nDervish

31 minutes ago, Baconjurer said:

What do you think about using POW as hero points? I know there's an optional rule in bgb for using MP as fate points, but I think I may make it permanent and slightly more powerful, like escaping death.

Well, RQ6/Mythras has Luck Points which serve that purpose (spend one to reroll any die affecting the character, or to downgrade a potentially-fatal wound to potentially-incapacitating, or to get an extra action in combat) and the number of Luck Points you get each session is POW/6, rounded up.  So there's at least precedent for doing something similar to what you're thinking.  Personally, I'd prefer to make them a per-session resource instead of a permanent POW loss, but YMMV.  (Note that Mythras omits POW gain from routine play.  If you're allowing POW gain on a regular basis, then burning POW permanently for Luck would probably work.)

1 hour ago, Mugen said:

Well, there is a "Regain footing" action, but it stipulates you must not be engaged with an opponent to perform it.

I must say that makes sense to me.

You're describing the RQ6 version.  Mythras modified it slightly to allow use of Regain Footing while engaged, but you must win an opposed Brawn or Athletics test or the action fails.

17 hours ago, jux said:

For my perfect game, I would wish a skill-list so that all the skills are equally important. For Athletics, Perception and Sailing - they are not comparable. Sailing is a clear dump-skill. That means all the characters will be very very similar, unless one deliberately wants to be useless.

That's demonstrably impossible.  Even if the skills are perfectly balanced mechanically, the specific campaign and specific GM will change that balance, often radically.  If you're playing a campaign where the PCs are pirates, then Sailing is going to be a pretty important skill, regardless of how useless it might be in the kinds of campaigns you're envisioning.

14 hours ago, styopa said:

Nah.  I'm not terribly fond of the determinism in picking special effects, frankly.  I think the Mythras model works well enough for mano-a-mano duelling, but doesn't scale to (my imagining) mass combats very well?  I think the action-point budget weights numbers of combatants extremely heavily - too much so for fun, really.

While Mythras is my preferred flavor overall, I do agree with both of these criticisms, to the extent of having bikeshedded some potential solutions that I'd like to try out, although I haven't actually gotten around to testing either one yet.

For the first, the obvious solution is to limit which SEs are available on any given attack, which is made even easier with TDM's release of the SE cards.  In principle, I could now print myself a customized deck of SE cards and, whenever someone gets an SE, deal them one card for every 20% skill (or whatever) and have them choose from those SEs.  Or perhaps each player holds a hand of some number of SE cards, with a new combat action allowing them to discard and replace cards from their hand by "repositioning" themselves in the melee to open up new avenues of attack.  Of course, before actually implementing this, I'll need to decide how many times each individual SE should be represented in the deck...

For the second, I've been toying with ideas for replacing the AP economy with Magic World rules (skill over 100% can be split for multiple attacks; unlimited defense attempts at a cumulative -30% penalty for each attempt after the first), but a lot of combat Special Effects interact directly with the AP system (e.g., the Pin Weapon SE prevents you from using your next AP to attack) and I haven't come up with a good way of handling them if AP are no longer a thing.

17 hours ago, Paid a bod yn dwp said:

On balance I think I prefer keeping the specials/criticals as a way of inflicting more/maximum damage from a weapon type only, and keeping the tactical manoeuvres as a special form of attack as in RQ2.  You still have tactical options but the action isn't slowed down at critical moments through deciding what special effect to use. Though i'm sure it gets easier with practice,  I think the RQ2 approach is a little less intimidating to a newbie. 

That's certainly the most common way to do it.  The problem, in my experience (and my opinion; you may not consider this "a problem") is that nobody ever uses the tactical options when they're a special form of attack, declared before rolling to hit.  This is partly because it's easiest to just take the default action (a normal attack), but, also, most game systems actively discourage their use by first penalizing the attack roll for these special attacks and then making them all-or-nothing.  Except for highly-situational cases where the special attack is basically a desperation play to get the side-effect that you absolutely need at that moment, a normal attack is almost always the better option.

