Lord Twig

In our RQ3 game, characters that wanted to concentrate on sorcery rarely wore armor because they didn't want to take the 20-30% hit on their sorcery skills. Also, during combat they spent time casting spells instead of attacking with weapons, so their weapon skills rarely went up. The one character that practiced sorcery and was a primary fighter rarely cast spells in combat and spent much of his training time on combat skills so quickly lagged behind the primary spell casters in magical skills. Really it worked fairly well.

Love the new cover! I just had to pop back in to say that. I have been AFK for a while when I realized I was spending far too much time on this board and not enough getting actual work done, but I have been following the news on it. When the 1st edition comes out I may not be able to resist coming back here to discuss the changes. Very much looking forward to getting my hands on a copy!

I'm really not understanding the point of your argument Atgxtg. Are you saying characters shouldn't get more powerful? That they shouldn't want to become more powerful? Maybe just that they should actually be harder to kill if they go up in power? Easy enough, don't ever increase the power of the bad guys and the PCs will always become more and more powerful relative to the power of their opponents. Not sure if the game would be quite as fun, but there is no rule that NPC have to be tougher when PCs get tougher. I once had my players surrounded by 30 city guards after they came back from a quest. The guards demanded their weapons and said they would escort them to the ruling council. The players were puzzled but generally were on good terms with the council so they agreed. Eventually they realized that they were not going the right way. Then one of them noticed some unusual holes in the outfits of the guards. Seems the thieves guild wanted to get rid of the party. At that point they attacked the 30 guards, each with a loaded heavy crossbow. Now a weaker party would have just been annihilated, but these guys were of tougher stuff! Sure, some of them went down, but the ones who didn't beat the pulp out of some of the thieves with their fists and a good dose of magic, then grabbed their weapons and finished off the rest. The characters who fell were quickly healed and they went hunting for the thieves guild master. So how are these characters not tougher?

I haven't played since 3rd edition, though I did by the 5th edition rule book.

Well, I guess it can be done. Honestly we usually had so much fun making characters that we rarely played the same one more than a handful of times. A few favorites were played more often and accumulated about 30 to 40xp. It was nice, but not overpowering. We also had some GM oversight on the power level of the characters, so even an experienced character would not do too much more damage than a starting character. Maybe a couple more d6. Without oversight you could have someone with 40d6 Energy Blast (and not much else), blowing villains away.

Forget patience! Call them again and hassle them! Good chance they will do the, "Oh yeah! I've been meaning to call you!" type thing.

Ken, we think alike I see.

Oh, oh! I know! "The setting will be the same world, not the same copyrighted words." It could have a race of Dark Trulls that worship Kigur Littor. Humaked could be the God of Death. And of course you could have a war between the invading Loonies and the rebel Orlunthi. Watch out for those Hurricane Cow berserkers!

I pretty much agree with everyone else here. Chaosium has gone one way and Glorantha has gone another. Waiting for the finished product?

I don't see a problem in there either. Now tack Mongoose RuneQuest at the bottom and there is a problem. MRQ is not a BRP game. It is not even related. The most one could say is that it was "inspired" by the original RuneQuest, but it is a separate game system. HeroQuest is also not a BRP game. It is it's own game. It shares a game world with RQ, but that's it. So why do people have a problem with MRQ, but not HQ? I would be interested in hearing peoples answer to that one, but I will try to answer it myself as well. No one has a problem with HeroQuest because it does not try to pretend to be something it is not. It was a brand new game that was created to better capture the feel of Glorantha the way Greg Stafford saw it. That is fine! You may or may not like the system, but you can't accuse it of trying to be something it is not. The same can not be said for MRQ. We have been told that MRQ is the new version of RuneQuest. This would suggest that it is the same game that we played before, but just a different version. But it is not, it is an entirely new game and is just claiming to be RuneQuest. Just because it has the name, doesn't make it the same game. That is why people became upset. As I said before, I would be interested in hearing other people's opinions on this.

Gotta love Google. You can find the quote here: RPGnet Forums - View Single Post - Mongoose doing Runequest?

If your character gets more powerful he can take on tougher opponents. That is a benefit by itself. So instead of fighting goblins or feral broos, you are fighting dragons and chaos terrors. Instead of seeing these things and thinking, "Oh crap! Run away!" you are thinking, "I think I can take him!" Of course it is different in other games. I played Champions for a long time and the characters grew very little in power. Add some skill levels, maybe a minor power and that was it. There were also a couple "Radiation Accidents" when someone really wanted to remake their character, but even then the "new" character was only moderately more powerful than a starting character. Really we played that game for different reasons than we played RQ.

You are going to have your own magic systems and your own combat systems. What's left? Skills? Equipment? Are you sure you don't want to just include everything in one book? That is what Mongoose did with Conan (If memory serves me right). Of course I would just end up using BRP anyway, so I guess it doesn't really matter for me. Anyway, this is starting to sound pretty interesting, despite my anti-MRQ bias. Any hint on page count and price range?

As I expected I am a relative newb here. I started gaming in 1980 with the D&D Red Box. Moved to RQ 2nd Edition shortly after that. I have played Car Wars as well. Plus Autoduel Champions!

Certainly! To each their own. I just wanted to point out that there has been a solution to this problem that has worked very well for decades.

Of course other groups appreciate that combat is "dangerous" and that there is a chance that they will be taken out of the fight by one lucky hit. As long as the whole group doesn't die the characters that fell can be healed back up by the ones who made it through the battle. It can also be addressed by GM fudging. I know some people have an unreasoning hatred of GM fudging, but it is a time honored tool. If I roll one critical, fine. Two? Bad luck for them. A third? Well, maybe I'll save that for later. The players certainly aren't going to suspect that I am cheating in their favor, I already rolled two critical successes against them!

