deleriad

I believe it's setting specific; i.e. it's up to you. Different cults will have different ideas about when an initiate is allowed to gain spells and so on. Bear in mind that many cults may require initiates to always learn certain spells first or may require various actions before certain (or any) spells can be learned. If you're not playing with a fleshed-out setting then 1-3 spells is probably a reasonable number for a fairly generic starting character.

Intensity is the effect of the spell. Magnitude is something like the spell's weight. The more Magnitude it has, the more likely it is to punch through magical defences. By itself, increasing Magnitude does nothing to the spell so the only time a sorcerer increases Magnitude is when they expect to face magical defences. Magnitude is in many ways the least commonly useful shaping art but when you need it, you really need it. Important to realise that unlike previous RQ, Intensity and Magnitude are now separate. In sorcery, Intensity is automatically gained from the sorcerer's skill while Magnitude has to be added using shaping.

Success levels in roll-over tend to become linear. E.g. a normal success is to roll 100+ on skill+roll, a special success is 150+ and a critical 200+. Unlike BRP this means that success levels can become either impossible to attain or trivially easy. For this reason one option is to allow "exploding rolls" - i.e. if you roll 95+ you can roll again and add. That becomes very close to saying that the equivalent of a natural 20 (5% chance) is a special or a critical depending on how good your base skill tends to be. Another option is to say that if you succeed and roll a double you get a critical while if you fail and roll a double that you fumble. That roughly simulates the 10% critical range of RQ6/Legend et al. However you never get better than an absolute 10% chance of a critical no matter how good you are. So there are fairly simple solutions but none of them are as elegant or scalable as roll-under.

For what it's worth, back in the day I ran RQ3 without magic for PCs as the default for a long time very successfully. There was however a large amount of dice fudging behind the GM's screen. RQ3 is not so much super lethal as prone to disabling and requiring a lot of healing time. That said, I was largely running urban fantasy and the NPCs didn't have magic either so, to adopt a current term, damage potential tended to be bounded and survivable. Combat was relatively rare and usually based around ambushes. Any time the PCs got ambushed they did their best to surrender as quickly as possible. Still, these days I would be more likely to use RQ6 because it builds survivability into the system without the need for magic and healing potions and I no longer need to hide away the dice rolls. You could mash up the systems by importing RQ6 Luck Points into RQ3 and, if you want to balance things, you could say something along the lines that any character with magic doesn't have Luck Points. Perhaps exposure to Mythos magic dooms you in more ways than one. Generally in RQ6 NPCs don't have Luck Points while in the kinds of s&s you're talking about, only NPCs have magic so the balance would sort of happen by default anyway.

It may be less to do with *system* complexity than *setting* complexity. If you want to get your friends playing "traditional" fantasy first where the concept is fairly straightforward then RQ lets you break out some simple scenarios with a bit of combat and a bit of roleplaying. Something like Delta Green probably requires more buy in from the players and is in many ways more demanding in terms of player input. So I can see good reasons to start with a fairly straight forward fantasy rpg setting and afterwards experiment with different settings and different genres.

Seems like a good plan. Only thing I would say is that Legend is actually no more rules light than RQ6. RQ6 has a whole load more magic systems in the actual book but combat, skills, character creation, armour, weapons are fundamentally the same as Legend. RQ6 is more refined, more cohesive and better explained which is what you would expect given that its written by the same authors with 2 years more experience. Given that you can buy RQ Essentials for the same price as Legend (or more if you like) there doesn't really seem to be any point in using Legend as a gateway to RQ6 when you can use RQ Essentials as a gateway. The one thing that makes Legend *look* lighter is that it's a smaller book. The reason for that is it doesn't put the same amount of detail into explaining how the system works so there's more onus on the GM on making sense of it. The system itself is no lighter. If you are going to use Caravan to Book of Quests then one advantage is that all the scenarios are written so that PCs don't need access to magic and the NPCs are also fairly simple so that the GM doesn't need a great deal of rules knowledge to be able to run them. That way you can start with RQ essentials and as you all get more experienced you can add more details and more magic.

