction, disease, death, and Tapping. Strike Ranks -- Ok There are two changes in this from RQ 2. The good one, is that it is now possible to alter your statement of intent, without having to waste 11 seconds to do so. The bad one, is that it now seems that a character moving up on another, strikes last because the moving character unconditionally looses strike ranks. The worst case, is where a character moves up and cannot hit his foe, since he hasn't enough strike ranks. His foe, who was waiting for him, gets a free attack. Also, any old numb skull with a high DEX gets the first strike even against a seasoned fighter. (While Runequest says that an attack is actually a combination of blows, almost none of the rules really treat it as such.) Aimed Blows -- Ok I am not overwhelmed by this method, holdover though it is from RQ 2. It does not simulate well what an aimed blow really is. Basic Attack Percentages -- Poor Someone at the Chaosium still has the idea that the better damage a weapon does, the lower percentage it should start out with. For example, a Naginata starts at 5%, while a Spear starts at 15%. Now while I will not pass judgement on the basic idea of making high-damage weapons more difficult to use (it is an issue of reality vs play balance), I do find it somewhat silly that they expect this technique to actually prevent players from just using the highest damage weapons. A lower starting percentage does not hinder a character's use of a weapon at all, since lowered starting percentages can be trained up easily. What is more needed is an innate difficulty factor, which would be a subtraction from a weapon's Skill Bonus (and experience bonus) because the weapon is innately more difficult to use. An addition to the Skill Bonus for shield parrying would also have been better than the high starting percentage. As currently written, the starting weapon/shield percentages really have no meaning. Parry -- Good The new rules for allowing hafted weapons to occasionally damage during a parry are good. It would have been better if all weapons only did damage on an impale, since such notching is not very common. Later we find in the book, Parry can now be used against hand thrown missile weapons. The rules and an example seems contradictory: "Thrown weapons can be parried if the parrier is aware of the attack..", and "A spear thrown from the darkness impales Churchak. The roll is 16 points of damage, but he gets his own spear in the way for a parry". (I am assuming in this example, that Churchak has not researched up his Darksense.) Also, in real life, any missile weapon used at long range can be parried, if seen. Weapon Armor -- Ok RQ 2 weapons needed armor badly. RQ 3 gave it to them, but in a funky fashion. From the rules, we find that the reason that swords don't break is not because they are made out of steel, its because they are "interposed" between the attacker and his target. Does this mean that if I "interpose" a trollkin (or a candle), in front of a descending troll maul, that the interposed object only takes 1 point of damage? Not likely. Chalk up another Reality Flaw. Parrying an opponents attack to break his weapon becomes a credible option, since a parry does full weapon damage when the attacker misses (unlike attacks). I would prefer half damage for interposed objects, and let weapon armor take care of it. Also, it is never explicitly stated what happens to a weapon which reaches 0 armor points. I assume that it becomes effectively unusable, but does it snap? Can it be rebent into shape? Dodge -- Very Poor The first major problem with this rule, has nothing to do with Dodge. It has to do with what it replaces: Defense. Defense is simply the idea that fast, small, lucky, intelligent, or experienced creatures are generally harder to hit than slow, large, unlucky, dumb and/or inexperienced ones. Talking to members of SCA, I have found this to be a generally approved of idea -- it's how combat really works. Now the RQ 2 implementation of Defense had a few holes in it -- which could be lived with. The first was that two creatures of equal size, had a hard time hitting each other in hand to hand combat if they were small, and an easier chance if they were large. (RQ 3's "Attack Modifiers" table maintains this flaw.) The second problem with Defense was the way that you got experience in it... unless you had a positive Defense bonus, you could not get any more, and the more Defense you had, the better you got at it. So change the special experience system for Defense, right? Wrong. What the brilliant folks over at the Chaosium decided to do was get rid of the idea of Defense entirely, and substitute in "Dodge" instead. A character can now Attack, Parry, or Dodge in a melee round, choosing two of the above actions. Thus, to instinctively avoid a blow, I have to either forego my attack, or put my shield behind my back. If I choose to attack and parry, it matters not at all if I am Size 4 or Size 19, if my DEX is 3 or 58, if I am the most experienced fighter or if I a raw amateur -- my opponent has the same chance of hitting me. If you try to Dodge and Attack, the Reality Flaw becomes more hilarious. Lord Alfred Winddragon had us simulate two fighters Dodging and attacking with Great Swords -- the resultant combat looked like a pogo-stick competition. Swords and shields were even more silly, since the attacker had to place his shield behind his back, so as not to accidentally parry a blow. The flaws become worse again, when you consider non-human types. How do you hit a with a composite bow Pixie at 120 yards? Simple, just catch it "attacking" and "parrying" another Pixie while fighting over a berry (or catch it slinging a missile). What do they mean "He's so bad, he can't hit the side of a barn?" They mean he's not an expert -- since even a Size 80 side-of-barn adds only a total of +30% to your chance to hit -- lacking rules for positive defense, a character who has missed his dodge is as easy to hit as a stationary object. Weapon Knockback -- Ok Well at least there are rules for doing knockback from a blow, even if they are somewhat silly. What does a pointy or sharp weapon have to do with knockback? Does a Bladesharp 4 really add almost a meter to knockback? Does a small mount charging down on a braced pike really get pushed back an additional 2 meters because of his own damage bonus? Intentional Knockback -- Poor Well now we know what the most effective form of attack is in Runequest 3. Intentional Knockback. All you have to do is Dodge and Parry and then Intentionally Knockback your opponent onto the ground. Then you get +20% chance to hit him, and he gets -20% chance to hit you. Simple, no? Stunning and Subduing -- Poor It appears that to aim a blow at the head, all you have to do is attack to Stun or Subdue. Then, regardless of the actual damage of the blow, you have a reasonable chance to knock your opponent out. Trollkin will love this attack, since it gives each one a 20% chance to knock out a typical great troll, with even 1 hit point penetrating. It also does not say if the damage done by a subduing blow is actually applied as hit points damage to it. One presumes not. Special Hit Locations -- Good These are re-writings of the RQ 2 Special Hit location system. They are good, but are not extensive enough. Some downward modifier should have also been included for swinging at extremely large creatures (such as giants). Mounted Weapons Limitations -- Very Good A reasonable set of special rules. Set Spear vs Charge should be based on velocity and size, not on strength of the mount. This is a very small detail though. Unfavorable Environments -- Good 1] Darkness has a reality flaw, since pitch blackness not only subtracts from an attackers chance to hit, but it also subtracts from the defenders innate Defense ability. The SCA has tried out fighting blind, and people are hit quite a bit more often than RQ 3 rules suggest. 