soltakss

It looks a bit old-fashioned, but hey - I like old-fashioned.

Actually, we took him down from the cross first (mainly because of the weight). Getting him back alive was optional, as long as he was resurrectable.

We always played that time spent on a cross counted against the 7-day limit for resurrection, so 3 days hanging, then dead meant that you had to be resurrected within 4 days.

So, taking him off the cross is probably a good idea.

Just dropped the price of the Xmas module to .99 cents for download and $5.68 for print.

99 cents?

Do you think we're made of money?

But using your reasoning, if someone steals something of yours, should we care?

Not particularly.

You know, I really don't care.

So what if someone doesn't acknowledge a game designer from the 70s? It was 30 years and several game versions ago.

I might change my mind if the people who haven't been acknowledged start saying they should have been, but I honestly can't see that happening.

If I wanted to write a new set of rules and based it on the OGL then I'd be covered anyway.

If I ripped off RQ/BRP and didn't want anyone to know, I wouldn't acknowledge those games anyway.

Since I plan to do neither, how does it affect me?

What people need is creatures they can use or would probably use.

This depends on settings, to a certain extent, and genre.

Many people would need standard real world creatures for historical or adventure settings, but then we get the bear/lion/tiger/wolf stats from RQ2/3/BRP repeated.

If you include creatures from real world mythology, then do you concentrate on mythology that most people know about (Classical/Celtic/Germanic) or emerging mythologies that some people know about (Aztec/Mayan/Native American/Japanese/Chinese) or mythologies that very few people seem to know about (Basque/Eurasian/African/Australian Aboriginal)? Apologies for anyone whose mythologies I have said weren't well known. You can end up with a book where vert few GMs will use many of the monsters.

Look at the RQ2 Bestiary. How many people, hand on heart, used Baeguests or Red Caps regularly? I've used Red Caps once and Barguests probably twice.

You probably need a generic book with the standard real world creatures and wel known mythological beasts, then folow up with bestiaries in supplements that are setting/genre specific.

But, that's like RQ3 Monsters book with the Gloranthan Encyclopedia to follow.

You can have cavern-crawls in different kinds of games with no problem whatsoever. In Sci-Fi games they are Bug Hunts, in SuperHero games they involve hitting the Super Villain's Secret Complex and so on.

The old-style Dungeon Crawls are a bit different in that you had vastly different creatures in close proximity with no logical reasons why they'd be there. Hopefully, people put more thought into the reasons why things are in complexes. But, there's nothing inherently wrong with going through a complex like a dose of salts.

I've got a real problem with the attitude that such-and-such a scenario-type is bad and so-and-so is good. I've played excellent scenarios of many different kinds and bad scenarios of many different kinds. Personally, I don't particularly like playing in detective scenarios, but I have done some that were really good.

The best scenarios are a combination of several scenario-types.

Also, combat-light scenarios are not always about roleplaying. They can turn into problem-solving or detective or gadget-making scenarios instead.

It's hard to generalise over what is a good roleplaying scenario, except to say that a good scenario is one that the GM and players enjoy.

Look at the comics. Many of them are combat-intensive, or the ones I used to read were. Ditto the films. Spiderman getting lumops whacked out of him, batman cracking heads, even Daredevil liked to mix it.

Combat has always been a big part of SuperHero comics and should be a big part of SuperHero games.

There are, of course, other things that are good fun. If you play The Nerd then you will be good with computers and science stuff; if you play The Whizz then you will be good at travelling quickly; if you play The Brain you will be good at problem solving and planning.

But, at the end of the day, it comes down to taking out SuperVillains and that may well involve combat.

I write programs every day. Do they belong to me? Of course not, because I have a contract of employment that says that anything I write in the course of my employment belongs to my employer.

Presumably games writers have similar contracts, or they would do if they worked for me.

So, there's absolutely no moral dimension to game-ownership.

Writers write for a company, whether as employees, freelancers or whatever. They don't own the rights to the game. Authors of computer games don't own the games - games companies do. It's the same with roleplaying games.

