Atgxtg

I have to take issue with this part of your argument.. The rest of the house rule aside, setting a minimum skill level is not akin to the concept of level. In a game like D&D, the max number of ranks in a skill (along with virtually everything else) is tied to level in some way, but in RQ a skill can potentially be raised to any level, regardless of other factors. What a minimum skill level does is simple state that a character must have a certain degree of proficiency with a skill before he may do something else which is more complex. That seems quite fair to me and doesn't reduce the fun level at all. Now normally RQ tends to handle that stuff with skill modifiers, and the minimum 5% chance of success rule normally still applies (tghe resistance table was one of the few exceptions)., but placing minimum requirements for something is not unreasonable. I wouldn't expect someone with 10% in Read/Write to be able to write and illustrate a book with fantastic calligraphy, nor would I expect someone with First Aid at 15% to be able to perform brain surgery, someone with boat 10% to circumnavigate (or in Glorantha sail around the perimeter). There are/have been a few places where skill thresholds have been used in the past, such as the caps of skill training vs. experience, so the idea is not without precedent. I'm not saying that I like (or dislike) the rest of the houserule, only that a minimum skill isn't like level.

I am too, with some restrictions. In fact in my last adventure one of the PKs decided to sleep in his leathers because he had reason to suspect trouble. I gave him an Energetic roll to avoid a -5 fatigue penalty for the uncomfortable partial night's sleep, and with his Energetic of 20, he easily handled it. I think you key point is "reasonable". I can certainly see the knights going around armored up if they have a reason to do so. Wartime, traveling though wild and dangerous terrain, guard duty, strange noises, etc. are all reasonable times for the PKs to armor up. But there are also some unreasonable times as well. Like when knights are out on a typical hunt, riding to church to catch Sunday Mass, when traveling by ship,and so forth. Exactly. I've done similar things. The only time I really make a point of it is if they are travelling for a long time, or are trying to be speedy, and then it becomes more of a horse problem than a PK one. Yes, exactly. One of the reasons why knights often ride around unarmed is because they usually can do so without issue. Yes, some GMs do try to set PKs up for things by putting them in a situation where they won't be able to wear armor just so that he can exploit that. That's a throwback to the old style adversarial Dungeon Masters, and both inappropriate and unfair. Any Competent GM can trap or manipulate a player character into a a bad situation and exploit a weakness. It shouldn't be done. That said, sometimes the PKs either fail to perceive a threat or a social situation turns sour suddenly and unexpectedly. Likewise it's perfectly fair for an NPC to try to trap or manipulate a player character into a a bad situation and exploit a weakness. This difference is that with a NPC, the GM has to work within the constraints of the NPCs abilities, and that has to be played out and could fail or even backfire.

It's something that Greg brought up in the past though. He had horses and riders getting tired in Knights Adventurousness to prevent Knights from riding around in armor on their chargers all day. Otherwise you wind up with Knights wearing thier armor all the time, sleeping in it and so on.

Well in depense of the adventure, the Shoggoth is really something of a surprise monster lurking about. It just that once it show up there isn't much the characters can do about it. I've gotten more millage out of the adventure in non-Mthos stories, but then I find that true with most CoC products. The Bermuda Triangle book, for example, makes a great sorucebook for any modern day adventure set in the Carribean, as around 90% of the content is non-Mythos related.

There is also a matter of the horses. When armored, the character weighs more and this tires out his mount that much faster. You could apply (or given an energetic roll to avoid) a -5 fatigue modifier to skills if someone spends a lot of time in armor riding the same horse. A knight would really want to bring some spare mounts if he were expecting to ride in armor for several days, or at least ride slower with more rest stops. But it mostly depends on circumstances. If the Knights are expecting trouble, or have reason to, then they would probably wear the armor and suffer the penalties (if any). If they expect everything to be nice and peaceful and have no reason to expect anything but a safe journey, then they probably go unarmored. When in doubt they make a judgment call, or possibly just ride in Gambeson and helm.

Or get them to hold the line for a minute while you go fetch more ammo. I still feel a little guilty about that one. I hope they guy died before the ignition turned over and I sped away.

I tired using common sense but it just gets me thinking to play something safer like Stormbringer or RQ.

Well Trail of the Loathsome Slime for one, but there are others. Guns work against crazed cultists and minor Mythos nasties like Deep Ones, but generally they are more of a symptom than the real problem. But when the Shoggoths or Spawn of Cthulhu show up weapon skills don't matter much.