2] Underwater is reasonable set of rules, if you ignore the Fatigue loss except for land based creatures (or ignore the Fatigue entirely). 3] High ground is very good. 4] Narrow passageways should include any thrusting weapon, not just spear and pike. Otherwise good. The Fatigue is silly. 5] The rules for Covered Targets have not improved since RQ 2. You still have a 50/50 chance of missing a giant who is covered by a hillside, even though the exposed portion of his size is greater than the size of a man. There is still also no way to aim for hit locations with missile weapons, which is bad. Criticals -- Good A critical now cannot do less damage than a special hit. This is very good. However every critical almost always does exactly the same damage. This is not so good. Specials -- Ok "Impales" look fine from a game balance point of view, though the extra damage done is still not all that realistic. I do find complaint with the effect of a special from a smashing or slashing weapon though. From the way the rules are written, a character who does at least 5 points of damage to any foe on a Special, knocks the target back at least one meter. This means that a duck with a club can knock over a giant, assuming the latter fails a DEX x 5 roll. Fumble -- Good Same old RQ 2 fumble table. Close Combat -- Ok It is always good to have a game at least approximate what goes on in close combat, even if it does not quite match up to reality. The closing rules are fine, but what happens when you pull up to too short a range is not. In reality, no one can attack at full damage when choked up too close -- whether you forego your parry or not. Also parry, as the game so correctly points out, is an instinctive response -- foregoing parry at all is almost a contradiction in terms. Disarm -- Poor Disarming an opponent remains too easy in RQ 3. If I attack an opponents weapon, he has no chance to effectively block my attack against breaking the weapon. Thus, regardless of the skill of my opponent, I can disarm him with a few blows. Multiple Targets -- Very Good There are now reasonable rules for all of these things. The example of Bigclub has a strange +1d3 at the end, which is not explained anywhere. Firing Into A Mele -- Very Poor How to make yourself invulnerable to missile weapons attacks: 1] Get a bunch of dogs. 2] Involve yourself and them in "mele" (pay the END cost for now). 3] Watch perfectly good missile wielders practically fumble their chance to hit a particular target. With 9 dogs, the attack percentage is 1/10 normal, etc. Sure, you're going to loose dogs, but so what? Engines -- Good Since adventurers rarely fight in long sieges (not heroic or profitable enough), I do not really see the need for these rules. SKILLS -- Good In general, the skills were explained as to what they were. Though there were some ambiguities left, it is not enough to make an issue out of. Also, some skills are too general, and really cover separate areas of expertise; these should have been subdivided. THE WORLD Falling -- Good Asphyxiation -- Good Fire and Heat -- Very Good My my how this reminds us of the Hero Sys treatment of the same subject.... Poison -- Very Good I am particularly impressed by the fact that the words "usually" and "Unless otherwise specified by the gamemaster" are included in this description. Disease -- Poor The same tired old Glorontha-ism of Disease is hanging around RQ 3. In it, we find that a disease does nothing more (or less) than permanently destroying characteristics. No Fatigue loss (even in RQ 3's botched up system), no skill subtractions, no temporary characteristic loss. Just total destruction. At least now, with the lack of species maximum, you can regain your characteristics back. We find that one way to save your life, if you are afflicted by mild Wasting Disease, is to lift weights (all modern hospitals should have them). This leads back to my comments about RQ 3 Characteristic Decrease in general. Also, notice the Glorontha-isms in the passage: "Broos", "The disease Goddess", "disease spirits". Aging and Inaction -- Very Poor "See that cleft chin? Notice how good he looks? That is the sign of a character who will never 'ugly away'. But over there.... see how he picks his nose, and has warts? He is going to die before he reaches 50. How about the Pixie? She's always been weak (Pixie's usually are), which means that she will life a short life. Look at that guy over there.... the one who looks like Woody Allen, he's got such a low DEX you can just about kiss him good bye. But the Halfling (who trained up his STR to 24) is going to live to be 500." The only characteristic which has any bearing on health is (or should be) Constitution. This should be obvious from the above example. Though it is true that STR, DEX, and APP can be lowered beyond 40, it has no bearing on the health of the character. Even so, CON reduction is an abstraction, since reasonably healthy people quite often just keel over and die. In addition, reading the rules as they stand, it appears that anybody can live forever. Alls you got to do is retrain the characteristic up, once it has been reduced. Yes, I'm sure that APP training is hard to come by, but by RQ 3 it all could be done. (Doctor: "Sponge" Nurse: "Sponge" Doctor: "Pad" Nurse: "Pad" Doctor: "Eye Liner" Nurse: "Eye Liner" Doctor: "Lipstick"....) Weather -- Very Poor By the wind rules, we find that a hawk cannot fly. Its STR is not enough to keep it from being bowled over by a STR 2 (calm air movement) wind. Children are knocked over by breeze which blows out a candle, and a normal woman will be knocked down occasionally by light wind. A moderate wind will most certainly knock down any average man, and most above average ones as well. Only at the very upper end of the chart does Wind effects table begin to look reasonable. (End of Chapter 1)
robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (10/25/84)
Thanks for a review that seems to prove something else altogether: If you make a really intricate, detailed, complex, fantasy game in order to attempt to imitiate reality, you will probably develop a hopeless muddle full of unrealistic bugs. So why bother??? In Lewis Carroll's late book, "Syvlie and Bruno", one of the characters has a really detailed map of the local area. It is made on a scale of (are you ready?): ONE TO ONE. There is some nice humor regarding the difficulty of using the map. BUT, In a complex FRP system, it's easy to start taking hours to play minutes of "reality"; then we catch up by taking seconds to play days of reality; then we... at some point I actuality prefer reality itself. - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison or: decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison or (emergency): princeton!eosp1!robison
steven@qubix.UUCP (Steven Maurer) (11/12/84)
