jp42

Another point to consider - SIZ is not height, nor necessarily remotely proportional to leg length. Dwarves, for example, are SIZ 10-12, and explicitly not due to their height.

Honestly, part of it has to be the granularity of the system. Healing Rate is currently CON/6, round up, because everyone wants to use whole numbers. If, instead, you chose not to round up, you'd have something a little more interesting, if a bit more complex. Your CON 13 character would have an HR of 2.167, while CON 18 gets you a full 3.000. Requires the tracking of fractional hit points (or a revamp of the entire hit point system) but would give you the granularity you want. Gets harder with Luck Points, where they replenish back to their starting value each session. You'd have to tweak the rule, to say that you get back your base value in LP, but do not lose any fractional LP that you have left in your pool - so that 2.167 LP guy ends the session and then gets points back to take him to 2.33, and eventually, after six sessions, he starts with 3.00 LPs and has an extra whole one to use. Again, you have to be willing to track fractions or revamp the rules entirely. Experience Modifier is actually a very close cousin to the way that prime requisites worked in OD&D - you had a high enough score in your primary stat and you got a 5 or 10% bonus to earned XP. It, too, was a static breakpoint that made any stat over that value effectively useless. At least here you get some skill default bonuses for those high ability scores. I suppose you could do the math-heavy version here as well - for every point of CHA below 7, you have a 16% chance of losing an Experience Roll. For every point over 12, a 16% chance of gaining an extra one. I'm afraid to try to tackle the fantastic breakpoint that is INT+DEX = 25 - 3 APs and benefit from rounding up on Strike Rank - ain't nobody going to sit still for rolling a percentage chance of getting an extra action point per turn, no matter how realistic it might be...

I wonder if that wasn't an early Steve Jackson Game - Melee, for example - that you are recalling. The system you talk about there is very GURPSy in nature, where weapon damage is based on Strength, which has a Thrust value and a Swing value, and a 10 STR character does 1d6 of Swing damage, and then the weapon dictates how much you add or subtract, and the type of damage (impaling, cutting or crushing). There are issues with GURPS with regards to scaling of damage as strength increases, but otherwise it's a very good system for representing the impact of weapons on damage, I think.

I kick myself for ever getting rid of my hard-bound copy. We played it until the binding started to break, but I really wish I still had it. I am not sure I'd buy it again in a reprint, but a cleaned up PDF copy, with all errata and a bit more modern publication sense would be lovely.

That they actually existed made it a Formidable task. Halved your skill.

I dunno. Equal odds of a hand hit as a chest hit? That seems less than likely, somehow. What ever happened to the days of Aftermath's thirty-location hit chart? You were torn between hitting the guy in the 1 (top of the head) for a quick kill and the 12 (right in the goolies) for comic effect.

I've owned this forever, and I don't think I ever got 'round to reading these rules. They really are remarkably thorough, and while I have some questions about some of the decisions in them (why all actions at once? for example) I can totally see adapting these to most any BRP style game with little effort.

There's been a little of this going on in house rules for GURPS as well - one of the line editors divorces Will and Perception, normally figured from IQ, and gives them a base score of 10 (average) from which you can buy them up or down to suit your character design. Keeps the natural order - otherwise geniuses all wind up having iron will and would be the ones fleecing the jocks of their lunch money.

When you get down to it, the numbers in RQ6 are skewed, I suspect, towards a more modern life expectancy - dotage at 90+ - so who knows what you'd get with the other races. Maybe they're all exactly the same as humans in the "default" world?

No, Loz, I didn't figure it would be a TDM product. Perhaps a third party monograph of sorts. As for putting it into the RQ6 book, that would tie things down too much. Every game setting could be different. Maybe dwarves live to be 200 in one game, but only to 120 in another and are functionally immortal in a third.

Does this mean that a supplement for RQ6 that was akin to the Dungeon Fantasy line of PDFs from Steve Jackson for GURPS would be in order? Basically translating hack-n-slash dungeon delves into RQ6 so you don't have to?

Can't say as I know anything about Magic World at all, to make comparisons, but I did wonder more than anything else what the benefit was to eliminating hit locations - is it intending to speed up the combat process? To allow you greater flexibility as a GM to determine what a hit actually means? I'm not trying to denigrate, just to understand the motivation. And if you do, wouldn't it be easier to just average CON and SIZ a la BRP, and have whole body HP?

Just for my own edification - can I ask why you'd do this?

RQ6 is a quandary for me. Call-backs to my memories of RQ2, back in the early 80's, cheek against jowl with modern concepts of combat resolution like special effects and combat styles. Fantastic adaptations of the magic systems that go back to RQ3, plus the addition of mysticism, but skill sets that are less finely grained than even RQ2. It's also the game that keeps drawing my attention back, away from the even more realistic games that I love, like GURPS, Hero, even BRP. I don't know if it'll happen or not, but the next fantasy game I run will likely be in RQ6.

I was thinking along similar lines (and posted as much on G+ RQ group) that it would make a great base upon which to play Shadowrun. No need for multiple cultures, as social classes are already built in. I'd make everyone civilized and go from there honestly. Gives some baseline "Everyman" skills. Professions is definitely where the heavy lifting comes in but given The relatively limited Number of skills to choose from it ought not be too difficult or time consuming.