deleriad

I actually like the way that MRQ has done it. They have basically posited a relatively short list of universal skills that every character has. Then there is another list of specific skills that need to be acquired specially. In BRP terms this is the difference between skills with a base chance greater than 0% and those with a 0% base chance. In any given milieu there will be a few specific skills that would be universal. MRQ tends to lump together several skills that are presented as individual skills in other BRP games. I didn't like it at first but in play, with occasional exceptions, I've come to prefer it. It means that a standard character sheet has just 20 skills actually written on it and then a column left for other skills the PCs might gain. Case study. MRQ uses the skill athletics. It covers swimming, jumping, climbing, running, lifting things up and so on. At first that seems overly broad but most times it is really handy to say "make an athletics roll" and let the players get on with it. In the case of a desert nomad you could add the trait - "Can't swim, won't swim" due to never having seen more water than he could drink at a single sitting. No matter how good his Athletics skill, he still can't swim. Conversely, a creature with wings might have the trait "flying" and could use athletics to make flying skill checks when necessary. Rather than adding skills to a sheet, different characters can do different things with their skills where relevant. The more I play with it, the more I prefer broader skills.

A really good thing for a web extra (or the wiki here) would be a list of relationships between optional rules. E.g. incompatible (use one or the other but not both), deprecated (you can use it but it really isn't a good idea), recommended (i.e. good idea to use both rather than just one) and required (you can't use one without the other.) Clearly there's a 5th relationship (no impact on each other) but that doesn't excatly need stating. So for example, under hit locations you could have: incompatible with major wound table, major wounds, random armour values. The anal retentive in me would find this a really useful resource and would do it myself if I had a) time and time to read the book thoroughly.

I must admit that I tend to take precisely the opposite tack because giving negative modifiers to parries veers into micro-management. That said, this is using RQ rather than BRP as I haven't properly read the parrying rules in BRP. Basically, someone trying to parry a giant, mutated charging pig with a dagger with just 4APs might as well be wearing a "tusk me, baby! tusk me!" shirt for all the good the dagger does. If BRP tends to all or nothing parries then I would say, depending on mood and genre "well, you can parry its tusk damage but the rest of the pig will trample you into dirt while you stand there." or "Due to your flourish of madcap bravery & the glint of your dagger the pig loses its nerve and veers away at the last minute as you successful parry the pig. All around you gaze in amazement and you are destined to be known as Logan the man who parried a pig with a dagger for all eternity. Even now, run down hamlets are starting to hear the story."

BRP is more lethal than D&D though nowhere near as lethal as CoC. When playing in a fantasy setting characters usually have access to some combination of armour, parrying, avoidance and magic to either minimise the damage taken from any given attack or recover from it. The BIG difference to D&D games though (when played out of the box) is that in BRP *any* attack from almost any enemy could kill a PC whereas in D&D you normally have to be weakened by several blows before your character might die. Consequently, in BRP, the most dangerous thing to do to a group of PCs is to outnumber them. In D&D if you outnumber the PCs 2 to 1 with a group of critters a few levels lower than the PCs, the worst that is likely to happen is that they lose a few HPs. Do the same to BRP PCs and there's a real chance you might accidentally kill one of the PCs. For most BRP/RQ fans, this is a *good* thing.