Indeed. Yes I can do the modifiers. I've been playing RQ since 1981. I used to GM a long Villains and Vigilantes campaign. I'm currently interested to explore what you can do to replace the calculation of degrees of success and modifiers with dice rolls. It is rather tiring to be told that this means that I didn't pay attention in maths class. I'm also a sucker for shiny dice. Been mulling over MatteoN's posts and thinking it would be fun to have a rune die. A d20 marked with some Gloranthan runes that you roll at the same time. E.g. if you fail your skill test and roll a Disorder rune it's a fumble or if you succeed and roll an infinity rune it's a critical.

I had a friend who bought Elfquest because we were all Chaosium fanboys and he had all the money so he bought everything. It was dire. If I remember, what happened is that Chaosium had no one to work on it because they were in the middle of all the stress in getting RQ3 developed so they asked Steve Perrin to do it. He took some of the prototype rules for RQ3 and hacked out some world background based on the comics. it was a classic mismatch of rules and setting. You can't blame Steve Perrin for it, he only had one head and two hands so there wasn't time to do anything else. Still they would have been better taking CoC as it was or even Magic World and adapting it. Instead you got detailed simulation rules for melee combat and almost nothing that had anything to do with the comics or world. Elfquest was an early step in my falling out of love with Chaosium products.

I know of d100lite. It uses doubles for criticals and a negative for multiple actions in a round if I remember rightly. I know that CoC7 uses something like advantage as well. Not overly fond of what I have seen of CoC7. I don't personally have any issue about doing the maths needed; I ran more RQ3 than I can remember and that was as fiddly as any BRP system has ever been. What I am interested in is looking at what happens when you take *all* of the maths out of the dice resolution system. That means no skill modifiers and no calculating critical/special/fumble results etc. I've used doubles as criticals in games I run with non-gaming friends and it works ok for characters in the 50-70% range. This is also normally for CoC so having lots of chance to fumble works quite well. There are various little quirks about doubles as criticals that means I don't think it's that flexible as a core mechanic. I've not tried the set numbers (1s and 0s) for criticals and fumbles but I think it is probably more flexible than doubles and preserves some old, old BRP standards such as 01 always been good and 00 always being bad.

The recent critical math thread and other things going on has reminded me that I tend to prefer to dice tricks to skill modifiers. So I've been dusting off some notes and toying with some ideas. The following works best as a replacement for 1/10 criticals and no specials. The key to this is to remember that skill modifiers are completely gone. No +/- no division or multiplication. Your skill is your skill is your skill. 1. A critical success occurs when you roll 1 on the units dice and succeed at a skill test. 2. A critical failure (fumble) occurs when you roll 0 on the unit dice and fail at a skill test. 01-05 is always a success (and 01 = crit). 96-00 is always a failure (and 00 is critical failure). Advantage. Is your skill test easier than usual for some reason? Roll two tens dice and pick your favourite. Disadvantage. Is your skill test harder than usual for some reason? Roll two tens dice and pick the worst. Mastery. Is your skill 100% or greater? Roll two units dice and pick your favourite. (i.e. double your chance of a critical.) The big problem with this is that for skills over 100 it doesn't really matter how far over 100% you are, there is no further advantage so it only really works for systems with hard or soft skill caps around 100% which, anyway, tends to be my preference. An alternative to mastery that avoids the 100+ issue is something like this. Mastery. Did you roll a number that is less than or equal to your skill minus 100? if yes, you scored a critical. (e.g. skill 127% roll 22% = critical). No actual subtraction needed and because skill doesn't change when tested, no need to double check. This also means there's no need to do any kind of skill adjustment for opposed rolls of skills over 100 because the extra critical chance means that you have a significantly greater chance of winning through the critical vs normal result. (Large skill differences in opposed rolls should probably generate advantage and disadvantage respectively.) What does the hive think?

To clarify, though most d100 is pretty modular I wouldn't recommend using combat manoeuvers and BRP 5-fold degrees of success together. It's fiddly to do so and leads to odd results. For example, is a special versus a normal 1 degree of success and, if so, should it be allowed to choose from critical CMs or normal CMs? (Or do you need to go through all the CMs and decide if there should be a 3rd type of CM.) You will get 2 CMs much more frequently (special vs failure) than you do in Legend and in general you will get a lot more CMs. On the other hand you will get much fewer critical CMs. None of these issues are unfixable and they won't "break" the system but they will make it play in ways which feel rather odd. By the way I would also strongly recommend you get the free (technically "pay what you want") RQ6 Essentials rather than Legend. RQ6 is a much tighter, smoother and all around better designed version of the same system. There are lots of niggling issues in Legend which have been addressed in RQ6.

