RosenMcStern

I agree absolutely. A newbie with a MP matrix used to be more effective with attack spells than an experienced caster relying solely on his soul. <unpopular-comment>One of the improvements of MRQ over old-school BRP is that the contest to overcome the target resistance is skill-based, not characteristic based.</unpopular-comment> Let us see how this evolves in the various variants of the new BRP.

Loreena McKennit. In fact I discovered celtic music by listening to it while gaming, many years ago.

Especially because there is no need to start them, they happen spontaneously. As expected, I got a copy of the license terms on the first business day after I asked. I hope Triff has received one too. Point #23 is particularly interesting, and it alone made it worth reading all the legalese. Even though BRP is not OGL, I think we will see several independent publications in the future. Now, for which day in May exactly is Deluxe Edition 1 scheduled ? :thumb:

You pinpointed the problem. The fixes are here. It is mostly spell corrections, which means that the Big Complainers of the MRQ community find it usable, after all.

On the contrary, I remembered. I mentioned "cantrips at zero PP", and that is one of the improvements in the magic system. Treat wounds is one of the spells that need reworking, because repeated castings have a cumulative effect. Together with Shapechange, Fly and others. But this is the first time we have a Malkioni Magic system that does not make you feel "Sheesh, we should rework it from scratch!"

This has been discussed for a long time on the appropriate forum. The fix is already on the MRQ Wiki: if you fail the roll, you pay 1 MP (or PP if you prefer). However, if you took the time to actually test it in play, you would notice that the zero magic point rule is definitely the best improvement, and the system is worth trying even without the fix.

My bad. I was referring to the automatic casting roll only. In any case, it was rather confusing on the part of Chaosium to name it Sorcery, since traditionally RQ Sorcery it skill-based magic while the other magic systems are auto-casting or characteristic-based. But the name was taken from Stormbringer, yes.

As the "Safelstran man" here, I have played with ALL the versions and can give you a nice account of the four variations (I'll not count RQ4 in although it has its merits). To avoid confusion, I'll refer to Sorcery as Malkioni Magic, as BRP's Sorcery is the equivalent of Divine Magic in RQ. Original RQ3: a sorcerer in RQ3 was in fact the weakest of magicians, and required 100+ stored Power Points to be viable. His role was just that of the supporting character who used to cast long-lasting spells to enhance the party's characteristics, as it took him two melee rounds to cast a spell that could disable an opponent, whereas a simple Befuddle acted in two strike ranks. Skill only affected how many times you had to retry before your spell worked, and an Adept without a decent array of Intellect Spirits was even weaker than a beginner due to the flawed Free INT rule (yes, RuneQuest had flaws, too ) RQ3 with errata (or Games Workshop): the revised Multispell rules finally made Malkioni Magic superior in combat to other magic systems. A powerful wizard was able to take down a squad of men with a single spell, and this was more fun to play. Sandy's Malkioni Magic: this was intentionally aimed at Glorantha, and worked decently. You have to introduce a new score for characters, Presence, and this requires additional bookkeeping, but your power is now connected to adherence to some principles ("vows"), which is more Malkioni, and skill at casting, not Free INT. I used it for Henotheists and Stygians as secondary cult magic instead of Spirit Magic and it worked fine, as players were forced to roleplay their cult vows to get more magic. Sorcerous Humakti with permanent Damage Boosting on their swords are .... scary :shocked: Warning: do not read further. You might not like what you read. You were warned. Especially the One who Breeds Amphibians. Mongoose Sorcery: it is by far the best incarnation of RuneQuest Malkioni Magic, if you accept the fact that a half dozen spells are totally botched and need total rewriting. A wizard reacts faster than a theist magician, and once he reaches a good skill with magic he can cast devastating spells at a cost of one or two Power Points, plus cantrips for zero Power Points. This is the first BRP magic system that allows you to have a powerful magician that does not rely on external Power Point sources. This is The Way it was Meant to Be. (waits for the people with the tar and feathers)

Oh, there are many similarities. The RQ Companion is almost thorough copi... - erm, I mean, paraphrased from the RQ3 Gamemaster Book. It appears someone did not realize they could have made a RuneQuest Ships out of it. In any case, I am pleased with the situation as is. I have seen the RQ Slayers PDF and the thought of the trademark being owedy by WotC makes me shiver (RuneQuest D20?).

Simon said it all, but I'll add two more details. a) Both? There have been five editions of RQ so far (one unpublished). They are not [legally] different because Mongoose made some changes. They are because Issaries (the Trademark owner) wanted something different, yet recognizable as RQ. It was intentional. Whereas the similarities between BRP and previous editions of RQ, which are much deeper, are intentional too.

Pardon me, but I have GMed enough RQ/BRP/CoC/whatever to have a clear idea about what skill most fighting-enabled characters tend to have. Excluding Soltakss' campaigns perhaps. Being a BRP forum, I think trolling is allowed here. Maybe it is just a matter of calling it "uzing" instead. As for resisting or not, the point is that when you come out with statements like "Opposed rolls create confusion and not realism", or someone writes "The Opposed Roll Taint" - can't remember if it was you - it reminds me of religion rather than a creative and intelligent way of having fun, and so I feel that you deserve a polite, but firm, reply. I am not a great fan of the "vox populi" principle, but please note that most people who write for, or simply play, BRP or MRQ or HQ or whatever tend to use or prefer a somewhat-opposed roll system. Of course I am the first to be suspicious of opposed rolls when using a matrix [it was ME who ran a poll to know what exactly people thought about it on The Other Forum, remember?]. Of course nobody forces you to give up your opinion. If you do not like opposed rolls, just play RuneQuest 2 or 3. They are still great games, and there are still copies available on eBay.