Mythras turns that on its head in order to get (at least in theory) more dynamic combat.  Instead of saying "if you want to stab through a gap in your opponent's armor, you have to roll a crit; if you fail to crit, you miss entirely", Mythras says "when you crit on an attack, you have the option of stabbing through a gap in your opponent's armor (or taking a different SE); if you don't crit, you still hit and do damage normally".  The Special Effects are added on top of the normal effects of the attack and you never lose anything by using (or attempting; some can be resisted) an SE in Mythras, so they get used a lot more often.

23 hours ago, Newt said:

I'm erring towards a system where only the player rolls, and their roll is modified if the opponent is especially competent.

Given the context of it being a BRP-family game, if you want to replace opposed rolls with a single roll, wouldn't the Resistance Table be the obvious way to do so?

Note that I like opposed rolls in general, and blackjack-style opposed rolls in particular, but, if you don't and you want to get rid of them, then why reinvent the wheel?

On 8/16/2016 at 7:32 AM, Mankcam said:

I wonder if Ben Monroe is in a position to be involved with a licencee.. ?

He recently popped up in a related thread on Big Purple and said that he's "moved on from BRP games", with a pretty clear implication that he wouldn't be interested in doing any further work on MW-related projects.

7 hours ago, Questbird said:

Practically that is true for most people who use the normal mathematical method (the critical results are considered to subsume the specials), but 20% chance of special is what is stated in the rules.

Ah, sure...  Make me break out the actual rules...  BGB, p. 13 defines a Special Success as "A roll of 1/5 of the required score for success indicates that your character performed exceptionally well and achieves a greater result than a traditional success."  Note that it says nothing about the actual chance of achieving a special, only the roll which indicates that you have done so.  p.11 defines a Critical Success as "This is the result of a skill check roll that is 1/20 (or 5%) of the regular chance of success."  Again, it is defined solely in terms of the roll which produces it, not the odds of a success being critical.

Since a roll under 1/20 of skill will always also be under 1/5 of skill, the 5% of hits that are crits necessarily come out of the 20% which are specials (20% of successes are superior, with 15% special + 5% crit).  The rules do not support 25% of successes being superior (20% specials plus an additional 5% crits), as there is no bonus triggered on rolling below 1/4 of the regular chance of success.

18 hours ago, RosenMcStern said:

It overcomes this problem outside combat with opposed rolls - where a higher roll trumps the lower roll even when the level of success is the same. But attacks/parries are not opposed, they are differential rolls. You need a crit to trump your opponent's normal parry.

While that's technically true, an attack vs. parry "tie" (i.e., same level of success) will still do damage if the parrying weapon is smaller than the attacking weapon, so it's still not necessarily a "no effect" result.  The real point here being that RQ6 has more factors playing into this than just "crit or no crit?".

11 hours ago, Questbird said:

Roll d100

1 or 2 on the units die is a special. If the result is equal to or under your skill, special success; over and it's a special failure (optional)

If you roll an odd 'tens' result, eg 10, 30, 50 etc. which is equal to or under your skill, it's a critical success*

Note that this makes specials more common than in the vanilla rules.  In vanilla, it's actually only a 15% chance of a special, not 20%.  (Special isn't just "under 20% of skill", but "under 20% and over 5% of skill".)

The way I'd personally do it is:

- Units die 5 or 0 = special

- Units die is 0 and tens die is odd = crit

Also note that any alternate method (including this one) may have 1% variations in the crit/special chances compared to vanilla, depending on the method and the roll's base success chance, simply due to things rounding differently between methods.  And, as Mugen pointed out, simple non-division-based systems start to come apart when the base chance exceeds 100%.

19 hours ago, K Peterson said:

Different editions of RuneQuest had the Tap spell which did "characteristic-sucking" from unwilling participants. I can't remember, though, if that was a characteristic-drain-for-characteristic-gain, or if the drain converted into usable magic points...

Can't speak to other editions, but the RQ6 Tap is characteristic-to-characteristic, at a 5:1 ratio.  ("For instance if a sorcerer cast Tap (STR) at Intensity 7 on four targets, each of the victims would lose seven points of STR whilst the sorcerer’s own strength would be augmented by +6 points.")

18 hours ago, Texarkana said:

The way I got around my RQ6 players always spending their first six improvement checks on Combat Style, Endurance, Evade, Willpower and Magic Skills, was to start giving them 10+ improvement checks whenever a significant quest was concluded (typically around 4-6 game sessions, or once every 2-3 months real time).

