Atgxtg

Not all that great. Not all chest or head hits are the same. Location does play a factor but I think you need more than that to get it to work. Now Timelords did use hit locations, but it broke the body up into more locations, and subdivided the body so you had a better idea f what you were hitting. It even helped with limb hits, since if someone got hit in the knee you could se ow a low point hit could still keep them from standing. Now what I think might work better to be to allow a more specific type of aiming (like say going for the heart of lungs rather than just the chest) and trading off skill for some sort of damage bonus.

Me too. There was a lot of good stuff in RQ3 that, unfortunately, seems to have been abandoned in the new RQ. I wonder if INT and SIZ are going back to 3D6?

HeroQuesting also skews things a bit. It's like someone from Classical Greece being able to visit the earlier ages and take some of it back home with him. Plus I don't think Glorantha is moving towards the mundane. the way the historical Greeks did. Everything is still magical in nature. Even the Lhanhor Mhy haven't replaced gods with science. Has Greg ever given any insight into what happens in the (far) future?

There are several possibles. tobarstep mentioned one. I've seen some games assign wound values based on the weapon's damage class and the success level. Other games can change the number or size of damage dice (for example.in BRP you could have a weapon that does one die damage for a success,two dice for a special and three or four dice for a critical. I have a BRP variant in the works where you add (or multiply depending on the weapon) the 10s digit of the attack roll to/by the weapon's damage stat.

Not so much the way the Japanese used them (no couched lance charges), but... especially against calvary. Plus that exta foot or two of reach is nice when fighting someone using a sword. Don't be. The Yari is usually referred to as a lance. It's why I asked for clarification. I think I'll pull out a Kurosawa film over the weekend.

Yeah it changed. In large part because Feudal Japan didn't have the whole ransom and spoils of war thing going on, and killing horses didn't have the same negative connotations that it did in the West, so the horse archer Samurai were no longer possible in the same numbers. I assume you mean the Yari, not the Nage-Yari (throwing lance). I suspect that's probably due to economics. Spears are a lot cheaper, easier, and faster to produce than high grade swords.

I think I agree. At least out of the various methods that have been used so far in RQ and it's variants. Although I do think I'd prefer a bit more control over the parry vs block thing. The RQ3 method tends to make some weapons much worse at parrying than they probably should be due to low AP scores. Plus longer weapons tended to be more likely to break this way than shorter ones (the extra length not only acts a lever for it's outgoing damage, but often for it's incoming damage. It's why bronze age swords tended to be short). Well since NuRQ is all about Glorantha, we probably don't need that something else just yet. IMO I think some of "that" could be addressed with the fumble and resistance tables. Comapring damage to weapon AP scores and the damage to the weapon being tied to the result. Yup, plus once the armor starts to deform it's weaker against the next hit. Not sure if it's worth the bookkeeping to track through.

This was also true in RQ2, although weapons used HP instead of AP. It's one of the problems with using weapon hit points for a "parry". A real parry deflects the attack rather than block/absorb it, so the parry weapon's HP really shouldn't factor into things. Shields also tend to be better at blocking (because they are so big), but even so wood tends to stand up to swords, spears, arrows, and even axes a bit better than flesh. It might be worth breaking down "parries" into partial and full parries, and only having weapons get damaged on exceptional rolls (specials, crtis, and fumbles). The argument can also be carried over into armor too. Often a "softer" armor (bronze, iron, low grade steel) can soak more than a harder armor, since the energy being used to deform the armor is not being passed on to the wearer. Harder armor might better resist being cut or punctured, but more force can sometimes pass through it to the wearer. I'm not sure if there is an easy fix for this in RQ, though.

Until you get to Japan, where, basically, there REALLY were that many people that went wading into battle IRL expecting to *dodge* their way through it. Shields were very rare, and swords were far to important to risk on a defense action. But then there was more of a "beat the opponent to the strike" thing going on.

1.44m x1.44m x1.44 m would do that as well, and give you something with a proportional shape similar to the default.

Ah, but the thing is, getting the firearms wrong, in an anachronistic way, provided that it's not too blatant, doesn't necessarily ruin a film. Most good Westerns being examples. To me anachronisms, are like science errors in games, usually they fall under the players' radar. It's only when something is blatantly off, or one or more players have an uncommon degree of knowledge, when thing can get so bad as to actually negatively impact or even completely ruin the game. I've seen a few games were the PCs went off on a tangent because the GM did something that "pinged" the players radar and the players thought that had to be an in universe reason for it.