I varies a bit based upon play style. Spot can be vtial if the GM?keeper has the players make lots of rolls to notice things., and not so much if he doesn't. Library Use can be vtial if the adventures often have useful information for the investigators to uncover through research, and again not so useful if there isn't. The most useless skills tend to be most combat skills, especially the heavier weapons. Against most Mythos nasties combat is not a viable solution. Most Mythos nasties are quite resistant to the sort of weaponry that investigators can carry around, and it is highly unlikely that an investigator would have access to the sort of weaponry that might actually injure them. So when a Great Dhole pops up, an investigator who knows how to operate a naval gun isn't any better off than one who doesn't.

I agree with both statements. Yes, that's the general impression I got. I think it was partly that Greg wanted to tinker with things, and account for new stuff he discovered, but I also think that si\ome of it was that certain sections of the rules were sort of place holders. Greg needed to have something to fill the void so that people could play the game, something that he intended one day to replace with something better. I also think that the various versions allows a GM to pick a version that fits what he wants, allow GMs to tailor the complexity of an event to suit thier particualr preferences, and play style, even on a case by case basis. Amen. I think the one thing that I would want to see in KAP6, over anything else, is consistency and standardization. I don't mean in terms of one battle system, I don't mind there being a "short form", "intermediate form" and "long form", like with adventures, but in terms of income, glory awards per rank (i.e compare the award for being a vassal knight from KA 5.2 to Book of Warlord), overall chargen (i.e. so a character built using a supplement is on par to one built from the core book rulebook, and vice versa), typos fixed, unit stats from the BoA made more consistent with the rules, armor consistent between books, etc. The good news here is that most of that stuff would be fairly easy to do.It's mostly proofreading , updating and correcting.

The good news in this is that the differences are less important in an existing campaign, as only new characters without established families need/use the luck table. Everyone else inherits. That phases most of the benefits of the Luck table out of play by the time you get to the second generation of characters.

I am bother by them, in part because I had a PK in my campaign who was a household knight get the cat and it died off before he ever benefited from it. Meanwhile a couple other PKs who were "poor knights" Started with over £25, and ended up anything but poor. Limiting the cat to one per manor makes sense although the RAW does not. While the fantastic pet can die off, if a PK gets lucky early on thier numbers could swell to the point that they become a self-sustaining population. A dozen golden geese are a great source of income, better than anything a PK could build on his manor. I don't mind that so much, there are such variances historically and in real life, but I do mind that this is independent on the PKs supposed wealth level. As I mentioned I've had poor knights who rolled a lot of money and were able to outfit themselves as rich rich knight. IMO rolls on the wealth table should factor the knight wealth level into account. Yup. Basically some of it being what was left over from the money raised to knight the character or some such, although again I think it should vary by wealth level. What I think would work best would be several tables. A money table, a quality items table (i.e. a sword, saddle, spear etc. that grants a +1 to skill, damage or such but out of quality and craftsmanship), a potion table (with various potions and ointments of varying power and number of uses - the more powerful the benefit the fewer times it could be used), and a wondrous item table (with the less powerful magical items at the low end and the greater, more powerful items grouped at the top, probably above 20) Each PK could spend a chargen pick to roll on one of the tables., and the GM could limit or prohibit rolling on certain tables. Two picks could be combined to give a bonus to the roll (+5 or +10) to get at the better stuff. The money table would also have a modifier based on the PKs wealth level. I have the same feeling about the differences in the family characteristics table, although the differences there are not as pronounced.

There are certainly not balanced in anyway., nor were they intended to be. I've seen some players get some really nice items, while others got little of of worth. I've also some some nice stuff (like pets) die off right away, but potentially could have expanded into an insane money machine. I have mixed feelings towards this. On the one hand I'm not a strong believer in balanced characters. IOn the other, I feel for a player who gets a handful of denarii while another player gets a destrier, magical sword, or marvelous underjerkin. Maybe the Luck table could be revised to group items of similar usefulness and power on the same tier? Players could spend some of the chargen picks to upgrade their luck to a higher tiered table.

In my campaign I allowed a player who squired his son to a Berroc Saxon the ability to choose which skill set to start with, Cymirc or Saxon. I figured the mixed cutlrual upbringing could allow for either package. You could allow your Irish PK raised in Salisbury the same. Let the player take a peek at the differences in starting skills and compare cultural specialties. That way it is up to him, ad if he loses points or has a poor score in one skill or another he has only himself to blame.

