Mugen

As said above, there are actually 2 Basic Roleplaying "Open" licences a available. The SRD is attached to the Basic OGL, which is the older one. The other one being the BRP ORC licence, whose SRD is the "BRP Universal Game Engine" book. The Basic OGL is more restrictive than the other, and although Chaosium has not cancelled it, it's almost dead now. I don't see how the game could work without those, to be honest. That's a good idea. I think a big problem for beginners with Call of Cthulhu is that the skill list doesn't clearly outlines which skills are important and which are for experts.

In general, I prefer d20. But d100 in BRP works well with various degrees of success mechanisms, based on fractions of the chances of success. Critical success on a 1 or a 20 (or your skill value in Pendragon, for skills <20 ) on a d20 means it's just luck, and completely disconnected from your skill. Basically, rolling a d20 under 13 or a d100 under any number between 63 and 67 won't make the game very different. But if you need to roll under 1 or any number between 3 and 7, it's a completely different story. In order to have chances similar to critical success on 1/20th of your skill with a d20, you can ask for a confirmation roll if you roll 1 or 20, like in D&D3, or old French game Légendes. But for some reason this kind of rule is more and more rare. But if you want to do the same with classical "crit under 1/20th and special under 1/5th", "crit under 1/10th" or "crit on a double", you'd find that a d100 is better.

Concerning characters durability, I would simply give PCs skills and characteristics above standard humans. Which is something Elric! did : it was possible to start the game with skills above 100%, and all characteristics were determined using 2d6+6. I don't own Magic World, but I think it works on the same principles. I would also consider that all damage that is not a Major Wound is just exhaustion, which can be recovered with a good night sleep. On he other hand, damage over the MW threshold would reduce the HP maximum until properly treated.

The three most important differences between Legend/Mythras being : The lack of Resistance Table. Though it is not difficult to re-introduce it in the game, as characteristics are still there. The scale of damage and hit points. A typical fighter with a broadsword and STR+SIZ above average deals 1d8+1+1d4 in BRP, and 1d8+1d2 in Mythras. It's a 2 point difference on average, which is a lot. Mythras doesn't have Generic Hit Points, only localized ones.

I don't know if anything exists for BRP, but you can check the Würm RPG from Nocturnal if you want a RPG setting.

Well, what I described above is the rules as written. But, despite what I said earlier, I would certainly not handle weapon skills this way. I'd rather have a broad "Melee" skill that can be used with any melee weapon, and specialties that adds a % to the base skill. I would also treat every skill this way, with -for instance- an Athletics skill with specialties such as Jump, Climb, Swim, etc. Or a Communication skill with specialties such as Command, Seduce, Bargain, Persuade, etc. I've yet to implement an experience system that works well with this variant, though...

If you have a Melee Weapon skill with a Great Sword specialization (base 5%) and use a Short Sword (base 15%), you're supposed to use your Melee Weapon (Great Sword) skill and add 10% (the difference between skills) to your skill. There's an exploit here, as it's easier to gain experience and go over 100% with a skill that has a base of 5% than it is with a skill with a base of 15%. I'd simply use the same base value for all weapon skills, and apply the difference in base skill as a modifier to the skill. For instance, the Melee Weapon (Swords) would have a 10% base, and I'd add 5% when using Short swords and subtract 5% when using Two handed swords.

That, and the fact failed rolls have no impact on the result of the contest whatsoever. But it's also true in Pendragon.

@lawrence.whitakerI have an issue with the SRD I downloaded from DTRPG. The tables' top rows and leftmost columns have black text on a black background. It's easily solved by changing the format, though. Note I use I use LibreOffice and not Word, which may be the source of my problem.

I assume it's the 7 core + EDU ? And same success level is a tie, as in these games ? That's too many ties for me.

ElfQuest comes to my mind. In this game, every PC is a member of a Wolf Riders tribe of elves, and has a unique bond with one wolf. However, I don't remember if there's any mechanism to build this bond, as both the wolf and his rider have been raised together since they were born, and the narural telepathic ability of those elves helps a lot...