No, I'm not saying that it didn't suck, anymore than you are saying that it would have been the next Citizen Kane without those ninja. Not all the classic weapons. Cap & Ball weapons didn't just vanish after the civil war, not did everyone go out and get a metallic conversion. Yet you are more likely to see an anachronistic automobile in the background of a western than you are to see a period accurate cap & ball firearm. No, it was a cap & ball revolver than later had a cartridge conversion. Look at most Westerns that are set during or before the Civil War. You will typically see metallic cartridges where they don't belong or at least weren't all that common. One specfic example off the top of my head in in the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The character of Angel Eyes uses a cap & Ball revolver, yet wears metallic cartridges on his gun belt. Likewise Tuco's gun switches from a cartridge conversion revolver to a cap & ball version of the same weapon. Now, admittedly, Spaghetti Westerns aren't partially known for historical accruacy, but then neither are most Hollywood and TV westerns either. Hollywood does get that wrong. It often uses "iconic firearms of the period" before such firearms actually existed.

Who'se Atgxtg? oh, wait, it worked! Okay, I'll send you an email. BTW, I was just thinking that the Pacesetter game mechanics would adapt well to that EFFECT system idea that I've been toying with for ages. Basically replacing the Chill Action Table with EFFECT.

Yeah, it's a limit only in the literal sense. IMO I think elementals should be limited a bit more by relative SIZ. I could see the 3x3x3m volume mean that an elemental could only drop a victim by 3m a round (1D6 falling damage) or some such. But then I'd also be more inclined to make the smaller elementals, smaller. 1mx1mx1m (1 cubic meter)seems like a better starting point. And we could double each of the sides per addtional Rune Point. So a 2 point elemental could be 2x2x2m (8 cubic meters), a 3 point one 4x4x4 (64 cubic meters), and so forth. Yup, and I could see a group of characters in the new RQ each summoning up an elemental, and taking down hoards of opponents. How did they defeat such a vast array of Chaotic nasties? Elementally..

Yeah then simply dividing up points (or even rolling the total points and diving them up,like 4D6+60 or some such.) seems best. Especially for a Horror game.

So that's what parachute pants were for! BTW, One approach you could use is to give the player a certain number of dice (say 25ish), and lets then assign the dice to each attribute, but they only get to keep the best three. What could be neat about this is that somebody who really wanted a high stat could dump a lot of dice into it, but would still cap out an at 18, even when they rolled five sixes! That similar to what Gary Gygax did in Unearth Arcana, only it gives the player the choice of attributes to prioritize rather than doing it for them by class.

Yeah, I think it probably makes more sense, in game terms if the elemental could only affect hit locations based on the relative SIZ between the elemental and the victim-much the same way somebody has to be above a certain SIZ to hit anything other than the leg of a a Giant. For example, Fire Elementals are limited to engulfing 10 SIZ of enemy per cubic meter, but earth emental have much less of a limitation. The problem is that, for elementals, 1 cubic meter =1 SIZ point, and the relation is completely linear, but for characters 1 cubic meter is closer to 80 SIZ points (based on the mass of water), and the SIZ only changes by 8 per doubling/halving (per the latest SIZ table).

"Umph! I mean, who's Atgxtg? No one but us Chaots here. Hail Kaos, the international cartel of evil!"

Uh, why? You could simply state that after the stats are rolled normally, the player has the option to replace one stat with a 16, or 1d3+15.

Hey Rod, if I change my name to Chaot...

This was changed in the RQ 3 errata: (Page 48) How to Parry. Delete the last two sentences of the first paragraph, and replace with: "In either case, no character may attack and parry with the same weapon on a single strike rank." So if you were going to attack on SR 5 but had to parry in SR 5 before you attack came up, you'd have to attack on SR 6. Or, if you were attacked on SR 5 after your attack, you'd have to parry with the "other" carried weapon/shield (if any) or dodge.

Yeah. Considering that Humakit get great magic for detecting ambushes, are some of the most skilled swordsmen,and tend to back it up with as much bladesharp as they wish to memorize, they are probably more likely to turn the opponents into "one-use" attackers , rather than being "one-use" guards. They are among the last opponents in Glorantha that I'd want to ambush!

Historical inaccuracies and anachronisms do not necessarily mean a compromise in quality. Quite a few stories in print and film take the odd liberty with history here and there. I all depends on what you do, how you do it, and why. For example, most Westerns use firearms firing metallic cartridges well before such weapons came out. Now I'm not saying a GM should take such liberties, but I also not saying that he shouldn't either.

Well the Graf Zeppelin did do a flight from German to New Jersey in 1928, and did set up a triangular route to Rio in 1930. So if you wanted to push it ahead a few years it wouldn't be all that outlandish. I've got BRP game stats for the LZ127 Graf Zepplin (I've got BRP stats for every Zeppelin). If you need them let me know. I can adjust them for CoC6 or CoC7, depending on what you are running.

Pity it wasn't set in 1930. Then they could take the Graf Zepplin right to Rio. Frankly, if I were the PCs I'd go by ship rather than overland from Panama. It would be a lot faster and safer. Malaria alone would give me reason not to go by land without a very good reason.