Now, you can argue about the morality of that as long as you want, but it still doesn't change the fact that people work for other people.

So, get over the history, who owned what, who wrote what, who sold what to whom.

Look to the future.

It might be a good one, at least for a couple of years.

The way around this is to make certain tasks harder.

In HeroQuest terms:

Look through underwear or look through a normal wall - resistance 14.

Look through a lead-lined box - resistance 10M.

Look through something far away 20M

Look through several walls at once 20M

Search a building from outside and read something stored in a cupboard 20M2

or whatever.

In BRP terms, you'd assign a penalty depending on how difficult the task was.

Look through underwear or look through a normal wall -0%

Look through a lead-lined box -40%

Look through something far away -40%

Look through several walls at once -60%

Search a building from outside and read something stored in a cupboard -100%

Which 3rd-party publications are you referring to, specifically? I might have missed something!

I'm genuinely interested in hearing about other 3rd-party materials.

Well, Tales of the Reaching Moon and Tradetalk were the main fanzines. You also have things like Wyrms Footprints, the Pavis and Big Rubble Companions and Books of Drastic Resolutions spring to mind immediately. Then the Unspoken Word books came out for HeroWars (not RQ/BRP but close enough for my tastes and Gloranthan which is an important BRP/RQ setting).

They kept things going long enough for the HeroWars/HeroQuest revival and the re-emergence of RQ.

They aren't that important to people who don't like/use Glorantha/RQ/HW/HQ but they are still useful things to have.

How do you know what you need or want without some exposure to the product?

Some things I take on trust, some times I look at a friend's book or follow reviews.

I've no real interest on non BRP/RQ/HQ products anyway, so I'm fairly set in my crusty old ways.

I can see if you are following a preexisting line, but what about something new?

Something new? I tried that once. It didn't work.

I don't particularly care who publishes RQ/BRP/GORE/whatever.

Chaosium was good in the 80s, produced some systems throughout the 90s and 00s, but as I have no interest in Call of Cthulhu, already had Stormbringer and strongly disagreed with the principles behind the esoteric-magic-game-that-bombed (I can't even remember it's name), their later products meant nothing to me. They sold RQ and it bombed, so I have no loyalty whatsoever to Chaosium as a company.

Having said that, they have done good work over the years and it would be nice for them to continue.

But, as to boycotting another company for treading on their toes, no thanks, not really my style. That's what happens on the stinking dunghill that is Capitalism.

As long as some company produces some games/supplements that look something like RQ, I'll be happy. OGL allows that in droves, other licencing agreements might allow it. The more the merrier, in my opinion.

RQ was kept alive as a game by third-party publications with precious little help from Chaosium, Avalon Hill or even Issaries for a while. So, third-party publications are the key to getting a lot of interesting material out very quickly.

We can all be snobby and sniff "It's not like Griffin Mountain/Pavis/Big Rubble/Trollpack/Borderlands" but nothing will be like them.

We've moved on. Cheap and cheerful and lots of it, that's what I want.

Wayland's Forge, here in Birmingham UK, always wraps their products. I've never asked them to open one so I could have a look at the contents but I'm sure they would.

I've never been one for browsing through a book - generally I buy what i need or want rather than buy on impulse.

I've played Superworld before and it didn't really work.

The problem with BRP superhero games is that BRP differentiates between skills, characteristics, powers and so on and there isn't really a mechanism for them all to work together.

So, Megaman has STR 100 and tries to lift Gorgo (SIZ 120) using the Resistance Table, all well and good. But what if Zapman uses his Mind Zap ability against Megaman? How will he resist?

Also, with BRP you need to describe each ability down to the last detail, what it costs, what damage it does, how it is resisted and so on.

HeroQuest is a far better system to play a SuperHero game, in my opinion.

It always bugged me a bit that most all fantasy games I've seen carry the assumption that every folkloric/mythological creature in the character's culture has a 'real' objective existence in-game... and that most all the characters believed in them too.

Well, yes and no.

Many people like meeting strange and exotic creatures in games. You can make them up or use the game setting as a base for the creatures.

