Mugen

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...

Well, @Atgxtggives the following list in another thread and lists Book of Feasts as the source: EDIT: Ninja'ed !!

I didn't know that, because I didn't buy any of the 5.X editions. I didn't notice big differences with 3rd edition when I looked at it in my FLGS. One of my players raised his DEX to 20 just to differentiate his knight from other PKs, as he feared any weapon other than a sword would break too easily at high level.

I'm not really a fan of using DEX/2 or APP/2 as a base for Melee skills, as it would mean people that invested a few points in a skill are likeley to lose them if they grow the appropriate characteristic. I also disagree DEX is as useless as APP is, as it basically covers all Agility and Stealth skills from other BRP games. It can be useful if you use Feint a lot, but you need to reach a very high level in DEX to make it reliable. Concerning APP, it would be possible to borrow the Generic Conflict rule from Revolution D100 and use APP as a base value for "Social Hit Points" and/or "Social Damage" in social situations. Alternatively, Social Hit Point could be a function of a personality trait instead.

Yes, and if you make it open-ended on a 20 (akin to a d20-ified RoleMaster) and count a crit if roll > threshold+20, you'd have critical success chance similar to RQ for skills below 20. HeroQuest does it quite well, I think, even though I think the "bump" mechanism could be elegantly replaced by a "success counting" mechanism : count 1 base success per mastery, then add 1 or 2 successes depending on the d20 roll.

Well, Pendragon has the shield mechanism, for instance, and asks for less maths in most circumstances. Of course, it is possible to implement the "shield mechanism" quite simply, with a "shield threshold" : if your (d20+skill) roll is inferior to your opponent's, but above Shield Threshold, substract 6 from damage.

Yep. Hence my post above where I say there should be a winner in opposed rolls in case both opponents fail their roll. As a matter of fact, doing so would allow to have probabilities similar to what is found in d20 roll over games.

It's also true for skills like Dance, or Climb, for instance, where a failure means you miserably fall on the ground (though Dance only hurts your self-esteem). In my view, a failed skill roll should only mean that the character didn't manage to do what he wanted. With Dance, he's just not dancing very well, and with Climb, he can't progress. With a Melee skill, he just does an ineffective attack, that is easy to defend against -except for incompetent fighters...

I never saw a french edition with this illustration. As a matter of fact, of all Young Kingdoms-based games (StormBringer 2nd and 4th, Elric!, Elric of Melniboné, Mournblade), only Elric had an original illustration from a french artist : All others were from Chaosium or Mongoose. Even Mounblade has a cover by Brom: Dragon Lords of Melniboné, also by Brom:

Well, the "half damage" part should make it not very dangerous for an armoured knight. Yes, but if you and your opponent decide to simulteanously use Berserk or Defensive stance, we're back to the original opposed roll.

In my view, you made the same error french publishers did for gloranthan games since the beginning : presenting the world as a huge and intimidating setting full of details, instead of starting with smaller scale areas.

One way to make low skills less abysmally bad would be to change the oppositions rules : In case both characters fail their roll, the highest roll wins, doing half damage. I think Paranoïa first edition did, with its skill trees. For instance, it could have had 1 Broad "Melee" skill with branches "1 handed weapons" and "2 handed weapons". In turn, "1 handed weapons" would have had sub-branches "1H Sword", "1H Mace", "Dagger", and "1H Sword" would have had "Short Sword", "Broadsword", and so on... So, a fighter could have had Melee 3, 1H Weapons 2, 1H Sword 1, Broadsword 3, Short sword 1, totalizing 9 levels when fighting with a broadsword, and 7 with a Short sword. Neverheless, it's too fiddly for my tastes and I prefer to only have "trees" with only one level of specialization.

You'd have to take into account the fact DEX/2 or DEX-5 is likely to be above most base skill values given in character creation rules, and DEX can change over time. A knight with DEX 18 is going to have 4 or 8 more points in his base sword skill than one with 10, for instance. A solution would be to have a handful of melee skills (perhaps One handed weapons, Two handed weapons, Brawl). Each individual weapon would require training, though, and a character without proper training would get a -5 to his skill.

On average, you'll need to wait for 20 rolls before they start taking damage (but it can also happen on turn 1, or after the duration of your spell, of course). It's a good thing that the Giant only has ~40% attack skill, even though one hit will be sufficient to miserably end your life....

Well, if we're speaking of 16m high RQ3 Giants (as I was), it's not really easy to suffocate them as they have average CON around 94. On the other hand, Sever Spirit works perfectly fine.

I don't own RQG, but I was surprised to see a 15m high Giant in RQ2 has 39 HP and 6 natural AP and has an attack that deals 12d6+2d8 with 110% attack chance (thanks to the fact there's , no upper limit to the impact of STR on attack skill). That's mostly due to ,the fact STR and SIZ grow with height, whereas CON remains the same. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that for a group powerful enough to resist his attacks, killing it would be quite easy, given the imbalance between offence and resistance. Giants in RQ3 have CON that scales with height, and as such are very difficult to kill...

Yes, something along the lines of Pendragon stats for monsters.

I use the average of SIZ and CON. I also prefer StormBringer-style Major Wounds over localized hit points. I don't like thresholds-based tables in BRP in general, as it makes some values much more valuable than others, and opens opportunities for min-maxing (even though there are de facto thresholds with Major Wounds, as it increases by 1 every 4 points of CON+SIZ).