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That could be interesting, as I was thinking in terms of heat of the moment play and such, but I do agree the checkmark would help. Yup. Basically I think some of the agony could be in there as well, since circumstances could force you to spend a HP to bump up something that you needed to bump as opposed to something you wanted to bump. I think that could be very interesting as I think it would lead to more organic improvement as opposed to players focusing on improving their favorite abilities. For instance, maybe a player hand wanted to improve his Sword but fell overboard and didn't want to drown so he ended up improving his swimming. I think you could even do away with the "end of the adventure" stuff and do the bump and the increase at the same time, as a sort of epiphany. That would fit with the mythic feel of things too.

Probably not. It would make for some challenging bookkeeping. You would need to distinguish between HPs that were used for bumps and those that hadn't been -unless the bump and improvement happened at the same time?

But is only is fun because your character becomes good at new things. If the characters doesn't become good at new things, or bettewr at the things they are already good at then where is the fun? But what if you start to fall behind in difficulty? That's the problem I see with automatic blanket increases in difficulty. Everything goes up where as with PCs not everything will improve because they have limited Hero Points to improve with and will be forced to prioritize. Yes, somewhat. The game should be fun, or at least have the potential to be fun. Acutally being fun is something that requires a group effort. But if the difficulties increase over time, regardless of how the characters develop then you will wind up with the PCs not bein gup to the task when they pick up new abilities. Yes, but if the opposing value is 2w2 your Campfire Cook 15 isn't going to cut it. That;'s the problem I see with any sort of pre-set automatic increases in difficulty, they don't take into account what abilities the character don't have. It's like old D&D adventures where a party was in big trouble if they lacked characters of certain classes. No thief and the fell for every trap, no cleric and they had no healing, no magic user and they could never identify and item and so on. So if you are already into a long running game and suddenly decide to diversify by taking Campfire Cook, it won't help you if the default difficulty has been raised to 2W5 by that point in the campaign. Yes, we don't want someone to take Unified Field Theory at 5W8 and be able to use it for everything. That actually ties into my point. In play a PC gets a limited number of hero points to spend on improving abilities. So in any campaign where the PCs diversify some, they won't be able to raise all their keywords at the same rate. That's both a given, and IMO desirable. But if all the opposing difficulties go up at a uniform rate over time, then the players are discouraged from diversifying, as the more abilities they have, the fewer points get spent on any one ability and the father behind they fall. For instance if the default difficulties go up by 5 points after each season, then the PCs need to improve all of they abilities by 5 points just to tread water. If they can improve faster than that, well they will run ahead of the curve and the game will become too easy. If they progress slower than that, then some abilities will fall behind the curve and become unusable. It why I don't believe blanket raising of difficulties can really work. Like it or not the position has to be scaled to the actual abilities of the PCs.

Yes, while you could roll up stat for every trollkin, bandit, or wolf, it is really just more work for soemthnig that nobdoy is probably going to notice. In most cases a point here or there doesn't mean much. What old RQ used to have were leader and squad sheets. The GM would come up with detailed stats for the leaders and then use more generic stats for the squad. So, if it were a pack of wolves the Pack Leader might be rolled up and have good stats while the rest of the pack used average wolf stats.

Since ability improvements are measured out though, it still encourages a narrow focus to ability improvement, though. If the opposing ability is going to 18 or a 5W or whatever, then the players have to have a ability in that ballpark to have a reasonable chance of beating the challenging. Also if NPC improvements happens "in between seasons" Like with a TV series then there will need to be adjustments made of the length of the "season". For instance compare a show that might had 10 or 12 episodes per season to once which has 26, or even and older one that had 40. Yes that would help. Basically what you are really doing is giving the PCs an competency Rating, say X, and then rating everything relative to X. Yes it does. Personally I favor HQ1's absolute scale of capability though, rather than HQ2/Questworld's relative ones. I find it much easier to both run and believe that the typical warrior might be rated at 3W and a specific opponent at 2W5 then to just assume that all the average warriors are now rated at 2W5.