Am I correct to assume that this is coupled with a house rule that you can only spend one XR on a skill at a time?  Otherwise, it seems that players who would normally say "I get three rolls, so one each to Combat Style, Endurance, and Evade" would just say "I get twelve rolls, so four each to Combat Style, Endurance, and Evade" for the same net effect, just chunkier.

Also, doesn't this dilute the effect of the Experience Modifier from CHA?  Getting 1 extra XR when 10 are awarded is much less significant than getting 1 extra when 3 are awarded.  (Not that I think this is necessarily a bad thing...  I've never particularly liked the Experience Modifier in the first place and may have houseruled it out entirely if I were using XR-based advancement instead of tick-based.)

Not currently running anything, but bouncing back and forth between working on two homebrew settings and trying to decide which one I want to try to get people together to actually play in.

The first is a post-technological, Dying Earth/Xothique-type setting focused around an ancient city on a fragment of the shattered Earth.  Definite Tekumel-like influences in social structures and organization-centricity, but based in smaller guilds rather than wide-ranging clans.  I think this is the stronger option, but tend to either bog down or waffle on a lot of the social and historical elements, so progress tends to be slow.

The second is a more generic post-apoc Wasteland/Road Warrior concept, starting off with three or so potential PC origin settlements, then growing ad hoc from there as characters explore and learn about the world around them.  This sort of organic, exploration-focused sandbox is what I've normally run in the past and has the advantage of being really quick and easy to get up and running, but they also tend to be somewhat generic.

Either way, my core system is Mythras/RQ6 with bits and pieces from other BRP-based games and various house rules.  The second setting would also involve a heavy dose of the Rubble & Ruin monograph.

19 hours ago, threedeesix said:

Even when playing a non-class based game, my players like to specialize. One wants to be the thief, one the spell caster, one the healer, etc. They find that the Experience Roll award system lets them retain that aspect, where a skill check system typically doesn't. They don't necessarily want to be told that only the thief can climb walls (as in AD&D), but the thief wants to be the best at it.

Check-based advancement can cover specialization implicitly:  The one who wants to be the thief does thief stuff.  The one who wants to be the spell caster casts spells.  The one who wants to be the healer heals.  If they're the ones using those skills the most, then they're going to be the ones getting the most checks on those skills and will be the ones who are most likely to improve in them.  The thief is the best at climbing walls because he's the one who climbs walls most often.

Also, training.  Even if everyone uses all skills equally during the session, they can still choose to each train within their specializations during downtime.  Although, if they're choosing to all use all skills equally during the session, I'd question whether they really want specialization anyhow.

31 minutes ago, RosenMcStern said:

I think few people are getting what Atg is trying to say. The point is that the tickbox approach makes characters advance also in areas where they would not - normally - wish to "spend" a limited resource. Yet it is quite dull that after spending half of a session on  a tree a character does not improve Climb because the player wishes to privilege Dodge and Crossbow instead.

One great thing about the tickbox method is that the character sheet itself tells you your character's history. That odd +4% in Sleight of Hand is there for a reason, not just because you did not know where to put that last IR.

Yes, to both points!  Using a skill leads to getting better at that skill and, conversely, if you're good at a skill, it's because you've been using (and/or training) that skill.  That's what I like about check-based advancement.

19 hours ago, krzysztof said:

Nevertheless, "talking sensibly" with 35-years-old nerds who spent over 20 years on gaming together is always tricky, especially when there are 2H swords within their reach.

2H swords within reach, you say?

Time to stage a practical demonstration! 

"First, throw this sword at <insert target here>.  Then hit it with the sword normally, and we'll compare the damage done each way."

2 hours ago, krzysztof said:

No, not halberd, but greatsword (sorry for mess with halberd example). Unfortunately, as pointed out by K Peterson, rules clearly allow throwing greatsword with practically the same damage as greatsword in hand-to-hand combat, but bigger base chance of success.

Not quite.

