deleriad

I will say that when it comes to hit locations, I think the RQII system of hit locations but no general Hit Points works well to achieve the results I'm aiming for. What I'm trying to figure out though is a simpler system without hit locations: essentially I'm looking at a 'threshold' system without hit locations to see how well it works. One reason for this is that I expect to run some CoC for rpg newbies sometime soon. There's nothing wrong with the system as written, I'm just interested in adapting it to something that fits my preferences better. The potential advantages I'm hoping for are: 1) no need to track HP loss for minor wounds. 2) Serious wounds can KO a PC without killing. 3) Major wounds are fatal unless treated and can be instantly lethal. Technically it's an exercise in trying to adapt a "wound-based" system to BRP.

Not sure it does. a) average human has 7 positive hit points. 2 average punches is likely to KO someone (taking them to 0 HPs or below) or disable a location. a character with a CON of less than 5 dies before receiving a serious wound which seems odd. c) characters spend most of their time being disabled in some way or other. I did try a similar system: positive HPs = SIZ, negative HPs = CON but it is functionally identical to the heroic option with different flavouring. Aesthetically speaking I don't like characters spending more time in negative HPs than positive ones. (I've played D&D twice in my life and in one of them my character spent most of the game on minus something HPs; not dead just useless.) To refine it a bit further: I don't want to track HP loss from 'minor injuries' hence the reworking of the 'threshold' mechanic. On the other hand I don't want characters to be invulnerable which is why I'm thinking of adapting the shaken mechanic from Savage Worlds; that also has the advantage of ensuring that minor wounds do have immediate consequences in play. Where it doesn't work particularly well in BRP is that without armour, any successful hit would shake a character. For that reason you probably want some inherent toughness to allow them to completely ignore very trivial damage. But then there's a question of how that would stack with armour. E.g. say a character has 'natural toughness' based on their damage bonus (e.g. bonus 0 or less, toughness =0; bonus 1d2 to 1d4, toughness 1; 1d6 = toughness 2 and so on) then would this add to AP or be overridden by AP? Anyhow, thanks for the suggestion but I don't think your system does what I want in this case.

I was passingly aware of that system. The problem I saw with it was the it added a 5th roll into the equation and meant that you were juggling multiple numbers in your head. attack, defend, location, damage, CON*5. Personally my tolerance limit is 4 rolls and either location HPs or General HPs but not both. What I would like to get to is a pulpish system where characters are about as robust as they are in MRQII without using locations and without throwing Hit Points at the problem which is what the BRP heroic option does and without adding more dice rolls into the mix routinely.

That would get over the problem that you can see in the Utah Smith example which is that any damage exceeding the character's APs would have an effect. You could treat something like SIZ/5 as toughness or natural armour points. Alternately you could say that after any minor wound, the character must succeed at a CON*5 or become rattled. It is an extra roll which isn't too bad if you don't have hit locations. Speaking off the top of my head you could use damage modifier as a variable number which is added to armour points to 'soak' damage. E.g. If a character has a 1D4 damage bonus and is wearing 3 APs of armour then if they get hit their "armour roll" would be 3+d4. This would have the effect that most 1H weapons would normally only cause minor wounds when hitting a person with a +d4 damage bonus. And what about small, weak people with a negative damage modifier? They become even more fragile - you would have to say that a negative damage bonus does not reduce APs below zero...

If someone has 3 APs and 6 HPs and takes 7 damage then 3 are blocked by armour leaving 4 to match against HP. 4 is less than 6 therefore it's a minor wound.