Exactly. Yup. Yes. I think the problem here is that they are looking for some sort of shortcut to rating the difficulties in order to make adventure designed easier. The problem is, as with all such methods, they don't really work, unless the PCs advance in a particular, controlled way. D&D tries to do this by linking everything to character level. Right down to the pluses of any magical items a character finds. The chance of fin ding a +3 sword in a dragon hoard is actually depending upon the PCs character level! But for a game with more open ended advancement, and few RPGs are more one ended that HQ, it probably won't hold up. Yeah. And I could see situations such as HEroQuests where a given task could be attempted at variable difficulties depending on what sort of result/reward the character was trying to achieve. Exactly, and if getting a screwdriver results in the difficulty of hammering nails increasing by 1, you'd be less inclined to pick up that screwdriver. So players are stuck deciding between remaining good at what they are already good at, or expanding their knowledge base at the expense of their existing abilities. That's a terrible situation, and one of the reasons why a lot of people like BRP over D&D. Skill points put into First Aid don't come out of 1H Sword. Yes, it might slow down your progression, but your relative competency vs. everyone else doesn't go down. With the HQ2/Questworld systems a PC could actually start with a great combat skill and watch it drop to insignificant by not improving it enough to keep up with the fixed increases. Ultimately I think the game needs a mix of fixed difficulties and specific challenges and opponents rated relative to the PCs to work, just like virtually every other RPG. So the typical Clan Warrior might have Warrior 3W, but the warrior the PCs have to face in a particular adventure might be 2W2 or some such. But, he doesn't have to be 2W2.

Yup. The opened nature of the choice was really to allow you to pick grandma instead of being forced to pick your paternal granddad. This might be because of gender preferences of the player or because a given character has to be male or female to be in a particular cult. The drawback to the open ended choice is that it makes it somewhat ambiguous.

But that isn't were the problem lies. The problem lies in a fixed number of increases. That forces the players to concentrate their improvement on a set number of abilities to ensure success. Even if it is only a 1% increase, as opposed to a 10% increase in a secondary ability, the 1% increase is better, since it is in something that is used all the time. For a real world example, let's say you are an airline pilot. Now you have Piloting at 97%. You can raise it to 98% or learn how to play handball at 30%. Now going from, say 5% to 30% in Handball is a larger increase, but for you piloting is much more useful, so you will raise that instead. Sorry, RM proves the opposite. Difficulty levels for taks were fixed, and didn't scale with the characters. Aragon would face the same difficulty when climbing up the side of a cliff ans a First Level RM/MERP Ranger. He'd be a better climber and is far more likely to succeed, but his faces the same difficulty. Yes, but like in RM it is still worth doing. Look at high level RM characters. Depite the fact that the characters only get 2$ or 1$ or a half % per skill pick after a certina point, they still do it, because having Broadsword a 157OB is still better than having Broadword 157OB, Mace 25OB, Lace 30OB, etc. That is what disproves your argument. Now there are times when linear improvement can be bad, look at most forms of D&D where after a certain level rolling to hit can become a formality. But the problem with HQ2+ is that of limited resources vs. an blanket difficulty increases. Whatever ability player doesn't increase will fall behind.

Okay, so 1/10th your skill, like the crtical chance in old Stormbringer. That could be handled by tying the success levels to the differences in rolls or to the tens die or some such. The problem is that % rolls doesn't lend themselves to opposed rolls very well. First off there is the pass/fail nature of the rolls. With most opposed roll systems a character will always generate some result, even if it isn't high enough to succeed, but with % dice failures tend to "zero out". The other difficulty is that the roll high, except for a critical or some such is counter intuitive since players want to roll high, except for a critical. The solution for that is to always use a roll low or roll high method, or to sepatate the success levels from high low completely (i.e. die rolls ending in a number) but a lot of people are convinced that the math behind that favors the underdog too much. But it really doesn't. It's just that most of the complaints against it focuses on a narrow set of results. It's like saying that roll low is unfair because if a guy with 5% skill rolls an 01 a guy with a 90% skill can't beat him. That statement is true, but it also completely ignores the fact that the 01 has a 1% chance of happening, that the 5% chance ends up with less than a 5% chance of winning, and that the 90% skill character will still win around 87% of the time. So 05% vs 90% with win probabilities of around 4.5% to 87% hardly favor the 5% characters.