On a more abstract level that has nothing to do with programming, it seems to me that the central issue is whether RPGs have improved over time or whether that is inherently impossible. For example, one would have thought that special effects have improved over time due to better technology, more options and more experience. That's not to say that the SFX in every film released this year have been realised better than one released 30 years ago. On the other hand, one probably doesn't want to say that poetry has improved over the last 2000 years. That said, there is undoubtedly a greater range of forms and techniques available to the modern poet. Now it seems to me that the best of contemporary RPGs have learned various lessons about game design. You would have hoped that after thirty odd years of d100 based playing and conversation that the designers of a d100 based game would have a much greater knowledge about implementing the system. Of course, they could still screw it up. For myself, I find the RQ2 rulebook to be the best written RQ rulebook out there. I re-read it properly for the first time in ages last year and was surprised by the dry humour, clarity of text and amount of material packed into it. Of all the RQ rulebooks it's the one that would most inspire me to delve straight into a game. Conversely I think the MRQ rulebook is the most usable of the rulebooks. Despite some glaring problems it succeeds in stripping away all the fat and getting you playing straight away. Now, I wouldn't say there is anyway of objectively measuring which of RQ2 or MRQ is the "better" system because, simply, I'm not sure there is an objective scale. MRQ does definitely propose answers to things that were seen problematic in earlier editions of RQ games. In that respect it has the advantage over RQ2 as written. Whether or not you agree with the answers is another issue. This risks being a woolly, post-modern post. However, I expect any rpg released these days to reflect the greater experience available to the authors. It's for that reason that I would forgive RQ2 for problems that I wouldn't forgive if I saw them in MRQ. To me it seems that systems like RQ2 or Basic D&D are somewhat like the 1950s classic movies. They're classics, they are watchable but they're also somewhat of their time. Depending on your viewpoint, a system like MRQ is either a bad reimagining of a classic or something like a re-release that's been remastered with improved special effects.

Well I think it's fair to say that if you want to play a particular game then it makes sense to get supporting materials for that game. So, for example, if you wanted to play RQ2 it would make sense to get one of the Moon Reprints of the RQ2 campaigns. If you want to play RQ3 then buy RQ3 and try to get a supplement - easier said than done. Same with Mongoose RQ but be aware that the default setting in Glorantha is different. However, buying BRP and a RQx supplement and then trying to mod BRP and the supplement to have them work together is a lot of effort for no obvious gain. The obvious question is: is it that system or the setting that appeals to the OP? (Or both.) If it's the setting and you want to use BRP then you will have to adapt BRP to the setting. From the sounds of it, the OP wants to run fantasy using BRP and does not much mind what the setting is. In that case just use BRP right out of the book and find a scenario or two to play to see how you like it.

You know that is a very good point and very well put and gets to the heart of why SRs cause so much confusion. RQ3 muddied the waters horribly. Basically, SRs measure who goes when, not "how long" an action takes. Obviously there is a relationship between how long an action takes and when you go but it's not a one to one relationship. Nothing else to add here. sorry :innocent:

The general approach is to use opposed rolls instead. If you want a strength contest for example then rather than doing it on the resistance table you use an opposed contest of two Effort rolls (STR*5%). Similarly if you want to use POW vs POW you do a contest of POW*5 vs POW*5.

FWIW, I bought it this morning (about 12 hours ago) and it was done instantly. Came straight back from the paypal page and the download link was in place. That said, the purchasing interface was horrible in the extreme.

Exactly. Sadly, there are those out there who feel an emotional need to trash D&D which tends to undermine threads like these. Personally, I like looking at other games and seeing what new ideas they come up with and then, if I like them, seeing how to adapt them for my purposes. What's interesting to me about D&D4e has less to do with the mechanics - which haven't changed that much - but the implementation. As far as I can tell, you could implement BRP in exactly the same way that they have chosen to implement D&D. In fact, RQ4:AiG, did exactly that by writing the combat mechanics explicitly from the perspective of figures on a grid. The other thing that strikes me is that the game rules are explicitly written so that every character can be involved in every action. Combat is the clearest example. Now, to simplify, a mage can attack with a blast spell that does about the same damage as a bow and as frequently as a person with a bow can do. Relatedly, it takes more than one hit to take down a beginning character because they can keep bouncing back up for a while. Clearly, the new edition has been written in the context of MMORPGs and mini games and draws on what has made them popular. Although I've no interest in playing D&D of any edition, there's a lot of insights to steal from it.

