Sorcery Magnitude question

[RosenMcStern]

You don't rely on Palsy or Venom when your sorcerer is at basic level. There are much better combos you can try. Let's see what your beginner sorcerer can do with the Fly spell, assuming he has Manipulation (Magnitude) 40 and Manipulation (Combine) 30, just decent levels.

a) take the weapon off the hand of up to 4 enemies within POW meters; they probably get a saving roll, but this is not worse than what you get if you Palsy them.

b) combined with Animate Bronze and Form Bronze, make your weapon levitate and strike at base percentile. I would prefer this over Palsy or Venom all the time. If you also have Damage Boosting, then your opponents are gonna have a hard time.

Creativity is the answer here. Do not concentrate on direct damage spells, there are better options.

 

[Deleriad]

You don't rely on Palsy or Venom when your sorcerer is at basic level. There are much better combos you can try. Let's see what your beginner sorcerer can do with the Fly spell, assuming he has Manipulation (Magnitude) 40 and Manipulation (Combine) 30, just decent levels.

a) take the weapon off the hand of up to 4 enemies within POW meters; they probably get a saving roll, but this is not worse than what you get if you Palsy them.

b) combined with Animate Bronze and Form Bronze, make your weapon levitate and strike at base percentile. I would prefer this over Palsy or Venom all the time. If you also have Damage Boosting, then your opponents are gonna have a hard time.

Creativity is the answer here. Do not concentrate on direct damage spells, there are better options.

This may sound great but remember that Combine 3 subtracts -30% from chances so with Magnitude 40 and combine 30 and animate + form + fly your chance of casting the spell is precisely 0%. For that you have had to learn 3 spells and 2 arts.

Yes using Fly against weapons is useful and Fly is one of the 0MP spells that is devastatingly effective. And animate bronze is useless against people with iron or steel weapons or against most spears, bows and arrows etc.

And if you want an animated sword to attack your chance of doing so is "half of the sorcerer's skill" in 1H sword. Not something your average sorcerer is that good at...

That said, Form/Set is another very useful 0MP spell. Providing you learn the right metals, you can form/set every opponent's weapons into blobs for 0MP over a matter of combat rounds.

This is all well and good but I wouldn't mind betting if you tried to turn on a new player to RQ rather than d20 clones and let them play a sorcerer you would fail.

 

[Ssendam]

Actually there are some spells that are useful...

Looking a little deeper, I suppose the Damage Bonus and Damage Protection Spells have a certain on going use, if perhaps a little boring.

I don't see much that can't be fixed with a little house extension of the spell description. Dominate, is quoted here often but you can curtail it by saying that forcing someone to harm themselves would break the spell or allow another save? If fact is great that most people here have said, "this spell is rubbish ... we do this ...", as it shows a positive response to the problem as well as giving me lots of good ideas! 8)

Again I think it boils down to a, "it's not the system thats bad its that the spells haven't been thought through". But then is that a feature of a new system? D&D Owners, (there have been a few!), seem to love altering the rules every 5 minutes.

The other issue, which I believe was mentioned earlier, is that players SHOULD be creative with the game. That is what makes it interesting for the DM/GM?

Stay Frosty

 

[RosenMcStern]

This is all well and good but I wouldn't mind betting if you tried to turn on a new player to RQ rather than d20 clones and let them play a sorcerer you would fail.

I would never try this (in fact I did this once and failed). Best option for RQ newbies is to try Rune Magic. This is one of the reasons I am not very happy with it: not every starting characte has it in MRQ

 

[Sinisalo]

I wish people would stop saying "nothing a house rule can't fix". Nearly all the problems we have been nagging Mongoose about would not have happened if the writers had given the game the proper amount of thought or playtesting.

Sorry if I seem rude but I really believe RQ and Companion weren't extensively playtested. You wouldn't put out any other product on the market without extensively testing it first.

Don't get me wrong I'm not a naysayer: Blood of Orlanth, Glorantha 2nd Age and Dragonewts are great books, Mongoose should be proud of those.

Yes you're right these problems are solved by house rules but my houserules run to several pages of A4. Yes we houseruled RQ2 and 3 but we only did it to make a great game better or to exrcise our creativity not to fix a broken toolset.