Tag: RuneQuest

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More Thoughts on RuneQuest

I’m reconsidering part of the rule I proposed for special effects like impale in RuneQuest. The problem with any die showing a 0 is an impale as long as it’s a success is that it skews the chances of impaling at low skills quite a bit. With 20% skill, half your successful hits are impaling. Not what I’d really like to see.

Instead, I’m thinking of making it 0 or 5 showing on the 1’s die. This restores it to about 20% chance regardless of the skill. I think this works out to where rounding would happen with the original RQ: skill 15%, say, you have 3 chances out of 15 (05, 10, 15), while at 19 it’s still 3 but now out of 19, not becoming 4 out of 20 until you hit 20.

In some ways this is even easier to spot: multiples of 5 are special. Hard to imagine even my math phobic players objecting to that.

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Simplifying Spell Resistance in RuneQuest 2e

As part two of “The Macy Conventions”, I want to look at Spell Resistance.

Spell resistance is another thing that’s needlessly complicated in RuneQuest 2e, or at least expressed in a needlessly complicated way. The rule is that to cast a spell on a resisting target, you need to roll 50%, plus 5% for every point your POW is higher than theirs, -5% for every point lower. 96-00 always fails. They even gave you a handy chart to cross index the POWs and see what you need to roll

Chart showing the percentile you would need to roll for each POW between 1 and 21 against POW 1 to 21.

That strikes me as an ugly way to achieve this result. My house rule is:

Spell Resistance

  1. Roll d20 and add (Your POW – 10)
  2. If result exceeds (not equals) target’s POW, spell succeeds
  3. If result is less than or equal to target’s POW, spell fails
  4. A 1 always fails.

That’s mathematically identical, but seems to me much easier at the table. Most people are very fast at subtracting 10 from a number, even when it results in a negative number, compared to subtracting arbitrary numbers between 1 and 21 and then adding 50.

POW Gain Rolls

If you qualify for a POW gain roll after an adventure (cast a spell that could fail other than the auto fail on a 1 in a stressful situation during an adventure), roll strictly higher than your current POW on a d20 and you can increase your POW according to the regular rule (10% chance of +3 POW, 30% chance of +2, otherwise +1).

This is mathematically equivalent to the original subtract POW from racial max, multiply by 5 and roll less than the result on %.