If you are adventuring in Ancient Greece then why shouldn't you meet centaurs, satyrs and fauns? If you are adventuring in Scandinavia, you could meet trolls, dwarves and elves. In settings based on novels, films or TV shows, you'd expect to meet things from the base setting.

What you wouldn't necessarily expect to meet are creatures from other settings/mythologies. So, I wouldn't expect to meet a conchon in Ancient Greece or a centaur in the Aztec Empire or a shurale in Roman Britain.

Not everything needs to exist, but if you base your setting on folktales and legends, then everything that was met in those tales could conceiveably me met in your game.

I can't recall reading/playing an adventure where the characters go on a 'snark hunt'...

But, it would be a good scenario, though, wouldn't it?

Well I think its practical to know more than just "can be tamed by heroes" about those creatures in your fantasy game. For example some game stats just in case the PC meet the unfriendly manticore.

Of course, you need stats.

I was talking about the supposed origin of the creatures and people's insistence on arguing about real world origins rather than game/setting-based origins.

If you have a creature in a game it will have a game-origin and game-stats.

There are some other points where reality and myth meet each other. Its not always clear what a mythological creature is and what not. Eg. in former times, many "mundane" animals have been given magical attributes by the people and so became a hybrid between mythological creature and real animal. So what do you do in your fantasy game? Do have rhinos magical horns or not?

In most fantasy settings, rhinos are normal animals. They dont have any magic attributes. This is because those games are viewing mundane animals of the fantasy world from a modern zoological point of view. But a few, like "ars magica" does indeed give rhinos or even geese magical abilities.

Once again, it would depend on the setting and how you want to play it.

In Chinese medicine, rhino horn is an aphrodisiac (actually in many folk medicine traditions, anything that is long and hard is an aphrodisiac, although I can't for the life of me work out why ......) so if you used a similar medicinal tradition in your game then rhino horn might have some magical effects.

Are rhinos as magical as unicorns? Probably not. Do many creatures have magical properties? Maybe, it depends on your game.

It's not a lot to do with Chaos in Glorantha, but .....

The Real World origins of various mythological creatures is irrelevant from a fantasy gaming point of view.

So what if people found dinosaur fossils and thought they were dragons?

In a factasy game, what is important is the mythological origins or the pseudo-historical origins of creatures.

In Greek Myth, Pegasus arose from Medusa's blood after she was beheaded by Perseus (I think). In Bashkort mythology, flying horses were gifts from the Sun to mighty heroes. Both are flying horses, but both have different origins. If I were playing an ancient Greek game then I'd use the Medusa-origin myth, if I played a steppe nomad game I'd use the Bashkort-origin myth.

The most important things are:

1. What they are

2. What they do

3. Where they came from

So, Griffins are hybrid lion/eagles, Pegasi are winged horses and dragons exist.

Griffins prey on livestock, Pegasi can be tamed by heroes and dragons hoard treasure and eat livestock and people.

Where they came from depends on the game setting and the myths used.

That's all I really need to know about them. Any "Real World" explanation is completely irrelevant to me.

I'm not trying to get into an argument, and all in my opinion, but ...

The principle rocks. It is the application that MRQ uses that is the problem. IMO The resistance table works just as week as Opposed tests. In fact the Opposed system used in D&D 3rd edition basically IS the RQ resistance table, but using D20s (D20+mods vs target number, or opposed d20+mod rolls).

The problem is that D100 opposed math is not as quick and easy as D20 math. What D100 is good at is dividing up the success (and failure) range to allow for different grades of effect. IMO the opposed system in MRQ would have worked better if they had gone to d20 resolution rather than D100. Pendragon does just that, and it works well.

I'd have preferred keeping fumble/failure/success/special/critical as 5 levels of success and having Opposed Contests determined by Level of Success then Margin of Success then Lowest Roll on ties. So, a special beats a normal, a critical beats a special, a normal beats a failure and a failure beats a fumble in all cases, then if the Level of Success is tied, then the person who makes the skill by the most is the winner (a bit of maths but it's easy maths) and in the case of that being a tie, the lowest roll wins, because rolling low should always be good.

