deleriad

Never really thought of doing that. You could make it easier by using an extra d10 and not noting a skill until the first time it is used. How you could do it is: Roll d100 and an extra d10. if the d10 is 1-5 then the skill succeed and the NPC rolled exactly its skill value. If the d10 is 6-10 then the skill failed by 1 E.g. roll is 27, d10 is 4, then the skill succeeded so the NPC's skill is 27%. (This may have been modified so you may want to reverse engineer the modifiers.) If the d10 roll was 8 then the skill failed by 1 point so the NPC's skill must be 26% Extra wrinkles, 01-05 always succeeds and 96-00 always fails so the dice roll doesn't tell you the skill (except see below). If the d10 is a 1-2 and the skill roll is 10-30 - the NPC rolled a special so it's skill equals roll * 5 If the d10 is a 1-2 and the skill roll is 1-9 - the NPC rolled a critical so it's skill equals roll * 20 Sort of wacky but might be fun.

If you're using Legend/RQ6 then special effects and reach is what would largely differentiate weapons as opposed to raw damage potential. Then again, following your logic, parry protection might also be derived, at least in part, from skill.

You can do a simple hack job which works passably well if you're prepared to wing it. Doing a more detailed conversion is possible. How many Hit Points does a creature have? Look at its location with the largest number of HP and that's its total HPs. So an average human has 7 HPs in the chest which means it has 7 total HPs. How many Armour Points does a creature have? Look at its most armoured location and that's its Armour Points. When does a character suffer a serious wound? A character suffers a serious wound when it reaches negative its normal HPs (e.g. -7 HPs) and every time it takes damage afterwards OR it takes at least its normal HPs in a single go. (e.g. a human taking 7 points of damage after armour in a single attack.) When does a character suffer a major wound? A character suffers a major wound when it reaches double negative its normal HPs (e.g. -14 HPs for an average human) or any time it takes at least twice its normal HPs in a single blow (14 HPs of damage at once, after armour, for an average human). You probably then want a serious and major wounds table but that could be a simple as rolling d20 to determine which location just took the wound. Choose location can then be used to pick a location for the serious/major wound and used to represent finding a weaker spot in the armour: rather than deducting armour points from the blow you roll a die based on the armour points to see how many APs were in the location you struck. E.g 1AP = 1 AP 2-3 = 1d2 APs 4-5 = 1d4 APs 6-7 = 1d6 8-9 = 1d8 9-10 = 1d10 for each AP over 10, add 1 to the roll. E.g. 15 APs = 1D10+5 Some NPCs might have such good armour that this effect can't be chosen. Statistically this will play out in a manner which is not a million miles from RQ6. It will often take 2-3 blows to put someone at risk of a serious injury however a major injury is more likely through accumulation of blows than in RQ6. This is a very different approach to trying to use the Magic World concept of total HPs in RQ6 but it does mean that basically you don't need to convert anything and you have outcomes which are reasonably close to RQ6 without actually needing to track hit locations. (The HP mechanic is essentially a beefed up version of rabble and underlings for everyone.)

It's a bit like buying a house. Say you bought a house a few years ago and you finally have the time to fix it up, repaint it and extend it in the way you always wanted to. Well that redone house is essentially what RQ6 did to MRQII. It's still the same house though it may have a new conservatory, paint job and a whole load of refinements to make it just perfect for the way you want to live in it. By contrast, Legend essentially consists of taking your MRQII house, giving it a quick paint job to hide the flaws and renting it out to pay the bills. Both the same house but very different approaches.

Beware of the curse! Seriously, Darren is doing a great job and I'm looking forwards to the revised version. I find it interesting comparing the difference in atmosphere between it and Book of Quests. SGB is classic exotic S&S with pyramids, sand and bloody sacrifices. BoQ is much more of an "old world" northern European style with mountains, cities and a lurking menace. Those who like mashing things up (like me) could find that both could easily be transplanted to the same setting quite easily. Probably a good 50 sessions of play time with both added together.

