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?

Unlimited choice of advancement in Hero can, indeed, lead to some pretty significant differences in power level, but neither of the last two editions have suggested unlimited choice of advancement.

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

On this, I tend to disagree. The most powerful Champion character I've played had about 100 XP, and he was way more powerful than when created. It took about 18 month to reach that point, so I would not qualify this as a slow rise.

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

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.

Appears I jumped to conclusions (again). They had been in contact with Chaosium per phone too, they just haven't heard anything back from them after that. But patience is virtue don't they say? :ohwell:

SGL.

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.

(emphasis mine)

Produce settings like/for Glorantha? Really? Somehow I doubt it. I've included a sort of mini-Glorantha in my campaign world (of Sartar/Prax exiles), but I presume Mr Stafford would sue if it made any money.

Or do you think a world that captured enough of the essence of Glorantha could be sufficiently un-like it to avoid legal problems?

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!

But, regarding Glorantha, I can't see Chaosium producing anything for Glorantha.

Second Age is sewn up by RuneQuest, Third Age is sewn up by HeroQuest. First Age would be interesting, but I don't think Glorantha could support three ages and three systems at once.

However, that doesn't stop people producing systems and settings that are compatible with both RQ and BRP and could even be used in Glorantha or in other worlds.

I pretty much agree with everyone else here.

Chaosium has gone one way and Glorantha has gone another.

Never in a million years / 420

Waiting for the finished product?

RQ came first.

BRP came second.

BRP was RQ with bits filed off. CoC's BRP was BRP with bits filed off. Ringworld was RQ3 with bits added on. Stormbringer was BRP with bits filed off and bits added on.

They are all interconnected.

Where's the problem?

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.

Was that actually said openly? By who? Mongoose or Stafford? :confused:

SGL.

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!

With all due respect, my Lord, but you can keep yer 'time honoured tool'! Maybe it's lack of fudging confidence, but as GM I want the support of a system I can trust - then I can sit back and enjoy the unfolding story, like the rest of 'em...

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.

One of the least attractive features of BRP (at least with full blown RQ) for many people is how remarkably easy it is to just get a bad roll (and not even necessarily yours) and get taken out in a relatively trivial fight where you fundamentally did nothing wrong; it tends to be a deal-breaker for using the system for certain groups even with campaigns it'd otherwise be attractive for.

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.

I think you are missing the purpose of the points. They are not there to add to the excitement, but to help mitigate some of the extreme effects-especially when players have little they can do about them.

Case in point, long ago in a campaign, the GM got a hot hand and criticalled every PC in the first two rounds of battle. No one's fault, dice do that at times. The net effect was that suddenly, the whole group was wiped out, the adventure was stopped dead, and everything was back to square one. All from what was, a "wandering monster".

That's the sort of things that hero points can address.

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 got my copy last Tuesday. 115 of 420.

Much bigger than I anticipated and covering so much I'm not sure where to start. This book should have been printed 20 (ahem) years ago.

I believe I saw someone state they received 125 over on RPGnet.

SDLeary

Edit: Sorry, 115

I think Merak Gren might know something about that.

Has anyone been keeping proper track of which numbers have gone?

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

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:

That's sort of how it's supposed to be working.

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!

At the risk of muddying the waters still further, I do think the entire Attack / Parry / Dodge system does need to be laid out, explicitly, in one place at some point.

Here is what I have pieced together so far - I know Jason is having a good look at the entire issue before posting his response, so I could be completely wrong, but this is what *seems* to be the likely way it works:

1.) Dodge is treated as an Opposed Roll vs. Attack. You don't use the Attack & Parry Matrix, rather a successful Dodge vs a successful Attack will reduce the success level of an Attack as per Opposed Skill Rolls on p173, with the caveat that the success level of an Attack can be reduced to no further than a Failure (see the Dodge Skill description on p55). Basically, a successful Dodge, no matter how successful, cannot make a successful Attacker Fumble - the worst they will do is simply Miss.

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.

2.) Successful Attack vs Successful Parry. My assumption here is that the Successful Attack rolls its damage and compares it to the HP of the weapon or shield which has Parried. If the damage exceeds the HP of the weapon or shield, one of two things happens:

i.) If the parrying item is a weapon, that weapon breaks.

ii.) If the parrying item is a shield, that shield takes the extra damage to its own HP. If those HP are reduced to 0, the shield then breaks.

In both cases, if there are any damage points remaining, they "go through" and damage the target.

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.

3.) Special or Critical Attack vs Critical / Special / Normal Parry. This is where the Attack & Parry matrix needs to be clarified. My assumption is that the dodgy "OR" is actually an "AND". So, on a Critical Attack vs Normal Parry, for example, you get:

Attack does full damage plus rolled damage bonus, and has its special effects based on impaling, bleeding, crushing, etc. I *think* that you then DO NOT match this damage against the parrying weapon or shield's HP, but I'm not sure. In any case armour seems to protect. And, finally, the parrying weapon or shield takes 2 HP damage anyway.

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.

I *think* that the principle behind the Attack & Parry matrix is that Attack/Parry is being treated as an Opposed Roll. Thus, if you get a Critical vs a Success, what's actually happening is that the Success is being bumped down to a Failure and the Critical to a Special, for the purposes of determining effects. NB: the Successful Parry doesn't actually *become* a Failed Parry, but is simply treated as one for damage purposes, etc.

In the Opposed Rule only the winner's success is downgraded, the loser just failed.

If this is the case, then Critical vs Critical, Special vs Special, and Success vs Success should all have the same result: looking at the Matrix, they basically do. However, when you try to extend the theory further, it starts to fall apart quickly - you can see *similarities* between Critical vs Special, Special vs Success, and Success vs Failure, but that's all they are.

They are the same except Special vs. Special, and I believe that was an oversight. Agree with the rest.

Hopefully Jason will get back with some clarifications on how all this works pretty soon. I'm sure it's actually extremely straightforward - you seem to have SB5 with Criticals and Specials rather than just Specials, so it should be just a question of clarifying the permutations and making sure the whole narration flows from top to bottom. At the moment we have the rules scattered about rather, and some *seem* contradictory (but may not be!).

One thing I will say: having seen the farce which was MRQ's muddy and confusing portrayal of combat 18 months ago when the rules first came out - and the fact that people on the MRQ forums are *STILL* asking today how combat works, I think it's worth making sure this is CRYSTAL clear in the BRP rules! I know the BRP *rules* work fine in this respect - we just need to make sure the *wording* of those rules is completely and unambiguously clear, even at the risk of repeating things.

Cheers!

Sarah

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:

And SB5 / Elric! DID have "impales" for some weapons, which we're even more effective than specials, so I suspect the confusion has arisen from translating that table (which had five levels of skill roll for Attacks ("impale", critical, normal success, normal failure and fumble) but only four for Parry or Dodge) to the BRP table (which has five levels of for Attack, Parry AND Dodge).

And speaking as one of the play testers, I'm kicking myself for not spotting these ambiguities at the time. *sigh* sorry all.

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.

It might be worth going back to teh SB5 / Elric1 approach and having separate tables for spell out the Att vs. Parry and Att vs. Dodge principles.

Agree.

What's particularly galling is that (unlike MRQ), Jason / Chaosium haven't tweaked anything substantial at the 11th hour... But you are absolutely right, this needs to be absolutely crystal clear.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

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?