deleriad

From p86. "Attack and Parry rolls are subject to "Opposed Skills Over 100% rule on p35, despite not strictly being an opposed test." What this actually means. Attack and parries work like BRP: make a roll and note degree of success (critical, normal, failure, fumble). If your result was a success and a better degree of success than your opponent then you get a number of CMs based on the difference between you. E.g. Rurik rolls a failed parry versus a trollkin's critical attack. The trollkin will get 2 Combat Manoeuvres in addition to the normal results of an attack. If one or both of you have a skill over 100%, then the excess over 100 from the highest skill gets subtracted from all participants. E.g. Rurik is 125% in Spear & shield while Burly Bob is 110% in Hammer. This becomes Rurik 100% and Burly Bob is reduced to 85%. For those who remember such things, this reduction is roughly how combat rolls worked in RQ2. (the higher skill didn't get reduced in RQ2.) Evade (limited form of dodge) is a pure opposed test. Combat Manoeuvres work like a mix of crit/spec results and tactics. Some combat manoeuvres can only be chosen if you have a critical result (e.g. bypass armour), some depend on weapon (impale, bleed, sunder) and some are general tactics that can be used both offensive & defensively (disarm), just offensively (choose location) or just defensively (riposte). So the trollkin above with his two combat manoeuvres clearly decides to choose bypass armour and impale then rolls d20 to determine a location. Something very, very important. Not defending is functionally the same as failing to succeed at a defense roll which means that any successful attack will generate at least one CM by default. This is also true for ranged attacks.

If I were to try to do a 1 page flyer (probably folded into an A5 booklet) I would take a very different approach of learning through trying. You are cold, tired and scared. It feels like you have been running for hours since THEY broke in through the door. Now here you are pressed against a wall in the alleyway and you can hear voices around the corner. You have to know who is speaking and what they're saying. In a book or a movie or a comic, the author will tell you what happens next but in a roleplaying game you are put in control of the character and it's up to you to tell the other players what you want your character to try next. Lets say you decide that you want to sneak up to the end of the alleyway and look carefully around the corner in order to hear what's going on. It won't be easy as there's broken glass on the floor and, though you don't know it yet, there's a dog behind a trashcan. So maybe you will successfully sneak up and listen or maybe one of the bad guys will hear you crunch on some glass or maybe you'll startle the dog and it will attack you out of fear. If you want to know what happens next, grab some dice and turn over the page. etc. In Basic Roleplaying you have a character who has skills. In this case you want you character to move quietly to the end of the alleyway. Luckily your character is quite stealthy and your character's information says "Move Quietly 50%." This means that fifty percent of the time, when it's a matter of life and death, your character can move so quietly that alert guards are unlikely to be able to hear any noise. So what do you do? In the full game, two ten-sided dice are rolled to create a number between one to a hundred. If you roll 50 or less, your character succeeds. If you roll 51 or more, it fails: simples. You now know one of the three important things you need to know to play Basic Roleplaying. Back to the plot. You roll 53 and fail to move quietly but maybe you'll get lucky. The bad guys might not be paying attention so the "Games Master" - the person who controls all the other characters in the game - decides that although you scuffed some glass the bad guys might not hear it. The GM says that the bad guys' Listen skill is only 35%. That means if they roll 36 or more they don't hear the sound. They roll a 72 and don't hear you. The dog did though. Startled and angry it bites at you with its bite skill of 45% and rolls 23 - a success. You try and dodge out of the way but your dodge is a poor 30% and you roll 81, a failure. You've been bitten by an angry dog so now you need to know how how much it hurts. Every character in BRP has a number of Hit Points (HPs) that measure how much damage your character can take before being at risk of dying. Most human characters have around 12 Hit Points. When a dog bites, the GM rolls a 'normal' six-sided dice (say it rolls a 2) and your character removes that many Hit Points. Lets say your character is a bit healthier than normal and has 14 HPs. He or she has lost 2 HPs and is down to 12. So it hurt, but it could have been worse and will heal in a few days. However, now you know the second of the three things you need to know about BRP: damage. Right now you have other worries. The bad guys definitely heard the dog barking and the dog's fixing to bite you again but you have a plan. Some old chicken bones fell out of the trash can when it got knocked over by the dog attacking you. You want your character to reach down, wave a bone at the dog and then throw it in the direction of the bad guys. Perhaps the dog will go racing after it and give you time to run. It's your turn to do something so the GM asks you to make a Throwing skill roll. You're not great at this (45%) but make the roll and get a 01 - the best possible roll. That's a great throw but will go it far enough? The GM says because it was such a great throw it can go for up to three times your character's strength in metres. So here's the last thing you need to know: every character in Basic Roleplaying has "characteristics" the tell you how big, strong, fast, smart and so on they are. They're all spelled out on the last page but for now, lets say your character is a little weak and only has a Strength of 9 (10 or 11 is normal). This means you could throw that bone up to 27 metres, more than far enough to get the dog racing after it and hold up the hitmen from Nesto Corporation who, as you'll soon find out, are after something precious that you have. The Last page. Brief description of characteristics, characteristic rolls, hit points, 10 skills listed, explanation of combat round and some equipment. I've just dashed that off with no real care and attention. It can be done but I'm not entirely sure when it would ever be useful.