Main thing is combat manoeuvres. You will generate a *lot* more of them.

This is an old, old issue. How fine-grained do you make a skill set? Make it too fine-grained and you get absurdities like a someone who can run and jump brilliantly but is useless at throwing. The what happens is everyone says "seeing as I'm good at running and jumping surely I can get some kind of bonus to throwing by taking a run up or something." The more fine-grained you make the skill system the more fine-grained you need to make it. RQ6/Legend has a specific issue here. While BRP has skill checks which means that the more skills you use in a session the more you can advance, RQ6 uses flat awards so the more skills you have the slower each one advances. So that system needs by definition broader skills. My personal approach is that highly trained aspects of RQ6 basic skills should be developed as new professional skills. So an Olympic athlete who specializes in long-distance running might have Athletics, Endurance and Athletics (Long Distance Running) at 120%+. In a skill contest then I regard professional skills as superior to basic skills so (and this is a house rule) in an opposed roll where one is using a basic skill and one is using a professional skill then I award ties to the professional skill user rather than high-roller. Finally, and I reckon most importantly, RQ6 is not an Olympics athletics modelling system. It is a fantasy role playing game that provides some (fairly) simple mechanics that tell you what usually happens when you hit an orc in the head with an axe. Complaining that RQ6 doesn't model the difference between sports is pretty much up there with complaining that "Pride and Prejudice" does a lousy job of deconstructing whaling in the 1800s.

No to all of these from me. Sounds like a software glitch.

That's it in a nutshell. Mastery of a skill (90%) means that in most cases, most of the time you will succeed at the skill under stressful conditions.

Personally I think that 100% refers to a level of skill such that you would expect to perform this skill successfully under most normal, stressful situations. Remember, you only roll for skills when the situation is demanding in some ways. E.g. driving a car. Once you've got some sort of skill rating, you don't bother making Driving rolls every single time you drive a car; you only make them when for some reason there's a risk of failure. Example; a pedestrian steps out in front of you unexpectedly. Make a driving roll to avoid hitting the pedestrian. The absolute value represents a degree of competence. Someone with a skill of 90% is labelled a master because 9 times out of 10, if they need to use the skill under stressful circumstances (such as the pedestrian example) they will succeed. However what if they wish to perform some sort of crazy stunt such as flipping up onto two wheels to drive at high speed down an alley way that's too narrow for the car while being pursued by alien bounty hunters on skyboards? That's where you need someone with Stig-like skills, perhaps Driving at 160% because there will be negative to your skill to represent how hard this is. The percentage value does NOT* represent the limit of normal human skill nor does it represent your skill in relation to other humans. It is a marker of competency. Once you reach a skill of 100% you can successfully perform all normal uses of this skill under stressful and demanding circumstances 19 times out of 20. (Because in stressful circumstances no matter how good you are you can always screw up.) Exceeding 100% means that you are more likely to succeed at the kinds of crazy stunts that even a regular master would fail at. *However when Chaosium first adopted the system based on the old Thieves skills tables, 100% was the maximum value. In original RQ2 and Call of Cthulhu, 100% was the maximum you could attain. In RQ, divine favour (being a rune lord) let you reach "superhuman" levels of skill that exceeded 100%. In CoC, 100% was the maximum because only the horrors of the cthulhu mythos or edlritch magic could go higher. From RQ3 onwards, this was dropped and skill percentage became simply a measure of proficiency and this has continued to this day.