Enjoying the Avalon Hill pink.

d10-2: 0, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 8 - average 3.6 median 3.5 d6: 1 2 3 4 5 6 - average 3.5, median 3.5 The difference is fewer extreme results so your leather armour prevents you from ever taking 7 or 8 points of damage. Say you have a 5 HP head then would you rather have a 40% chance of being knocked out by a single blow or a 33% chance? I'm not sure there is a 'realism' element here. Reducing damage steps means that armour tends to "muffle" the impact but rarely fully negates it.

One way to do it would be a "6 step system" You have 6 damage dice: 1d2, 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10, 1d12 If damage exceeds 1d12 you simply add the next dice step so it becomes 1d12+1d2, 1d12+1d4 and so on. 1D6+1 would be 1D8 in this system. Damage bonuses/penalties would step the damage dice up or down as appropriate. Atg's armour system presumably works similarly, stepping damage up or down rather than subtracting from damage done. If you want to you can say that any result that rolls all 1's only counts as 1 point of damage. That would probably work best with locational hit points as that tends to be the most lethal flavour of BRP. It is roughly the system I use in my very lite CoC variant I use for running coC with non-rpgers.

Well I think the OP's point is that a 1 HP damage roll represents a graze. It is just as possible to be grazed by a .50 cal as it is by a dagger. The 'problem' is that the effect of a successful hit is, random and largely independent of the skill. (Obviously criticals and specials influence the amount of damage.) Although it seems oddly pedantic, it is hard to know what represents a "graze" in BRP. Is a graze a 'near miss' that does effectively no damage but maybe leaves a cut or a bit of a burn? In that case it is a failed attack. On the other hand, if a graze is defined as 1 HP of damage then the majority or weapons and anyone with a damage bonus, can't actually cause a graze. Personally, I tend to think of grazes as 'near misses' i.e. inconsequential damage. I think of any HP damage as significant. Personally I'm all for losing +/-'s from damage rolls. I'm old enough that when faced with a weapon doing 2D6+2, a 1D4 damage bonus and +2 damage from a spell that I start to lose the will to live when asked to roll damage.

RQ3 sorcery is not unusable as written, especially if you use the errata Chaosium provided. What it does is to provide a very, very narrow bunch of options. On the basis of running an Ars Magica style troupe campaign for several years the main issues with sorcery for me were. Book-keeping. There is a lot to track as a player of a sorcerer and even more as a GM. In actual play as a GM you end up pretty much hand-waving every NPC sorcerer. Scope. The interaction between manipulation and spell list means that by far the most efficient use of sorcerer is to buff up warriors to extreme levels. Magic item dependency. This is pretty much a deal-breaker for me these days. Because sorcery is so MP hungry every master sorcerer is really the sum of their magic items. Untested spells. The spell list in general is all over the place and some of it, creating familiars in particular, appears to provide the opposite result to what you would think it would do. I found that if you were prepared to make sorcery the focus of the campaign and use a troupe set up with a Pendragon style focus on integrating adventures with the seasons and domain management then you can use the system. At which point you realise, as we did, you know what, RQ3 sorcery's main problem is that it is dull. There is no sense of magic about it. It is like Battle Magic amplified. After about 2 years we switched to a variant of Sandy Peterson's system and things were suddenly far more interesting.

Mostly. There are three ways to try to avoid being hurt in RQ6. Use a combat style to parry as a reaction. This includes a mixture of avoidance, deflection and blocking depending on the weapon. Use Evade to throw yourself out of the way as a reaction. This is a desperate move that usually ends with you prone. In theory you can attack from a prone position on your next action but in practice that's usually suicidal. Use Evade to Outmanoeuvre as a pro-active action. If you succeed your enemy/enemies can't attack you for the rest of the round unless you attack them. Naturally works best when you have the initiative. It's a different model to BRP in that it combines some elements of BRP dodge and parry into a single reaction that it calls "parry."

Simply put, SIZ is more fine grained so differences in SIZ have more effect. E.g. in a game with size categories then every human is probably Size medium or some such so there's no real difference between someone who is 160cm and someone who is 210cm. Naturally you can say that someone who is STR 18 is probably bigger than someone who is STR 8 but having SIZ allows you to have someone with low STR but high SIZ. It is a logarithmic scale so most conceivable creatures are less than SIZ 100. It is also possible to use it fairly abstractly and have large but light creatures, useful for flyers. In actual play the SIZ stat is fairly useful as a quick approximation. That said, it's best not to look at the numbers too closely and really you could easily remove it from the game and replace it with SIZ categories with no harm done. (Base the damage bonus on STR alone.)