A bug killer. Another bug killer. A third bug killer. I've been getting a number of requests for the original posting of my RQ 3 review. Though my followup corrispondence was well distributed, some sites didn't get the original review. So here it is again..... -- Steven Maurer ==================================== REVIEW OF FLAWS IN RUNEQUEST 3 (Chapter 1) A few weeks ago, in response to an article praising Runequest 3, I replied to that message by saying that the new Runequest "sucked". Now, while I hold it to be my prerogative to hold any opinion I want on a game, I should have qualified my opinion with what I found objectionable to it. My only excuse for not doing so is that when I made my initial comment, I didn't have time to even begin listing the varied and numerous problems with RQ 3. Now I do. As a final note, before going into this review, let me state that I am both an experienced player, referee, play tester, and game designer, who has had much experience with Chaosium games. If my review of Runequest 3 seems biased, it is because I am looking at it from the perspective of a Runequest 2 player who expected old bugs to be fixed, not new ones introduced. Even under the new rules, Runequest 3 is not all that much worse than AD&D. It can still be fun, if (as in AD&D) you try to ignore rules problems, or invent variant rules which fix them. The attitude that rules don't need to be good because people will naturally fix them, seems common in the gaming industry, but would hardly be sanctioned in our own profession ("This software works, just as long as you fix all the bugs in it"). Of course, I'm not much of a fan of AD&D either. In all the following review areas, a five grade listing is given. These are: Very Good, Good, Ok, Poor, and Very Poor. Following this, is usually a note explaining why the grade was given. The areas are grouped together under area titles, which usually correspond to one of the books in the box. Also, at this time, I would like to give thanks to all the people who helped me write this review, and pointed out bugs to me. Particularly helpful were, Steven Barnes, Ricky Taylor, Jeremy Higdon, Robert Mace (and other SCA fighters), and innumerable numbers of convention goers and RQ 3 play testers. RUNEQUEST 3 GENERAL COMMENTS Game Considered Overall -- Poor to Very Poor Particulars follow. Speed of Publication -- Poor The Chaosium has a reputation for being late in everything. However, in Runequest 3 they were especially late. More than a year went by without any support for Runequest in any form, because of the slowness of the change over. Backwards Compatibility -- Very Poor 1] Played by the book, Runequest 3 is entirely incompatible with Runequest 2. This means that an investment of up to 100 dollars in Scenario packs, play aids, and cult descriptions, are now worthless. The last time I talked to Greg Stafford about this, he indicated that the Chaosium's plan was to re-release the old SP's in the new system (making you pay all over again, for the old materiel). Aside from the basic obnoxiousness of this plan, it has another fatal flaw: the Chaosium's lateness. By the original schedule, Glorontha Pack should have been out 1/3 year ago, and new materiel would start appearing in 1986. As you may or may not know, Glorontha Pack will (as best) hit the store shelves by the end of the year. This implies that the new materiel will actually come out by the earliest, in 1987 -- that is, if the schedule is kept. 2] There is nothing on the front cover of Runequest 3 which says that it is a new game system, and separate from its other releases. Thus a customer who is ignorant of the actual state of affairs of the game, may pick up a new Runequest 3 and buy any number of old incompatible Runequest 2 scenario packs, still unsold in stores. I almost saw this happen once, but the game store owner was too moral a fellow to let it slip by. 3] Both as a player, and as a referee, I am forced to perform many hours worth of labor converting my characters into the new system. Even if the method of conversion was a piece of flawless elegance, (which it is not by any means), I still do not like having to perform such a laborious task, for essentially no reason. Runequest characters are not like AD&D characters, who can be summerized in 6 characteristics, class, level, HP, race, and magic items; each skill, and its accordant percentage, is individually listed and must be rewritten on a new character sheet. Cover Art -- Very Good Aside from minor technical and esthetic flaws in the drawing -- the woman wearing gems, not a helm; the mans kneepads drawn as part of his boots; the picture of the man disjoint from the rest of the drawing (look closely, his feet look as if both of them are slipping off the stairs); -- aside from that, a very pretty picture. Someone has finally found out that a pretty cover helps along a bad rules system, better than any amount of advertizing does (an old trick learned by TSR a long time ago). Price -- Very Poor At 38 bucks a shot, the new Runequest is no small investment. It would not be so bad if the new rules actually made a playable game, or if the customers were assured that it was a one shot deal. This is not to be. The SP's for the new Runequest will be similarly priced. (25$ for the Referee's rules, is a particularly bad deal, since the only really usable book in it is the creatures descriptions). Paper Quality -- Poor The books themselves are more tender than a soft bound book; the cover is made of the same paper as the internal pages. Already, the RQ 3 that I borrowed, is beginning to show signs of wear. It is not yet 1 month old, and hasn't been treated any worse than any standard book. Perhaps I may be surprised, but I doubt that these books will have half the lifetime of the RQ 2 books (or 1/10th the lifetime of a hard bound AD&D Players Handbook). I also do not like Avalon Hill's decision to make Runequest into a "Bookshelf Game" (i.e. to put it in a box). As the people at Avalon Hill, may or may not know, FRP games are not usually played off the bookshelf. Rather, students and other adherents to FRP, carry the games around with them for quick reference -- most often in a backpack or some such. In this environment, a box disintegrates within a period of 3 months. It cracks at the bindings, and becomes completely unusable. Large boxes are particularly susceptible to this, so most RQ 3's should begin falling apart by the next convention. Layout -- Good Avalon Hill, or Chaosium, or both, did a good job on this one. The pictures are clear, the type is readable, the colors draw attention but do not interfere with reading. The one thing that I didn't like about the Layout, is the way that the previous experience charts are spread out all through the beginning of the book. This makes the tables hard to find, in addition to interrupting the continuity of the initial rules. (Other general comments can be found at the end of this review, listed under the title "Summary Comments") OVERALL GAME Clarity -- Good As in all Chaosium games, the writing style is clear and simple. Sometimes too simple. There are a number of ambiguities in the text, which should be resolved. For instance, "Jump" says that a character must make the jump roll to jump "twice his height horizontally, or up to his height vertically with a running start". But it does not say what roll to make (if any) for distances less than that. (Remember: running is is series of small jumps). World View -- Poor A World View of a game system, is the world which the game writers imply. For example, the world view of AD&D is monster infested wilderness interspersed with "dungeons" containing fabulous treasure and magic; Chivalry and Sorcery's world view is medieval Europe in all its gory detail; Tunnels and Trolls has a world view in which whimsical gods toy with the adventurers, giving fabulous power, and then taking it away. Some games are tied only to a genre (a set of world views). D&D, Champions, Arms Law, Justice Inc., all fall into this wide spread category. Some games are not only tied to a specific world view, but are tied to a specific world. Call of Cthuluhu, Paranoia, Elfquest, EPT, Stormbringer, fall into this one. Each approach has its own strengths: a general system can be adapted to any number of different campaigns, a specific system has more time to explore its own particular world. Runequest has always been a specific system. Its world is Glorontha. The designers of Runequest, attempted to write a more generalized version of Runequest. This attempt failed badly. Instead of generalizing Runequest, the new world view attempts to Glorontha-ize fantasy. We find no Cyclopses and Medusa in Fantasy Europe, but Broos and Gloronthan Trolls instead. The religions are barely disguised Glorontha cults -- not even general enough to handle the Stormbringer pantheon (another Chaosium FRP game). Though many references are made to Tolkien (and presumably his creations), we find that elves "are tied to their forests in ways not understandable by men" -- a reference straight out of Glorontha. Through out the rest of the review, I will be pointing out these Glorontha-isms. They are subtly pervasive throughout the game, concentrating mainly in the magic book. This alone is not enough to give the World View of RQ 3 a Poor rating. Glorontha is, when viewed with a forgiving eye, an interesting world with a fascinating cosmology. It's easy to settle a campaign there, provided you only pay attention to its gods, continents, and empires. The problem with RQ 3, is that it allows no support for world views other than Glorontha -- though a "Viking Pack" is supposed to come out, the societies, gods, money, and motivations will all still be Gloronthan. "Fantasy Europe" already resembles Glorontha much more than any authentic earth mythology; it will no doubt only end up like the defunct Questworld: A place to put all the scenarios that "aren't good enough" for Glorontha. Game System -- Very Poor "A roleplaying game's system is the invisible support from which the game world must hang". True enough. However it is also true that a game system must derive itself somehow from reality. This was always the concept which set Runequest 2 apart from other game systems. While a high level fighter in AD&D had more hit points than his shield, a RQ 2 character was always realistic. This is no longer necessarily true, since the Chaosium has decided the TSR approach to game design, which is to "play balance" all approaches to combat regardless of realism. What's worse, is that many of these game flaws are not simply bugs which have an easy fix. The flaws are built so deeply into the system that removing them is equivalent to redesigning it; if you want your average healthy Cimmerian to have a much greater stamina than an under exercized game designer, you have to rebuild the Fatigue system from scratch. In the following text, such errors will be pointed out as "Design Errors". This is not to say that Runequest 3 is unplayable under all circumstances. Far from it, if you only run average humans, and kill them off before they become too skilled, you will find that the system mimics reality to a tolerable degree. But this is also true of almost every other system on the market, including some real loosers like Tunnels and Trolls. The acid test of a GOOD system, is how it handles powerful characters, non-humans, and exotics. Again, Runequest 3 fails miserably. The rules repeatedly encourage characters to do things which are unrealistic in a fantasy setting. To a certain extent, such flaws can exist in the system without destroying the world. Players are supposed to be more interested in "character conception" then that. But after a while, this will break down if the holes are too blatant, and run across too often. Players quickly learn that a dead character makes a very uninteresting concept. In the following text, rules which are unrealistic, or promote unrealistic behavior, will be pointed out as "Reality Flaws". Game Examples -- Ok "Cormac the Pict" is a good idea to give examples with. But it was a better idea with Rurik the Restless. Why, do you ask? Well because such examples also serve as the indication of the style of the campaign. Rurik in RQ 2, started out a beginning adventurer, suffered a major setback, but eventually made it to rune lord. Cormac in RQ 3, is beaten up, suffers serious disease, is thrown in jail on the whim of a nobleman, is knocked over by wind, and turned down by a Shaman. His only success is to repeatedly avoid being killed, by managing to hide. He also learns a few basic battle magic spells. If the designers of RQ 3 seriously want a referee to run their games in such a ritual sacrifice fashion, (which they do: "These personalities ... reveal how some more or less ordinary adventurers progress (or don't progress) in actual situations") then I don't want anything to do with it as a player. Suffering repeated "Roll your 52% Hide, or die when the enemy tribe finds you", is not what I call fun; this should NOT be "Call of Runequest", despite what Sandy Peterson might believe. PLAYERS RULES Characteristics -- Good I always liked RQ 2 characteristics, and am glad that they didn't delete or seriously mung with any of them. They still give silly numbers, (Size has nothing to do with Strength, and vice versa), but this is true of all 3d6 systems. Characteristic Increases -- Very Poor RQ 2 had a concept called "Species Maximum". The idea was that there was a limit to how high you could train your characteristics, which depended upon your race. The Reality Flaw with this system, was that at the highest levels, everybody began to look the same. POW 18, DEX 21, CHA 21, STR/SIZ/CON equal, and INT usually 17 or 18 (if you wanted a character who progressed quickly). There was also a Reality Flaw with STR/CON/SIZ, which hasn't been fixed. RQ 3 does away with "Species Maximum", without substituting any good alternate, and thus makes everything worse. To the old STR/CON/SIZ Reality Flaw, RQ 3 adds a Design Error. The old Reality Flaw has not been fixed: Large and/or strong creatures can become incredibly more healthy (resistant to disease, etc), and naturally healthy creatures can become incredibly strong. But all this cross training WAS limited by Species Maximum, and so things did not get out of hand (except for Dragonnewts). Now, since there IS no species maximum, we find that an average Halfling can train his STR up to 17. Particularly healthy ones can eventually become much stronger than trolls. An intelligent Manticore, being naturally strong, can train both his health (and therefore his venom) up to amazing levels. For the old DEX/APP Reality Flaw, RQ 3 substitutes a new one. Both DEX and APP are now limited by half again the original roll. What this means is that one of every 72 people, will be able to attain a Dexterity like unto the gods (26), whereas the low 1 of 72, will never be better than a klutz (6). Such variation will inevitably lead to DEX inflation (starting out with the highest DEX possible), since any high DEX character has a much better chance of survival. POW now has a wonderful Design Error, where it had none before. The Species Maximum characteristic used to be one sixth again the maximum rollable. This meant that an Elf (2d6+6 POW) would have an 18 + 1/6 x 18 = 21 Species Maximum. Humans likewise. Now, RQ 3 makes you add the minimum rollable plus the maximum, so an Elf now has a 8 + 18 = 26 Species Max. A Dryad (2d6+16) near Species Max, handily defeats the Bad Man in spirit combat, and I don't even want to THINK about Hags. The repercussions in the areas of Magic are considerable, since higher Species Max means easier POW gain rolls. This in turn gives more POW for spells, magic items, and binding spirits. Non-human Shamans are amazingly gross. Hit Points -- Good Much of the old Reality Flaw from RQ 2 has been removed. Good. This is somewhat offset by the botching of training up STR and CON, however. Damage Modifier -- Ok The same old Damage Modifier is being used, with its enormous breakpoint effect. For a normal human, 1 additional point in STR or SIZ can suddenly add about half again to the damage of all weapons he uses. Some sort of increasing die roll (1d1, 1d2, 1d3, etc) would have been better. (Could have even been substituted on the old RQ 2 character sheets). Number of Strike Ranks -- Ok For no obvious reason, RQ 3 now has 10 Strike Ranks instead of 12. All the tables have been adjusted accordingly, but there didn't seem to be an overwhelming need for a change. Perhaps the game designers wanted to make clear than SR's, had nothing to do with seconds of time, by removing the (apparent) one-to-one correspondence. Actually, Strike