[Runequest] Highlevel combat

[Wayne Shaw]

At 12:42 AM 11/8/2010, you wrote:
>I must admit that strengthening enchantments were something I 
>disliked with a passion after playing with them in my first 
>campaign. It just felt like a case of higher level characters 
>gaining additional Hit Points. It also tended to make RQ3 in 
>particular feel as though it were a game where they only way to be a 
>swashbuckling hero was to be loaded to the gunnels with magic. It 
>didn't help that most of my RQ3 campaigns were ones where magic was 
>only known by specialists. It was about a year after I started 
>running RQ3 that I banned strengthening and armoring enchantments 
>and adopted hero points instead. I felt much happier with that.

Well, it might not be the only way in a low-magic game, but my own 
experience was that if part of the party consisted of divine mages, 
the rest was going to need something magical to keep up.  I don't see 
any way around that, per se.



>Looking back from here, I suspect that RQ3 is the system that is 
>least suited to high-level play. It's very fine-grained, uses a lot 
>of small modifiers and dropped Defense and 100%+ attacks reducing 
>parry, both of which worked better at high levels. RQ2's magic limit 
>also prevented high level play from being solely about who had the 
>highest powered magic, which is what RQ3 tended to devolve to.

Actually, I saw that come up easily as much in RQ2, maybe more, 
because everyone was rune levels and had bound spirits coming out 
their behinds.  The only issue you didn't have to deal with was some 
of the RQ3 high Duration sorcery abuses.