It looks to me like the opposite. If the difficulties are going up at set intervals, across the board, then any skill which the players can raise at the same rate (or faster) will fall behind. I think the end result will be like with D&D 3E where a hight level character might have an ability, but not high enough to actually be able to use it reliably. Generally speaking the players can't improve every keyword on their sheet the same way the GM can up all the difficulties. So either the player will tred water with some abilities and let the rest fall to the wayside, or outpace the generic increase in some skills. Either way the character will either fall behind the increase or get ahead of it. Neither is desirable. Conversely if the PCs progress equally with the difficulty, then there is no point in the increases at all. That is the problem with getting a fixed number of improvements. Because they are limited, the players don't want to "waste" them on "minor" abilities, especially when their primary abilities suffer. RQ doesn't have this problem because of the skill check system and the ability to improve multiple skills at the same time. D&D doesn't have the problem as badly since most improvement is tied to level. But games where a player gets a limited number of things to improve will always suffer from "tunnel vision" and asymmetrical advancement - unless you force some sort of artificial skill pyramid, ala FATE or somehow force a more broad based skill improvement like with Sangiune's Usagi Yojomob RPG, where the characters have to spread out improvement over 4 things at a time. Exactly. As your stories should. Yes, but the fixed difficulty progression works against all of the above. Players only have a limited number of things they can improve at any given time, and diversifying their skill set comes at the expense of mastery in their main abilities. The points used to raise, say, Dragon Pass Lore, comes at the expense of Spear & Shield. That's okay, unless all the difficulties are going to be universally increased at regular intervals. Except that after a certain point the musician follower won't offset the increasing difficulty. And since the difficulty is increasing at a steady rate for all skills, the PCs can never catch up, or if they can, it comes at the expense of letting their primary abilities slip. Yes, I agree. Not every challenge should become increasingly difficult. Something like fixing breakfast in the morning or hiking up a trail should stay the same throughout the course of the campaign. But that is now how the game system works. It just sort of assumes that since the PCs have become more skilled, and more heroic, everything they attempt will become more challenging and difficult.

Well, I think it depends on what else is going on in the game. If this were an espionage or mordern combat RPG I'd be fine with a stun/shock mechanicac. But for CoC with all the SAN rolls and weapon resistant monsters, it just becomes one more thing against the PCs. Yes, from what I've read unless someone get's sot in the brain or heart it's mostly psychological. People get shot, think "OMG, I've been shot!!" and promptly fall down and start dying. If, on the other hand they go" He shot me! I'mm going to beat the stuffing out of him!" they tend to stay up and keep fighting. I've read that police departments actually had to retrain police officers getting shot wasn't necessarily a death sentence, and that the survival rate from gunshot wounds increased significantly afterwards. It also why animals tend to fight on or run away when shot, they don't know they are supposed to fall down and die, and sokeep on going until they bleed out. Maybe. I think the chase rules might be a bit more important than the combat rules in CoC as Investigators often can't fight the Mythos nasties, but instead need to get away. I'm not all that wowed with the implementation though.

Yeah, I've seen that quite a bit with older PKs. Greg even mentions it in one of the KAP4 books, with older knights having the advantage on horse compared to younger knights, who will often do better on foot. a PK with a high Sword skill but whose damage stat is slipping is a prime example.

Just pick one. The idea is to help you generate the history of said grandparent and the backstory for your character, so that you will find out some of the events that have happened in the past and how they affected your family. This sort of came from another game, Pendragon, where you just rolled the history of your grandfather, but because they wanted to make RuneQuest less male dominated than Arthurian Britain, they gave you the option of picking any one of your grandparents. So in the end, barring a few gender specific cults, it doesn't really matter who you pick, unless you want it to.