I've been running KAP since the 1980s and have yet to have an actual grapple happen, outside of the occasional monster that grapples when it bites or constricts, and, more recently, a retarius with a net. Doesn't happen all that often. The typical knight should get past armor most of the time, even when shields are used.

Yeah, thats because they not all Saxons. There are Saxons, but also Angles, Jutes, Danes, Frisians, etc. In fact it was "infighting" amongst the various Saxons tribes that drove many of them from their homelands and into Britain. The Huns "helped" as well.

BTW, one alteration to the BoB that I've been testing is to change the chances that Archers fire from the values on Table 4.15 (page 65) to 2xthe Battle Zone on a D20. The odds are pretty similar to the BoB and it's easiler to remember. If nothing else, someone should put the values from table 4.15 onto the Battle Zone table (page 15). Anyway here is the math for those who are interested and would like to see how much of a change my method makes. Zone Official Variant 9 1-6 (100%) 1-18(90%) 8 1-6 (100%) 1-16(80%) 7 1-4 (67%) 1-14(70%) 6 1-4 (67%) 1-12(60%) 5 1-2 (33%) 1-10(50%) 4 1-2 (33%) 1-8(40%) 3 1 (17%) 1-6(30%) 2 1 (17%) 1-4(20%) 1 None 1-2(10%) Average: 48% 50%

Yup. Although if I were to try to port over Mythos stuff, instead of directly copying, I'd Probably just make something similar to a Cthulhu nasty, but in a Stormbinger mold. Rework the stats with D8s and so forth.

About the only real questions would be if the Mythos extends to the Multiverse or just local to the Cthulhu dimensions (i.e. our dimension plus a few nearby/related ones), and just how the Elder Gods relate to the Gods of Law and Chaos. Are they actually gods or not, members of the Gods of Law or Chaos, or something older. But the Mythos could be easily ported over to the Young Kingdoms or encountered in a off-dimension adventure. Maybe a group of Deep Ones tucked away in Oin, Yu or Dholes in the Sighing Desert. It all fits easily enough.

I does to some extent, as archers could be attacking from different sides, especially on the battlefield. No, in a battle tun most units, including archers only get to use one weapon. There are the occasion units that get a cheap shot off with a missile weapon (usually a javelin) before engaging in melee. They are rarely that effective, but my PKs hate them just the same.

I use a lot of paper minis these days, mostly because it is easier to find a printable mini or adapt an image to one than it is to find a cast, molded or printed mini that matches the character or monster, plus it's a lot cheaper to print a sheet on minis on photo paper, cardstock or DVD cover cardstock (most economical) than it is to but a bunch of solid minis.

I think the biggest differences are: how it feels to the players: There are times in play where a normal hit gets turned into a critical hit because of the shield (i.e. attack roll of 10 when the archer had a 15 skill, giving the players the impression that they would have been better off without the shield). tying defense to skill :(the higher the skill/DEX of the character, the better their chance of success and avoiding damage, as opposed to a flat -5 modifier. which is the same for everybody, regardless of skill multiple Attacks: Since skill isn't a factor with the -5, PKs do not have to spit their skill up when attacked by multiple archers, which is a huge difference.

Beauty? I'd say say a necessity. Unlike virtually every other RPG, Pendragon follows the same timeline and course of events in every campaign. If a GM didn't vary things the campaing would get boring a predicable, much like most computer RPGs. Yup. Lots of options for the GM to choose from, although the campaing history and players actions will (and should) play a big part in determining that direction.

Pretty much, although the occasional weak encounter hear or there can help too. It shows that the Saxons are not invincible, but just that it is difficult to do defeat them at present. making the situation seem much worse, exactly. Part of the purpose of the Anarchy Period is to make the situation look bleak in order to make Arthur's rise and victories all that greater. The idea being that Arthur is special and can do what others either wouldn't, couldn't, or in the case of Nanteleod, died before they could, accomplish. The game needs those dark times to make the golden age of Arthur stand out more.

Yup, and you have a point too. That is partly because of the shift in comics to be darker. The MCU has even permanently (so far) killed off major heroes too, although I suspect the latter is more due to the casting issues that come with A list actors and blockbusters. Tony Stark doesn't cost anything, but Robert Downy Jr. does. I think Superworld (boxed set) also works for four-color comics Marvel, too, with a few restrictions - mainly that some of the more high powered characters are probably pulling their punches at times to reflect how many times normal or near normal people get hit by very powerful characters and survive.