There's an idea I've been kicking around for a while and I am interested to see what people think. I must admit that I don't like the heroic Hit Point option in the book, it seems too D&Dish to me. So with a little terminology stealing from Savage Worlds for now, I've been trying to come up with a system that gives PCs more staying power without adding more hit points. So: A character's Hit Points = (CON+SIZ)/5 - rounded up. A character dies when it takes more wounds than it has Hit Points. Any injury that exceeds a character's Armour Points but not their Hit Points is a minor injury. Any injury that exceeds the total of a character's AP+HP is a serious injury. Any injury that exceeds the total of a characters AP+2*HPs is a major injury. Minor injury: character is 'rattled'. A character remains rattled until the end of the next combat round. If a character is already rattled and takes a minor injury, then it takes 1 wound. Note that a minor injury can never cause a person to take enough wounds to start dying. Serious injury. Character becomes rattled and takes a number of wounds equal to the amount by which its AP+HP was exceeded. Must make a Resilience/CON*5 roll to stay conscious. Major injury: character incapacitated and must make a difficult CON*5/Resilience roll. On a fail, it dies within a few rounds, on a success it dies within a few minutes. A serious injury that does enough damage to cause a character more wounds than Hit Points becomes a major injury. Rattled: I'm swithering over the precise effect of this but it would probably be a stun effect preventing attacking until the end of the next combat round. Could be shaken off with a Fate Point or CON*5/Resilience roll. The idea is to avoid having to track hit point damage for minor injuries while still ensuring that a serious injury is, well, serious. An example. Utah Smith is CON 16 SIZ 15. This gives him (31/5) = 7 Hit Points. He's clocked over the head with a chair leg for 5 damage. This is a minor injury which temporarily stuns him. Shortly afterwards the fight turns serious and someone unloads with a revolver. Utah cops 9 points of damage, that's 2 more than his Hit Points so he takes 2 wounds and must make a CON*5 roll to avoid falling unconscious. He now can take another 5 wounds before checking out to meet his maker.

I personally think this is great. On the whole I prefer PDFs as they let me print just what I need, print extra copies of maps, stat blocks and so on. £13 for each volume gives me a lot more content than I would normally get for that price and I don't have the original publications. So colour me happy with this. Have bought 2 volumes already.

These are great. As someone running Second Age Glorantha and planning to run the Pavis Rises campaign, any Pavic, Praxian, Wyrmish, Sorcerous and so on types of characters would be eagerly printed off...

I'll get back to you on that one, once I'VE WASHED MY BRAIN OUT WITH BLEACH!

Boy this thread seems to have degenerated into atgxtg's one true way of gaming and become distinctly off topic. I suggest that maybe a discussion of the pros and cons of improvement rolls vs skill checks would be better in another thread. The key problem with MRQ1 for me was that it made many changes but rarely implemented them properly or with an eye to the knock-on effects on other parts of the system. Improvement Rolls were one example of that. There were more obvious problems. The combat system appears to have been rewritten late in the day but various tables plus a 2 page example of combat weren't updated meaning that it was hard to figure out how combat was actually meant to work; a pretty major failing given that RQ had always prided itself on the combat system. Finally, it bears stating that many regulars in BRP land have emotional allegiances to Chaosium or a particular flavour of BRP, bad experiences of Mongoose's hap-hazard playtest or a suspicion of mongoose's way of doing business. Add this to the many flaws of the system and failings of the publication model where a large number of thin, shoddy hardbacks were rushed out of the door at high prices and you get a pretty toxic mix. You should realise that this board was born because its owner expressed pretty vitriolic dislike of Mongoose RQ repeatedly on the Mongoose boards getting banned in the process. So there is quite a deep cultural antipathy to MRQ around here.

What I found in my last couple of years running RQ3 was that I followed this method and by default I was gradually adopting a system which might as well have been an IR system. For example, a sorcerer might spend a long time reading over ancient scrolls. Rather than making him make Read rolls I would have making an Idea or Lore skill roll to find the information and at the end of the scenario might say that'll count as Read and Lore checks. It also solved the old bugbear of what about the person who learns through failing? Mind you, I'm also a big believe in "Let it Ride" and "say yes or roll dice." Rather than asking for a Climb Roll every 5 or 10m I figure the player tells me what the character wants to do and if there's no reason to worry about failure I'll say "ok off you go." If dice are rolled I try to have one skill roll suffice rather than loads and tell the player the consequence of failure. I suspect that I call for less than 1/10th of the number dice rolls now as I did when I was a young whippersnapper. Means that IRs work better for my style of play than experience checks. Nowadays I'll tell players you can have X IRs each. Bob you can have an extra one because of the way you handled dinner with the Count and you can also all get 1 each in Lore (Regional) because of what you learned. Then it's up to the players to assign them based on what their PCs did and learned. It's a system I prefer but you do have to follow the implications right through: something that MRQ1 patently failed to do and, what's more, the various patches often made the problem worse.