That from a purely business sense is a puzzling one. On the mooted changes, judging from the little bit of discussion I saw about people playing it at Continuum, it didn't seem any different to how CoC normally plays. Things like dying at -CON rather -3HPs are pretty much a tweak rather than quantum change (effectively turns on "heroic" Hit Points to an extent.) Changing the combat system into something that sounds like a hybrid of Pendragon and BRP is a really odd one. Again it probably feels somewhat like BRP (two of you roll, damage is absorbed by armour and single bits of damage can cripple.) But surely coming up with new combat systems for CoC is missing the point. Unless Chaosium think that the combat system in BRP doesn't work, why would you spend time and effort developing a combat system for a game that's not about combat? I'm far from being a BRP traditionalist and a lot of the innovations being mentioned seem interesting. They just seem to be misplaced. Personally, I would be far more interested in following the lead of the new French printing of CoC. With the caveat that I don't speak French so I may have too rosy a view of it but from what I understand, that printing does all sorts of nips and tucks without major alterations. If CoC 7 was to CoC 6 what RQ6 is to MRQII then I would be a happy person.

I like the sound of a lot of the ideas but it seems strategically to be a really bad idea. You invest in making the BGB and then do a new edition of your flagship game and have it go off in a very different direction. It doesn't make a whole load of sense. The effect seems most likely to be to reduce BGB sales because CoC is largely the gold standard for the system. I could see the SAN and connections and so on element being added to the BGB for genre emulation but having a radically different combat system, new ways of resolving skills, replacing characteristics and so on. Well, I can only see it making the BGB more marginal.

I think Loz has already said that the next two planned supplements are Monster Island and Book of Quests. MI seems to be a combination of S&S style bestiary with a sandbox style background. BoQ seems to be a linked set of S&S scenarios that can be played as stand-alones or as part of a campaign. I don't know about the rest but you can pretty much take any MRQII (or Legend) supplement and run it as is under RQ6. Magic is about the only thing that has significant differences (e.g. MRQ2 Divine Pacts needing dedicated POW) but even them can simply be either updated on the fly (ignore the missing MPs) or simply run as is.

I ran DragonLance using RQ3 twice (not planned that way but one was with my university group and the other with my play group back home) and pretty much did a conversion on the fly. It wasn't that difficult. The main things I did at the time (back in the 80s when men were men and soft rock hair styles were soft and fluffy) were: added Hero Points Used a divine pool mechanic for Goldmoon's divine spells and let her treat the staff as a super shrine because she was, like, super. Sorcery got dealt with in two different ways in the two different campaigns. In one I simply translated the spells in Raistlin's book to a magic point equivalent and didn't bother with manipulation. You could do that with Classic Fantasy now. In the other, the player had his own free form magic system that he wanted to use. That was pretty much it. The rest I made up as we went along. This was before all the source books and such like came out so the world was a lot less complicated than it became later. One campaign felt like an action adventure while the other turned into a dark and twisted character study when they forgot to save the appointed one...

Yes, that's exactly how I do Intimidation and other cases where an Advanced "specialism" is logically dependent on different core characteristics. As you say, it is implicit in the rules and it works nicely with Improvement rolls because players can decide whether to specialise or stick with the general skill.

Again I think examples like Oratory and Fast Talk show the strength of splitting the skill system into a small number of general skills and a potential infinite number of advanced skills. Using Influence as the catch-all social communication skill then a player may say "I want to stand on the wall and deliver a speech to the mob to make them angry." In general that would be an Influence skill roll. It might take some time, have some minuses and so on. A second player might have a character who has developed the skill of Oratory so his character probably won't have a minus, might do it more quickly and rouse the mob to a greater intensity while able to keep better control. Similarly, a player might decide that they want to create a Fast Talk advanced skill which is just like Influence only happens more quickly and is based on confusing its victim and keeping them so off balance that they don't spot what they agreed to until too late. Again you could do this with Influence but could do it better with Fast Talk.