The System Notes on BGB 83 say that you can add half your damage bonus to an improvised thrown weapon's base damage.  Nowhere does is say that a greatsword has the same base damage as an improvised thrown weapon as it has when used normally.  On the contrary, when you throw a greatsword, you're not using it as "a greatsword with range", you're using it as a SIZ 3.5 improvised thrown weapon.  The fact that the object you're throwing happens to be a greatsword is largely beside the point.

So set the base damage as you feel is appropriate for any thrown SIZ 3.5 object (which will surely be less than the 2d8 of a greatsword; maybe 1d8, given that a thrown short spear does 1d6+1?), with the possibility to Impale on a Special, since it's pointed.

Also don't forget that, per the same System Notes, anyone under SIZ 14 has to roll on the resistance table to be able to throw it in the first place.

20 hours ago, Baulderstone said:

...The Sunder card is going to spend a lot more time in the hands of people that can't use it. Same with Impale Impaling weapons should be able to Impale, and it feels odd to lock the result behind a card draw. Entangling weapons no longer seem worth having in the game at all. 

Certain SEs really don't feel like they should be restricted. Close and Open Range don't seem like things that should be restricted to showing up maybe once every other combat...

...I'm simply trying to identify issues that the system could create.

Definitely some good points there!  Also, one other issue that you haven't mentioned:  The same restrictions should reasonably apply to any NPCs, monsters, etc., which means that, as the GM, I'd have to either make extremely heavy use of the mook rules or manage a separate hand of SE cards for each non-PC combatant, which would quickly become its own organizational nightmare.

14 hours ago, styopa said:

Meh, I think "trip" and some of these others were artifacts of the extraordinarily punishing nature of SEs in RQ6...

"Extraordinarily punishing" in comparison to other RPGs, perhaps.  In comparison to actual combat, I think less so.

Or, as I told one of my players when he complained about prone being too harsh, "Lay down on the ground by my feet, then try to stand back up while I beat on you with a stick."

8 hours ago, Vile said:

That makes sense to me. I had always assumed that variable armour in Stormbringer was there to model different armour values for different body parts in the absence of hit locations. No Idea where I got that idea because there was no intertube at that time, but I'm sticking with it.

That was my immediate assumption as well when I first encountered variable armor points in BGB.

You can get a free quickstart version of the Conan rules from DriveThru if you want more details of how it all works, but the actual meaning of how that list is structured is that you have a "Personality" attribute (more-or-less equivalent to Charisma in various other games, including some RQ/BRP flavors) which is used as the baseline skill value for Animal Handling, Command, etc. skills.  So I suspect it's not really what you thought.

17 hours ago, Baulderstone said:

Trying to fix the problem of players liking a handful of SEs seems a bad idea. It's saying, "Oh you like doing that, huh? Well, how about I take that away from you." You are much better off presenting combats that make other SEs more attractive than locking options down.

I don't particularly agree.  In just about every other aspect of RPG, whether on the roleplaying side or the tactical side or the resource management side or whatever else, it's generally accepted that having constraints on the players' options is a good thing.  Why shouldn't that apply to SEs?  Is "no, you can't buy a great axe in this town because nobody is selling one" really all that different from "no, you can't cause a Bleed SE this round because you don't have that card"?

In any case, I simplified the origin of the card idea somewhat.  It actually came from a desire to allow players to play with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the rules, which isn't really possible with RQ6-as-written, with SEs being the biggest obstacle to that.  (Not just knowing what SEs are available, but also the strategy around knowing when it's better to pick an SE that can be resisted vs. picking one that works automatically.)  From there, I jumped to using SE cards pedagogically, in which case I would have allowed players to use any SE they know the mechanics of, whether it's in their hand or not.  And then, from that point, using the cards restrictively, where you can only use an SE that's in your hand, is only a small step further.  I don't know which of these modes would work best in practice, but I fully suspect that it would vary from group to group based on the individual table's preferences.

8 hours ago, eyraud said:

did any one consider/try taking away the choice and making special effects a random result?

I haven't actually tried it, but I've been toying for a while with the idea of printing up Special Effect cards and dealing three or five (or maybe Combat Style divided by 20?) to each player, then have them select SEs out of their hand.  This was originally intended as a way to ease new players into the system and avoid the decision paralysis of having a dozen-plus options, but I could also see interpreting your hand as being the maneuvers that you're currently in a position to attempt and restricting SE choices to only those that you have the cards for.  This would also deal with the complaints some have had about players always choosing the same small number of SEs.

