Mugen

As for myself, I don't really like having one skill per weapon, as it doesn't feel right to me that an expert swordsman suddenly loses all his combat reflexes when he has a weapon he never used in hand. I prefer when there are fewer melee skills with specialities (for instance a character good at swords might have Melee 65%, and Sword +20%, totalling 85% when using a sword, but only 65% with a new weapon).

Note that I have personally 0 interest in such a game.

There are a few historical two swords fighting styles, the most famous being Miyamoto Musashi's Niten ichiryu.

Sure, but averages hide the fact you're going to miss your parry 1 time out of 4. Even with a parry skill of 90% and an average protection 3 points above the sword's (14.4), you'd fail one time out of 10. I think it outweighs the fact kite shields are better parry weapons. And, again, I can have a second broadsword in off-hand, with which I can attack at 47%. Though you might say that attacking with the shield may be a better option, provided your SR is low enough.

That's how I remembered it in RQ3, but RQG pre-gen characters have broadsword and shields with the same AP value, 12. But if you miss your parry because of the difference in skills, you're very likely to lose a limb. Personally, I prefer to have a broadsword in my off hand than a shield. If the one in my main hand breaks, I can use it as a replacement, and gain a bonus attack, even if it has a very low chance of success. I forgot two important words here : "in melee".

Problem with modern BRP is that shields require a specific skill to be used, and you can attack and parry with your main hand with the same chance of success. Older editions separated attack and parry skills for each weapon. So, you could have 75% attack skill and 25% parry skill with your sword, and 65% with your shield. In such a case, using your shield is a no-brainer... However, having separate attack and parry skills was not a very good rule. In RuneQuest, non-critical parry only reduces damage, by an amount depending on the weapon used, and kite shields have big armor values. Also, weapons break, and shields are easier to break and replace. Neverheless, I will not use a shield in RQG either, where attack and parry skills don't exist, if my shield skill is more than 5% lower than my main weapon skill. Pendragon doesn't have a shield skill, but it means you use your shield with your main hand skill, which may seems silly.

Perhaps a good Glorantha adaptation to D&D 5e would be beneficial for Chaosium, financially speaking, and allow players interested in playing in Glorantha to find online games more easily. 13th Age Glorantha is a D&D-related game (and a far better game than 5e, IMO), but is not exactly as popular as D&D, and incompatible with 5e, unfortunately...

There are many ways to deal with this situation. You can introduce special and critical successes, and consider a special or critical success can only be parried'or dodged by a similar or better success. You can use Mythras and Pendragon style skill opposition rules : if both opponent have the same level of success, the one with the highest roll wins. To avoid combat to be too deadly, you can reduce damage by an amount depending on the weapon used for parry (4 to 6 points). That's my favorite option. French game Rêve de Dragon has a rule that you could add to a BRP game without changing any other rule : an attacker has the option to reduce his attack skill to reduce his opponent's skill by the same amount. I also tend to consider that if both opponents rolled a failure, the one with the highest roll wins. That rule is to speed up the scenario where both characters have low combat skill...

60% seems like a very high chance to me. I'd be more in line with: 50% no long-term consequance, 30% chance limbs disabled, 15% permanent characteristic loss (+limb disabled), 5% limb severed.

POW is the problematic one in games with POW economy (such as RuneQuest). IMHO, Other characteristics don't change that often to really be a problem. A Simple solution is to put POW outside of skill category modifiers. Mine was to simply get rid of most characteristics except POW and CON, for Magic Points and Hit Points. Everything else is a skill.

Agree. Skill values in 80s roleplaying games using percentiles were in fact very low. See StormBringer or Warhammer characters for instance. Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon allowed for better skill values, but was a knight with 17 in his sword skill invincible ? Not quite. All too often, designers of roll-under systems tend to think that the highest value on the die used in the system has to be a limit to skills. But having 100% or 20/20 only means you have maximum chance of success versus "average" difficulty tasks, something all real-world experts have.

Dual wielding allows you to attack twice. Once with one weapon at its own SR, and once with second weapon at the sum of both weapon's SRs. As a side point, splitting attack skill doesn"t seem like a very interesting strategy to me in RQG. -If you don't split your 150% attack skill, you'll attack once at 100% and your opponent will parry at -50% -If you split your 150% attack skill, you'll attack twice at 75%, and your opponent will parry first attack with his full parry chance, and the second at -20% You're more likely to land at least one blow with option 1 than option 2, even if possible rewards are bigger with option 2.