Ranks are themselves kludges. They have little to do with the progress of blows in an authentic mele. Since there is no easy alternate, it can do. Previous Experience -- Very Good Previous Experience is an exceedingly well done piece of work. It allows players to build reasonable backgrounds for their characters, and allows a reasonable amount of previous experience, without getting gross. The only real problem with it, is that it contains a large number of Glorontha-isms ("Healer, Civilized: 01-75 Your adventurer's parents worship the earth goddess...."). Quick Experience System -- Very Good For its limited scope, this works very well. Simple Skills -- Ok The old skills are unchanged. The 05 success, 95 failure is still kept. This still has its old Reality Flaw wrong with it. Get 20 people to try something, and almost always one of them can. It isn't noticeable usually, unless you ask a giant to jump. (Because of his size, the giant will fall over most of the time, but take off to the moon on a 01-05). Skill vs Skill -- Poor It does not explicitly state if a skill which has been modified to negative ADDS to the opponents chance of making the skill roll. Also, the Skill vs Skill algorithm is not transitive -- i.e. it matters greatly which skill is designated the "attacking" skill, and which one the "defending" skill. Consider two characters who are 90% in Tracking: one who is looking for a trail, and one trying not to leave one. Both characters have a 85% total chance of success, if theirs is the roll considered "passive". The "active" wielder can only hope the "passive" user blows his roll. For 5 to 45 percent range, the percentages are reversed... the "active" wielder gets the better deal, since the Skill vs Skill roll assumes automatic success if your opponent blows his roll. Skills Categories -- Poor Improvements in this one: no more break points. Alas, it is offset by the ill definition of most categories. We find that good Boating and Throwing depend heavily upon being very small. A Miss America contestant can speak foreign languages much better than a plain girl. Great Trolls make wonderful pick pockets. This could possibly be fixed by rules alterations. Negative skills should be secondarily negative (1 for 2, not 1 for 1). Throw and Boat should be Manipulation based skills, and Manipulation should not have STR in the calculation at all. Sing & Speak Foreign Language should have no APP modifier, and Sleight should have a Negative SIZ modifier. Experience Gain Rolls -- Very Poor The old Reality Flaw "you learn only during a stressful situation" is still around, as expected. ("Gosh, I learned to play the piano twice as quickly as my friend, because I only play when the trolls are attacking!"). This can be explained away in the interest of getting players to go out in the field, and is perfectly fine. Experience Gain Rolls suffer from being tied to skill modifier bonuses, because all the silliness of the Skills Categories becomes magnified. Not only do people who are very lucky (high POW) rather noticeable, but they are made incapable of learning how to be less so. Manticores can learn to Play Instruments much more quickly, because they are so strong. Giants can learn how to Track much more easily, because they are very healthy. More to the point, we find out that high skill modifiers aid characters in learning in an astounding way. A human and a giant, with an equal INT and DEX, at 100% Sleight, will find that the giant learns his skill 10% more quickly than the human can; getting 100 checks, a character over 100%, with a 20% skills modifier will go up an average of 70%, while a character with a 5% skills bonus will go up 14%; under 100%, the ratio is even more extreme, since skill level affects the chance to even get the check in the first place. This all is just begging for characteristic inflation. It encourages the 17 DEX character to train his DEX up to 26, since this will mean an automatic +9% chance to learn how to use half the skills in the book. In addition, any character who has a +1 Skills Modifier can train all those skills above 100%, but characters with a 0 bonus cannot. In short, RQ 3 took the old RQ 2 Reality Flaw, and magnified it. While RQ 2 encouraged INT inflation (rolling intelligent characters), this was more palletable for several reasons. One, most of the enormous fighting machines {Minotaur, Manticore, Great Troll} were rather dumb. So, a player had to choose between being powerful to start out with, or having a better future ahead. Two, strength and smallness have little to do with learning, only intelligence does. (In fact, the DEFINITION of intelligence, is the ability to learn. Look it up, if you don't believe me.) Finally, since you want to encourage people to play intelligently anyway, it did not hurt to encourage them to play intelligent characters. Fatigue -- Very Poor The first point to ask about Fatigue, is why is it necessary? Certainly people get tired, but Conan never seems to (even when he is wearing plate). Many SCA fighters have told me that when in top shape, they can fight for almost half an hour before getting really pooped. Real fighting includes pacing, and looking for openings, which allow characters to rest even when "attacking" an opponent. Especially under the adrenaline of combat, people "die" long before they are seriously hampered from fatigue. RQ 2 seems to work just fine without it, so would have RQ 3. Alas, things are not that easy. You cannot even do away with the whole system, since the game designers offer no other, and Fatigue is enmeshed so thoroughly with Encumbrance, that they are almost inseparable. In short, it is one big Design Error, interspaced with Reality Flaws. To wit: "Cormac is still being pursued by enemy tribesmen. Though he is a strong runner, he still hears their calls and jeers behind him. He is now -3 fatigue points -- all the fatigue points (including zero) on his fatigue tally have been checked off, and he has lost three more besides. In this melee round, his player must therefore subtract 3 from any skill, resistance, or characteristic roll he makes for Cormac. What the author failed to mention, is that Cormac, an unencumbered healthy primative hunter, has been jogging for at most 4 minutes. In another 3, according to the RQ 3 system of Fatigue, he will faint. But this is not all! Assuming Cormac was the healthiest and the strongest a human can be, and he was jogging entirely naked, he would skill keel over from exhaustion in less than 15 minutes. Whatever inhuman levels of Constitution a modern day jogger must have in RQ 3 is left up to the readers imagination. The problem of Fatigue actually goes much deeper than this. It really has to do with the designers attempt to simulate multiple types of exhaustion with one simplified system. For instance, we find that prolonged hiking or riding over several hours, reduces a characters Fatigue (as it should), but this Fatigue loss is measured in the same units that sprinting around the block is. Thus, to rest from a entire days exertion, one need only to recover the Fatigue points through a 1 minute rest. Doing so at the end of each hour of hiking, insures that a character is never down more than 1 to 2 points of Fatigue. The game designers make loss of sleep (sleeping in armor) cost Fatigue points as well. They use a bad example, since sleeping in most armor (without a helm on) is actually quite comfortable. Aside from that, of the type of Fatigue being lost is again, obviously, the wrong one. It leads to the humorous Reality Flaw of a character who is sleeping in armor, asking to be woken up every hour or so, so that he can rest to recover his lost Fatigue. In fact, the only "_p_e_r_m_a_n_e_n_t" Fatigue loss springs from ENC; this turns out to be exactly the wrong application of permanent Fatigue, since it leads to a linear relationship