Well it was fixed for Glorantha only in MRQ1 and then properly fixed in MRQII. That said, the sorcery spell descriptions were never fixed. For example you had the illusion spells that were essentially impossible to cast as intended because Mongoose didn't properly update spells that were written in RQ3 on the basis that a master magus could probably pull off about 18 levels of manipulation, something almost impossible in MRQ1. The MRQ1 line is a great case study of the strengths and weaknesses of Mongoose. On the positive side, they get product out of the door and they tend to get good authors. On the negative side their editing and quality control is abysmal meaning that there is no consistency of anything but page count. MRQII is basically what MRQ1 should have been.

As stated, the basic problem was that lots of innovations were added into the system without understanding their impact or thinking through how they worked. One simple example is in the change from experience rolls to improvement rolls. In BRP, using a skill successfully gets you a chance at improving by experience so if you have a character who relies on a lot of different skills then they tend to use them all during a session. Conversely a specialist who only uses a small number of skills doesn't gain so much experience. MRQ1 replaced this with improvement rolls given out by the GM. As most players got the same number (+/-1) then characters who used lots of skills (such as sorcerers) got shafted. However they didn't update sorcery. To be honest, it's hard to think of a single innovation that was properly implemented in MRQI. On the other hand, a lot of the innovations had potential and the new edition shows what happens when you spend a couple of years developing MRQI systematically. I personally like what MRQ tried to be and think that MRQII is now my favourite member of the BRP family but I wouldn't touch 90% of the MRQI line.

I suppose at the most fundamental level that if you allow splitting of attacks against the same target you start moving towards something that is more of a Combat Action system where your number of Combat Actions is based on your skill. The problem with talking in the abstract is that BRP has so many combat modules that the implications change massively. E.g. say you retroclone RQ3 (as I know RQ best) then being able to attack twice against the same person who only has one parry is a huge advantage. On the other hand, if using the BRP core modules with multiple degrading parries and with the BRP combat matrix then splitting attacks against a single opponent is probably going to be counter productive. The main thing for me is that splitting attacks against single targets is a perfectly reasonable module to have in BRP. However you have to realise that BRP is not quite as modular as people sometimes assume: changing one module does have impacts on others. That said, play with whatever you have the most fun doing. If splitting attacks against the same opponent proves to be underpowered, players will gradually realise this.

That said, RW3 spirit magic and MRQ2 common magic spell lists are 90% identical so it doesn't really make sense to buy Basic Magic just for that. One quick and easy mod to RQ2 spirit magic might be: Remove all the "always on" spirits and replace them with spell casting spirits that cast common magic spells for you. E.g. 1 Intensity of spirit could know 2 Magnitude of common magic. It runs the risk of being overpowered so I would say that spirits in fetishes cannot regain MPs while bound in a fetish so, eventually, the shaman will have to release it back to the spirit plane and find a new spirit.* Don't forget as well that most shamans will know a mix of common magic too. *True names always handy here... Basically, this allows you to have, effectively, a spell list. Also, check out the thread on rpg net by a poster called tgryph. One of his Pc's is an animist and has lots of good ideas about talking with spirits and so on that seems far more animist than anything I've previously seen in RQ. If on the other hand you want to create something more like (stereotypical) druidism, skin changing and so on, then those might be best modelled through Divine worship.

One possibility might be to draw some inspiration from RQII magic where generally there are two skills involved. 1 to cast magic and 2 to determine the strength of the magic. Back in the day I used to use a variant of verb/noun magic in RQ3 but was never happy with it. You were stuck with no really good way to deal with two skills at once. If I were doing it now though I might think of nouns as determining the strength while verbs show your ability to cast (and maybe to manipulate). E.g. "Transform" as a verb and "body" as a noun. If you wish to cast a spell to transform the body then the effect of the spell would be proportionate to your skill with Body magic while your skill at casting it would be your Transform skill. This saves having multiple skills to roll against and also allows you have spells with one verb and two nouns where needs be. There are other ways. So, as an example. Verbs: cast chance for a spell and effect level of the spell. Noun: limits to manipulation. So if Transform is 63% then maybe you could use critical chance to determine effective level of the spell when cast spontaneously and double critical when cast as part of a "formula." If Body is 63% then maybe you could have one level of manipulation for each 10% of Body: that would be 6 levels to split between duration, range, targets, magnitude and so on. If I were thinking of doing spontaneous/free form effects now, I think that's where I would start.