I don't like the abandoning of the Special in RQM, one of the many things that I personally don't like about it. That doesn't necessarily make it a bad system, though.

To be fair to MRQ, RQ2 would have benefited from d20 dice instead of d100, too. Skills were in increments of 5%, so the only thing that needed to D100 was the criticals (and D&Ds roll and confirm method would fix that).

RQ3/RQM and BRP are all percentile systems and don't equate to D20 in the same way that RQ2 did.

All quite fair. That was one reason why I asked for another point of view (and had you in mind when I posted).

I'm just pleased that I could be your stooge.

For the most part I tried to point out differences without going RQ=good, MRQ=bad, but I realized some bias was inevitable.

Bias? If you start from the position that one system is "Good" or "Bad" then bias will be present.

Now your bias is showing. I don"t think the things you listed are necessarily "good":

The only bias I have is that RQ is a good system, something that I'm not going to apologise for.

I think that a lot of the things brought in for RQM are backward steps. Spirit Combat stinks to high heaven, Opposed Rolls in combat don't really work that well, Specials have been lost, linking spells to Runes doesn't work at all for me, Divine Magic has been trashed, some cults use Spirit Magic (Runemagic with a different name) where they would have been better off sticking to Divine Magic, to name but a few.

But this thread isn't about what is wrong with RQM, it's about how it differs from previous versions of RQ. When D100 comes out, we can start a thread complaining about how D100 differs from RQ.

Legendary Abilities screw up the way the game works. It changes the game form "a learn by doing/studying approach" to a "get XP to spend on cool powers" approach.

When I first read them, that's what I felt. However, having thought about them a bit, they are no different in essence from the Heroic Abilities, Gifts, Special Abilities or HeroQuest Abilities that were in previous versions of RQ. The only difference is that they have been consolidated and rationalised so that they use the same game mechanics and that they have been made generic and easily accessible. The first is good, the second not so good. I would have preferred them to be linked to cults, to special deeds and not to be easily accessible. But in principle they are a good idea.

Modularity doesn't exist. In fact, it is one of the major things that I find objectionable about Matt Sprange view of RQ. The various rules in RQ are interlinked. You can't really switch stuff in and out without creating more problems. The various "rule updates" should illustrate that. One changes causes others. The same is true with the problems with MRQ Glorantha. You can't change the gods, magic systems, and economic systems without the world changing.

What I meant by "Modularity" was the various rules for things like Equipment making, enchanting, adapting armour, weapons, ships and other vehicles, traits for creatures, flaws for Pirates, that sort of thing. These rules are modular in nature and I like the approach. That approach is better than older versions of RQ.

Equipment & Vehicle Design- No comment, since I haven't bought those supplements. Although if the rules are like the stuff that in the equipment book, there are quite a few comments on the MRQ forums to the effect of "bad, bad, worse".

People are entitled to their own opinion, of course, but I think that Arms and Equipment is one of the top 3 supplements for RQM (Pirates and Elric are the others). The magic items are perhaps a list of cool things to have, in D&D style rather than descriptions of interesting magic items in Plunder style, but the rest of it is very good.

SRD- Okay, this I do consider good. It lets people look at the book before they decide to plop down some cash. Wish I had waited for this before MRQ rather than prepaid for the game. But, hey, when I read that Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin were involved in the design for MRQ (that was in the ads), I figured it a safe bet.

OGL- Bad, bad, bad. Letting anyone publish stuff for a system means that, well, ANYONE will. While there are SOME decent OGL products, there is a lot more crap. The sheer volume of OGL products for D20 is another problem (there is so much stuff, and so many similar guidebooks, that it is tough to sort through), although a problem that is thankfully exclusive to D20.

The more the merrier in my opinion. So far, we have Stupor Mundi, a good Fantasy Europe supplement that would mesh very well with Mythic Russia, several very low cost items from Seraphim Guard, several series from Sceaptune Games, Ronin Publishers and GORE to name but a few. Perhaps they are a bit generic, but that's because they can't write for Glorantha and don;t have specific worlds/setings to work with. But they are good for ideas and are very useable as scenarios/backgrounds.