I've read multiple accounts too. I'll admit that I think they need to up the crtical/special chance in CoC7 for such situations, but the end result is not all that unbelievable or uncommon. Doubly so considering that CoC doesn't have any sort of rule for Stun/Shock/Stopping Power/Pain resistance beyond the Major Wound rule. A Keeeper could add in POW rolls for such things, but they would have to apply to other weapons and attacks, and might not be all that desirable, as it would make the Mythos creatures even harder for the PCs to deal with. A Deep One shows up in front of a group of four, half of the Investigators fail a SAN roll, then an Investigator who made the roll gets clawed for a couple of points and gets stunned and can't act. Not so good.

The irony though is that HQ1. like virtually all RPGs also escalates the difficulty and opposition with the advancement of the PCs. So character improvement doesn't really work out as people think. Namely that improving a character increases their odd of success and ability to win a battle. It just means that they can deal with tougher challenges, and they will. I think it is still flawed in that it will encourage PCs to pull all their eggs into one basket in order to keep their primary abilities on par with (or ahead of) the increased resistance. This is pretty much what used to happen in D&D 3E, where a player could spend his skill points as he wished, but he was usually better off maxing out a handful of skills rather than spreading out the points. I think either an absolute scale for rating challenges or a completely relative one would work better. That way the players either have an idea of what they need to be good (absolute scale) or an idea of how tough a given challenge/opponent is supposed to be relative to their abilities (so that master Swordsman is always a Mastery higher than the best PC warrior). And sort of continual progression runs the risk of catching the PCsin an aerea they cannot cover effectively, and never will. For instance if, say, the PCs need to play and instrument at a set difficulty to succeed at a challenge and nobody can do so, well,. by the time someone picks up the ability, the difficulty will increase, so the PC will never be able to gain ground against the difficulty. At least with a fixed or relative skill the PC can catch up as the opposing ability is either fixed, or can be adjusted by the GM if desired.

He was very negative about the adventure, not about the diving rules, which he stated were better than the house rules he had come up. Since the OP is looking for 1920s era diving rules and gear, this seems to be the best supplement, regardless of the adventure.

Then the Crash Dive adventure in Fearful Passages is probably want you want, or at least as close to it as you will find in a CoC supplement.

Yeah. I tired something similar. Ultimately I think you need to ditch the low roll or low high mechanic if you use the ones die for success level. Otherwise you get those cases where somebody wins but would have lost if they had rolled "better: or vice versa. Alternately, you can ditch the ones die and just use a high roll wins or low roll wins and use the difference between rolls to determine the success level.

Yeah that is mostly true, although the sufficiently chivalrous part has become much tougher.That math works out to around a 93% chance of losing a point every year, or about a point of the lowest stat every 5 years. So statistically a character who can make 200 glory per year can, in theory, offset the loss in the lowest stat. Factor in for adventuring and the PK copuld, last quite a long time. Someone like Lancelot, who can rack up over 1000 glory a year, consistently, is nearly immune to the effects of aging. Nearly. The great equalizer is that, with bad rolls a character can lose multiple points in stats, somethings multiple points in the same stat. This is what seems to really put PKs into decline rather than a gradual process. Especially when multiple bad years come close together. I've seen PKs who've reach 40 without losing any attributes, take a sudden, rapid decline when they rolled a 2 one year, an 11 the next, and they lost a damage die and hit points. I had one player who didn't want to give up a PK with a 35 Sword skill, and eventually would up doing 3d6 damage. He'd critical a lot, but a 6d6 hit is only above average. And the extra two decades or so spent with the older character ended up coming at the expense of the next character, who, because he wasn't played, missed out on all that glory, and all those glory points which got spent trying to fight off aging.

