deleriad

At the risk of simply echoing what everyone is saying, the complexity in the system comes from defences and armour. You mentioned zombies and that is probably an extreme case because basically zombies get hit and don't do much about it. A single good hit and it'll probably fall over and squirm on the floor. Similarly, a fight is often settled by the first undefended hit unless you're using various heroic options. When you're playing with characters in 60-70% range then the most common outcome is one success and one fail meaning that combats can be over in a single attack. A lot of the game engine in D&D is designed to prevent that from happening. Sounds like your players like the feel of a combat where the first successful blow never ends it so that they can all pile in. I suspect the target number issue is a misnomer, I suspect that what they want are fights that last a long time. If you're not already doing it then the heroic options might fit better. Also, you might consider letting the boss guys use PPs to buy off the first few lethal blows so that they can keep on fighting. I wouldn't really worry too much about trying to shoe-horn target numbers into the system because it's complicated enough without having Tiny Tim (Siz 10) getting +20% to attack Burly Bob (Siz 21) while Moderate Mike (Siz 13) gets nothing. You're better off saving that kind of thing for special abilities of monster so that it feels *special* when it comes up. So, unlike everyone else, I say look a little at survivability in combat so that combats last a fair time.

I do exactly the same though it's for MRQ rather than BRP. Basically once you get full grown adult creatures then I assume that their weight distribution is on a bell curve which means that you probably don't need a wider range than 4D6 plus a minimum value because each point of SIZ represents a higher mass. If I were to rewrite BRP history I would not have any stat with a wider variance than around 4d6 and I would keep all stats other than STR & SIZ between around 3-24. Obviously magic and sufficiently advanced technology may change the base parameters.

At the risk of sounding overly critical, I don't think that what you have written achieves anything other than to say "your SR is different every round." This would add a lot of overhead for little obvious gain. I did run a few Ringworld scenarios back in the time and the reason the impulse system worked was that you almost never used it. When you did use it, normally it finished before more than a few things had happened. It always seemed like such a good idea until you actually tried to play it. It looks to me that your system takes all the worst aspects of a tick-based system (tracking) and loses all the benefits in order to fit it into rounds. As I said this probably sounds over-critical: playing with rules ideas is always fun it's just that this one looks like a dead end to me.

One big advantage of opposed rolls is that skill counts for more than it does in normal combat so you don't find such a need for mook rules. E.g. 100% vs 50% results in a win for the 100%er roughly 85% of the time. The dodger still dodges occasionally but not enough to bog the game down. That said, I find in any combat I run I always seem to end up with one super mook who survives the worst the PCs can do for quite a while. In the last session, a spider-demon worshipping cultist brandishing a piece of wood lasted several rounds against a Humakti, earning the nickname "log ninja." That is until the Uroxi wandered over and cut him in half.

It did indeed. The very first superhero scenario I ever ran featured my friends rolling themselves up as superheroes in V&V then foiling a bank robbery. Remarkably great fun. I've been fond of V&V ever since.

While I'm thinking of it the other way I use opposed rolls in combat is for manoeuvring. E.g. the winner of the roll can shift the direction of the combat a small way in one direction or other. Or, if you want to have a "special effect" instead of damage for an attack then you make an attack and the opponent defends and the winner is fairly obvious.

I know. However I'm using MRQ where criticals are 1/10th roll so that would be just too much. In addition, MRQ has the just a tiny bit controversial Armour Skill penalty so having 1/10 successful attacks ignore armour would just make armour useless. That's exactly how I ran a lot of RQ3. I ran two major campaigns over several years. One set in Sanctuary and one an adaptation of DragonLance. I would argue that the combat system needs to stand or fall on its own feet without needing a magic system to make it work. The Sanctuary campaign worked because combat was relatively infrequent and often featured daggers and stabbing in the back. In DragonLance I adopted Hero Points so player characters usually dealt with severe damage that way. My current MRQ campaign is set in Glorantha second age and the pc's are still pre-initiate. 2-H weapons are surprisingly scary and magic is still very low level. The players are new to the system and learning as they go along. So far things are working out well. That said, the system doesn't really bolt on all that well to BRP I suspect and MRQ RAW features - in a roundabout way - all or nothing parries just as BRP does.

