Mugen

I have similar ideas for BRP, but never actually used them. I did, however, design a homebrew roll-under blackjack d20 system, partly based on Pendragon, and also old french game Légendes Celtiques (which was itself heavily inpired by old FGU games). I didn't use BRP-style success levels : the roll was the Degree of Success. If your d20 was equal to your chances of success, you re-rolled it and added the new result to the first one. I also had the same problem with chances of success. As it was an attribute+aptitude system, most average characters ended up with combat scores between 8 and 12, and fights were boring. In the end, i added 3 points to all stats and put a "specialties" system which boosted everyone's abilities. It resulted in a much more fun experience. Nowadays, i think I'd consider that in a failure versus failure case, the highest roll wins. I've got a problem with the unit die : even though it may look like a random d10, in reality its possible results are very different depending on the units of your skill. If you have 30%, your chances to get every posible result between 1 and 10 will be 10%. If you have 43%, your chances to roll results between 0 and 3 are bigger than your chances to roll any result between 4 and 9.

Was it ? IMHO, the weapon damage values are one of those few bits that are reminders of RuneQuest's original ties to OD&D. I wouldn't be surprised to read that the choice made by Mongoose to remove the adds was to use damage values that are closer to D&D 3.X values. I was in the playtest group, but I don't remember if we discussed the reason for those new values. But the first draft had so many problems that maybe no-one really cared... I agree. My own preference would be to a system where damage is in part based on the tens of the attack roll, though. Perhaps Damage Die+tens of the roll, or the highest result between those two. I'd give traits to weapons, too, and give a bonus to "Heavy" ones.

I think the modification of damage bonus was essentially done to have a more gradual increase. In MRQ and others, you start with 1d2, then 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, etc. Basically, for every 5 points in STR+SIZ, your average db increases by approximately 1 point. In BRP, you start with 1d4, which is huge compared to the base damage of most weapons, followed by a relatively tiny step with 1d6, then again a huge step with a second d6, and then additional d6s. As for the lower weapon damage values, I think the goal was to make the game less deadly. Hit locations also had increased hit points, each gaining 1 HP per 5 points in (CON+SIZ), mirroring damage bonus progression.

I see. In fact, It's also interesting to have a higher minimum against heavy armor because your chance to deal 0 damage is less important. Against a scimitar, you need at least 6 points armor to have a chance to nullify an impale, not counting the damage bonus.

I don't get your point. Sure, Scimitar has higher minimum impale damage, but identical average and lower maximum.

At first, I thought "what a strange idea !" Then I remembered one of my ancestors was ennobled (is it the correct verb ?) by the Pope in 19th century... I think there are two kind of "knighthood" here. One consists in being a member of the noble class, and the other means you become a member of an elite group and adhere to the moral ethics of Chivalry. See my example about King Francis being knighted by Bayard. Even if it's certainly not an historical event, it shows how people considered a King could be "knighted" by a Knight of lesser rank.

Although that scene is surely a pure fiction and it took place in Renaissance, there's a famous episode of the Italian wars where Francis the first is knighted by knight Bayard after a battle. Note that Bayard was a living legend, and not a simple knight.

Last time I visited Japan in 2018, I went to 2 stores that were selling RPG books (the "Yellow Submarine" shops), and in both half of the shelves were filled with CoC products. Just like if you entered a hobby store and the D&D books had been replaced by CoC books. Sword World was reported as #1 sales, but a new edition had just been released. There were even scenarios that looked like national small press releases, which I think were to be used by 2 players (1 GM plus 1 PC). They seemed pretty dark, judging by their covers, and nothing like the "R'lyeh School" books, which seem to be very humoristic. I my first trip to Japan in 2001, it seemed to me that GURPS was much more popular, with Japanese language sourcebooks dedicated to anime-inspired settings.

I agree. If you use "atomic" classes that are dedicated to one area of expertise and leave "hybrids" (such as the Paladin), yes, definitely.

And don't forget to modify Brawn according to the difference in Damage Bonus, so that your Durulz with 110% Brawn but DB -1d4 only uses a fraction of his skill.

I think that what is difficult with BRP is to reproduce DC and Marvel Super-Heroes, which often don't care about verisimilitude and often violate their own rules. It's less of a problem if you're Ok with the fact Superman Omni-man can kill any human being by a simple touch than if you want Batman to be able to fight Superman. There are many ways to make BRP less lethal, even without changing the rules. Increasing stats is one. A PC with CON 100 is not as fragile as one with CON 10, for instance, even if they both have SIZ 13. Another very effective way is to give damage reduction powers. If Omni-Man reduces all damage taken by 200, he's going to be extremely difficult to kill. And you don't even need such absurd numbers to make opponents tougher.

You can't really rely on multi-classing to learn individual skills in those games, to be honest, as it heavily slows your progression in your "main class", you better get them through feats or backgrounds. IMHO, multi-class is a vestige of older d&d games, which didn't have the flexibility of skills. The only game in which it works well is the japanese game Sword World, but classes are in fact more akin to very broad skills in this game. It's not very different from Barbarians of Lemuria, but with a very limited seletction of professions.

Note that if you want to use "something like" BRP and not a copy-paste of any version of BRP, it's very unlikely you'll get any trouble. However, you'll get into trouble if you try to sell a clone of an existing Chaosium game, even if you make small rules changes, which is normal.