I agree 3 MP for 1d6 is too much, but I think 1 MP is extremely cheap for 1d6+1 damage. The Disruption spell in RuneQuest costs 1 MP and deals 1d3 damage, for instance. Its main strength is that it's not affected by non-magical armor. Maybe 1d3+level-1 ? In Sandy Petersen's Sorcery rules for RQ3, damage for instant damage spells was 1dX, where X was the Intensity of the spell, which is even less than 1d6 per 3 MP. But RQ3 had Sorcery Matrices, which allowed a sorcerer to cast spells with base Intensity equal to the POW sacrificed into into the enchant, which allowed for very effective 1 MP spells... Edit: oh, I forgot Sandy Petersen also changed Sorcery matrices. Those either only added 10% to the caster's skill, thus allowing to put more MP into the spell, or allowed to cast non-modifiable versions of the spell. Less awfully overpowered.

So, it's only relevant for people using one of those options, and my experience tells me Hit Locations are not very popular outside RuneQuest audience. Of course, your experience may be different from mine.

The 2011 Camelot TV series may be worth viewing, with Joseph Fiennes as Merlin and Eva Green as Morgan.

Problem is that reducing skill to gain benefits may be counter-productive, especially if you have skill over 20 and a substantific chance to roll a critical attack. Perhaps a second damage value, based on either DEX+STR (or even 2*DEX, but it may be overkill) and only usable if you have a 1 handed sword or a dagger ? Perhaps also only if your attack roll is 5 points above your opponent's ? EDIT: if you REALLY want to give more value to APP, that second damage value could be based on DEX+APP. 😁

If DEX and APP are useless, the simplest way to deal with those is simply to discard those characteristics. The things that were handled by DEX rolls can be replaced by one or a few skills. Problem is that now, we have a triplet of characteristics that are very similar, and could all fall into a single "Body" attribute in other games. Also, SIZ is more interesting than tye other two, as it contributes to both Hit Points and Damage, whereas STR and CON each only contribute to one of those.... EDIT: as a matter of fact, if we also drop SIZ, CON and STR we're not far from HeroQuest...

Well, compared to StormBringer 1st edition, I would not say RuneQuest is extremely simple, quite the contrary. There are a lot of rules to remember in RuneQuest, with Strike Ranks, the effects of special successes depending on your weapon type, the effects of wounds depending on which location is hit, and so on. My own tastes are for rules between the two, as I remember how boring StormBringer fight were, in which the usual attack result was either a miss or a parried hit. But I understand why some people don't want to learn anything more complex than "initiative on reverse DEX order/attack/parry or dodge/hit point loss = weapon die-armor/on 0 you're dead".

Well, combat in RQG is also very simulationist and complex, and it's more difficult to just ignore it than Sorcery. It's possible to use simpler iterations of BRP combat (like those in StormBringer, or OpenQuest), but you need to be aware those exist, and you'd lose some parts in the translation. Apart ftom this, I agree D&D 5e is not the super-simple game some seem to believe it is, for all the reasons you mentioned. It's the simplest version since the "Basic" version in the 80s, but it's still much more complex.

Putting a hard cap is just too much IMHO. But it could replace the 15 threshold in the winter phase : if your skill is superior or equal to DEX or CHA, you need to spend 1 whole year to augment it. But some skills are not tied to DEX or APP, and a character with DEX above 15 would raise his skills to 20 very quickly.

Anyway, all BRP derivative I know have characteristics that have more mechanical weight than others, which always makes point distribution character creation systems problematic. That's why I dropped every characteristics except POW and CON (for MP and HP, respectively) in my own simplified version of RuneQuest.

We're in Basic Roleplaying subforum, and not RuneQuest. Attack% and Defense% should also be factored, IMHO, even though it's very difficult to compare a creature with 100% attack and 1d10 damage versus one with 10% attack and 10d10 damage.

I had in fact two regular players in my Pendragon player, the one with DEX 20, and another, who fought defensively most of the time. I guess the other would have done so if I had understood the rule correctly and let him fight defensively and use Double Feint...

I hope Magic will look like Sorcery, with flexible casting, and not Battle Magic, with fixed effects and costs. Fixed effects and costs could be an option for non-professional magic practitionners, which could buy "ready to cast" spells inside crystals or other minor enchants. I also hope "ready-made concepts" are not going to be full classes, but rather character creation guidelines. OpenQuest has always favored spending Improvement Points in places where RuneQuest required POW. But RQ POW is meant to fluctuate a lot, contrarily to CoC.

It didn't occured to me either that DEX penalty was to be applied on Double Feint... But isn't DF a stance (*) and nullified by defensive or berserk stance ? That's how I undestood it. As such, it's easy to counter someone that uses it consistently. (*) sorry if it's not the correct word, my rulebook is not only 3rd edition, it's french 3rd edition...