deleriad

Indeed. The "mouth-feel" of a die rolling mechanic is definitely part of the intangible element of a game. It's sort of RNA vs DNA. If the DNA of the game is its basic building blocks then, mechanically you have various ways of implementing d100 roll under but they can feel very different. Likewise a skill list is in BRP's DNA but the name of the skills, the granularity of them, splitting into common/advanced feel like variations in expression rather than fundamentals hence thinking of them as RNA. I would say RD100 has some variations from BRP in its DNA (especially non-linear scaling of special results) but is mostly difference in expression. Same with Mythras with the major variations being combat and "POW economy". Technically, if you have a d100 roll under system where you always have a 5% chance of success if you can roll then whether you set the actual die results of 1-5 as auto-success or you say any roll within 5 points of your skill is an auto-success or some other auto-success mechanic then the DNA of the mechanic is the same but how it feels in practice can be quite different. (D&D went through agonies with THAC0 charts and AC.) It will be interesting to see what happens with various BRUGES fantasy heartbreakers now that ORC is here. It's the first time that (unlamented Legend aside) it's been easy to homebrew traditional BRP.

Ultimately that comes down to determining what the levels of success "mean" and what the ratio of them is. For example, if a "good" success happens in about 1/10 of all successes then how much "better" should it be than a normal success? Probably not 10 times better but clearly, because it is a pretty rare occurrence it needs to be significantly better. If a good success happens about half the time that you succeed then it will clearly be better than normal but possibly not "twice as good". To a large extent, the whole random number element of the game hinges on this. As a historical note, D&D did not originally have criticals (or fumbles) and Gygax argued against them for as long as he could. He believed in limiting randomness and extreme cases. RQ definitively proved that players love the drama of extreme results. As a game, the moment of rolling the dice is (or at least should be) one of the most dramatic parts of the game. Some players hate and fear it; some love it and embrace it. For me, I like the notion that a "special" success is almost non-existent for a novice but quite common (or maybe even more common than a normal success) for a master; that means the chance for a special success needs to be non-linear in some fashion. Probably then we should use log tables. It was good enough for DC Heroes. 2D10, exploding doubles with a log base e lookup table is where it's at.

Middle aged adults have been complaining about how ignorant young people are since the dawn of time. Plato and Socrates did it. So I have zero respect for any opinion that includes it. In general, people tend to be good at the things they need to be good at. If you're designing a *game* to sell then it needs to be engaging, fun (for some value of fun), accessible and so on otherwise no one will buy it or play it. Probably the most fundamental element of a role-playing *game* is how do you determine what happens when there is a degree of randomness present but the imaginary characters have different capabilities that might affect the outcome. If you then think in terms of a "user interface" how do you design the method of determination so that it is intuitive, easy to operate and is engaging when it happens. RQ and the percentile system came about, in part, because Stafford, Perrin et al found the d20 mechanic in D&D unsatisfying. They preferred the greater complexity and granularity of d100 which was a brave move at a time when many wargamers found buying and using a d20 to be problematic. Interestingly, Steve Perrin stuck with d100 but Greg Stafford preferred simpler systems and moved back to d20 for Pendragon, his magnum opus. There are undoubtedly multiple ways to design a d100 roll-under system, one of which is that which RQ pioneered: multiple levels of success and failure derived arithmetically from a [potentially modified] success chance. It's possibly also important to remember that the first two systems (RQ & CoC and, implicitly in the BRP booklet) that 100% was the cap on skill ability. In RQ you had to be a hero (Rune Lord) to get a skill over 100. At the most abstract level my personal preference for a d100 roll-under system is one where your skill doesn't change in-game during a test, where it is capped at 100% and where levels of success and failure can be read directly from the roll without performing any sort of arithmetical operation. You could actually argue that d100 was the first type of this system because you rolled two dice and rather than adding them up you read one as a 10's die and one as a unit die. Anyway, division and arithmetic in a game is fine for those who like that sort of thing. If I were designing a game now that I wanted to sell, I wouldn't include a mechanic that involved division and multiplication unless the game was about division and multiplication.