I do though I specifically use MRQ rather than BRP. That said, I don't use the MRQ system as written for precisely the reason given above. So what I have is basically a hybrid of RQ3 and MRQ. In an opposed roll if you make your roll and win the contest then you score either a critical or normal success but if you make you roll and lose the contest then your result becomes a partial success. (Obviously if you fail or fumble you fail or fumble as usual). So for example: Parry critical success: block all damage and can riposte. Parry normal success: block 2*APs of damage. (Means weapons block roughly the same amount they did in RQ using MRQ AP ratings). Parry 'partial' success: block 1*APs. (Still pretty significant for shield) Dodge: critical - ignore all damage and opponent becomes vulnerable; normal - ignore all damage; partial - ignore half damage. Attack: I DON'T use partials in attack. Basically, the damage roll in an attack is an extra variable and represents how 'good' the hit was. For that reason, I have criticals as double damage rather than maximum damage. This is one step more complicated than RQ3 because you have to compare rolls but I like the feel of the system. Hits are still hits and sometimes getting just a little bit of a parry in is enough to save you. It's been interesting running it with a group where 5 have never played any form of RQ before and 1 is pretty experienced. What I like about it is that even when your parry/dodge is up around 100% you still have some tension. In RQ3 if your parry is 100% you are going to parry 95% of everything and the outcome is fairly predictable. In this system, if your parry is 100% and someone hits you with a roll of 42 suddenly there's some tension about whether you get a good parry or a partial one. When used in MRQ with its lack of General HPs, lowered APs and weapon damage, slightly increased HPs you tend to get characters who come out of big fights bleeding from several wounds but still standing. It works for me. YBRPWV.

In RQ2 you still had to apply defence against an attack; it didn't affect all incoming attacks. E.g. if you were surrounded by three trollkin and you have 20% defence then you might parry the first, apply defence against the second and do nothing against the third.

As written, yes. Finally had a chance to read the rules and they are crystal clear. SRs are incompatible with skill splitting for multiple attacks. You can attack a number of times per round based on your SR. So for example, if your SR with a melee weapon is 3 then you can attack on SRs 3, 6 and 9. In the extreme case, a SIZ 21, DEX 21 person with a Pike can attack 10 times per round (once each SR). I must admit that I would never actually use this system as written as I think it misses the point of SRs - as RQ3 occasionally does. Basically, SRs should simply tell you when things happen not, on the whole, how often things happen.

Well the best thing about the MRQ Spellbook is that it's a hardback which makes it useful for bashing any player about the head who brings it with them. Thankfully, it's not OGL so can't be included in SQ anyway. OGL sorcery does have some problematic spells when used as cantrips, notably smother and fly but I seem to recall Newt fixed them in SQ zero anyway. Main issue about using one skill for all manipulations is precise wording. E.g. you have Palsy 57% so you can use 5 levels of manipulation. Does this mean 5 in addition to the base parameters (e.g. Could cast Mag 6, duration 1, range 1) or do total parameters have to add up to 5 (e.g. max might be Mag 3, duration 1, range 1.) Probably ought to be the former. Alternately you could envisage level 0 and add the manipulation levels to it. Mag 0 = no significant game effect Duration 0 = POW in combat rounds (or until end of next combat round) Range 0 = touch targets 0 = self only. If you did this then quite a few spells are obviously meaningless at level 0 (e.g. Palsy unless you want to give yourself a quick thrill) but some could have colour effects: e.g. cantrip version of animating stone might be to make some small stones move around a bit.

I think the idea's a good one but then I would. You do need to go back over the sorcery spells one by one though from two perspectives: 1: what happens when I cast this spell at magnitude 1 and 2: what happens when I cast this spell at magnitude 7. Under your system, 100% in a spell would mean that you could cast it at somewhere between mag 7-10 so that is the level of mastery. The illusions in MRQ SRD are a classic example of someone not thinking through just how useless they are. I do recall you doing this in SQ zero so it shouldn't be a lot of work. There is a good rationale for letting un-manipulated spells be cast for 0 MPs as it fits in with the current Zeitgeist of ensuring that each character always has something to do on their combat action. However, you have to make sure that base level spells are really no more than the equivalent of cantrips.