A slightly different analogy. in BRP games where there are hit locations then in melee combat you roll hit location randomly because you can't predict where you'll manage to find an opening. To hit a specified location is either harder or requires a special success of some type. (Using generic terms here.) So, firing into a "body" of people (i.e. a group) is no more difficult than usual providing you don't care who you hit; simply roll the target randomly. If however you care you hit then it's sort of like aiming for a specific location. Using standard BRP you would simply say it's hard or very hard depending on the context. E.g. "I want to hit one of the orcs" when you don't care which one out of the three orcs near your two friends you hit might be HARD. "Aiming for the orc leader" might be VERY HARD. Of course what everyone tends to obsess about is accidentally hitting a friend. There are at least two ways that can happen. A fumble and random selection. If you want a third way then you can say something like "if you miss and roll doubles" (but don't fumble) you have accidentally hit a random target (friend or foe.) This has the intended side-effect of making it actually slightly easier to hit someone but that that someone might be a friend. And of course it means that if you are aiming for a specific target you are also slightly more likely to hit an unintended target, presumably because the reason you missed is that the victim stepped right in front of your missile at just the wrong moment.

Simplest answer is that characteristics are *relatively* unimportant in RQ6. If you are rolling randomly then this is probably a good thing as it means most characters are about as viable as most other characters. Note also that by default, RQ6 has no permanent way of improving characteristics. The choice of "breakpoints" means that someone using points-buy does have meaningful decisions to make. E.g because CON 13 is significantly better than CON 12 for healing rate you don't have to bust your budget to hit a breakpoint. The other way to do it, rather than making it more granular, is to set the breakpoints more to the extremes so that most characters are close to the same. E.g. Action Points might be. INT+DEX 1-6: 1 Action Point INT+DEX 7-30: 2 Action Points INT+DEX 31-36: 3 Action Points Each +12: +1 Action Point That way, only exceptional people get more than 2 Action Points. Ditto Luck Points POW 1-3: 1 Luck Point POW 7-15: 2 Luck Points POW 16-18: 3 Luck Points Each +6: +1 Luck Point RQ6 is fairly well balanced in terms of attributes. If you start adding more points in the normal human range to make it more granular you start getting more Luck Points per session, more action points per round and so on and the game can ending up feeling rather stodgy with combat rounds in particular taking longer to resolve.

I don't think the changes are anything like as major as 3rd and 4th edition D&D. It reminds me more of RQ2 to RQ3 with plenty of changes that feel more like solutions looking for a problem. It still feels like a really odd idea to create the BGB then rewrite your flagship line to be less consistent with it. Personally I didn't back the Kickstarter partly because it felt like someone's houserules that appear to add complexity for no gain that I see and partly because I don't trust Chaosium to deliver any time soon.

It is an interesting idea and does occasionally bubble up. I've always liked the idea of a wound threshold. E.g. using the RQ6/Legend model you could have a value for HPs equal to something like (CON+SIZ)/5 rounded up. Probably around 5 HPs for most humans Any damage which does less than the threshold in damage after armour is a minor wound of no immediate consequence. Any wound which does at least the threshold is a serious wound which briefly stuns you. Then resist with Endurance immediately to be able to continue in the fight. (Remember RQ6 doesn't use resistance table so it pits attack roll versus "endurance roll." Any wound doing at least twice the threshold is a major wound and you are incapacitated. Resist attack roll with endurance to avoid dying. Afterwards you could have a table for lingering effects if you wished. The problem with all these is the difficulty of bringing down high HP/AP creatures because you can't nibble them to death. It's not so bad in RQ6/Legend because you have special effects to bring down the bad guys instead.

I think there are all kinds of details - some more subtle than others - that make this hard but not impossible. For example, over the years different versions of BRP have had different ideas of how to relate skill level to "competence." E.g. Stormbringer characters basically didn't get out of bed for any skill under 100%. Alternately, in RQ2, 40% might be quite a reasonable combat skill for a militia guard. So if you wanted a tough town guard in stormbringer their skills would be quite different to a tough town guard in RQ2. On the other hand, there is so much in common that probably what needs to happen is a meta description so that different systems can be defined. On the gripping hand, that's a full-time task taking a lot of work for someone. E.g. every skill can probably be defined for all systems with something like the following parameters Base chance: fixed value, formula or 0% (i.e. professional skills for the latter) Category modifier: formula or null. Category modifier skill set: list of skills affected by category modifier for a given system. a current skill value consists of base chance + increases + category modifier + system specific adjustments* + if base value is 0% then value is 0% unless increase is >0 *E.g. CoC: skill cannot exceed 100%, RQ2 skill cannot exceed 100% unless Rune Lord It certainly feels as though it ought to be do-able but it probably would need significant funding to achieve and then host.