Some things I think. BRP is not "simple." BRP looks simple to us as experienced roleplayers who have played BRP. A lot. If you're wanting to hook non-roleplayers on a simple, introductory system the BRP would not be the choice. When the ancestor to BRP came out it was not simple. It was more complex than the main competition (D&D). It was, if you like, the opposite approach to Tunnels & Trolls. Both tried to come up with a unified resolution system but RQ added a lot of complexity while T&T went for light-hearted fun. I've been mulling over the relative popularity of Classic Fantasy and it suddenly occurred to me that BRP is the generic system that looks most like D&D pre-4e. There are the same stats, a skill system, weapons with individualised damage and so on. GURPS and Hero system are conceptually much further from D&D 4e than BRP is while newer generic systems are radically different. In fact there's an argument that D&D4e is in some ways further from previous editions than BRP is. Classic Fantasy is possibly successful because it recreates the motivation behind the original RQ: how to have D&D-like fun without being D&D. In some ways this is a thought process that's not very productive but if it were up to me I would stop trying to make BRP something it isn't. It *is* the role-playing game your father played. Think of it like Star Trek. RQ1 was original Star Trek. BRP with a new lick of paint, talented people and fun supplements can be the new movie. I think what Classic Fantasy shows is that if you have fun while putting the work in BRP can find a market. For me then what BRP needs is focus, supplements and a virtuous circle of people playing it with friends and at cons who then do the same. That's my 2%.

Most of the mechanical changes from RQ2 to RQ3 were neither more nor less Gloranthan. You could argue that RQ3 tended to favour some notion of simulation over MGF as most changes tended to increase the amount of book-keeping and feature very fiddly modifiers. There was an attempt to turn battle magic into spirit magic in order to satisfy Greg's tripartite model of magic (spirits, deities and sorcery) but then everyone treated spirit magic as battle magic which defeated the object and you ended up with something that was neither fish nor fowl. In Gloranthan terms, if spirit magic was relegated to just animists and a small amount of common magic became available with broadly similar effects to basic spirit magic then you would have something that was more in lines with Glorantha. Divine Magic was an attempt to think through in more detail about the types of magic that would be available to priests. It's more coherent than RQ2 but perhaps rather drier. Sorcery was based on notions of Gloranthan sorcery but the system was not put together with much thought about it making it usable in play. It has its fans but then so does colonic irrigation. All in all I would use RQ3 magic for Glorantha rather than RQ2 as it's a little more thought through at the expense of being slower to play, harder to to use and more fiddly. The major change to cults was an attempt to genericise them. Therefore acolytes were introduced (senior initiates) and rune lords and priests became different branches of membership so rune lord-priests no longer existed. Allied spirits were also made less common. Most cults were presented in short form write-ups but that was purely pragmatic as the idea was to expand the number of playable cults quickly and let long form write-ups catch up later. The changes are all logical, sensible and, perhaps, less fun to play. As I understand it, almost nothing in RQ2 and very little in RQ3 matches up with Greg Stafford's concept of Glorantha. Mostly RQ2 matched up with the problems he saw in D&D at the time. The one exception to this as I see it, is that that everyone has a little magic in Glorantha and that was recreated in RQ2/3. However Stafford later became dissatisfied with the amount and power of commonly available magic, especially healing magic. So really it's pretty much a case of personal preference. Neither really recreates Glorantha as seen by Greg Stafford significantly better than the other. I would say that RQ2 at the top end risks devolving into munchkin Glorantha while RQ3 becomes accountancy Glorantha. Personally I feel that what I know of MRQ2 hits a pretty sweet spot between the fun factor of original RQ2 while having more fidelity to the source material. That's not something I suspect you want to hear though. :innocent: It does however strike me that both the new HQ and new RQ have looked back to RQ2 to inspiration far more than they have RQ3. Make of that what you will.

