Mugen

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.

The "playtest" was a mess, and the first draft of the rules was a (bad) joke, with a d100 roll over system for combat, and a classic roll under system outside. The last playtest document had been reworked by Kenneth Hyte, and was insteresting. But the Mongoose team modified it before publication, and they destroyed it... They even included a Magic system that Steve Perrin had submitted to them as a draft, but was never edited. One of my problems with RQ3 when I was introduced to it was the lack of truly "gameable" products. All that was available to me was the french translation of the early RQ3 line, which included Gods of Glorantha, Genertela, Elder Secrets, and a few scenarios. Those were truly awesome, but it was very difficult to get into Glorantha through them. As a result, I never played in Glorantha.

That's the reason why I prefer to consider rolls under skill/10 as "Crits" and rolls under skill/2 as "Specials". The maths are easier, and it scales perfectly with skills over 100%. Of course, the frequency of those results is very different, but I'm fine with it. 🙂 However, my favorite method to figure quality of success is by using the 10s of the die, with 0 being read as 10 in case of a roll < Skill/10. I then add the 10s of the skill above 100 to the Quality.

Burning Wheel's Character Burner could be used as a basis for a Life Path system for Fantasy BRP too. I guess Burning Empires has something similar for Sci Fi. Basically, in this game Character Creation let you chose a number of Life Pathes at character creation, which represents occupations your character had before the game starts. Each come with a number of years, whose total gives your PC's Age, a number of skill points to distribute, mandatory skills you must buy, and skills you're free to invest points into. You'd have to define a rule to convert skill points, which is not so easy. BW is a success-counting system with skills ranging from 1 to 9, with a maximum of 6 at creation. That's a rather limited range to translate into a percentile one. You also need to spend 1 point to "open" a skill and give it a base value, which is usually 2 or 3. You can still make an attibute roll if you try to use an aspect of a skill that doesn't need training. For instance, if you try to climb a small wall without the Climb skill

How do those books compare to Lordly Domains ? I only know this one, and in my memory it could serve as a basis for another system. Edit: hmm... I should have looked at the comments section at DTRPG, as it seems I already have my answer there...

@AndreJaroschit seems Nephilim is missing from your list.

@AndreJaroschI don't know if you wanted to list only english-speaking BRP products, but there has been a second edition of Hawkmoon by Oriflam in French in the 90s. It was based on Elric! system.

I have the same issue with the Sorcery rules in the BGB, in which Summoning spells cost 1 MP too. It seems to me part of the rules were lost when the Elric! system was simplified to put less emphasis on demons and elementals.

What is your question exactly ? Do you ask what we want published under ORC, or do you ask what we think people in general expect from ORC games ? As for myself, I don't have much expectations from this licence. I'd like to see systems that are not D&D-like to gain more audience, but ORC is also going to be PathFinder's and Kobbold Press' D&D clone licence, so... As for what other people may want in ORC is the possibility to play in different universes with a familiar system. That was part of BRP success in the 80s, at least in France. But it was also part of its problem, as people thought it could not offer more than the very simple and mortal rules from CoC.

Truth is, these adjectives are just technical game terminology, and you should avoid to tie these to your daily use of those words. "Easy" means "a situation where there's a risk, but lower than usual", and "Hard" means "a situation where there's a higher risk to fail than usual". Not all uncertain situations are equally uncertain.

French game Légendes divided the body in 20 hit locations, plus 10 sub-locations for joints. For instance, location 18 was the lower right leg, and location 18A (A as Articulation, French for "joint") was the right knee, location 12 was the right hand and 12A was the right wrist. Location roll was made using a d100. It didn't use localized hit points, only a "major wounds" system, whose severity changed depending on damage and location. Its second edition, whose Celtic version had been translated in English under the name Celtic Legends, removed the joints from the system and simplified the wounds system. Location roll was made using a d20.

Le Département des Sombres Projets lost two of its writers in the last few years (and both at a rather young age), but as far as I know it didn't impact their will to publish Moorcock material, even though their focus is more on the Elric Boardgame and Hawkmoon right now.

I designed a long time ago a system that mixed "action points" and initiative. Basically, the idea was that your Initiative roll was also your "Action points" pool. Each Action and Reaction cost you Initiative points. You could act every time the current Initiative count was equal to your Initiative total. Reactions were usually cheaper than Actions, and you could use "quick" versions of Actions and Reactions, with lower Initiative costs. @GianniVaccaused it for the amateur version of its Imperial China game, but removed it from the professional product. It was very similar to what you can see in Revolution D100 complex combat system. It's also very similar to Feng Shui, but I read it after I designed the system.

I think I'd use FATE myself, or Revolution D100 in the extended BRP family, as its Traits can be used as simili-aspects.

I think it's wot mentioning there's an implicit rule in your example that in case of 2 failed rolls, the higher roll wins the contest nonetheless. Often, in roll-under opposed skill contests, failure versus failure is considered a tie, with 2 losers.

My solution is to put a cumulative malus after 1 action and 1 reaction. However the malus from actions applies as soon as they are declared, while the malus from reactions only applies to folliwing rolls. Say I declare 3 attacks. All 3 will be affected by 2 cumulative maluses. If I'm parrying three times after these 3 attacks, the first parry will suffer he same 2 maluses as the attacks, while the second and third will have respectively 3 and 4 maluses. The reason why I wanted to give a malus on all actions is because I had a terrible experience in a game where there was no "cost" in doing multiple actions except a cumulative malus. As a result, the GM rolled every attacks he could, even those that had less than 1% chance to occur due to the malus. It was boring... I also think Star Wars D6 worked like that...