Opposed rolls would be my reason to use dX+skill instead of dX roll-under. I like the simplicity of just having to compare both rolls. Oppositions in roll-under tend to rely on more complex or less intuitive systems. Edit : it could be possible to make skills as a threshold to beat in a roll-over system (for instance, if your skill is 4, you need to roll 4+ with a d20). But it seems to me it would be a solution worse than either roll-under or roll dX+skill.

Yes. Games like Talislanta or Age of Atlantis have a base system which looks a lot like D&D 3e, or a simplified and d20-ified RoleMaster, but has no classes nor levels. RuneQuest originally looked a lot like a level-less and class-less D&D variant, where everything was based on thieves skills. Even the way characteristics influenced skills was reminiscent of how DEX changed thieves skills (if your DEX was between X and Y, some skills got +5%, and if it was over Y, those skills got +10%, while others got +5%).

You can use the 10s of your roll as a Degree of Success. If your chances of success are >100, add 1 to your DoS per 10% above 100. Also give bonus chances of success depending on the situation. If your 60% Chemist is doing a manipulation any student with 10% could do with a relatlively good chance of success, give him a huge bonus. As the bonus will rise his skill above 100%, his success level will rise in the same time. I'd also use the following critical success rules : If your roll is under the tens of your skill (or a double if you prefer this method), read the die as being 10.

I don't remember Specials as being very impressive in RQ3, except with impaling weapons. However, broadswords are very popular, so in the end it's a very common case. But there were part of the system I never used, such as err... recul in French. It means an opposition between skill 110 and 90 or between 130 and 110 have very different probabilities, which is something I'm not very fond of. My preference goes to systems where the chances of success in an opposition are roughly the same for a given difference in skill. French game Rêve de Dragon (Reve, the Dream Ouroboros in English), which was heavily influenced by RQ2, has a rule which is obviously a variant of the "anti-parry" rule. An attacker (even if he has less than 100% chance) can voluntarily reduce his attack chance to lower his opponent's parry chance. RdD rules treat difficulty differently, but in RQ you could see a character reduce his 120% skill to 80 so that his opponent's 60 drops to 20, or prefer to keep his full chance to get a crit or a special. The "skill over 100" rule is in fact a special case of that rule. The last playtest version of Mongoose RuneQuest used skill opposition. If both the attacker and defender rolled the same success level, the amount of damage blocked by the parrying weapon (usually 4 or 5) was doubled if the defender had the highest roll. But, unfortunately, that version -which I believe was from Kenneth Hyte- was altered by Mongoose team before publication...

If that was the goal, it was IMHO not a very efficient method. "Combat Ping-Pong" is a problem that occurs essentially when both protagonists have a high skill, not when one has a much higher skill than the other. In RQ3, if you have a skill of 150% and your opponent only has 50%, you won't wait long before you succeed and he fails (even if it's very likely to last much longer than with RQG :)). On the other hand, if you both have 150%, you'll have a long fight, both with RQG and RQ3 rules. It will even be faster with RQ3, as the protagonists will surely split their attack and parry skills at some point, making things much more random. In RQG, splitting your attack is possible, but it means your opponent can use his full skill for his first parry, and only gets a -20% for the second one. @Lloyd Dupont concerning cumulative malus for successive defenses, RQG actually follows the rule of the first StormBringer editions. AFAIK (I only read SB 2, the first one translated in French), the -30% was introduced in Elric! Maybe because the skills in that game started at 2 higher score : a character with a 60% starting skill with a weapon was considered a good fighter at character creation, whereas in Elric!, it was possible to go beyond 100%. SB 1-4 also tend to be farther from BRP canon than later products. Even if there are significant differences between them (such as the fact Elric! uses crit chances equal to RQ special chances, and has much more forgiving rules for multiple defenses), games published after 1984 tend to have more consistency, and look more like the BGB rules.

Mythras simply uses damage bonus when one's physical build might grant him an advantage. Armwrestling, for instance, is not only based on Brawn skill, and if your opponent has a better damage bonus, your skill will be reduced. However, in the case of combat, weapons' relative Size is the most important factor to determine parry's efficiency, and skill will only help you if your opponent's weapon is not too big when compared to yours. Of course, huge creatures tend to have weapons with bigger Size than a human, based on their SIZ/10.

With the caveat that slashing and bludgeoning weapons are usually used in moves that are essentially rotations, which means you also have to factor the geometry of the weapon in the equation. Hitting someone with a 1kg iron ball is not the same thing as hitting him with a 1kg sword.

If you want to go the easy way, I think there are less ducks than theories...

Does Dullblade work on ranged weapons? I thought it could only be used againt melee weapons.

But dullblade won't help you suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune...

It could also be possible to consider that armor that protects from either piercing or slashing damage in fact changes part of it into blunt damage.

I thought that was changed, as the rules in the Quickstart for OQ3 use a variant of the "roll under blackjack" mechanism, where the highest roll wins (or lowest if they both failed). https://d101games.com/2021/04/07/openquest-3-quick-start-the-lost-outpost/ IMHO, it's the best solution (except I'd let the highest roll win also in a fail/fail scenario), my second favourite being based on the Resistance table : 50+(skill difference).