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I figure BRPs fate is dependent upon how the new RQ does. If RQ does really well,then BRP will probably not see much more support. Not that it really needs any- it's mostly a toolkit. If the new RQ doesn't do so good, then Chaosium might default back to BRP, as it has been somewhat successful. But it's also possible that if the new RQ does well, Chaosium might go through something of a renaissance, and keep supporting BRP and expanding into new lines, much like they did in the early 80s. I doubt it will happen that way, but it could.

LOL! That is where I got the basic idea. Where I departed was that instead of just using it for unarmed combat, I allow it to handle any weapon. Instead of rolling a random die on a hit based on the weapon (1d6, 1d8, 1d10 etc.), the weapon gives a modifier to the final damage. So a weapon that might have done 1d10 would get a +1 modifier to the damage. I also expanded upon the idea to handle stuff other than combat. For instance, is someone was piloting a vehicle, the EFFECT points generated would be used to "pay" for turns and other maneuvers. If crafting or repairing something (mundane or magical) the EFFECT generated could be kept as a running total against a target number. Once enough effect has been generated the item is completed.

It wasn't the base chances that bothered me so much as the fact that attributes had no effect of advancement. Once somebody had, say , a 40% skill , his chance of improvement was the same as anybody else. Not did I like how the game doled out improvement rolls.

Yeah, from what I've been told someone high up at Mongoose pretty much decided how things were going to be and didn't want to hear it when people raised concerns about things.The fact that they went with a closed second playtest is an admission of that. You'd think they realize they have problems with the fans just from the way the playtest went. Back when MRQ was just hitting the shelves a lot of people would go onto the forums and raise concerns (or complain) about some of the rule changes. Stuff like, "if you change X then Y, Z, A, B, and Q don;t work right anymore". Apparently just about EVERYTHING that the fans complained about HAD ALREADY been brought up by the playtesters! I think it was rather telling that Mongoose did MRQ2 so quickly, and that the lead designers for MRQ2 were gamers who were actually familiar with RuneQuest. The problem is, though, is that Mongoose's approach didn't really backfire on them. According too Matt Sprange, something like 75-80% of RPG products that people buy are read, but not played. RPG companies make their money from sales, not from games being played. So it doesn't matter to them if you play the game or not, as long as you buy the books.

Yeah, I never had a problem with that either. At 90%+ skill and boosted by battlemagic such as Bladesharp, fights didn't bog down. Typically somebody would get a special (it happens nearly every other roll at that skill level, or even more freqently when over 100%), critical, or just chew through the opponent's weapons/shields with the damage enhancements.

Don't feel too bad. I've been told by a playtester that even Steve Perrin didn't have any ability to influence the design of MRQ, In fact, he was told that he didn't know how to design an RPG by someone at Mongoose. Kinda ironic. If Steve didn't know how to design a RPG, why make MRQ at all?

Yeah, a bunch of cultists hold mass, and it leads to destruction. That's what White Bear and Read Moon was all about.

Elf, the other non-meat.

Not bad, but you might need a higher value for specials and crits. In the normal RQ rules a character can get up to 18 points with a critical with an impaling (or slashing) weapon. Even more with a damage bonus. So 10 points probably wouldn't be enough. You will also have a problem with character who have a low skill score. Someone with a 25% skill can only get about 2 points and might never get past his opponents armor. Also, you will need a way to handle skills over 100% (unless you cap skills at 100%). I've got several, but have been leaning towards comparing the roll against 100% and the remainder of the skill. For example, if somebody had a skill of 150% and rolled a 47, he'd get 4 points of damage for rolling 4x and under 100% and another 4 points for rolling 4x and under the remainder of 50%. If he had rolled a 78, he'd only get 7 points for rolling a 7x under 100%, and nothing for rolling over 50%. It's simple, scales to handle even higher skill scores, and mostly cancels out when skills are close.

I did just that in another thread. Basically you use the 10s digit as the damage and the 1s digit as the hit location. It's not all that complicated. But I do think the base chances have to be a bit higher for it to work.

I kinda like that. It's similar to how truesword worked in RQ2. I'd say got a step further and allow the character to apply it as a plus or minus to the roll, capped out at max. That way a highly skilled character could do precision light strikes instead of devastating wounds. I, fact, I'd let the character apply the modifier to either damage or hit location.

That the old stuff that was needed to run a camaign (and CoP was just that) were brought up to 3rd edition specs, and that new adventures campaign packs would have been released. In other words just what Chaosium seems to be trying to do with the latest edition.

