atgxtg said:
No, you point doesn't stand. RQ3 boxed set consisted of FIVE books. A players book (character generation and game play rules), a magic book (with 4 magic systems and item creation), a gamemaster's book (with information on economics, ships, and an adevnture), a creatures book (with the rules need to create monsters, animals, and intelligent species), and a Glorantha book (with glorantha history, creatures, and another magic system). So you are going to have to buy a lot more stuff to cover the same ground as in RQ3.
Yes, my point does stand.
Do I really need to spell this out? The RQ3 boxed set consisted of 5 books. The Players Book, Magic Book, and GM Book appear to correspond with the new Main Book and Companion. The Main Book and Companion both contain creatures that would have been in the RQ3 Creature Book. Right there, we now have 2 books at $40 that cover what was in 3.5 or 4 books in the boxed set. (Neither of us knows how many creatures are now included, so don't know how comparable it is there, but the rest is pretty straightforward.)
The Glorantha Book in the boxed set was just a tease for the world. Outside of a couple of pages on Dragonnewts, there wasn't enough there to do anything in Glorantha. The 2nd Age Glorantha book is 160 pages. Whether that's an overview, like Genertela and/or Elder Secrets or more of a campaign book, I don't know, but in either case you can't compare it to the little Glorantha book in the RQ3 boxed set.
So, you're looking at $40 for two books to play MRQ compared with $40 to play RQ3 with the boxed set. If the Main book and Companion really lack creatures, then maybe add another $20 for the Monster book when it comes out.
Now it seems that all this is going to be spread out over multiple products with a much higher pricetag (yeah, I know it is 20 years later and prices have gone upo, but requring a half dozen books at $25 each to set up a Glorantha campaign is/will be the kiss of death for MRQ. No one but Glorantha devotees will shell out that kind of money to do so).
If you want to play in Glorantha, you may well want to spend the money, but others will happily play in other worlds with the RQ rules and spend very little, or spend money on other worlds for RQ. RQ does a lot of things very well besides Glorantha.
In RQ3, you couldn't play in Glorantha until you at least had the Deluxe Edition boxed set, the Gods of Glorantha boxed set, and the Genertela boxed set, and you still didn't have any prepublished adventures from that. Go figure what that cost in 1980's dollars. Then add in Elder Secrets, Troll Pack, and Troll Gods for three more nearly essential publications and you still only have one premade adventure out of all of that (Munchrooms), and a few cameos.
More important than any of the MRQ vs. RQ3 stuff is the fact that it's well within line for the modern RPG market, which RQ3 most definitely wasn't. That's the real key above all else IMO. If it's not overpriced (like RQ3 was), then it'll have a good chance of acceptence on the quality of the product. Part of what shot RQ3 down was that it was priced so high that many people skipped it for other RPGs on the market, due to that alone, so it never had a chance it being judged on the quality of product.