I'd rather have 100 mediocre supplements available than 5 good ones.

After all, I can always adapt a mediocre supplement. In my opinion, I have to adapt even good supplements, so there's not a lot of difference, really. As long as they have some background, spells, NPCs and scenarios then I can use them.

What's "definite" about it? Your post does nothing to prove you point.

Was I trying to prove a point? I didn't realise. Sorry about that. I'd better check first to see what the purpose of my posts should be.

Here's a few points to the contrary.

1) Mongoose's products are mostly d20 based.

Which, of course, means they can only do more D20 stuff. they couldn't possibly do something new or different.

2) Matt Sprange is an experienced D20 author with little to no experience writing for skill based systems.

And is he the author of the RQ line?

3) Reduced lethality, spell casting limited to dedicated spellcasters, and improvement awarded by the GM, all all characteristics of D&D.

Reduced lethality is a symptom of modern gaming. I'm even using it in RQ3.

Spell casting is not limited to dedicated spellcasters, quite the reverse.

Improvement awarded by the GM is something I've used for at least 15 years with absolutely no influence from D&D. HeroQuest uses it as well. It avoids many of the pitfalls of the skill-chase and allows PCs to be focussed on what they want to.

4) The admitted demographic that MRQ is aimed at are the D&Ders who are disenchanted with what D&D has grown into. That came out in the chats on the Mongoose boards back a year and a half ago. Basically, if the old RQers buy it, that's great, but they were not the target audience. D&Ders were.

I'm sure that Chaosium would love to tap into that demographic as well.

Both Mongoose and Chaosium have a (small) security blanket in that many of the old RQers will buy both RQM and D100, both to support the systems and to see what they are like. They won't all buy the supplements, but a lot of them will buy some of the supplements.

But, if they want a lot of sales, they have to try and tap into the market of people who buy RPGs and the largest share of that is the D&D/D20ers.

It's the old argument about commercial success vs integrity. You can't have integrity in a game if it a commercial success. Load of rubbish, really.

All in my opinion, of course.

The Resistance Table is an elegant way of resolving some Chracteristic vs Characteristic contests, but it is deeply flawed as it doesn't cope at all well with relative values. So, someone with SIZ 200 shoulder barging someone who is a little bit bigger at SIZ 210 (5% bigger) has a 5% chance but someone who is SIZ 10 shoulder-barging someone with SIZ 11 (10% bigger) has a 45% chance.

HeroQuest resolves as skill vs skill on almost everything and this is a far neater way of doing things.

RQM uses Opposed Contests that are not particularly well thought out, but the principle of Opposed Contests should work better than the Resistance Table. I'd use Characteristic x 5% as a skill and use Opposed Contests rather than using the Resistance Table if Opposed Contests worked better.

I know that D100/BRP is a rival system to RQM, but let's not turn this thread into "Why Mongoose RQ is rubbish".

Until D100 comes out, we won't know which is actually better.

I would guess that there will be things from RQM that would benefit D100 and things from D100 that would benefit RQM.

I know people who are just as happy being able to cut a demon's head off as being able to turn them onto a pancake.

I also know people who just don't like using lots of magic no matter what PC they play.

Sometimes, I've been in a group where there was a large difference in ability ratings and that was far more of an issue than one person being able to cast magic and another being a fighter-type.

There are no general fixes for any of these issues.

What works for one group might not work for another.

You have to really see how your group works, what the dynamics are, how people like to play their characters and then work on fixing any problems that may be occurring.

I can't see that RQM is D&D-RQ.

It is clearly based on the old RQ, more RQ2 but with some RQ3ish things.

Many of the things about RQM are good - Legendary Abilities, Modularity, Equipment Design, Vehicle Design, SRD and OGL. Some of those are apparently D&Disms, but I haven't played AD&D for a long, long time and have never played D20, so I couldn't say.

