Hi all, let me start off by saying, I LOVE the PC series of games known as "Gothic" (sans 3 and "4") and the "Risen" series (I have not had a chance to play the 2nd one and was only a quarter of the way through the 1st before my hd died).
Now having said that, I have searched far and wide for a system to simulate the feel (if not the mechanics) of Gothic, I posted a few threads on the rpg.net forums with only a few suggestions. Pathfinder being one of them, (to this day not I still cannot wrap my head around all the modifiers and crunchy bits), and Savage Worlds being the other, my own suggestions were WFRP and BRP (I had never really looked into BRP before and mind you this was 2 or 3 years ago).
It is now 2013 and I have tried running WFRP with the plot of Gothic and sadly, it hasn't gone over too well, my players are waaay too weak and damage is crippling (they have had a lot of fun with the crit table though!), and I must say I enjoy the lethality of wfrp immensely! However it is just a little too lethal for what I want to do, and wfrp is obviously later medieval early renn. inspired in setting and tone (nothing wrong with that), and I found it refreshing to see guns and other firearms incorporated (so did they). Whereas Gothic from the get-go has a very down to earth medieval feel to it which I love! When I did suggest BRP as a basis for Gothic, I was informed that HP doesn't scale like in Gothic and that was that, I quickly decided to move on, however here I am on a BRP forum and looking more deeply than I ever have into BRP!
What I have found is a deeply modular simple d100 system! However up until late lastnite I was under the impression that I would have to forge my own setting and toggle and widget the systems found in the BRP book to my liking till I got something that *fit* the feel of Gothic, that was until I read a post on here, unsure where or whom, that made mention of RQ in comparison to BRP as a standalone Fantasy setting (yeah I know about Classic Fantasy but that isn't exactly what I'm going for either).
Now I did do research on RQ and OQ several years ago (around the same time I posted on the rpg.net forums) but in retrospect I hadn't even scratched the tip of the iceberg! I had read that RQ was.... cumbersome and tried (and failed according to one blog I had read) to simulate realistic medieval combats, or really the blog didn't say fail outright just RQ was too simulationist in its mechanics that it drowned out all the other aspects of an RPG.
I have looked over the character sheet of RQ AND Legend and, IMO, compared to WFRP it really isn't all that complex (than again; this is only a preliminary glance and I have not read the rules at all), I have read reviews though and I am intrigued by the action points concept (I can compare similar to Fallout 1 and 2 another one of my favorite PC series!) and the individual hp for body parts I can compare right off the bat to Vagrant Story! (You guessed it another one of my favorite games, the creator is a big PnP nut too!)
Now with ALL that said and done, this brings me to OQ, yes I did do a glance at OQ along with RQ at the same time but passed it on. As you can tell I am back at it and more indepthly now, I must say I believe I have found my holy grail of systems for Gothic, a long long post short, am I correct in my assumptions?
P.S. I DO have the CoC 6e rulebook but I hardly ever really read through, (fault on my part really), RPGs don't intimidate me, I have tons! (V20 included!) yet there was always something intimidating about CoC's width (I know weird) that I just never really read into it, until I read (again yesterday) that most of the book's size comes from a biography on Lovecraft and the actual CoC short story along with a few other things, that when taken out would greatly reduce the size of the book, which in a weird way revitialized my interest in BRP! I was also about to order the BRP hardback yesterday but at the last minute decided not to and boy am I glad I DID! Now I know about OQ and RQ! (But i am not opposed to picking it up sometime down the line).