>This shaman vs. sorcerer discussion is starting to get stupid. I'm
>beginning to suspect that Joerg is making up arguments which he
>_knows_ to be faulty, hoping he can slip one by. Say it isn't so.
I'm just relaying my playing experiences. And a beginning shaman is flea-bitten where a sorcerous apprentice can start to work on his own...
Did you ever have a PC shaman apprentice undergo the shamanic quest described in the rules? I had, once, and the character was weakened beyond useful gaming. It turned out unwise to wander the spirit plane with POW 9...
>>JB. However, he needs all the MP the fetch just spent to overcome
>>the spirit to contain its MP.
> This comment, Joerg, is so specious that I wonder if you can
>be serious. First off, it's unlikely the shaman has lost more MP than
>the captured spirit.
Happened in gaming...
>Next, note that the spirit's current MPs are 0,
>which any fetch can contain with no trouble at all. As the spirit's
>MPs recover over time, so do the fetch's.
T'was the POW 7 fetch of the POW 9 beginning shaman, and the spirit had POW 10. Life is a bitch...
>Finally, the shaman doesn't _have_ to bind it into his fetch.
This one had to, lacking the appropriate item.
>>the fetch is useless as >a permanent storage for spirits, unless the
>>shaman wants to spend >most of his time discorporated hunting for
>>all the escapees.
> Either you have not played much with shamans, or else you use
>very aberrant rules. I can't think of a single time a shaman in any
>of my campaigns had an "escapee".
See above. I guess that's what one gets for "honest" use of the rules, about 6 years ago.
Sandy managed to misunderstand my example, and missed the opportunity to redirect it to the rules digest. Since that horse is quite dead to me by now, I won't either.
Exorcism as just a shaman's specialty ritual: yeah, that was what I missed, though I still don't see why restricted to full shamans.
Nor do I see why a folk magic specialist has to be a shaman able to discorporate. A witch learning from a nymph or other natural spirit he or she is allied to would do as well, IMO, more like the wise women of the Vikings box. These would be more appropriate to vast parts of Glorantha, too, IMO.
>>The RQ3 shaman is about as dull as the RQ2 shaman.
> Eat me. It's no duller than the players who run them. I've
>had enormous fun with these shamans over the last decade.
Touche. The first of my shaman players wasn't the most inventive, and the second did not really get into the spirit...
>A spirit combat, once initiated, has three possible endings:
>3) both sides voluntarily agree to stop fighting. Nothing
>prevents this from happening except GM and player lack of
>imagination.
This means that the combatants have some means of communication other than MP-slugfeast. Too bad this variant was not spelled out in any example until now - life could have been easier.
>Why does the shaman have better spirits than the sorcerer?
Because the shaman doesn't fight them, but bargains with them, or coaxes them. But then this is what the early Malkioni wizards were experts in. 3rd Age sorcerers and wizards may suffer from the same RuneQuest Sight that your examples do, but in the Dawn Age bargaining with spirits (and gods) was the wizards' daily job. Let's call it the God Learners' heritage...
>A sorcerer can go hunt on the spirit plane and look up the
>type of spirit he needs.
The beginning shaman from above doing so ended up lost in the limbo, and had to be brought back from his encounter with an ordinary magic spirit by another shaman. The sorcerer carefully dosing his amount of MP to manifest the spirit fared a lot better...
> Hence, a shaman can have various elementals, pain spirits,
>wraiths, hellions, etc., and change his assortment of spirits
>depending on what is needed for the task at hand.
The beginning shaman from above never even managed to bind a single spirit into his fetch. The character died of non-spiritual causes a short while after reaching shaman status, and the player had had her share of spirit hunting...
So: powerful shamans beat powerful sorcerers on the spirit plane, only my campaign never developed any powerful shaman through play. The sorcerers ended up quite powerful...
End of Glorantha Digest V3 #199
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
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