I would say that if classic rpg fantasy was rooted in killing things and taking their stuff, classic rpg sci-fi was in getting shares in a ship and going trading. Though not as all-dominating as D&D, Traveller with its trading, world generating, ship building and lifepath char gen is probably as close to a default rpg sci-fi genre as I know. Both of them were about the grind. In D&D it was down to the dungeon, go as deep as you can, come back, spend xp. In Traveller it was find trade routes, generate profit, upgrade equipment and ship. The adventures were what happened while you did it.

1982 the GW RQ box set in the UK. Lived in a small village and heard radio reports of a new game called Dungeons and Dragons. Actually saw it in a newsagent's shop, asked, was told that yes it was Dungeons & Dragons and yes there were metal figures inside. Neither statement true but never looked back. Have played D&D precisely twice in my life since then.

Well caution is always a good idea and buying or not buying on the strength of one rule seems rather extreme. Personally, if opposed roll combat has gone I'll be disappointed. Though I didn't like MRQ1.5's version of it, I use opposed roll combat in my version of MRQ and am loathe to turn back the clock. I'll also be really surprised if opposed rolls are gone for good or the resistance table is back or characteristic rolls are back. For me the selling point of the MRQ toolkit, as it were, was the attempt to strip back the system into something streamlined. Though MRQ1 kept failing to implement its ideas well, the philosophy behind it was a good one. So hopefully, MRQ2 will stick with the philosophy but implement it properly.

I think Rurik is right to say that the BRP rulebook is a good tool for experienced players who have been playing BRP for a long time. It's not so good for bringing fresh blood in. I suspect the best means to bring in new players are good standalone products built using BRP that are fun to play in and of themselves. Classic Fantasy - though not to my taste - would be an example. Soltak's "I can't Believe It's Not Traveller" would be another. I do believe however that BRP could do with a "Basic" system that isn't overloaded with modular options; i.e. putting the Basic back into basic. In many ways modules such as hit Locations and Strike Ranks are genre emulators and, really, would be better in specific genre books. In my world there would be 196 page book that presents a basic universal roleplaying system with the selling point that it is simple. Not sure how to do something? Pick a skill or stat and roll percentile dice. If you have that and good standalones powered by BRP then you get a system that can be quickly picked up and played. That said, it'll never be more than a niche market but provided it is capable of a critical mass of interest then that is fine.

Without having RQ3 in front of me, a parry blocked any kind of attack, even a critical. You might be thinking of Dodge. In general I tend to agree with Rosen. I ran "non-gonzo" RQ3 with exceptionally good characters being maybe 120% and generally ran games where magic was not commonly available. Even then, for all intents and purposes, a decent shield plus armour stopped all damage pretty much all of the time. Fights were generally settled by the first person to fail a parry. On the other hand, I tend to like numbers in BRP games. I would rather a parry a stopped X amount of damage based on the parry than being all, nothing or half. MRQ tried to do this by reducing parry APs but then screwed up the implementation. E.g. If you look at what MRQ tried to do: An average weapon stops 3 or 4 points of damage. Average 1H weapon does 3-4 damage. On average a 1H weapon parry blocks most of the damage from a 1H attack, maybe leaving you with a minor wound. An average shield blocks all of the damage from an average 1h weapon most of the time, and blocks most of the damage from a 2H weapon most of the time. Realistically, the hardness of a weapon doesn't really model its effectiveness as a parrying device but most of the time it's not a problem in play. I personally wouldn't go back to RQ3, despite running it for most of my gaming life because in retrospect I find its sweet spot for combat is pretty narrow.

Well, there you go. I must admit that I don't think I've ever noticed that it's called RuneQuest 4 there simply because I hardly ever use the reviews. As for conversation about RQ on RPGnet. It occasionally happens but it's usually among a very small number of familiar user IDs. Of the BRP incarnations, I suspect that CoC accounts for about 90% of the conversation on RPGnet. Mongoose RQ it seems to me suffers because it is neither a mainstream product with a lot of name recognition nor is it a sexy Indie game. Add into that the dislike for Mongoose among a fair percentage of BRP players and MRQ appears to be either unknown by most and unloved by some of those who do now it. I personally hope the new edition gives it some sparkle as it's been a great excuse for me to get back into roleplaying.