*I* can do this stuff easily. *I* don't have a problem with it. A surprising number of people I have played with, can't. I've also seen way too many sessions get bogged down by someone doing a skill roll, getting + something or other, - something or other, making a roll and trying to figure out whether they have succeeded yet alone whether it is a critical, special or something else. Given that the name of the game is *Basic*... you don't really expect to be hit by having to consult a page full of numbers to see if you succeeded at something. If I am just running a one-off for people who don't usually play and/or are unfamiliar with the system I usually keep skills under 100 and tell them if you roll a double it's twice as good if you succeed and twice as bad if you fail. If it's a hard test then they have to roll twice and succeed twice (keep the worst roll). If it's easy and they fail, they get a second chance for free. Though it may seem like a time sink, the second roll mechanic is surprisingly dramatic and engaging. "Almost impossible" - if you roll 01-05 you succeed through some form of blind luck otherwise you fail. "Very easy" - if you roll 96+ something goes wrong otherwise you succeed. Skill vs skill - best roll wins. (high roll breaks tie) Mechanically it's not robust enough for a full rpg system but as an intro it works perfectly well.

I find in actual play, dice flipping works well around 50-80% but after around 90% it starts becoming trivial. Players do always start asking questions like if something is easy then what about a "very easy" option and so on. The advantage of numerical modifiers is that you can always make the modifier bigger. Also some (but not) all players love having skills of 200%, 300% and so on. Personally, I like capped skill ranges and I don't like doing math during a game. In some ways I would like (as an example) the gap in ability between 80% and 90% to be a lot more significant than the gap between 20% and 30%. However that is not easy to achieve. The R100 method is an elegant way of doing that because there are a lot more special chances in the range between 80-90 than there is between 20-30. Not sure if it is still the case, but in Call of Cthulhu it used to be the case that you couldn't get above 100 in a skill without modifiers during a skill test. That was partly to keep player characters at risk of failure. Mastery in BRP was always pitched at 90%, not 100%. Personally, I would like to see skills over 80% to be rare and at 90% or over to be exceptional. That does mean playing with a capped range and some sort of accelerator which gives skills in that range some form of non-linear advantage over those below.

I thought the cleverest system I have seen is that if your units die is lower than your 10s and you succeed then you "special succeed" (likewise failure). E.g. skill 41% then your possible range of special successes are 10, 20, 21, 30, 31, 32, 40, 41. As with all these types of dice tricks though many things are impacted 1. How good is a "special". In this case it can't be as "good" as a traditional BRP critical. If it is then you have a game with a lot more criticals and everything that implies. 2. Awkwardness of checking a dice roll. Sounds odd but it is easy to forget to apply this. It's the sort of thing that tends to trip up players. 3. Skill progression is no longer equal. You get more benefit increasing your skill from 41-43% than you do for increasing it 46-48% because you get more specials. 4. Stops scaling at 100%. So you really have to decide that 01-100 is your skill range or come up with an alternative. In my BRP fantasy heartbreaker I would have skills that cap at 100, modifiers that affect the dice rolled (rather than the skill value) and a specially marked units die. (Or else an additional die that is rolled along with the d100.)

No, that was Pete and Loz. I did come up with an adaption of folk magic to Gloranthan spirit magic but I forget whether that was used in AiG - I would have to dig out my copy of AiG. I got asked, as a thought experiment, to come up with an adaptation of theism to Gloranthan rune magic. Apparently it got criticised by Chaosium for being too much like HeroQuest which, I thought, was the point. Must admit to getting a bit salty about that 🙂 Although I admire the content that Chaosium has put out for RQ Glorantha, Mythras is my preferred flavour of D100.

Probably very difficult. Lots of issues but fundamentally RQG works as a "POW economy" where you sacrifice POW and regain it in order to gain benefits while RQ6/Mythras works with your POW as a limit and threshold; you don't sacrifice and rebuild POW, you use it a bit like a storage tank. RQG (like RQ2/3) also has an economy of magic items that you can use to enhance your abilities while Mythras (largely) doesn't. Full disclosure, I was one of the co-authors who wrote the long articles on animism in RQ6 (as was). I love the system but it did feel a bit like grappling with quantum mechanics at times. Obviously in a house campaign you just do whatever floats your boathouse but I would find trying to add it to the RQG mechanical structure more problems than it is worth.

I do have a bunch of the Obscurity Inc fanzines; it was the fanzine of the University of Edinburgh RPG soc, GEAS. I wrote a review of RQ3 for it; I don't remember what other RQ material it had but can dig them out and see.

The less money bit I agree with but the rest I'm not so sure of. There were some randomly inserted colour plates and sub-Warhammer illustrations that had little to do with what was going on and tonally at odds with the source material. The way they cut up standard and advanced also made the game largely unplayable without both. And, as you say the binding was also terrible. Obviously they were trying to recapture the success of their UK printings of RQ2 and CoC but that window had shut. As a UK RQ player who had forked out my life savings for RQ3 I was excited at first to see GW producing UK prints but they left a bad taste in my mouth. Funnily enough, my RQ3 boxed set has held up a lot better than the hardbacks despite many years of intense use.