I had thought but could have it wrong that in RQ3 you had to have both the SRs and the skill in order to make multiple melee attacks in the same round. Thus if you had 120% skill in 1h sword and attacked on SR 5 then you could make two attacks; one on 5 and one on 8. (We had tried the house rule about using your DEX SR as the gap between actions rather than the flat 3 but it did seem to make DEX SR rather overimportant.) This did make multiple attacks a round quite difficult. I *think* we may have ruled that skill enhancers like Bladesharp and situational modifiers added on after the halving though which made them rather tasty. If you had 120% greatsword with Bladesharp 4 and high ground advantage then suddenly you were a mowing machine.

This is really rather silly. Creators do have rights. For example, this is a BRP board and many of us will have played in Glorantha. So, how do you think Greg Stafford would feel if I took a bunch of his creations, adapted some of the material in his unfinished works, wrote it all up in d20, scanned in a lot of the good RQ3 art and gave it all away in a nice looking PDF online? I'm sure many people on this board would be all over me and rightly so. Mongoose and Issaries pay money to Greg in order to do that. Now there is the concept of fair use and it can be a bit blurry. I personally think that the OP has used too much copyright material, especially when it comes to the art.

I suppose the thing to ask yourself is, how happy would you be to have someone doing to your work what you plan to do to Tolkien's? What you are doing would not fall into "fair use" but might be just about defensible under the conventions that generally fall into fan fiction. To be honest I suspect the only thing that would stop Tolkien's estate issuing you with a cease and desist notice is them not noticing you. From the little bits I've seen so far it looks as if you're basically just assuming the rights to use Tolkien's work and you're melding it with screenshots from the movies along with complete images from artists. Just adding a copyright doesn't cut it because the point of the copyright declaration is to prevent you from doing what you're doing. On top of that you're integrating your interpretations of Tolkien's work with his (and possibly also work appearing in other copyrighted sources) so that you can't see the joins and, implicitly, laying claim to it. You're also extending BRP material without any obvious right to do so and some random Tolkien lawyer might even rattle Chaosium's cage. What I would do if I were you is to keep the nicely formatted, lavishly illustrated version to yourself. Under general conventions of fan fiction you could do a more basic "here's how I might interpret some elements of Tolkien's work in a game using the BRP mechanics but of course no copyright is challenged" version and put that up here instead. I'm saying this because fun though it is to do this sort of thing (I've done it myself with B5 stuff) you do have to act responsibly towards the creators of the work you wish to use - whether its the artists whose work you are using or the ideas of those who wrote the texts. It's not just about corporate men in suits seeking to wring every last inch of profit out of something it's also about dealing fairly with authors and artists.

It's a difficult one because generally the requirements for a legendary ability are one stat at 15+ and one skill at 90%. In addition, increasing stats in MRQ is far, far harder than BRP so just requiring CON 17+ wouldn't really cut it. I would be tempted to revision it as something like: STR 15, CON 15, Grapple 90%. Also you need to figure out whether you are going to require an analogue to hero points or not. In general you may need two stats for each Legendary ability in BRP to represent the greater ease of increase. Then again, I've avoided using the MRQ legendary abilities as I'm not really keen on them so I could be totally wrong. Another problem with making Skin of the Bear just a simple CON requirement would be that those creatures with naturally high CON, e.g. dwarves, would be pretty much born with the LA.

I was going to disagree with this but having had a thought, I think you are right, pretty much everything in the advanced skills list could go onto one list. However, part of the fun of BRP systems has been making up your own skills so I think you need to leave an option in there to expand into new skills. If it's useful to you, I long since converted the base chance of every MRQ skill into two stats added together rather than the somewhat random and obscure set of base chances in the SRD. It's just simpler. That might also be the way to go with SQ. You can also tweak it to represent the fact that some skills are more widely practised. So for example, Culture (Own) & language (Own) could start at INT+INT+30 while Culture & language (Other) starts at INT+INT. Conversely, Stealth skills could be DEX+DEX-SIZ. On cha gen, a simple method I use for fast PC creation in MRQ (and to judge the strength of an NPC) is to give them 9 skill adds which have to go onto 9 different skills: +50, 40, 40, 30, 30, 30, 20, 20, 10. On the whole it makes for structured choices and highlights the player's concept as that tends to be defined by their 50/40/40 choices. It usually gets the character starting out with their best skill around 70-80 and there's usually not enough to give the player everything they want. Finally, I do find +/-25% to be an annoying modifier. 63-25 is one of those examples where you have to spend time figuring it out. I woud be in favour (as someone else mentioned) having the simple modifiers as 20/40/60. Something like "easy, very easy, what could possibly go wrong" & "hard, very hard, got a bad feeling about this." Cheers