Err... No, I just didn't check what I wrote... You can ignore one of those "all"... What I meant is that all PCs should have at least a couple of skills at 90+, an at least 65+ in some others.

It's possible that paragraph was influenced by two different versions of BRP. The improvement roll with a maximum of 21 is from RuneQuest. But most other games (StormBringer, CoC, for instance) have no POW improvement roll and no such maximum.

The RPG systems that have the most "pulp" feel for me are FATE, Qin:The Warring States, D6 and 7th Seas 1st edition. There's no reason a BRP derived game can't be "PULP", but IMHO it needs to change at least two things that are common in BRP games : Wounds should be rare, and most Hit Points loss should be bruises or exhaustion, that can be quickly recovered. Skilled characters should be able to do much more things in a round than mundane characters. And all PCs should all have high skills.

No, and I didn't read Space Opera either. 🙂

The most complex game I read was french first edition of Légendes. Character Creation was a nigthmare. You had a ton of attributes, each with its unique table used to determine its value based on 4 to 7 base attributes. The same logic applied to skills, except the values you got from the tables was a maximum value, which was modified according to the number of "education points" you put into each skill. And sometimes you needed a minimum value in a skill to put points in another. Typically, you needed 30 in Balance to learn Ride. Which meant you couldn't simply put education points then do all the maths... But the worst part was that you had to do the calculations 4 times (except for skills), once for each possible health state. Because, obviously, some attibutes changed with Health Status, and others didn't.

And Other Suns too ?

I own it. Very insteresting read on a complex and not very well known subject (religion wars in France in the second half of 16th century). Character creation uses a "Lifepath" character creation, in which you create your character's backstory step by step (childhood, adolescence, ...). Nevertheless, I've never tried to play with it, and it's very intimidating. I prefer imaginary settings which I can make my own more easily.

One thing I liked in l'Ultime Épreuve was the short list of skills, which is very close to what I'd chose myself. Without much surprise, it's almost identical to the list of RuneQuest's skill categories.

No, due to its very complex rules system.

When I read about TDE and DB/DoD, I can't help but feel sorry we didn't have a similar game in France. There was an attempt with l'Ultime Épreuve, but it was not a very interesting game, and quite amateurish. We even had TWO competing French editions of TDE in the 80s at the same time, with two different translatios. One by Gallimard, for traditional book shops, and one by Schmidt, for toys and games shops. Gallimard had a huge success with Chose Your Own Adventure books like Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf, and they thought a Roleplaying Game would be a good addition to their line. They also translated Pendragon's first edition. I wished they tried to do their own game instead. But I feel like people thought that D&D was the real thing, and other games were less worthy of interest.

No, because when you attack, you roll to reach your goal, which is to reduce your opponent's hit points to 0. When you roll for defense, you do it with the hope nothing happens in the round and no-one gains anything. Like if the current round never occured in first place. If you never win initiative and always defend, or even if your opponent just wins initiative more often than you, a defensive strategy will lead you to defeat. It's also very uncommon in games to completely have to forfeit your actions of a turn in order to defend yourself. You may have an option for "full defense", but it's usually an option for better defense, not the default defense.

That would be true if you were guaranteed to gain something when you defend yourself. But it's not the case : if you fail your defense roll, you've just done nothing in the round, while your opponent has a step towards victory. And even if you succeed, you've just nullified the turn. Of course, if you score a counter-attack, you're a clear winner. But it's a rare case, and you can't count on it when you chose to defend Defending yourself instead of attacking is a losing strategy.

To be able to defend yourself without sacrificing your ability to fight back is one of the things that I consider as a base use of any combat skill. 🙂 To me, having to learn an Heroic Ability for that is not different than your example for Disguise. I also don't really understand what's the meaning of an attack roll with no opposition or influence on the attack roll from his stats in general (which is also true for BRP games). Is the opponent standing still and waiting ? If not, why isn't it harder to hit a quick character than a clumsy one ?

As for myself, I didn't like their implementation of opposed skills, where ties are broken using a "lower roll wins" rule, and the fact that, by default, you have to forfeit your attack to defend yourself in melee. On both subjects, I can't help but think Pendragon offers a better solution.