I would be surprised if anyone could ever get *really* confused by an edition of RQ produced in the early 80s and one in 2010. On this board it's easy enough to differentiate from the versions produced by Chaosium and those by Mongoose. I can't say I've ever seen MRQ referred to as RQ4 on RPG net. Maybe someone did once for effect but generally it's either referred to as simply RuneQuest or Mongoose RuneQuest by those who are familiar with the history. To be honest, RQ is pretty much a non-entity on RPGnet. As for new editions, maybe I'm a cynic, but when I bought the MRQ rulebook I expected that they would want me to shell out again in 3 years time. I didn't really expect that they would still be selling the same rule book in 2015. The only time companies don't update rulesbooks is if the game, company or licence dies. As a gamer you plan accordingly. I'll buy the rulebook because I'm a system junky and with Loz and Pete Nash in charge then it's going to have good ideas.

Cool cover.

I had my very first example of someone rolling 00 on the fumble table just two weeks ago. I use the MRQ tables (modified to fit d100 than d20) so they're not as harsh as the RQ3 ones. It was for a major NPC and I always let players roll NPC fumbles. The poor blighter almost exploded from the fumble. I must admit that I do think that a fumble table needs to be an optional module. I run middle school games (i.e. not old school random, frequent death but not completely narrative-driven, you don't do unless agreed beforehand either) so a fumble table sort of works for me in that it gives dice a way to intrude very significantly into a game. Something that is very notable about MRQ is that semi-competent PCs never fumble. My players are fumble averse and will spend a Hero Point to re-roll a fumble. For that last 6 months or so the only fumbles have come from NPCs.

It was nice to see this right on the front stand of my FLGS today. I really wanted to buy it but it was £10 for 48 pages. 48 pages of big text and lots of white spacing. I can't speak to the content but in the end, much though I'm glad to see some exposure, I wasn't willing to spend that much money on what looks like a pretty small piece of work. It also looked very dowdy right next to various shiny, new books. I'll have to check out the pdf price at Chaosium which is also a shame as I would like to be able to support the FLGS for making the effort to get it.

I think the confusion is that Divine Magic was, effectively, one-use per episode for runelords/priests. Irrelevant if you've an episodic campaign because you simply assume that the worshipper goes back to church between adventures. The house ruling issue was always over initiates. You had to have 10 points of stored magic (IIRC) which meant that to become a priest you basically had to be an initiate who never actually cast divine magic. Assuming that you wanted to play a character who worked up to priest-hood - maybe over 5 years of game time - you ended up with a magic system that the PCs had to sacrifice for but never actually used. Something distinctly lacking in MGF. That's why most worshippers in RQ never actually cast divine magic. The pact system in MRQ has made Divine Magic episodic for initiates and acolytes (on the whole) and in-episode for lords/priests. It is also now in tension with MP using magic systems so if you commit to Divine Magic you're weaker at MP using magic.

I must admit that if I were to use Divine Magic in BRP games I would use the Pact/Dedicated POW mechanic that Loz has developed for MRQ along with, on the whole, the RQ3 divine magic spell list. I find it has more MGF than RQ2/3 Divine Magic because its more useful early on without exploding at higher levels. It also has inbuilt mechanisms for gifts, geas, superstitions, taboos and so on so you could think of it as a self-contained Power system. Probably (though I don't know the allegiance rules well enough) you could replace the Pact Skill with an Allegiance rating and cast magic through a theology skill.

I would say that just add them to the toolbox and note their incompatibilities. I don't think you really need to make them work together. I would say of Rod's depiction that banning the parrying weapon from being used is a mistake as it makes using a 2H weapon or a 1H weapon by itself pretty sub-optimal. It's a classic image of fantasy combat when the hero with a 2h sword deflects an attack and immediately strikes back with the weapon. That said, the counter-attack rule as written suddenly gives meaning to unarmed combat skills because now there's a way to parry with a weapon then immediately make a knockback attack or kick to the chest without using up your normal attack. So maybe I've just argued against my original point... :innocent:

It seems to me that the simplest, most general rule is: If you are a master of a weapon and manage a special success while parrying with that weapon then you may immediately counter-attack with that weapon as a free action. This counter-attack may be parried or dodged as normal. Spot rules. You don't have to counter-attack with the same weapon you parried with. You may make any sort of viable attack as a counter-attack. (E.g. you could attempt to knock someone down by tripping them as a counter-attack.) Counter-attacks can be counter-attacked in turn should two weapon masters find themselves facing each other. Counter-attacks are resolved on the same DEX (or SR) rank as the initial attack. This could mean one attack may be followed by a series of counter-attacks that are all resolved as part of the same attack. Counter-attacking and parrying counter-attacks are exceptions to the rule forbidding multiple uses of the same weapon on the same SR. Although there is no penalty for making multiple counter-attacks in the same round, the usual penalty for making multiple parries applies. Implications. Counter-attacks are a huge boost for weapon masters but the requirement for a special success means that long chains of counter-attacks will be extremely rare in all but super-powered campaigns. This is more of an example of incorporating new 'technology' into BRP rather than picking and choosing between pre-existing rules so it goes somewhat against the grain of the BRP rulebook.

The primary reason I wouldn't use it is book-keeping. Game flow is also an issue. Using the suggested riposte rules you would have to keep track of defence reductions, attack reductions and DEX rank reductions That's an awful lot more book-keeping. Furthermore it happens either never or several times a round. Game Flow wise, I would rather deal with all the ins-and-outs of a single attack sequence at once rather than having to keep interrupting it to go back to something else. Would be even worse if multiple masters are involved in riposte sequences. Finally, the concept behind attacks in BRP is that they are a flurry of attacks, not a single swing and the DEX/SR is a timing sequence not a speed chart. Having each riposte "take" 1 SR implies otherwise so it goes against the underlying structure.

I was picking up on a different suggestion. It seemed to me that the riposte rule was getting complicated and starting to require all sorts of book-keeping so I suggested something simpler.

This is a stereotypical simulation for two 99%ers though I forget whether in BRP defences are declared before the attack is rolled or after. Assuming Before then what you get is: A attack, B parry. B riposte @-30, A parry A riposte @-30, B parry @-60 B possible riposte @-90, A (chooses not to parry in order to save better parry) B attack, A parry -60 This means that there's an advantage to going second as you may get more attacks and your later 'real' attack should find your opponent being quite open. If defences are declared after the result of an attack roll is known then the situation is more even. The other aspect of this is that two master duellists will be resolving 3-4 attacks each action rather than the normal one. Fights will also finish much more quickly in game time as an average combat round between two masters will probably have around 5 attacks to resolve. Note as well that the defences fall more quickly than the offences so a disabling attack will probably happen more quickly too.

Why make it complicated? The proposed rule is really a generic rule for any sort of counter-attack with any sort of weapon. It's not specific to fencing. Why not just say that a riposte/counter-attack is an attack using a defensive reaction. A riposte thus subtracts 30% from your next defense (just like any parry or dodge) and the attack can be any sort of attack. I see no need to bother with DEX ranks and so on. After all, a regular attack doesn't consist of mostly doing nothing except on your DEX rank, the DEX rank is just a handy method of ordering who does what when. It seems to me that the essence of BRP is about using fairly quick and simple ways of resolving issues with minimal book-keeping.

This is an interesting conversation. My understanding is that real world data is, to say the least, contradictory and probably not a whole lot of fun to play in a game. I wouldn't betting that if you managed to accurately simulate real world injuries that it wouldn't look very convincing to anyone who's knowledge is based on films.... The net result of using Hit locations without general Hit Points seems to me to be that you get a more narrative type of system because you end up with two types of location: (vital and non-vital) and three types of injury: (minor, serious and major). Some major injuries are cumulative and some happen in a single blow. This does mean that it's fairly intuitive. A minor injury to an arm sounds painful but not life threatening while a major injury to the head is dead or dying. About 18 months of using this with MRQ has shown me that it makes characters about as rugged as the heroic HP option in BRP but with a grittier feel.

Out of interest does this version cover the errata to the magic rules from RQ3 (e.g. Multispell)?

Well a limb would only be severed if the damage is done in *one* blow rather than as an accumulating effect. Real world evidence is pretty patchy about the severity of severed limbs. Various stories of farmers getting their arms chopped off in a harvester and walking home with them exist. For a severing injury I rule that a severed vital location is instant death. Severed non-vital location is a pain test: succeed equals bleed out slowly, fail equals bleed out quickly.