To get back on topic... What D&D4e seems to be trying to do is to emphasise the "game" element in role-playing game. So, in combat, there are attempts to define various rules and actions. It strikes me that a D&D4e combat (and I say this is an outsider) is most analogous to a game of American Football. The players attempt to execute various moves based on their characters' roles and abilities and the GM opposes them with a NPC team. A "good" combat encounter is probably one in which the teams are "evenly matched" but the players prevail, narrowly, through clever use of tactics. Thus, a D&D combat could be resolved without any "role-playing" if the players were so minded. Indeed, where the roleplaying comes in depends on the players. For example, a player might decide that their Paladin refuses to carry out the obviously "correct" action because some leering orc has just insulted his god and must be smote. I think what WotC has decided is that you can't enforce roleplaying. Rather you provide the game and let the players decide how much to roleplay. This is probably the correct decision. Thing is, this has nothing to do with the D&D system as such, you could make exactly the same decisions with BRP. All you need to do are to define the rules and actions so that you can play it as a game. What the D&D designers seem to be doing is defining the rules so that they can be programmed into a computer and trying to analyse what it is that is enjoyable about playing D&D as a game. I think that's really quite interesting in a Windows Vista kind of way.

Well, perhaps oddly, it depends on how quick and dirty the rules you are using are. Say for example, you are a couple of metres from your opponent for some reason and there's some sand to hand. Now if you believe that it's a good idea not to worry about moving into combat then you would always just attack. If on the other hand, you say that moving into combat allows the opponent to hit you on the way in then suddenly using a missile weapon is potentially a good idea because you might be able to rush your opponent while they're clearing the sand from their face. Of course the problem tends to be that a good warrior might be 120% at hitting with swords, 100% at dodging and only 40% at throwing sand in which case throwing sand is always going to be suboptimal. This was a frustration I always had when playing in RQ3. I had a couple of characters that I was always trying to do cool combat tricks with and no matter what, it was never efficient. I did it anyway. As a GM using MRQ I've tended to implement tricks through using the Influence, acrobatics and athletics skills. E.g. to pull off the "behind you" trick a character can make an opposed Influence roll as an action. If successful, the character's next attack is at +20%. This is useful when you're fairly evenly matched or outmatched because odds are that the opponent hasn't boned up on their Influence. Essentially you're sacrificing a standard combat skill in order to have an unexpected edge. This works nicely in MRQ as I use the opposed roll combat system so most things work the same way. Possibly wouldn't work as well in BRP. On the actual topic of this thread; every game has something to learn from. I think the designers are doing interesting things with D&D4. A lot of what it reminds me of is a complex board game that in some ways takes the "game" side of role-playing games back to their roots. It seems to me that if you write a RPG as a board game then those who want to ignore the board and play in their minds can do so. On the other hand, if you don't provide the "board" it's a lot harder to create it. Now I've played D&D twice in my life and have no real interest in the system but it seems to me that there's an awful lot of systems analysis that's gone into the new edition and I'm looking forwards to reading the SRD (if there is one).

I've played and used RQ sorcery a lot. RQ3 (after the errata) is book-keeping heavy. Most spell casting is actually done during down time with sorcerors pre-casting long duration spells on themselves. It's not a "plug and play" system as even the weakest spells tend to need multiple Power Points(*) to cast. Once you have a powerful Magus though (e.g. about 50 years of game time) then they're humongously powerful. Summary: High book-keeping, extremely weak at low level, probably over-powered at high levels. RQ4. This attempted to downgrade the top end of sorcery and adopted some ideas from Sandy Peterson's system. Still requires extremely complex book-keeping. Sandy's system. A very different beast. Much of the system requires Gloranthan cosmology because sorcerors gain power by taking restrictive vows. You could re-engineer it into other game worlds. Tends to require a lot of book-keeping and downtime. MRQ. The simplest system. At first glance looks like RQ3 as sorcerors have skills for each spell and each art. However spells cost far fewer PPs to cast. Cast at the base level they cost nothing. Because MRQ makes POW gaining a lot harder than other versions of RQ, MRQ sorcerors can generally make a decent fist at magic using just personal power. MRQ is the strongest sorcery system at the bottom end but progresses in a linear gradient rather than exponentially as does the rest of RQ. MRQ is my favourite but has one HUGE problem; Mongoose's right hand never knows what their left hand is up to. Thus, the spells have been basically copied from RQ3 without noticing the differences in the system, especially the ability to free cast base level spells. This means that some spells are ludicrously overpowered, some the reverse and some simply don't work. You can't seriously run MRQ sorcery as written because of this.