I got a copy of this back in the day (the one without the Shaman rules) and, initially, our gaming group were keen to try it out. We had mostly been playing non-Gloranthan RQ3 since RQ3 came out so I was particularly keen to see how Glorantha would be re-embedded particularly because I was Jonesing to run a generational campaign set in Jonatela. After ploughing through it, doing some char gen and starting to convert Rainbow Mounds, we gave up. It was just so much detail. At the point, as a group, we were quite into detail in lengthy campaigns but on the whole we were tending to simplify game play and character sheets. Less book-keeping more playing. RPGs in general had been on a trajectory of increasingly complicated and detailed systems from the mid-80s and RQ4 would have been the poster child for that. I'm not sure there's anything "wrong" with RQ4 as a system in its own right but it was just too much work to enjoy it. That said, I had mixed-opinions when I learned it had been cancelled because it meant that the RQ hiatus would continue. Plus I wasn't really keen on the narrative games that were emerging: ultimately I enjoy the type of world-building that BRP style games push you towards.

This has happened to me too. I remember a player who just couldn't get her head around the notion that rolling 00 was 100 rather than zero.

I use doubles for criticals/fumbles when playing with people who are basically non-gamers. It's simple and quite intuitive "twice as good/bad." I also use exact skill rating as auto success (e.g. 73% skill, roll 73 is auto success and even better than a regular double) and 00 as auto-fail. I don't use 01-05 as auto success or 96-00 as auto fail. I don't use skill modifiers. If something is hard I'll say you'll have to succeed twice or if it is easy, you get two chances to do it. Really hard is only doubles will succeed. (Really easy is you succeed but you can roll to see if you get a double if you like.) I have occasionally mulled over trying this in a "real" campaign but life has got in the way of regular role-playing. I did try using flipping for a while but it always felt kind of awkward.

Although I haven't enjoyed many of the decisions that Chaosium took with RQ I think this starter set is all manner of amazing. It feels like all the right ways to introduce Glorantha to new players while scratching that nostalgia itch of us oldies. The visuals in particular are beautiful and evocative; they give the world a look that is familiar enough to latch onto while different enough to excite a sense of wonder. I'm never going to be enthused by the mechanics of RQ, but this product makes me want to jump into Jonstown and start playing.

I do have an opened but unused Pearly King in Yellow pledge. Doesn't look like I'm ever going to play it so I would part with it if it went to a good home. I'm in the UK (Edinburgh). Send me a PM if you're interested.

Just dug my copy off the shelf. Think I also got it at Convulsion. It's one with the blank Gamesmastering chapter. I remember my group going back, starting to make characters and discussing what to play with them but it just seemed to go on and on. Looking back at it now, the authors seem to have decided that the main problem RQ3 had was that it wasn't detailed enough.

I did spend a while back experimenting with something this. Using d120 (d12+d10) for "hard skill tests." A fumble was rolling over your skill and rolling 100+ or rolling a natural 120. 116-119 was a failure regardless of result. It might be interesting BRP variant where you modify dice rolled rather than skill value but you really needed a d16 as well.

Well it only matters if it matters. For example, if you are trying to climb in the middle of a scenario and you only have a certain amount of time to make your climb. If you fail then the GM might say "you can't see a safe hand hold anywhere. Do you want to wait 5 minutes while you look around for a different way up or do you want to try again right now at -20%?" That kind of thing. If the player tries again immediately and fails you can say "looks like it's impossible in these conditions. I guess you could take a chance and try again right now at -40%. If you fail this time you fall." Player thinks. "How far would I fall?" GM says "Hard to say. If you make a luck roll you'll fall the equivalent of 3d6 metres before stopping on a ledge. Otherwise, I'll roll 3D6*10 metres." Player realises that's death staring them in the face etc. On the other hand if you are spending a day trying to navigate a high pass and fail a climb roll the GM says, "you spend the day but can't find a way through. Try again tomorrow." Which is all to say that the results of a failed roll don't have to be death. Sometimes, it just time. That's fine until time is critical.