between the weight that the character is carrying, and the strenuousness of the exertion. For example, a character can jog with a full pack, about 1/2 as long as he can jog totally unencumbered. This makes characters able to run with inhumanly large amounts of ENC for a relatively long time, but fall over when totally unencumbered after a relatively short time (relative, that is, to reality). Because the Fatigue system all works off of one attribute in a very simplistic fashion, it can only be tuned to be realistic on one setting. This setting seems to be a human, with average STR and CON, unencumbered, and who is very very out of shape. Nikkelos the Sorcerer looks perfect under the Fatigue system, as does, incidentally, Steve Perrin (or even myself). It does not work for the average adventurer. To try to patch up the system for other races and sizes, a completely separate Fatigue table is given, which occasionally leads to the correct results. (The table seems to have been designed for horses). I talked to Steve Perrin about this, and he mentioned in response that Fatigue was in "melee rounds only", i.e. don't count fatigue unless the referee is asking for statements of intent. The first problem with this is that it is a obvious and stupid Reality Flaw; some people claim they are already researching a spell to put others in "melee rounds" to make them tire out. It may even be more simple than that: in the example, Cormac hears "calls and jeers behind him", which forces him into melee rounds -- so much for "...and names will never hurt me". Secondly, only counting Fatigue in battle allows characters to perform inhuman feats of endurance outside of it. ("Run for an hour carrying my horse? Sure, no problem, just make sure I don't go into combat"). Swimming also uses Fatigue, tell me does the Chaosium really only mean Swimming while in combat? Another incidental Reality Flaw is that the designers went overboard on reducing percentiles for being Fatigued. Athletes, we find, are particularly vulnerable to disease because they are fatigued so often. In addition, when tired, not only is your strength effectively reduced by a large amount, but you also are less Lucky. A Storm Bull after having slaughtered 100 Broos, finds the god unwilling to respond to a tired worshiper (Divine Intervention -- POW x 1 characteristic roll). If he does make the roll (by some miracle), then he has lost a huge amount of additional permanent POW, because of the Fatigue loss. Encumbrance -- Very Poor Encumbrance is inexorably intertwined with Fatigue, but it has other problems as well. Since the ENC of armor increases as a multiple of Size, but Fatigue increases as an average, we find that a large strong people (who have high STR relative to CON) have fewer rounds to fight than small weak people when wearing equivalent sets of armor. This means that Pixies and Halflings can all wear Plate without a worry about fatigue loss, but Trolls cannot. Particularly large trolls are even in worse condition. A Size 21 two legged creature uses the size equivalency chart. This means he has 28 Fatigue points to start out with, regardless of his STR or CON. Dress the troll in Plate, give him small clothes, a Troll Maul, and nothing else, he will start out at -16 Fatigue. It is quite possible for an average well equipped large Dark Troll to faint if he accidentally goes into melee rounds. If the troll feels bad, he should talk to the newlywed husband. The strong and healthy guy (13 STR/13 CON) tries to lift his lithe (SIZ 9) wife through the doorway, when someone "called and jeered" at him, and he went into melee rounds. Figuring out his current Fatigue (since this is what you do when you start into melee rounds), we find he has 26 total. A respectable number, until you realize that his wife weighs (9 SIZ x 6 ENC/SIZ =) 54 ENC, which makes him faint dead away. How embarrassing. The Design Error lying behind all this is not all that difficult to spot: Fatigue and Encumbrance are calculated in exactly the same way: you compute the number of melee rounds you can exert yourself in exactly the same say as you compute what you can carry. So it is impossible in RQ 3 to have a character who can carry a great deal, but tires quickly (high STR/low CON), and impossible to have a character who cannot carry much, but can do so for a very long time (low STR/high CON). No one, for instance, expects a high STR Sumo wrestler to be able to jog twice as far as the normal man, but this is what RQ 3 implies. Can a Halfling carry more ENC than a human? Due to the Halfling's high Con, the RQ 3 system says yes. This is reminiscent of the D&D concept of mixing high Dexterity (ability to avoid a blow), and Armor Class (ability to absorb damage); the RQ 3 Fatigue/ENC system takes two related, but entirely separate world elements, and tries to mix them together. The resulting system is so unnatural, it has to depend upon such artificialities as "melee rounds", and being tuned to work correctly for one specific archetype. This type is (not surprisingly) for average size armor worn by out of shape humans. Because it is a system which is unrealistic, fixing the Fatigue or Encumbrance numbers so that characters could carry one another in combat, as in the movie Uncommon Valor, helps not a bit. It only would make the formula silly elsewhere (perhaps allowing people to jog carrying their horses for half a minute). If you want an effective ENC system in RQ 3, you have to design it yourself. ENC also is supposed to subtract directly from both ability to cast magic, and Dodge ability. I am not too concerned about the latter, since Dodge is such an asinine idea anyway, that it doesn't make any difference if ENC affects it or not. About the former, I can only wonder what the designers were thinking about when they made this rule up.... to add insult to injury, we now find that the Size 21 troll in Plate now has a -55 percent chance to cast his spells, while the STR 2 Halfling in Plate is discomfited by no more than -15. A Giant can't cast spells, not because no one taught him, but rather because his belt buckle weighs too much. (After all, he only has a 125 STR to lift it). These Reality Flaws are really humorous, until you realize you paid 38 dollars for them. Training -- Ok Some parts of Training have been improved, although I do find it strange that "Experience" is more useful than having someone teach you correct technique. Is this why the Chaosium felt the need to invent "Martial Arts", to explain away the fact that people who are taught ancient, well thought out combat methods, are better than street fighters? Well, other than that, and the artificial 75% limit (which was always there), I like this section. Particularly good are the paragraphs explaining just where all that money goes to, and the time involved in learning. Incidentally, the 1d6-2 roll, is just like saying you get 2 plus an optional 1d6-4. From this perspective, only a fool would take the roll. Strange how, in a later Cormac's saga, it shows Cormac rolling average (20 & 21 total on 6 dice) and the text calls this luck "uninspiring". It is his player's intelligence that is uninspiring. Research -- Poor Having problems with all those skills at 0 percent? Have no fear! Research is here! From the formulas given, we find that you take no time at all to learn a skill from the base 0 percent. Throw a man in a French library, and before you know it, he'll be writing his first faltering words ("Parlez vous ...."). Everybody should learn his first 1d6-2 Martial Arts easy.... just make like Bruce Lee. Its not that Research is not a good idea, you just have to add a few more ideas like experience bonuses for knowing what you're looking for, previous experience in the field being researched, and innate predilection toward the skill in question. The system presented is much too simplistic, and