Here's a sorcery simplification for your perusal. As you say, do away with the manipulation skills. Your skill in the spell determines your ability to manipulate it. Once you reach 90% with a spell you have mastered it and can do two extra things. You can add targets. Each target past the first costs 1 additional MP and counts towards the limit you can manipulate it. E.g. Mikolos wants to palsy 3 charging goblins. He has 92% in Palsy which means that he can use up to 9 levels of manipulation. He decides to cast Palsy at 6 Magnitude on all three goblins at the same time for a total of 6+3 levels of Manipulation. That would cost him the normal 1 MP for the spell plus an extra 2 MPs for the two extra goblins. You can combine spells together. If you have mastered two different spells then you can combine them together and treat them as one spell. This is "difficult" (-25%) and costs 1 MP in addition to the normal costs. If you have mastered 3 spells at 90% you can combine them all together. This is very difficult (-50%) and costs 2 extra MPs.

Quick bit of error trapping: Bludgeon gives +5% and +1 per mag while Bladesharp gives +10% and +1. I suspect that Bludgeon needs revising. Create charms: example refers to a "Befuddle 4" spell. Probably needs to say that the highest mag charm you can make is equal to the mag of Create charm (as per create potion) Create magic point store: needs to specify what is the largest amount of MPs that can be stored - presumably it equals the spell's mag. Note that you can use this spell to make lethal hand grenades... Demoralise: note that this also affects parries but not dodge. This is an ussue with the MRQ SRD. Detec Enemy: has a rogue comma in "spell" Fate: should not have the instant trait. Firearrow and fireblade: should probably specify whether user still gets their Damage Modifier added to the weapon or not. Good Fortune has the traits touch and concentration. This would generally imply that the caster must remaining touching the target(s). Multimissile - refers to a "missile weapon" being charged rather than a "missile" being charged. Oath of ordeal reads: "This spell may not be resisted, but it will be obvious to the spellcaster if his Oath of Ordeal spell has been resisted." It's a problem with the SRD - text is probably meant to read: "the target may choose not to resist the spell. If the spell has been resisted, it will be obvious..." Second Sight: this spell should either be "self" only or should read "..the *target* to gauge..."

The problem with that would be that if you trained your Unarmed skill up to 100 then you would start at that percentage with any weapon you're unskilled in. Even if you said any unskilled weapon was unarmed-50. If you say that any thrown weapon can be used with either throwing or the appropriate weapon skill that does make throwing very useful. It's sort of what MRQ does and providing you don't have players who like to game the rules it's ok. However there's a reasonable point to be made: if you can use bolas, boomerangs and shurikens all with the same skill why do you need different skills for swords, spears and axes? I've taken out the ability to use throwing in MRQ and use specific weapon skills for each weapon ever since I saw one person try to create a bandolier of different thrown weapons for different purposes all using the same skill. Humorous but wrong As a thought experiment, if I wanted to stress the simple side of SQ then it might have the following really broad weapon skills: Brawling (unarmed) Simple weapons (basically spears, maces, knives etc) Military weapons (swords, axes, polearms etc) Exotic weapons (flails and so on however each exotic weapon has to use its own skill) Thrown weapons Bows Crossbows Exotic missile weapons (as exotic close combat weapons.) You could say that trying to use a weapon that your character hasn't used before (or for a long time) is difficult (-25%) until you've had a few minutes to practice it. Then you could say that: if you use a 1h weapon and shield then you get the shield's APs when parrying. if you use a weapon two-handed (providing that it's not something small like a dagger) then you get +1 damage and the weapon's STR requirement is reduced by 3. It depends on how simple Newt wants SQ to be. Seconded.