It's a neat cover though I do hope we see the original cover in some form as well sometime as I liked it.

It was Nephilim for me. When I saw it I was hooked. I loved the potential it seemed to offer for layers of deceit. I thought the magic in it was an interesting attempt to model western occultism and the game system was an interesting variant of BRP. And yet, try though I did, I couldn't persuade anyone else to get interested and came up short when finding anything playable to do with it. Jorune was another. A friend kept trying to run a campaign and we kept trying to get our heads around it and nothing ever happened.

I played in a short-lived Ringworld campaign a long, long time ago. At first I thought the RSM mechanic was brilliant but it quickly became meaningless and complicated at the same time. These days I use 2 stats as base scores for every skill and the MRQ notion of "basic" and "advanced" skills. For a while I had 7 category modifiers each based on 2 skills, but now rather than forming a skill taxonomy and having to occasionally shoe-horn skills into a slot that doesn't fit, I use skill labels instead. So for example, 1H Axe skill is a "combat" skill and an "agility" skill with the base score = STR+DEX. I find it more flexible system. Thing is, when you break the Ringworld RSM system down, all it is is skill category modifiers that you have to spend points on during character creation. It is much easier just to skip the spending points bit and have a skill plus category modifier or in my case, a skill base chance based on 2 stats. For example, say you want to play a Botanist. In RW you train your knowledges RSM up to its limit then start training in Botany at a base score equal to your RSM. In my system, you spend time learning a new skill (Botany) and it starts at a base chance equal to INT*2. (It would be INT+EDU if I used EDU). They both end up in the same place. The main thing I remember about RW is that EDU and POW can hit stratospheric levels quite quickly which means that you can be looking at 50%+ RSMs for skills at character generation.

Actually, this strikes me as a GM/player problem, not a system problem. Part of the role-playing side of the game is to deal with the random reversals that the dice deal you. If the GM and the player wish the character to stay in play then how do they deal with it. For example, does the GEAS mean that he must actively distrust the non-Humakti? Now the player has to play a character with an instinct to trust his friends who is worried about what his God thinks. What a brilliant role-playing opportunity. Does he tell his friends? Who does he confide in? Does he go to his Sword and ask for guidance? Or maybe the GEAS actually implants a seed of distrust in his heart and now he has to play someone who has conflicted feelings. He knows he should trust but his spirit is telling him to beware all who do not show his faith. Or maybe the GEAS is turning him into an emotionless member of the faithful. By distrusting this simply means that his ability to trust is dying as he becomes more Humakti. One of the joys about RPGing is responding to vagaries of dice rolls from time to time. Each group has to make their own decisions about when to roll the dice and when to re-roll the dice and how to respond to them. Of course, everyone has a different thing they enjoy about RPGing. For me its about the balance between the game and the roleplaying and randomness is an integral part of that.

I must admit that what I hope happens is that the licensing and so on allows a lot of flexibility. So for example, say someone wants to do A Song of Ice and Fire as a BRP line then you could basically put together a stand-alone book which uses SRs, Hit Locations, Static armour values and so on so that you wouldn't actually need the BRP book to play this setting. Basically it remixes the BRP book and adds to it where necessary while removing Powers that aren't needed and so on. Future supplements in that line would then use this book as the source. On the other hand, someone might decide to do a simple 48 page fantasy scenario published on demand as a PDF or something and use just the basics from BRP. This is all to say that the issue will be to do with licensing as anything else. Providing there's a lot of flexibility then, if someone thinks it might sell, they could publish a game called "Basic Fantasy" which essentially retro-engineers BRP into RQ3 and then, if it does prove popular, find a setting which works. Personally I will buy the book but I'm more likely to continue running RQ stuff using my own mix of MRQ and RQ3 and CoC stuff with my copy of CoC. What I hope will happen is that others will start producing high-quality supplements for BRP that I can take and use. Hopefully the BRP book will enable others to write supplements and that's, in my opinion, where the BRP will succeed or fail.