assumes that all skills become predictably more difficult to learn, after you easily got the knack of them in the first place. The rules are better than nothing, but not much. Characteristic Increase -- Poor Having the cost and time of characteristic training depending upon an arbitrary game value is silly. Why should a Halfling doubling his strength take half the time doing it that a Troll doing the same thing does? The real cost associated with raising strength should have to do with how much you have raised it already, or how much is normal for your species, not based on arbitrary values. Since we have already discussed the lack of species maximum for characteristics, I will not rehash those Reality Flaws. Characteristic Decrease -- Very Poor RQ 3 promotes the idea that characteristics are not an abstraction, indicating a wide range of personal aspects, such as DEX being a combination of hand-eye coordination, musculature, and flexibility. No. Characteristics are treated as some form of elixir, which every character has, but some have more than others; which can, in turn, be squeezed out of a person like blood from a turnip. For example, Appearance (not at all in the eye of the beholder), has a particular Magic Point value for each character, which a sufficiently skilled sorcerer can Tap. Rock Hudson is a veritable storehouse of magical power, (no doubt found somewhere in his classic jaw line), while you or I have almost nothing. An athlete who dies, can be resurrected twice as long after you or I, because he has so much more STR in him than we do. A juggler who gets the Shakes, will survive much longer than anybody else, because he has more DEX in him to begin with. While Runequest 2 had some of the same ideas, at least they did not pursue them with the same fervor that RQ 3 has. The idea was holed up in the back of the book, listed under optional "Disease" rules. This is no longer the case, as Characteristic Drain is now the method of aging, inaction, disease, death, and Tapping. Strike Ranks -- Ok There are two changes in this from RQ 2. The good one, is that it is now possible to alter your statement of intent, without having to waste 11 seconds to do so. The bad one, is that it now seems that a character moving up on another, strikes last because the moving character unconditionally looses strike ranks. The worst case, is where a character moves up and cannot hit his foe, since he hasn't enough strike ranks. His foe, who was waiting for him, gets a free attack. Also, any old numb skull with a high DEX gets the first strike even against a seasoned fighter. (While Runequest says that an attack is actually a combination of blows, almost none of the rules really treat it as such.) Aimed Blows -- Ok I am not overwhelmed by this method, holdover though it is from RQ 2. It does not simulate well what an aimed blow really is. Basic Attack Percentages -- Poor Someone at the Chaosium still has the idea that the better damage a weapon does, the lower percentage it should start out with. For example, a Naginata starts at 5%, while a Spear starts at 15%. Now while I will not pass judgement on the basic idea of making high-damage weapons more difficult to use (it is an issue of reality vs play balance), I do find it somewhat silly that they expect this technique to actually prevent players from just using the highest damage weapons. A lower starting percentage does not hinder a character's use of a weapon at all, since lowered starting percentages can be trained up easily. What is more needed is an innate difficulty factor, which would be a subtraction from a weapon's Skill Bonus (and experience bonus) because the weapon is innately more difficult to use. An addition to the Skill Bonus for shield parrying would also have been better than the high starting percentage. As currently written, the starting weapon/shield percentages really have no meaning. Parry -- Good The new rules for allowing hafted weapons to occasionally damage during a parry are good. It would have been better if all weapons only did damage on an impale, since such notching is not very common. Later we find in the book, Parry can now be used against hand thrown missile weapons. The rules and an example seems contradictory: "Thrown weapons can be parried if the parrier is aware of the attack...", and "A spear thrown from the darkness impales Churchak. The roll is 16 points of damage, but he gets his own spear in the way for a parry". (I am assuming in this example, that Churchak has not researched up his Darksense.) Also, in real life, any missile weapon used at long range can be parried, if seen. Weapon Armor -- Ok RQ 2 weapons needed armor badly. RQ 3 gave it to them, but in a funky fashion. From the rules, we find that the reason that swords don't break is not because they are made out of steel, its because they are "interposed" between the attacker and his target. Does this mean that if I "interpose" a trollkin (or a candle), in front of a descending troll maul, that the interposed object only takes 1 point of damage? Not likely. Chalk up another Reality Flaw. Parrying an opponents attack to break his weapon becomes a credible option, since a parry does full weapon damage when the attacker misses (unlike attacks). I would prefer half damage for interposed objects, and let weapon armor take care of it. Also, it is never explicitly stated what happens to a weapon which reaches 0 armor points. I assume that it becomes effectively unusable, but does it snap? Can it be rebent into shape? Dodge -- Very Poor The first major problem with this rule, has nothing to do with Dodge. It has to do with what it replaces: Defense. Defense is simply the idea that fast, small, lucky, intelligent, or experienced creatures are generally harder to hit than slow, large, unlucky, dumb and/or inexperienced ones. Talking to members of SCA, I have found this to be a generally approved of idea -- it's how combat really works. Now the RQ 2 implementation of Defense had a few holes in it -- which could be lived with. The first was that two creatures of equal size, had a hard time hitting each other in hand to hand combat if they were small, and an easier chance if they were large. (RQ 3's "Attack Modifiers" table maintains this flaw.) The second problem with Defense was the way that you got experience in it... unless you had a positive Defense bonus, you could not get any more, and the more Defense you had, the better you got at it. So change the special experience system for Defense, right? Wrong. What the brilliant folks over at the Chaosium decided to do was get rid of the idea of Defense entirely, and substitute in "Dodge" instead. A character can now Attack, Parry, or Dodge in a melee round, choosing two of the above actions. Thus, to instinctively avoid a blow, I have to either forego my attack, or put my shield behind my back. If I choose to attack and parry, it matters not at all if I am Size 4 or Size 19, if my DEX is 3 or 58, if I am the most experienced fighter or if I a raw amateur -- my opponent has the same chance of hitting me. If you try to Dodge and Attack, the Reality Flaw becomes more hilarious. Lord Alfred Winddragon had us simulate two fighters Dodging and attacking with Great Swords -- the resultant combat looked like a pogo-stick competition. Swords and shields were even more silly, since the attacker had to place his shield behind his back, so as not to accidentally parry a blow. The flaws become worse again, when you consider non-human types. How do you hit a with a composite bow Pixie at 120 yards? Simple, just catch it "attacking" and "parrying" another Pixie while fighting over a berry (or catch it slinging a missile). What do they mean "He's so bad, he can't hit the side of a barn?" They mean he's not an expert -- since even a Size 80 side-of-barn adds only a total of +30% to your chance to hit -- lacking rules