Glad the comments were helpful. I can certainly see the rationale for allowing athletics to be the skill of pretty much any physical action with the exception of dodge. Sorcery will be a problem on two fronts. One front you're using the MRQ OGL which has distinctly screwy sorcery descriptions. In particular, things like the illusions. For example, someone with a skill of 120% Magnitude and 100 in all illusions can't actually make an opaque brick. You will need to go back through them and actually adapt them properly. Basic premise is that 10 Magnitude is a master magus and should be correspondingly powerful. I made a basic stab at this on the MRQ wiki if you're interested. Secondly, even MRQ sorcery is still not simple in play. I would strongly consider dropping the basic manipulation arts (mag, dur and range) and folding the ability to manipulate the spell into the basic skill. E.g. A spell can be manipulated for magnitude, duration and range but to a maximum extent equal to the caster's spell skill. So, a caster with spell skill of 75% could cast it mag 7 or at mag 2, range 3 and duration 2 or what ever combination adds up to 7. Because of the nature of sorcery, a character can always cast a spell at its base parameters of mag 1, duration 1 and range 1. Manipulating a spell costs 1 MP for each manipulation. You might want to go back to MRQ's 0 cost for unmanipulated spells. Sorcery for beginning characters has a high miss factor so being able to throw "cantrips" around all day is no bad thing. (You could treat spell casting as the equivalent of hard work for the purposes of fatigue to stop PCs abusing it.) Combine and Targets. These could then become esoteric arts which adepts learn. You wouldn't roll against them but instead, for example each full 20% of combine could let a sorceror combine an additional spell to the one being cast. Each 10% in targets lets them add an additional target. As ever it would cost 1MP to use each manipulation. Doing all this means that the player only has to roll against 1 number, which appears to be in your ethos. MRQ as written could feature players with 66% in spell, 62% Magnitude, 71% range, 52% in targets rolling 58 and wondering what it means. (Spell goes off with Mag 7, Range 8, 1 target for those wondering.)

Battle Magic: you could fairly easily simplify this further. For example: all spells with a limited duration have the same duration (either a fixed amount such as 10 minutes or equal to the caster's POW). Make all spells ranged. After all, the idea is to keep things simple and keep extraneous information off the sheet. All spells are progressive unless otherwise stated and are Magnitude one unless otherwise stated. It means that you can make the spell descriptions much cleaner. So, for example Bladesharp would read Bladesharp This spell can be cast on any weapon with a blade. For every point of Magnitude, it increases the chance to hit with the weapon by +10% and deals one point of extra damage. ... Befuddle Fixed Magnitude 2, Resist (Persistence). You also might have a problem with spells like Coordination that add bonuses to characteristics which break the big modifier rule. E.g. Coordination 1 adds +2% to all combat skills (except, oddly, unarmed...) They go against the ethos of your system.

Nice work. I haven't had a chance to look over much of it yet but I do like the way you've simplified the skills list in an attempt to make every skill impoart. The things I've noticed are: you have either removed the throwing skill but forgot to remove references to it in the weapon skills or you've accidentally omitted Throwing. Personally I would include throwing in athletics and treat athletics as the "olympics track and field" skill. You don't seem to have an acrobatics skill. You might be using characteristic rolls though I haven't actually seen them yet. If you are not, I think you probably do need it as it is good to differentiate between runners and gymnasts. If not, you probably need to indicate how to resolve things like balancing, squeezing through small spaces and so on. Unarmed - this is mentioned in the combat skills table but not actually defined as far as I can see. Technically it should be a basic skill. It might make sense to call it "Brawling" and use it to include any sort of unarmed attack, grapple or act of picking up rocks and hitting people with them. It's a simplification that works for me. Grappling: there appears to be a missing table or the descriptions are fu-barred. Hope this is useful.

I think it's perfectly valid for some genres and settings. I'm sure there is a good argument for including a powers set for martial arts for those times when you want to focus on such things. Personally I think it makes sense as part of a power set than as a 'normal' skill. Thus you could have the power "Fight Multiple Oponents". For each X percent in this skill the user can attack and parry (or dodge) one additional opponent per round without any minuses. This power has no effect when only fighting one opponent. This power can be activated as a free action at any time during the round for a cost of 1PP and lasts until the end of the round." This is very clearly a cinematic martial power rather than a super-duper skill and the user still must train their normal skills for attacks and parries.

I played in a campaign where the GM switched to Superworld for a while, or at least tried to. Of all the supers system I played back in the day it was the one that lasted the least time; it simply wasn't enjoyable for us. We had started with me running V&V which was quirky and fun. My friend was inspired to run Champions which was ok but in the end was crunchier than we really wanted. He tried out Superworld once and we recoiled. I meanwhile had gone from V&V to champions to DC Heroes and stuck with DC Heroes ever after. My friend eventually settled on it too. I don't really know what contemporary supers games are like. I could imagine running BRP Supers in a Watchmen like universe where, basically, the supers are just guys in suits. With the exception of Big Blue who is basically a NPC plot device anyway.