Something Steve Perrin has often said he is unhappy with is the expansion of SRs in RQ3. As Nick says above, SRs were basically an abstraction to help answer the question of who does what when. Unfortunately, RQ3 suffered SR creep where more and more stuff got loaded onto them until they started to look more as if each SR was an interval of time. I remember seeing what happened when I would watch people playing RQ3 with miniatures on a table and they would move their figure 3m each SR and then people would wonder how they could attack someone who had run past them before they could attack on their SR.

That's not what it says in the RQ3 rulebook. Player's Book p46. "an adventurer must start moving on the SR equal to his/her DEX SR. ... During the next melee round he can move at 3m. per SR, beginning again on his DEX SR."

Having not seen the BRP rulebook I can't comment on this but MRQ made exactly the same mistake when it added downgrading into opposed rolls and forgot to think through all the implications (surely some mistake...) so the BRP book really, really needs the line that the winner can't be downgraded to result that's worse than a normal success. Personally I use a "partial success" mechanic; i.e. if I lose the opposed roll but still make my skill test successfully then I get a result that's about 1/2 as good as a normal success. I doubt it would work in BRP because that still has critical/special/normal and I wouldn't want to add yet more into it. I must admit that ever since I started using opposed rolls in CoC and RQ back in the 90s I've been sold on the mechanic. It's not a perfect fit but, somewhat like democracy, it tends to be the least worst answer.

What, you mean you run MRQ? :innocent:

No time to read the rest... A Song of Ice and Fire. I figure that BRP is made for this setting. Babylon 5. Ditto. Uplift books. I've also always had a hankering for 70s cop shows. Once ran a mini-campaign called Benson & Hedges for just that reason.

First started playing RQ with the Games Workshop in 1982 and branched out into pretty much every other Chaosium game afterwards. Didn't touch ElfQuest with a stick. Played many other games, DC Heroes being my favourite. Played RQ3 to death and even had a badly mangled article printed in Heroes once it went downhill. HeroWars/Quest never really grabbed me and drifted out of RPGdom into CCGs and boardgames. Happily playing a house-ruled version of MRQ and looking forward to seeing more about BRP. Not into the BRP culture wars.

I have been using opposed rolls in BRP games ever since I read Pendragon and a light clicked on. Not seen the new BRP rules but my house campaigns collapsed specials and criticals into one (as MRQ does) which meant that I was happier with the range of outcomes. I'm in the camp which tries to read the result off the dice without calculation so I use highest roll wins if the result is a tie. I've never come across any resistance to this among players. "Made by most" is more aesthetically pleasing but when I tried it (it was the first way I tried to run ORs because it's the most obvious way) there were just enough "hang-ons" that they seemed to interfere with the game and once someone pointed out that I could do highest wins then that ran much more smoothly with my play style. I did occasionally find that having criticals, specials and normals felt congested once opposed rolls started to get used a lot, which is why I collapsed criticals and specials together. I'm also becoming increasingly converted to opposed rolls in combat. I don't use MRQ's method because it's a mess but with critical/normal/partial results it runs smoothly and all you have to do is look at your dice. It feels about the same level of complexity as RQ3. Personally I like the deep logic behind opposed rolls. You make a skill test when it's just you against a passive resistance and a skill contest when it's you against someone else. In a skill test there is a fixed modifier affecting your result. In a skill contest there's a variable modifier affecting your result.