[Runequest] RuneQuest stuff on Ebay and Strike Rank variation

[Wayne Shaw]

At 04:24 PM 7/3/2009, you wrote:
>On Thu, 2009-07-02 at 11:40 -0700, Wayne Shaw wrote:
>
> >
> > This would seem (as all such systems do) to provide an overly strong
> > benefit to those with high Dexterities.
> >
>
>Whilst I certainly prefer game systems that separate Manual Dexterity
>and Reaction/Agility, I don't think that this system provides any
>additional advantage to DEX to that which already exists in the RQ
>rule-sets. In fact it's slightly less in most senses (DEX 7-13) because
>DEX no long affects spell-casting speed.

Most of the standard versions of RQ made it very hard to impossible 
to get in more than one melee strike, which this doesn't seem to, and 
made it nearly impossible to get in more than one cast spell.


>There is, of course a notable benefit of high DEX due to the # of
>actions per round, but I consider that a benefit rather than a bane.
>Fast characters should act more often.

Which is what I'm talking about being too strong.  That's been the 
case in essentially every game I've ever seen that took this tact; it 
selected for high Dexterity over virtually everything else in the way 
of attributes.


>I should also mention that an action in this context does mean an
>attack, a parry, a move etc. So characters with a DEX of 6 can either
>attack, parry or move. A character with a DEX of 15 can attack, parry
>and move!

Ah.  That makes some difference at least.  I wasn't assuming 
attacking and parrying were separate actions for this purpose.

I still think there's a huge difference between a routine Dex being 
able to get in one attack and parry in a round and the person with 
the 15 getting in an additional one, though.  I suspect this would be 
incredibly noticable in practice (and particularly irritating if you 
happen to be a 13 Dex fighting a 14 Dex).