Yes, I recall reading of several instances where people were shot, at "point blank" (actually it's probably not point blank , but that's another topic) range and received only minor injuries. Sometimes these includes heat shots where the bullet glances off bone, and other times where someone got shot multiple times, and then went up tot he shooter and beat them to a pulp or killed them. The whole someone gets shot so they fall down dead or incapacitated is more fiction that fact. It's why they train cops to be ready to defend themselves from being stabbed it they shoot a knife wielder at close range. There is a very high chance that they guy who got shot will be able to close the distance and stab the cop before they "bleed out" and drop. This stuff does happen. On a similar note, about once a year somebody falls from a great height and lands with little or no injuries. It's rare (and usually limited to skydivers who have major equipment malfunctions), but ti does happen. I agree. I will say that had this been old CoC or BRP the bonus to hit from the situation would have increased the chances of a impale or a critical hit, and this result would have been less likely to happen, but still possible. Part of the "problem" here is that skill doesn't play as big a part in weapon damage, as the damage die from caliber does. In game terms a hit is a hit, unless it is a special or critical, and so the size of the damage die is the major component. Realistically, shot placement is the major factor, but that is mostly handled by the random damage roll. So the poor damage roll means it wasn't that well placed a shot.

You mean like 10, 20, 30, 40 etc? Harnmaster uses numbers ending in 0 or 5 as the critical/special results. Where or not they are good or bad depends on if the roll is under your skill or over it. But is is simple and duplicates the special success chance from RQ easily without the need to do math or have a table. But HArnmaster also doesn't use direct opposed rolls.

Plus the key thing in KAP seems to be the "casting spells" part. It's dishonorable for a knight to cast a spell, but not necessarily to benefit from one. It is like chirurgery or industry. Not things that a knight should be doing, but it's certainly okay for a knight to benefit from. Somebody has to probe wounds and tend the fields.

No, it's not. A character sheet is just a record of some of the key stats tracked by the game. That's all. Thinking that it is the most important part of RPG design is like saying your tax form is the most important part of your income. If the character sheet were the most important part of thew design of an RPG then: D&D and the other early RPGs would have failed, as they originally didn't have a character sheet at all. People just used blank paper. Even when official characters became a thing, they were pretty bland. Thery just tracked the name of the player, name of the character, and all that game data thay people actually use during the game. Game experience and compatibility would change depending on what sort of character sheet a player ops for, and custom character sheets wouldn't be compatible with the core rules, and older sheets wouldn't work with newer editions of the rules. RPG companies would spend much more time focused on "most important" character sheet as opposed to the "less important" stuff like the game system, setting, and adventures. Characters in the past would have eliminated stats such as ability ratings, hit points, and equipment for the art. RPGs would use the arts character sheet for the cover, as obviously the single most important part of design would be a major selling point. The cover and cover art exists to sell the book. Can you provide an example of where the characters sheet improved an actual game so much as to be a major factor in how the game played? I know I can come up with multiple examples of where it hasn't. In my current campaign I have a player who has a character written up on a sheet of blank paper because we were out of character sheets at the time. While he now has a another character sheet to put the character on, he hasn't bothered to do so, and it hasn't changed the game in any significant way -and that's in Pendragon, an RPG where art, in the form of a character's coat of arms, is of some importance to the game, as it is part of a character's identity. So it is probably the RPG where the art is as important to game play as it gets. So as soltakss has noted repeatedly, "You don't need art on a character sheet." You might wan't art or like to have art, but you don't need art.

I think Superheroes might be a bad comparison. Yes, Superman doesn't apologize for using his super strength, but he also is an illegal alien who commits Assault & Battery and forcibly detains people without any legal authority to do so. Most superheroes are vigilantes and are acting outside the law, and so are not good comparisons to knights, who are part of the medieval legal/justice system. If superheroes really existed they either be drafted into government service, wanted fugitives, or convicted felons. As far as Pendragon goes, I think with magic it depends on the source of the magic. Anything from God or some Saint of Holy Man is considered a good thing and thus should be acceptable. Thus Gawain is off the hook. Most other magic depends on it's source and the reputation of the wielder.

I don't think your right about that though. If you ran a campaign where the PCs success chances are above 95%. I don't think it would keep the players interest for very long. The element of risk and the ability to overcome the odds are part of what makes RPGs satisfying. A campaign where players would succeed over 95% of the time, probably wouldn't keep the players interest.