5 hours ago, skoll said:

One pretty fundamental thing, that I really, really they hope they won't go back to, is the POW economy.

A sentiment which seems to be shared by at least a few others here...  Why is that?  I've only played franken-RQ6, so I haven't seen POW economy in practice, but it's something that looks good to me in theory, so I've been considering feeding it to my monster.  What drawbacks have I (potentially) missed?

(Skill fluctuations arising from RQ6's stat+stat baselines aren't a concern for me.  I use software to track my game's characters and it takes care of that automatically.  And I assume that wouldn't have been a factor in RQ2/3 anyhow.)

18 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Oh, and for those of you that use a later version of RuneQuest, why?

Because the combat Special Effects in RQ6 are one of my all-time favorite things I've ever seen in RPG mechanics and I have no nostalgia for older versions, having never played them - my first experience with BRP systems was buying RQ6 and BGB, then sitting down and reading both of them.  I also prefer RQ6's stat+stat skill baselines and opposed rolls over the resistance table, so that pretty much makes it the obvious choice for my base system.  There are parts I port over from BGB, MW, etc., such as skill ticks, but, for all the really big core chunks, I like the RQ6 version better.

16 hours ago, Archivist said:

In D&D variants, you get rough character balance because of how classes are designed. In a pure point-buy system, like vanilla BRP or GURPS or Savage Worlds, you get a balance based on the points. If you just hack in "stuff," how do you make sure that the guy with access to magic from that Magic system you've chosen to use isn't vastly overpowered compared to the other characters?

I don't.  It's not something I even think about consciously.

Now, I do adjust things if they don't "feel right" and part of "feels right" is that it's not so strong or weak that taking it or avoiding it is a total no-brainer, so things tend to end up more-or-less balanced because of that, but I don't make a point of sitting down and crunching numbers or running simulations to confirm balance.  I just don't care that much about it, plus RPGs are so flexible and wide-open with what can happen that everything ultimately ends up being situational.  The ability that's utterly OP today can be worthless in next week's game and vice-versa.

6 hours ago, Mankcam said:

I like Pendragon passions, although I'm unsure that they may be too limiting nowadays, and perhaps there is another way of putting an emphasis on personality traits.

I like them too, but going heavily into that (or, really, any) sort of personality mechanic is a risky move, considering how many people look at it and reflexively object that "I should control my character's actions, not the dice!"

I'm using RQ6 as my base system these days, but always have BGB, Magic World, Pendragon, etc. close to hand when I'm writing things up.

6 hours ago, Jeff said:

If you need to know how to handle a situation, you look down the character sheet until you find an applicable skill. If you don't find an applicable skill, you are hosed.

That is exactly what I dislike about the Design Rules from the post.  I don't want my players to look at their character sheet and say, "Hmm...  Which of these buttons can I press now?"  I want them to look inside and say, "Hmm...  If I were my character in this situation, what would I do?"  It looks to me like what you (and the post) are describing is what The Cool Kids are calling "mechanics-first" gaming these days, while I favor what they call "fiction-first".  "Find a mechanic to use, then describe an action to rationalize it" vs. "describe what you want to do, then figure out what (if any) mechanic applies".

And, yes, I'm one of those dirty hippie GMs whose players don't always have character sheets at all and aren't required to learn the game's rules.  I prefer that they think in terms of game mechanics as little as possible during play.

14 hours ago, TrippyHippy said:

I do think that the option to shift your SR, in order to gain more control over hit location is a good one though. I could even see it being used to add to the accuracy of the shot in 5% increments also. Eg Add +2 to your SR for a +10% accuracy on your attack roll.

This makes the fighting order less predictable, but also gives some tactical control to the players.

I can definitely see your thinking, but it seems like something which would be wide open to minmaxing abuse, with players doing all they can to get their characters as fast as possible so that they can maximize their "delaying" bonus.  (If you're on SR5, then I want to be SR2 when I duel you so that I can get a free +10% to hit by delaying until SR4 every round.  But, then, if you survive my attack, it ends up benefiting you even more, since you can get +25% by delaying until SR10...)