I would say it's both simple and hard to convert between MRQII and BRP. If you know both systems well then it's pretty easy to eyeball the statblocks and off you go. If you don't actually know MRQ there are a lot of subtle differences that can trip you up. The balance between weapons, armour and hit points is different from BRP's core assumptions. Skills are broader and skill levels higher than BRP equivalent characters. Common Magic is easy to port across but while in BRP, getting extensions to Power Points is relatively easy, in MRQ it isn't, therefore MRQ spells tend to be more powerful than BRP norms. Also the spells themselves have been written to mesh with mechanics in MRQ that aren't in BRP. A lot of the time the differences can just about be hand-waved away if you're happy running very loosely.

The general guideline is that a grimoire should have about 6 spells. A major, important order of sorcery will have a few more, a minor order a few less.

When it comes to sorcery that's the key in my opinion. I do think that one failing of presentation of RQII was in giving concrete examples of how things might work. The cults chapter makes a start but for a generic rulebook where the balance has to be in the rules rather than an appeal to the setting, you need something firmer. Conversely, you can probably mandate that a sorcerer needs supporting skills. Mastery of an arcane language is an obvious one and every sorcerer needs high Persistence. The thing as ever is if players build one-dimensional PCs is to challenge their weaknesses. There's also the specific example of higher magic gained during char gen. Currently it's basically a freebie. It probably ought not to be. Off the top of my head I would probably say for sorcery that the first spell in the grimoire is free, the second costs 10 free skill points, third costs 20, fourth costs 30 and so on That way starting with 4 spells would cost 60 free skill points. The cost is a reflection of the time and effort needed to transcribe and master the spells. I would probably say the same for Divine Magic. For spirit magicians, each intensity of spirit might cost 10 free skill points.

Certainly more powerful than any prior version of RQ. Magic is dangerous in the extreme. That said, Befuddle is probably still the quickest way to take someone out of a fight. Also, going up against a sorcerer or spirit magic user with no defences of your own is pretty analogous to taking one someone wielding a greatsword with your bare hands in your underwear. I would actually say that MRQ1 magic was the low point of magic strength in RQ. The lack of general HPs meant that it was nigh on impossible to kill someone outright with magic and sorcery still required multiple skills while Improvement Rolls meant that you could only improve a fairly narrow range of skills. The different subsystems in MRQ1 didn't join up and one of the results was that magic was pretty nerfed. I do think there is an adjustment phase where people who have been playing MRQ1 or older versions first run into MRQII magic and get marmalised. It's probably not dissimilar to the way that non-BRP players feel when they try it out and charge the guy with the loaded crossbow. If playing MRQII in a magic-prevalent world like Glorantha, you have to have some sort of magic defences. That's probably no bad thing.

I'm not sure that the MRQ2 version of dodge would work under BRP because the drawback is based around combat actions *and* it is the only part of MRQ combat which is a pure opposed roll: in MRQ dodge is all or nothing. In BRP, dodge has always felt uncomfortable to me. In MRQ it's more of a combination of a manoeuvre skill and a throw yourself to the floor skill.

Technically MRQ is a version of BRP with some major changes such as removing general hit points and replacing experience checks with improvement roll, innovations such as Dedicated POW and tweaks such as broadening skills. MRQII has refined, altered and added to this with combat style and combat manoeuvres. So far the most tested and played BRP system is CoC. After that you probably have i order RQ2, RQ3 and Elric!/Stormbringer (though the 1st and 2nd editions are so radically different from the later ones that is is almost a different game). I don't know actual numbers but I suspect that MRQ has already sold more and been played more than all the BRP systems except CoC and RQ2. I believe RQ3 basically bombed as a mainstream RPG but has been played for a long time by a dedicated core. RQ2 was relatively brief but very popular. It is pretty likely if the current situation continues that MRQ is going to end up being the second most played and developed BRP system after CoC.

there aren't any. you get access to critical cms. (cat on hand, hence no capitals...)

Well the attack parry cycle uses the same opposed roll mechanic as the original RQ2 rules. if your skill is over 100% then it reduces your opponent's skill by the excess.* Shall I assume you didn't like the original RQ2? *There is a difference. in RQ2 the excess was only subtracted from the lower skill while in RQII it is subtracted from both.** **Given the cost in IRs of improving over 100%, I could see a good rationale for using RQ2 mechanic of only reducing the lower skill to emphasise the importance of skill.

Presently disarm is probably my favourite use of a parry CM though damage weapon is pretty useful when you're using a 2H weapon to parry: good fun lopping off spear-heads with a greatsword. Pin weapon, a critical defense manoeuvre, is the perfect choice for dual wielders against single wielders.