Work is okay, but this is more interesting.

Also, noticed that people were putting #/420 in their sigs. Which let's everyone know that they have an advanced copy and what number it is. Pretty clever. Added a sig for myself just so I could include it.

In D&D we allow a character of the same level. It is easy to do in D&D, everything is defined for every level. The other players don't feel slighted. They would honestly prefer having a more powerful character to help them out. In RQ3 we just had people make a brand new character. This worked better in RQ than D&D because even a newbie can do something in RQ. Also the more experienced characters would help them out. Hand him a few magic items and cast a BladeSharp and Protection 6 on the newb and he does loads better. New characters with the support of experienced ones seem to grow faster in power than a group of new characters, probably because of better loot.

I think Merak Gren might know something about that.

I haven't recorded them all, but Jack Tar said he had 132 on the previous page.

Players in my long running RQ game always loved training, but they wouldn't train for years. Adventures don't happen everyday and you have to do something in between. Generally once combat skills progressed to a certain point it was no longer possible/practical to continue to train them up, so they would focus on other skills that they felt their characters would be interested in. They would train up First Aid, some Lores, magic skills, Climb, Jump, Hide and Sneak. This is also when they would work on secondary weapon skills or their Dodge skill if they primarily parried. All of this was done to round out the character. If you did nothing but adventure you would find that your primary sword skill was 200%, but your chance to fight with your dagger was 30% and your World Lore was still 8%. Or your "Heroes" would come to a river and drown because no one had a Swim higher than 20%. Money is also a factor. I required them to spend money on living as well as training and eventually they would run out and need to go get some more. Usually off the bodies of defeated foes like any other upstanding member of society. :thumb:

Cool! That would be similar to how it was done in the past as well. So that makes sense.

I look forward to the cleaned up text! One thought I had, maybe combat shouldn't use the Opposed Roll rule exactly. Maybe just compare degrees of success and whoever wins wins (with the loser lowering the degree of success if he also succeeded on his roll, but lost). In a tie (Success vs. Success), it always goes to the defender, regardless of who rolled lowest or highest. This would mean that you don't have to compare rolls and would make it easier for people who decided to use one of the Opposed Roll variants. Some people really don't like the Opposed Roll rules, so making them a standard part of combat could really sour them on the game. Just a thought!

I can see treating Dodge as an Opposed Roll, but the caveat makes no sense. If I am reading the Opposed Roll rule right, you can't reduce an opponent to less than a success anyway, and that is only if you lose. If you win you don't reduce your opponent at all. You won, he missed. This would be the RQ3 way of doing things, except that weapons would break FAR too often. I can guarantee that my players would never go for such a rule. (Please note that it doesn't matter if it is realistic to have weapons break all the time, having your magic sword break every few battles just sucks.) The way I ready it a successful parry against a successful attack is a parry that blocks all damage. Period. I read it as a successful parry blocks the attack, but takes damage from it. So a Critical vs. Success does 2 damage, Special vs. Success does 1 damage, Success vs. Success of course does none. Against a failed of fumbled parry the weapon does damage to the target of course and in the case of a fumble the target also rolls on the fumble table. This of course runs afoul the problem of "I parry a critical dagger strike with my Hoplite, it takes 2 damage. I parry Big Club the Giant's swung tree with my buckler it takes... 2 damage. In the Opposed Rule only the winner's success is downgraded, the loser just failed. They are the same except Special vs. Special, and I believe that was an oversight. Agree with the rest. It is unfortunate, but probably true that BRP will suffer enhanced skepticism because of MRQ. Even though they are different companies the claims that MRQ is related to BRP is enough to link them in people's minds. Being burned once before, people will be extra cautious before buying BRP. It really needs to be pretty tight. I am encouraged that Jason asked for input. It reassures me that the book will be pretty clean when it is finally released. :thumb: So how did you actually play it in the test? This could go a long way toward clearing up the confusion that those of us who didn't are having. Agree. Agree again. To bring this back around to being a "Typos, Errata, Corrections, and Clarifications" post... One of the best things about RQ3 was that you never needed to look at a table. You rolled the dice and the result was the result. With that in mind I suggest the following (and I hope I am not being too bold). I think Dodge as an opposed roll would be fine, as long as it works the way I think it does (and if it doesn't it might still be fine, depending on how it works. ). So a Dodge that wins the opposed roll means that the attack failed, no damage is done. A losing Dodge that still succeeded on the roll reduces the degree of the attack if it lost by degree (Special vs. Success for example) but not if it tied the degree of success but still lost (or it would reduce it to a success regardless of degree more likely). A Failed Dodge of course does nothing to reduce the attack and a Fumble could make it worse. For parry I honestly saw nothing wrong with how RQ3 did it. Attacker always rolls damage regardless of the parry (Unless it was a Crit parry of course) and if the damage exceeded the AP of the shield the rest of the damage went through to the defender and the shield was damaged in the process (usually just one point). Looking at that table in BRP maybe it could be an Opposed Roll as well. So If the defender wins, no damage is taken, the shield is fine. In the case of the attacker winning the result would depend on degree. Critical vs. Success = Attack rolls damage plus gets special effect depending on weapon type, defender subtracts shield AP from damage (not armor), parrying weapon or shield takes 2 damage. Special vs. Success = Attack rolls damage plus gets special effect depending on weapon type, defender subtracts shield and armor AP from damage, parrying weapon or shield takes 1 damage. Success vs. Success = Attacker rolls damage, defender subtracts shield and armor AP from damage. A Special parry would use the same results, just shifted down one. Critical shifts it down two (to a regular success). A Failed parry of course would be like he hadn't tried to parry at all. A Fumble would require the defender to roll on the Fumble table. Make sense? Or is it done a different way?