Problem is that this is in tension with the improvement system which requires successful skill rolls. so you have one part of the system steering you one way (no need to roll unless it's meaningful) and another part encouraging players to roll as often as possible in order to increase in skill. That's one of the reasons I prefer RQ/Legend's improvement roll system.

Again I'm not sure what an "amazing" mechanic would be. BGB/RQ has at least the following mechanics for combat (off the top of my head) Aimed/called shots Pulling blows disarming, knocking back, tripping, damaging a weapon, damaging armour, using weapon length to hold off or step inside, charging, grappling, weapon special abilities (e.g. bolas, whips) Plus modifiers for fighting in all sorts of circumstances (e.g. hanging upside down while blinded and being ticked by a marmot) RQ6 also has (again this is not exhaustive) compelling surrender, forcing a failure, temporary blinding (e.g. kicking sand into someone's eyes), warding a location, manoeuvering to make yourself hard to attack, swallowing, poisoning, temporarily incapacitating a location, rolling up to your feet in combat and more Regardless of the flavour of BRP, that's all a whole lot more than swing and repeat. I would be hard to pressed to think of any mechanics that are missing or anything else that you might actually want to be able to do in combat that's not already covered.

Interesting questions. Deadliness. I would say that BGB tends to be more deadly than RQ6 when played straight but if you use "heroic" options things slip. What makes RQ6 relatively less deadly are Luck Points. Luck Points can keep you alive or give you a second chance. The way RQ6 works is that you are more likely to be 'defeated' than killed outright. Two other things though. RQ6 *feels* more deadly because you have hit locations so it takes relatively little damage to reduce a hit location to zero. Thus almost every successful hit is threatening. In BGB, two-handed weapons aside, you can usually survive one or two hits before you have a problem. So I tend to fend combat in RQ6 feels more stressful. Especially as a failed parry leaves you open to both damage and a special effect. Fluidity. Can be a problem in RQ6 if you have indecisive players because they can agonise over which Special effect to choose. For experienced players in both systems, RQ6 tends to be more fluid because there are a *lot* fewer pre-roll modifiers and players make fewer choices until a special effect turns up. BGB is probably easier to learn. Flavour. I suspect that you may be conflating two things here. There's nothing "flavourful" about making a skill roll. It's what you do with the skill that defines the flavour. So if combat is "bland" it's probably because the situation in the game is bland. So one element is making the situation interesting. The second element is mechanical combos. E.g. systems like D&D 4 are all about chaining various combinations of attacks, spells and so on to create a synergy through mechanics. E.g. attack A has a side-effect of moving a goblin 3 squares. The Goblin is suffering a condition that makes it take damage when it moves. Furthermore, the attack it happens to move right next to character C who gets a free attack when attacking a creature that has just moved next to him. Player C high-fives player A and the goblin dies in an efficient way. No form of BRP does that kind of stuff. If your players are looking for those kind of game mechanical combos then they're in the wrong system. BRP is all about getting the mechanics out of the way so you can focus on the in-world effects. I would say that pretty much all the mechanics in BRP of any type are "bland" because they are meant to be. To give you an idea of how I run it, here's some notes about a parallel combat I ran. Everything here was done using RQII/RQ6 special effects and came naturally out of the system. RQII/6 players will recognise various fumbles and special effects. Hope that helps

That is indeed correct. My understanding is that it is a bit of a legacy from an earlier version of the system. Originally you had to declare your parry before you saw the result of the attack but that was poor both as a game mechanic (leads to agonising decisions for no good reason) and as simulation (you can judge the attack as you see it.) What it sort of means is that you can only attempt to parry an attack which you are paying attention to. So you say "I'll parry if needs be." If the attack is poor you can either do nothing or attempt a parry in order to gain a CM. I forget as well about the role of Evade in this. I *think* in Legend if you wish to Evade you may need to declare it before hand but can't remember whether you can freely abort it like a parry. Basically, just ignore it. Assume that unless someone says otherwise that they will make a decision on parrying or evading after they see the dice roll. RQ6 does add a mechanic to differentiate parries declared in advance versus those declared afterwards.