Speaking of just the rules elements of MRQ1 for now. I had been out of role-playing for a fair while when I stumbled across the existence of MRQ1. The last two RQ3 campaigns I had run finished in 1997 when I moved to Canada. All I had done since then was the occasional CoC 1 shot for mostly non-gaming friends. Prior to that I had run a lot of RQ3, contributed to the RQ Digest and so on. Opening up the book, about which I literally knew nothing, my first impression was "god, this is cheap and nasty." So I started to go through the rules and created some PCs to see how it worked. My reactions were along the lines of: "No General Hit points!? Did I miss them in the rules somewhere? Surely not. Actually, you know, thinking about it, this is a genius idea." "Hero Points! woo hoo. I've been using hero points in RQ since 1985. Hero points buying heroic abilities?! Oh, bad idea. Actually, heroic abilities are a bad idea." (About 9 months later I watched how motivated my players were to gain them. I hate being wrong.) "Skills as two characteristics added together. Neat." "No resistance table! Excellent!" "shortened skill list. I like it." "Opposed rolls. I do like me some opposed rolls. Lots of really neat ideas in here and at least the production standards are better than Daughters of Darkness." "What's going on with 'rune magic'? Are their some pages missing? This is awful." "Ok so Strike Ranks are an initiative system with the word Strike Ranks attached. I'll try it out then see if my players prefer RQ3's Strike Ranks. (Reader: they didn't.)" "One skill for attack and parry, works for me. This is going to be so easy to teach." "Combat. Belay that previous comment. Has someone torn out some pages and eaten them? This just doesn't make sense. Let me re-read that a few times. Nope this is simply inconsistent. Let's look online to see what's going on. Bloody hell, this is a mess. Right then, lets adapt some of my old RQ3 house rules about opposed rolls and combat. Successful parry but lose the roll? double the AP of the defending weapon, job's a good un. This actually works out ok." "Runes?!? Come on, really. I mean I know it's called RuneQuest but it's not called 'Dig the runes out of your freshly slain victims and use them Quest'. (About a year later, running Blood of Orlanth I started to find really interesting things to do with tangible runes and became moderately in favour of the idea apart from the whole stabbystabbytakeyourruney thing.) By the time I had finally grokked the book I felt like there were all sort of neat ideas in there and it felt the first really fresh take on BRP since Nephilim. Admittedly I would have to spend a fair time hacking it into something I could actually run but when I did run a 1-short for a bunch of people I had never met at an Edinburgh meet up we had a great time. It would go on to form the start of a campaign that would last 3 years and revitalise my enjoyment of Glorantha. Ultimately, MRQ1 showed all that was good and bad about Mongoose. Good, they actually published material. Bad, the utter lack of professionalism. You never knew what the brown stuff in your sandwich was going to be when you bought a Mongoose book.

It always comes down to what happens when a character is only within melee range of another character for one SR but the enemy's SR is higher. Now remember that in RQ3 SoI's are much looser and can be adjusted/changed by adding your DEX SR. Given the usual issues around movement and engagement if one person wants to run past the other you pretty much work through a flowchart. Does the "defender" know what's going on? Is the defender able to do anything about it? what does the runner plan to do if the defender attacks and so on. After all that it turns into Quantum movement for a while. if the runner gets past then the runner will end up at point A, a certain distance away from the defender. If the defender can plausibly attack the runner then the defender resolves the attack at the SR when the runner turns up. depending on how much of a grid you are using and the length of the defender's weapon the runner could be in a variety of places. This may be significantly earlier than normal but remember your Melee SR is an abstraction based on a whole melee round of jockeying for position whereas this is (sort of) a non-melee attack. The attack happens, someone loses a leg, the wave state collapses and the SR sequence resumes. Mostly my RQ3 days consisted of me saying "you want to get to the balcony, that's about 8m away so you'll get there on your DEX SR+2. The trollkin with the loaded sling will fire at you while you're running. The other one is getting another stone so won't be able to fire until SR 6." Unless other people were involved, I would often batch a series of actions around one person or area rather than counting all the SRs. We would generally play with some figures, various dice for markers and a sketch map to one side showing the area so distances were always somewhat approximate. A round often consisted of a bunch of discussion about what players planned to do and my feedback on what I thought that might entail, at which point they might adjust.

