soltakss

There are some tables which I don't understand - UK Occupation Tables 1,2 and 3 and UK Nationality Tables. I thought they might be typos - should they be for the Unknown East?

BRP, RQ and similar systems work well with the "I hit you and you hit me and we dodge about a bit" way of fighting. I.e. the kind of thing that I would do if I wanted to work a combat out. It doesn't handle all the intricacies of martial arts. That's why I always say that any rule in roleplaying games will satisfy most people, but experts will say that it is rubbish. Look at all the debate over unarmed combat - Experts in judo, ju-jitsu and aikido don;t like the throwing/grappling rules as they are too limited and don't reflect real life. Experts in taekwondo, karate and kung fu don't like the moving/blocking/parrying/flurry rules as they don;t reflect real life. Experts in fencing or the various martial arts that use weapons don't like the combat rules for the exact same reasons. It all depends on what level you like. RQ/BRP still reflects what I see in my head when imagining combat, even with the little bit of martial arts that I did when I was younger. For me, that is fine. For experts, it will never be fine. A roleplaying system that handles all the intricacies of fencing, kendo, aikido swordplay, kung fu weaponplay and all the other martial art forms out there would be far too complicated for my tastes and, I think, would not work particularly well.

For me, it's a one page of bullet points, perhaps with a little bit of description for major ones. Any NPCs are statted up in very vague terms (HPs, weapon skills, basic spells) as they probably won't last more than a couple of rounds anyway.

Reported

Almost always the case

At the risk of offending most of the people on this forum, losing Chaosium would not have made a lot of difference. Sure, we would have lost CoC, which might have upset some people. Elric/Stormbringer might have been affected, but it wasn't doing a great deal. The BRP ruleset is good, but is more of a rehash of other rules rather than anything really new. Apart from that, what D100 gaming have they produced? Mongoose have produced more D100 games material in 10 years than Chaosium has in twenty. Other games companies keep producing D100 supplements, some under the BRP banner, some under OpenQuest or Legend, some under RuneQuest. Add these up and they amount to a fair number. What would happen if Chaosium stopped supporting BRP tomorrow? I reckon that most of the games material would be produced for Legend, or something similar, under the OGL banner, perhaps without OGC. D100 gaming would continue.

It is unlikely that a mainstream bookshop will stock RPG books. At least I have not seen any in Waterstones or WH Smiths, the two major book chains in the UK. As for the FLGS, Waylands Forge has a reasonable RQ/Legend/BRP collection, including independent supplements from Alephtar Games, D101 Games and so on. I don't go to other games stores (no need), so I am not sure how they are doing. On the odd occasion that I venture to London, Leisure Games normally has some D100 game books.

Stormbringer/Elric is probably the closest, then maybe RQ2, or RQ in general.Most of the things can be used in BRP without any conversion, or with minimal conversion if you can run things like Strike Rank/DEX Rank on the fly.

And that is the point of this thread - exploring other. non-Chaosium options. Writing for BRP means that Chaosium have to be involved. Writing for an OGL D100 product means that CF can be self-published or even published in a partnership with another company.

I'm lucky if I produce a book every 2 years at the moment, so I feel your pain. Just do as much as you can and that's fine for most of us.

Classic Fantasy II: http://basicroleplaying.com/basic-roleplaying/new-direction-classic-fantasy-3010/

Legend would be a perfect fit for Classic Fantasy II (CF2). In fact, if you were careful, you could make CF2 into a more generic beast that could work with Legend, BRP or RQ6. By using Legend, you can publish under the OGL, can amend rules etc and can add rules without a problem.

Yes, it makes a lot of sense.

That's not atypical - I have seen several characters behead themselves following a fumble. The use of Hero Points in later versions of RQ help protect against these. However, the best I have seen was a troll who was exploring a cave system with a party when all of a sudden he was surrounded by a fluttering echo-locating flock of bats. Panicking, he swung his maul, rolled a fumble, rolled a "Roll twice" result, then proceeded to roll "Hit nearest friend doing maximum Damage" and "Hit nearest friend doing critical damage", he rolled chest and abdomen and the GM asked the player to roll randomly for which friends were hit and he rolled the two closest to him, so neatly killed them both.

Exactly. 30 years ago, the risky thing for me was staying alive. Now, risk is different. It is not just about individual player characters, it is more about the community, the clan/tribe/city, religions and the world in general. In RQ, the focus used to be on saving yourself. In HQ it is about saving the world. To be honest, I don't use Extended Contests. If I need to use something similar then I use Chained Simple Contests from Mythic Russia. Extended Contests just confuse and bore me.

That's what I am planning to use for Legend:SciFi, if I ever get back to working on it.

I get that, I just can't see why HQ2 is more fun than HQ1.

I meant the first edition of HeroQuest, (HQ1), not HeroWars (HW). It has changed a lot, as far as I can see. HQ2 seems to be more about the story experience, so your chances of succeeding at something depends on how important that is to the plot/story. There are a load of mechanics I can't get my head around, but I can't remember what they are. I am getting old. I got HQ as well. I don't really get HQ2, though. I see what they are trying to do, but my overriding question is "Why?".

I spent a couple of hours on Sunday putting some of the the information into a spreadsheet. When I am done, I'll generate a whole host of random entries, but it might take a week or so to type in the data.

Exactly, and it is surprising how often similar things come up as players find inventive solutions to problems. I've done some conversions to RQ3 for HQ Cults at Hero Wars Cults Conversion - Cults and creatures at Converting HeroWars Creatures and my views on why HQ1 didn't really work as well as I would have liked at Why HeroQuest Doesn't Work At its core, HQ has a very simple, very scalable resolution system that can be used in any situation. The rest is just additional stuff to confuse things. I prefer RQ in many ways, but I have taken many of the ideas from HQ and used them in RQ. HQ2 doesn't appeal to me at all, I understand what it is trying to do and agree that it's a jolly good idea, but it doesn't grab me in the same way that HQ1 did.

In HeroQuest, an Innocent Smile ability could beat a Sword ability. That just wouldn't happen in RuneQuest. It invites a different style of play, in my opinion, where the players are far more inventive about how they use their abilities.

If you have them in a text file, that would be even better. I could use them to generate a D20/D100 table pretty easily based on a text file.

That might not be a bad thing!

The thing that a lot of people don't realise is that you can use whatever rules you like in your own games. So, the new edition might lose the Resistance Table. All this means is that you can choose to use the new way of doing things or can keep the Resistance Table from other versions. I have been slow to take up changes to new versions in my games. Usually, I only use them if they are better than the old rules. This makes my games a hotchpotch of rules, but means that I get the best of both worlds - better rules when they come but stable rules when I need them.

Of course