for positive defense, a character who has missed his dodge is as easy to hit as a stationary object. Weapon Knockback -- Ok Well at least there are rules for doing knockback from a blow, even if they are somewhat silly. What does a pointy or sharp weapon have to do with knockback? Does a Bladesharp 4 really add almost a meter to knockback? Does a small mount charging down on a braced pike really get pushed back an additional 2 meters because of his own damage bonus? Intentional Knockback -- Poor Well now we know what the most effective form of attack is in Runequest 3. Intentional Knockback. All you have to do is Dodge and Parry and then Intentionally Knockback your opponent onto the ground. Then you get +20% chance to hit him, and he gets -20% chance to hit you. Simple, no? Stunning and Subduing -- Poor It appears that to aim a blow at the head, all you have to do is attack to Stun or Subdue. Then, regardless of the actual damage of the blow, you have a reasonable chance to knock your opponent out. Trollkin will love this attack, since it gives each one a 20% chance to knock out a typical great troll, with even 1 hit point penetrating. It also does not say if the damage done by a subduing blow is actually applied as hit points damage to it. One presumes not. Special Hit Locations -- Good These are re-writings of the RQ 2 Special Hit location system. They are good, but are not extensive enough. Some downward modifier should have also been included for swinging at extremely large creatures (such as giants). Mounted Weapons Limitations -- Very Good A reasonable set of special rules. Set Spear vs Charge should be based on velocity and size, not on strength of the mount. This is a very small detail though. Unfavorable Environments -- Good 1] Darkness has a reality flaw, since pitch blackness not only subtracts from an attackers chance to hit, but it also subtracts from the defenders innate Defense ability. The SCA has tried out fighting blind, and people are hit quite a bit more often than RQ 3 rules suggest. 2] Underwater is reasonable set of rules, if you ignore the Fatigue loss except for land based creatures (or ignore the Fatigue entirely). 3] High ground is very good. 4] Narrow passageways should include any thrusting weapon, not just spear and pike. Otherwise good. The Fatigue is silly. 5] The rules for Covered Targets have not improved since RQ 2. You still have a 50/50 chance of missing a giant who is covered by a hillside, even though the exposed portion of his size is greater than the size of a man. There is still also no way to aim for hit locations with missile weapons, which is bad. Criticals -- Good A critical now cannot do less damage than a special hit. This is very good. However every critical almost always does exactly the same damage. This is not so good. Specials -- Ok "Impales" look fine from a game balance point of view, though the extra damage done is still not all that realistic. I do find complaint with the effect of a special from a smashing or slashing weapon though. From the way the rules are written, a character who does at least 5 points of damage to any foe on a Special, knocks the target back at least one meter. This means that a duck with a club can knock over a giant, assuming the latter fails a DEX x 5 roll. Fumble -- Good Same old RQ 2 fumble table. Close Combat -- Ok It is always good to have a game at least approximate what goes on in close combat, even if it does not quite match up to reality. The closing rules are fine, but what happens when you pull up to too short a range is not. In reality, no one can attack at full damage when choked up too close -- whether you forego your parry or not. Also parry, as the game so correctly points out, is an instinctive response -- foregoing parry at all is almost a contradiction in terms. Disarm -- Poor Disarming an opponent remains too easy in RQ 3. If I attack an opponents weapon, he has no chance to effectively block my attack against breaking the weapon. Thus, regardless of the skill of my opponent, I can disarm him with a few blows. Multiple Targets -- Very Good There are now reasonable rules for all of these things. The example of Bigclub has a strange +1d3 at the end, which is not explained anywhere. Firing Into A Mele -- Very Poor How to make yourself invulnerable to missile weapons attacks: 1] Get a bunch of dogs. 2] Involve yourself and them in "mele" (pay the END cost for now). 3] Watch perfectly good missile wielders practically fumble their chance to hit a particular target. With 9 dogs, the attack percentage is 1/10 normal, etc. Sure, you're going to loose dogs, but so what? Engines -- Good Since adventurers rarely fight in long sieges (not heroic or profitable enough), I do not really see the need for these rules. SKILLS -- Good In general, the skills were explained as to what they were. Though there were some ambiguities left, it is not enough to make an issue out of. Also, some skills are too general, and really cover separate areas of expertise; these should have been subdivided. THE WORLD Falling -- Good Asphyxiation -- Good Fire and Heat -- Very Good My my how this reminds us of the Hero Sys treatment of the same subject.... Poison -- Very Good I am particularly impressed by the fact that the words "usually" and "Unless otherwise specified by the gamemaster" are included in this description. Disease -- Poor The same tired old Glorontha-ism of Disease is hanging around RQ 3. In it, we find that a disease does nothing more (or less) than permanently destroying characteristics. No Fatigue loss (even in RQ 3's botched up system), no skill subtractions, no temporary characteristic loss. Just total destruction. At least now, with the lack of species maximum, you can regain your characteristics back. We find that one way to save your life, if you are afflicted by mild Wasting Disease, is to lift weights (all modern hospitals should have them). This leads back to my comments about RQ 3 Characteristic Decrease in general. Also, notice the Glorontha-isms in the passage: "Broos", "The disease Goddess", "disease spirits". Aging and Inaction -- Very Poor "See that cleft chin? Notice how good he looks? That is the sign of a character who will never 'ugly away'. But over there.... see how he picks his nose, and has warts? He is going to die before he reaches 50. How about the Pixie? She's always been weak (Pixie's usually are), which means that she will life a short life. Look at that guy over there.... the one who looks like Woody Allen, he's got such a low DEX you can just about kiss him good bye. But the Halfling (who trained up his STR to 24) is going to live to be 500." The only characteristic which has any bearing on health is (or should be) Constitution. This should be obvious from the above example. Though it is true that STR, DEX, and APP can be lowered beyond 40, it has no bearing on the health of the character. Even so, CON reduction is an abstraction, since reasonably healthy people quite often just keel over and die. In addition, reading the rules as they stand, it appears that anybody can live forever. Alls you got to do is retrain the characteristic up, once it has been reduced. Yes, I'm sure that APP training is hard to come by, but by RQ 3 it all could be done. (Doctor: "Sponge" Nurse: "Sponge" Doctor: "Pad" Nurse: "Pad" Doctor: "Eye Liner" Nurse: "Eye Liner" Doctor: "Lipstick"....) Weather -- Very Poor By the wind rules, we find that a hawk cannot fly. Its STR is not enough to keep it from being bowled over by a STR 2 (calm air movement) wind. Children are knocked over by breeze which blows out a candle, and a normal woman will be knocked down occasionally by light wind. A moderate wind will most certainly knock down any average man, and most above average ones as well. Only at the very upper end of the chart does Wind effects table begin to look reasonable. (End of Chapter 1)