That's actually not the case. In RQ3, SRs were explicitly made into a hybrid impulse/initiative system. In RQ2 they were explicitly an initiative system and RQG rolls back to RQ2. To be precise, RQ2 consisted of three different timing system. Melee SRs - used for determining who goes first in melee combat.[1] DEX SRs, used to indicate order of actions in non-melee combat. (i.e. missile or magic attacks) Movement: used for dealing with movement and actions that don't interact with combat. In general, if two combatants are not engaged in melee the idea is that they close with each other on one melee round then attack and parry on the next. Where it gets complicated is when one person joins a pre-existing melee. If you add an offset to the third person's melee SR for movement then it starts to turn into an impulse system. And then things start to get really hairy. In RQ3, the authors embraced the impulse side of SRs and the game started to bog down. I mean I played RQ3 for more than 10 years in multiple campaigns and it works OK providing you handwave most of the interactions into yes you can/no you can't/add X SRs to your attack. It seems to me that if you took all the most immersion breaking failures of an initiative system and married them up with all the most cumbersome elements of an impulse system, what you end up with is SRs. If you look at all the ground-breaking elements of RQ1/2 that were copied and influenced RPG game designs for the next 40 years, the one thing you don't see is the SR system. There's a reason for that. Probably in RQG you should take one of two options. Handwaving. If someone wants to try and move past an armed and ready enemy, make up something e.g. Attack vs dodge out of the normal SR sequence or Dex vs Dex, with the enemy getting a free attack if they win. If they're X far away then maybe someone can cast a Befuddle first. Or, if consistent application of rules is your preference, use RQ3 style impulse counting in order to integrate movement and action. Providing you know what you want to do and everyone's on the same page then it won't matter. Either way there will be (as @EpicureanDM has posted while I write this) there will be "some awkward bits hanging out" so choose what is least awkward for you. [1]There was an option in RQ2 to use DEX SRs for combatants who were already engaged before the melee round started but that was largely forgotten about. Even back in 1979, the authors felt that pikes being "faster" than daggers for people in close combat made no real sense.

Indeed. You see some of the same ideas in Mythras applied to damage: e.g. magic tends to increase the chance of you doing maximum damage not increase the amount of damage you do. Likewise modifiers tend not to stack, characteristics tend not to increase. Some variants have hard caps on skill values, Mythras by default tends to have a soft cap. It's fairly hard to increase your access to Magic Points. Lots of ways in which Mythras tends to have deliberately created narrower bounds to the game than standard BRP. I actually really like it. I find if the game stays within certain boundaries that success is measured more through the things you have successfully achieved than by, say, having skills over 200% or the ability to routinely inflict 20-30 points of damage on a normal hit once you're all magicked up.

Back in the early 80s when I joined Edinburgh University's RPG society, it was split in half. Half played AD&D and half-played everything else except AD&D. (No one played D&D.) A small number of people crossed over. The society was even called "The AD&D and Roleplaying Society." I was of course in the non-D&D half and we all had an immense sense of our superiority. After all, AD&D was just roll-playing and 10th level fighter could survive a fall from orbit. How stupid was that!!?! I like to think (or at least I hope that) I have grown up since then. Admittedly I've only ever got round to playing any version of D&D twice (both times were poor experiences but that was more down to the people than anything else) but would happily play in a game of D&D if it happened that way. I also think that we're going through a golden age in game design for all manner of games, including RPGs, where there is a real focus on what makes a game a good game. What I have seen of D&D 5e is that it tries really hard to be the best possible game of D&D that it can be and it seems to do really well at that.

I think this is an excellent approach and I really like it. Rather than having to manage your powers through book-keeping and efficient spending of resources (which I realise is a thing that some players enjoy) you focus on actually using them. Instead of making "stunts" something you have to succeed at with a negative modifier you can use your resources to achieve them. In that respect it follows the same logic as special effects which I think is an under-appreciated and fundamental innovation that the Mythras line has brought to BRP games.

The DEX rank approach in Big Gold Book etc is much closer to a standard initiative system than the SR system in RQG. To generalise: With an initiative system, each character performs its action(s) on its initiative number. (There may be sub-phases in which all movement, all ranged attacks etc happen.) With an impulse system, a character performs its first action on impulse X, then each subsequent action happens y impulses later. Y is variable and depends on "how long" the action takes. Roughly speaking, an impulse system is action-based while initiative is character-based. DEX ranks are a bit more complex because sometimes you end up performing additional actions with 5 DEX ranks between each one. So they have some impulse-like elements. RQ SRs are much closer to an impulse system in that you perform your first action on a certain SR then any subsequent actions after a variable number of SRs based on how long it takes. Unlike a pure impulse system, your impulse count resets at 12 (unless you're casting spells). The authors have tried to make SRs act more like an initiative system but it is still, in my eyes, a hybrid that is further down the impulse line than DEX ranks. Historically speaking, Ringworld was a pure impulse system that was virtually un-managable. The earliest BRP book and CoC was basically a pure initiative system. Mythras is an unusual kind of initiative system where you act once on your initiative and if you have any actions left you act again when your initiative cycles back round. Because I had a spare hour and I'm a bit of a game mechanic geek, I did have a look at whether it was possible to make SRs into a pure initiative system. Didn't look like it was going to work and you end up with a lot of numbers and overhead simply to figure out who goes first.