So quantity over quality? I don't think it's harsh at all. They didn't have to cover 60+ deities. CoP/CoT might have only covered 23 cults, but they were the the major ones for the area. I'd much rather have one campaign area that is well fleshed out and detailed, than a couple dozen area that get cursory coverage. Since RQ3 was supposed to be the continuation of the RQ line, then they should have updated CoP to 3rd edition. It woulnd't have been all that hard for them to do.

No, it wasn't a "Bushido conversion", far from it. Its just that Bushido covered a lot more. LoN didn't cover the culture, setting, histoy, politics, etc. in much detail. It didn't give much help to GMs. If I were to run an RQ3/LoN campaign now, I'd pull in stuff from other RPGs and probably port over some rules as well. Both Bushido and Sengoku have information on organizations/clans that could be helpful to an LoN campaign. Hmm, you got me thinking. I love the combat options and "crticals" (read special successes) in the Sanguine version of Usagi Yojumbo RPG. They are somewhat similar to what they did with RQ6. It could make for a very interesting RQ Japanese RPG.

That's pretty much true of just about anything. If you aren't aware of or familiar with what came before it, you don't know what's missing. The thing with Mythic Europe is that you didn't get enough info on the various Mythic European cultures to do the character justice. Nor did you get enough for Mythic European religions.

Chaosium might have wrote it, but I believe AH had the final say on what went out, and they were pushing for something to be more generic fantasy-like D&D. mOst of the glitches (there weren't that many, were there?) you can blame on the designers. And certainly some of the blame should go to Chaosium, especially Greg, for what came out and what didn't.

Land of the Nija looked incomplete to me. I owed Busido, so I was aware of how much more info the author could have put into LoN but didn't.

I pretty much agree with you, although I didn't mind Cormac's saga that much. It was the playtest for RQ Vikings- which IMO was probably the best of the non-Gloranthan RQ3 supplements. I think what RQ3 desparely needed was some sort of setting to work with. All the RQ2ers were used to and expected it. I was hoping that we might had gotten a Mythic Europe book. I didn't mind expanding RQ beyond Gloratha, but I did mind that Glorantha kinda got put on hold. Most of the early RQ3 supplements were either reprints of RQ2 stuff, or were so all encompassing that they lacked the level of detail that made RQ2 great.

I've done something similar too (as mentioned elsewhere). As has been pointed out, it will probably cause conflicts with specials and criticals. You might run into a situation where somebody does less damage because he rolled a special Another approach you might want to consider-if you want the bonus to be based on skill rating, would be to bump up the weapons's damage die based on the character's skill. For instance raising a d8 to a d10. You could put a threshold value where the character gets the increase (50% skill, maybe), and possibly for additional upgrades (say 75%, and 90%). The math would be a lot easier, the effect would be similar, and it would be more compatible with the existing rules for specials and critical. But that's just an idea. A slighly different version of the above would be to reduce all the weapon dice to about in half) (i.e. A sword that did 1D8+1 would do 1d4) and would then be bumped up for skill as above. Special successes would mean rolling two dice damage, and crticals three. This would be slightly more skill dependent than RQ, and slightly less dependant on lucky die rolls. Again, just an idea.

Plus, I believe it was mentioned in some of the ads for RQ3 that AH wanted to shift the emphasis away from Glorantha and make RQ a more generic game that could be adapted to handle other settings- specifically so that they could sell it as more of a fantasy RPG. There was a Glorantha book in the RQ boxed set, and they did reprint a lot of RQ2 Glorantha stuff for RQ3, but I think that was more to keep the existing fanbase on board while they shot for a bigger market.

Sure. The way it works is that you roll percentile dice against the character's skill or ability score. If the roll is under the score then you generate an EFFECT value equal to the 10s digit. This value is then adjusted for things like equipment, magic, special abilities and so on. If you roll over your rating, then your EFFECT value is equal to Zero and you can't add any modifiers. For example, let's say you had a character with a 65% Sword skill. If you rolled a 43 on the dice, you'd generate 4 EFFECT, plus modifiers, but if you rolled a 73, you'd generate 0 EFFECT and not be able to add any modifiers. Note that rolled really low, like 09, is better than rolling above your skill, since you get to add any applicable modifiers. Now if a roll is opposed by someone or something, the EFFECT scores generated cancel each other out, so that only the difference between the two counts. For example if the character with the 65% Sword skill generated 4 points of EFFECT on an attack, but his opponent generated 3 points of EFFECT on a defense roll, only 1 point of EFFECT would get past the defenses. Oh, and with passive resistances, like say lifting a rock or jumping a ditch, the EFFECT score could be fixed, since the difficulty of the task isn't going to vary by performance. So a 100 pound rock will always generate the same EFFECT score to resist being lifted. In combat, EFFECT becomes the damage inflicted, and can also be "spent" (reduced) to buy special effects such as disarms, trips, impales and so on. Outside of combat, EFFECT can be used in a variety of ways depending on what you are doing. If you were trying to lift a heavy object, the EFFECT score would determine if you could pick up or shift the object and for how long or far you could do so. With spellcasting, the EFFECT score is basically the pool of points you get to use to craft and adjust the spell's parameters (damage, range, are of effect, and so on). When operating a vehicle, the EFFECT score is the number of points you get to spend to maneuver the vehicle (turns, rolls, slips, loops and so forth). If you are repairing or building something the EFFECT score becomes a running total of that is compared to some target value to see how long it takes to fix or build something. In a contest, such as a race, it is also used as a running total to see how far along the course a character has progressed. In other words EFFECT gives us a way to track how well a character is doing both in the short term (say 1 melee round) with a single roll, or over the long term (hours, days, weeks) with the sum of multiple rolls.