I would rather say "in the 1-20" range. We want to give an idea of the order of magniturde, not the dice rolled to generate a character. The concept of weapon+personal-armor is poorly explained. We should split it in two: - Defines damage done by a hand attack as the sum of weapon damage and personal damage bonus (or malus) [note that this applies to D&D too] - Describes the effect of armor as decreasing the actual damage done and not influencing the chance to do damage

Sigh! This is really turning into a religious dispute. Most battles take place between opponents in the 80%-90% skill range. Using non-opposed rolls, two combatants with 95% skill take some ten melee rounds to resolve a combat - no, to hit once, since you are not guaranteed to win a fight after the first hit. The "over 100%" rule only applies to limited cases, as most characters never exceed 100%. In a real situation the difference in skill between two opponents always matters, be it a tackle in a soccer match or a duel to the death, while with yor suggestion skill difference only matters when skill goes above 100%. No, it doesn't. It is in systems like HeroQuest where all rolls are opposed versus a "Standard difficulty" that things can get messy. In BRP a roll is opposed only if someone is actively tryng to counter what you are attempting to do. Like landing a blow upon one of his most beloved organs

But please don't speak the name here, or you might have your tongue cut off by some Zealot :eek:

Being able to publish for BRP "as it is" would be enough for me. With all that options, there is very little need for houserules. Anything I sent them over the years got a reply. And we are talking snailmail, not electronic.

Me too. Let's see what happens. Now the big question is: as there is a lot of independent stuff already out for MRQ, will publishers be allowed to make their products multi-compatible?

This was quite obvious, of course. The OGL is definitely the best detail in MRQ (well, there are other advantages of course, let's be fair). In any case the system is being slowly corrected over the months.

@Lord Twig: I agree with your ruling, and in fact I also like to rule that a 1-handed weapon can never block more than its wielder's STR (STR x 1.5 for a two-handed weapon or shield). However, this sort of rules, although very realistic, tend to be not very appreciated because they add complexity. Furthermore, if your magically enhanced sword cannot totally block the attack of a weapon with Bladesharp on it, you are unbalancing combat magic. Frogspawner: In a fencing or kendo contest, it works exactly that way - either you hit or you miss, no "amount of damage to be blocked". And this is better portrayed by an opposed roll than by checking if the blow overcomes the APs. However, in a real battle you will see a lot of blows clumsily blocked with shields and wapons just to avod being killed, so I just allow both options - opposed and unopposed rolls.

Yes, this is correct when the parryng weapon is inherently magical or, as in the case you mentioned, the parrier has heroquesting powers (<i>Garyunder</i> can jump on a thrown javelin, not everyone). I have witnessed and handled several occasions when a player character wielded a true adamant weapon, and in this case we just followed the AP rule - the weapon has infinite armor points and thus can parry anything. But we are speaking of an item forged for the gods, not a mere AP-enhancing enchantment. In this case the point was "Yes, you can do this with your weapon as it actually becomes, when you are on the Hero Plane, Arkat's Unbreakable Sword." rather than "Oh, your weapon has a lot of APs, you can parry it."

Indeed, this is a subjec that might arise in real play. Some time ago (fifteen years, in fact - please forgive my senile babbling) I introduced the Chaos Gaggle in my campaign. And it happened that a Rune Lord attempted to parry an attack from the Zeech [for those who lack this widespread knowledge, a Zeech is a land-crawling chaotic whale]. Now my GM ruling was "let's figure out the damage and see if the parrier survives" - there was the chance of a critical, after all. The most experience player contested me: "It's a whale, now what chance can he stand?". My GM judgement would be different now - I would just skip the attempt. Rules should cover the average situations, not the extremes. A whale ram cannot be parried, no matter the APs of your weapon.

I have run a RQ3 campaign with characters having several combat and Sorcery skills above 100%, and the skills were really useful. There was a lot of heroquesting in that campaign, and the 120-150% skills were really useful for gameplay. As for sorcery, since we used Sandy's Sorcery, the spells at 120% could be manipulated up to 24 points of effect, so yes, the extra skill was not wasted!

The discussion is getting messy 'cause we are discussing MRQ rather than BRP. Anyway, the official position in MRQ after the player's update is that you *can* parry a brontosaur. After a long debate on The Other Forum I think that the reality is that you can parry a Brontosaur, but only with a polearm, i.e. something that can damage the creature or hold it at bay. Parrying in that case is rather anticipating the opponent's move and feninting so that it does not really have a chance to attack, or its attack is disrupted - difficult but not thoroughly impossible. A shield or short weapon would be pointless in this case. The problem is "how do we define a rule of thumb to decide what can parry what?" The point is that any Parry is always also a partial Dodge, and any Dodge is facilitated by the fact you have a weapon. In cases like the above (the Bronto) I would rather go for a Dodge augmented by the parrying skill with the weapon in hand. In my current RQ3 group we are experimenting with penalties to Dodge if you have no weapon in hand - unless of course you are dodging an unarmed attack.

We are talking different system variants. MRQ is more similar to RQ3 (with lowered weapon APs) while SB is already focusing more on skill. There is no "weapon damage on criticals" in any edition of RQ, for instance.

Your ability to parry effectively no longer depends on how sturdy is your weapon, but on your skill.

<mrq>Ah, The Big Complaint #2, you mean! The "attack succeeds but AP is subtracted" happens only if both roll the same number (and none has a skil above 100%). Many people complained that this makes APs useless, but I think they are wrong because this is effectively what happens in CoC and "default", AP-less BRP, so it is a perfectly viable rule. I houserule that damage reduction by APs happens only if you have a shield, effectively differentiating between Parry and Block.</mrq> Yeah, I remember. I had not suspected there were so many synonyms for the word "Beetle". And I have a degree in Entomology!