The main problems with RQM are that they brought a lot of stuff out quickly, when they would have been better consolidating the first books into one, as they have done with RQ Deluxe. Glorantha Cults 1 and 2 should have been combined, they really cocked up some of the background and some of the cults/spells, but that was probably due to unfamiliarity with existing sources or perhaps unwillingness to stick to existing sources.

But, they have brought a lot of stuff out (my wife says too much) and, as someone whose tagline is "Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width", I couldn't complain about that as they have an awful lot of width, which can only be a good thing. We can fill in the quality ourselves.

As to how RQM and BRP differ, people have covered that ground already. They are probably closer than people think, although Chaosium are understandably not keen on identifying the products very closely.

My ideal world, as people probably already know, would be for multi-statted supplements to appear or for supplements that are compatible with both to appear. But, maybe I am naive.

So, RQM is defintely not RQ for AD&D/D20.

It might not be to everyone's taste and I am stil running RQ3, but every time I've played it I've enjoyed it.

See Ya

Simon

:eek:

Quote:

Originally Posted by soltakss

...They are adventurers and are the rarest kind of adventurers as they are, by and large, successful ones and don't end up eaten or naked in a ditch...

We obviously play very different styles of BRP...

Nick Middleton

You meet a bandit, he attacks you, you kill him, you strip him of his armour and throw him into a ditch.

What did you think I meant? Oh, hmmm, perhaps occasionally .....

I always liked the Discworld (books not RPG as I've not seen the RPG) approach that you can either do it or you can't. That and the idea of chain-smoking, mysoginistic, 100 a day wizards who live for the next meal and don't have to pay in shops ("Pointy Hat Sir? That'll do nicely.")

You could make magic use dangerous, culturally taboo, illegal, difficult to learn, restricted to certain families, available only to those who are talented or whetever you want, but what happens when a player says "I really want to play a Sorcerer/Priest/Wizard/Magic User/Whatever"? Do you say "No, they are very rare in this setting" or do you set out a certain number of goals that the PC must do to use magic?

After all, PCs are very rare. They are adventurers and are the rarest kind of adventurers as they are, by and large, successful ones and don't end up eaten or naked in a ditch. So, Magic Users are rare, PCs are rare, therefore PCs are ......

Whaddya mean it doesn't work that way?

Look at modern day fantasy fiction. Magic use may be rare in the books, but one of the Heroes is invariably a magic user. That's what people like to play.

No matter how often people try to move away from stereotypes, people still want to play the same kind of characters. In our game, one player really loves playing shamans, another loves playing trader/scouts, another loves playing fighters and I love playing berserkers.

Magic Users are one of the broad stereotypes that people like to play, so I don't see why you'd want to restrict them.

Unless, of course, it is a question of restricting magic in general. But, even then you have the problem that as long as there is some magic in the world, some people are going to be able to use it and PCs are going to want to be in that group of people. Knowing PCs the way I do, if a PC wants something then a PC is going to get it despite what the GM wants.

So, perhaps banning it completely is the trick, but that restricts the fantasy element quite a lot.

Just Say Yes to Magic Use and have spells being bandied about left, right and centre. It's far more fun that way.

Use SAN for creepiness and prolonged shocks and it works really well. Imagine teenagers in a Haunted House, teenagers being chased by mass-murderers, teenagers hunted by mutants, teenagers .....

Using SAN for shock value works fairly well. Imagine turning up to see your doctor and finding him with his skin peeled off.

Using SAN to scare hardened adventurers doesn't really work that well. You see something big and dark covered in tattoos with a huge club and it ... "Oh, it's a troll, what cult is he in?" You see a beast-like creature, foul and covered with filth, with a powerful odour and it's coming closer to you ..."Oh, it's just a broo, we'll kill it!" You see a horned winged creature, taller than the tallest of men, the air is full of the smell of brimstone ..." Oh, it's just a demon, we'll kill it!"

It's like soldiers. Some come back with Post Traumatic Stress, something that can be modelled with SAN. Most don't as they get used to seeing things and it's only really extreme things that bother them.