Hmm, let me clarify. As I currently have it,someone with a 20 skill, will be beaten by somebody with a higher skill who rolls a 21 plus. Even when the lowered skilled character does win, he doesn't do much damage (1 or 2 points plus modifiers), since my method uses the difference between the die rolls.. And chances are this is going to be rendered moot once we factor in for armor. The is no chance for the lower skilled character to get a lucky hit in the way he can in RQ/BRP ( or most other RPGs). Even if I were to allow doubles to get a nice bonus to EFFECT (say 5 points), a lower skilled character with doubles can still be beaten by a higher skilled character, or even when he does win, the effect will be marginal (1-2 points again), Which leave me right in the same boat as before. So,, what I think I need is a way for the lowered skilled character to occasionally get a good hit in. A penalty to the next action isn't bad, but it doesn't solve this particular problem. It does help to address something else. I think I might have to do something like zero out the defense or some such just to let the lower skilled character get the occasional good shot in. Note that this is only a big problem with very low skill scores, since they can't generate much effect. BTW, I'm thinking I can replace modifiers to the die rolls with modifiers to EFFECT. It should do about the same thing without having to alter the chances of success. P.s. Love the new icon. Maybe I'll change mine once Wabbit Quest comes out.

Me too. BTW, I'm really trying to figure out a better option to handle "criticals" in my variant. I don't have a problem with using doubles, but what I am concerned about is finding a way to give a nice boost in EFFECT so that a low skilled character can get lucky once in awhile. For example, someone with a 20% skill might get a crit by rolling an 11 (doubles) but even with a 5 point boost in EFFECT for doubles he can still be easily beat be a higher skilled character, or at least have most of this effect negated. Now since the is the "best" the character can roll, I'm thinking it might need a bigger boost or a bump of some sort. Maybe I could have doubles trump the normal "high wins". Since the characters with higher skill will have a greater chance of rolling doubles this seems reasonable fair. Also, I'm considering dropping the idea of have effect dice negate each other and just going with a winner take all approach.

Yeah, or use a multiplier. For instance I'd probably have a broadsword (1D8+1) have a x2 multiplier. Not quite. While I didn't have RQ style crtis, I did want to have a way to bump up the total to reflect lucky hits and desperate maneuvers. That's why I wanted to add some sort of bonus to the EFFECT total when the player rolled doubles or some such (remember this was/is a work in progress). I also had a concept for raising the difficulty where you traded off skill for extra EFFECT. The tricky bit is that if you fail your skill roll you zero out your effect total. So it could leave you wide open if you mess up.

Well it addresses one of my pet peeves. Mainly that in most RPGs, damage is more dependent on what you are using for a weapon rather than how good you are at using it. It's one of the reason why small, light weapons such as knives and low caliber pistols are nearly useless in most RPG combat. For example, if you shoot someone with a .25 pistol in a game like CoC, they can walk right up to you and punch you and do more damage! I used to hate it when someoneboy would roll a speical success and then roll minimum damage and the "special" would "bounce" off the target. One thing I like about the old SAGA rulesets was that the attack score, basically was the damage score. Another thing I liked was that since the defense roll came right off of the attack roll/damage, the better your parry, the less damage you would take. Another thing I liked was that all the rolls were made by the players. So if a PC got clocked by a good hit, it was because he blew the defense roll, not because the GM got a lucky roll. I don't believe that I'd need to preserve the existing damage ranges exactly. That said, it fairly easy to keep something in the right ballpark. A broadsword might do 1D8+1 in RQ, but with impales, and damage bonus, a typical character can do 19 points with a max roll, more with really good stats and magic.