In actual play, it's a non-issue. As a GM I hand out the improvement rolls and the players decide what to spend them on. To be honest I don't ask them, I just let them get on with it. The only restriction I have (and I forget whether this is actually in the rules or not) is that they can only spend one roll per skill. If I was in a context where for some reason I thought my job was to stop players from "abusing" the system I would ask them to tell me what they're doing and we would do it as a table. i.e. player 1 makes his choices, rolls and we all watch and comment. Then player 2 does it and so on. If a choice doesn't make sense in the context I would ask the player to justify it and the other players can help or hinder as they see fit. Personally though, if someone wants to improve their ride skill when they didn't do any riding during the actual session then that's the player's choice and I don't have a problem with it. I don't see what the issue is. Perhaps the character has been practising in his spare time or watching others ride or bought a copy of Riding for Dummies or something. On the OP's point. The issue with a extending the skills list in Legend is precisely as noted: IRs are a fixed commodity. In BRP (to an extent) the more skills you have the more skill checks you are likely to get. For example, run, climb, jump and so on are all parts of Athletics in Legend. There are 21(?) basic skills and those cover probably 95% of all the mundane things you'll ever need to do. If you want to differentiate then I would simply add more advanced skills. E.g. Someone wants to be really good at running then let them develop an advanced skill at running. This skill might let them run for longer or more quickly than the standard Athletics skill and maybe in an opposed roll based on running the running specialist gets a bonus against the Athletics generalist. That seems to me to allow players to specialise without forcing players of sedentary characters to have to track a half-dozen different athletics skills.

Thanks. You're mostly right. In RQII/Legend, bypass armour is a critical only CM. Choose location is a normal CM. So to choose location and bypass armour would need 2 CMs and would require a critical. The balancing point then is that if you have partial armour on a location and an opponent gets a CM allowing them to choose location then the partial armour can be bypassed for free. If you don't choose location (say you pick impale) and roll the location randomly then the armour protects normally. In return you probably want to give the armour less ENC or Armour Penalty (probably both).

The way I would do it in RQII/Legend is to let partial armour be 'bypassed' through a Choose Location. E.g. You're wearing greaves that cover up to your knees. If I get a CM I can choose location to hit you in the thigh. On the plus side, I would reduce the ENC and maybe the Strike Rank penalty. If you don't choose location and happen to hit the location anyway, then armour protects normally.

It appears to be still on the Mongoose web site. http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/pdf/rqconverr.pdf

There was a comment on the Mongoose forum that they had lost the author but just replaced him/her. I seem to remember it's now tentatively rescheduled for July but I could be wrong.

I'm with you on this; I find the suggested pace and amount of Improvement Rolls to be extremely slow. If you take the rules literally and play once per 2 weeks it could take about 6 months (real time) to get enough Improvement Rolls to increase an average characteristic by 1 point and that prevents you from increasing any skills. It's ok if you're set up to play a game with minimal improvement but you need to have realised that in advance. On the other hand, the speed of increase possible through training is quite extreme. Easiest way to improve characters quickly is through training. That said, there is no mechanism for improving characteristics through training that I recall.

This is all getting rather convoluted. Generally the way you handle characters trying to use a skill outside of their usual context is to give the skill use a penalty rather than generating a whole list of environmentally dependent skills. E.g.rather than having a tracking in the snow and a tracking in the sand and a tracking in the grass skill you have someone with a tracking skill. If they grew up in the arctic but find themselves in the Sahara trying to track a camel you would give them a penalty to the to skill roll. This represents the unfamiliarity with the context. After a while living in the desert the Inuit hunter might work off the penalty. The details of how long are really best left to emerge in play than being hard-coded in the rules. "tracking in an urban environment" is a confusing example because it's getting confused with a PI trying to *follow* someone covertly. Tracking is usually about following physical signs until you can see the quarry at which point you then try and follow covertly. Now there is always going to be some confusion about how broad skills are and where the boundaries between different skills lie. For example, Legend has one Perception skill while basic BRP has several. Different folks prefer different levels of granularity and the system can accommodate most of them. So, in a campaign that's all about hunting and tracking then you can focus in on those skills and make them far more granular (track by spoor, track by scent, track [environment], scan, search, listen, touch, identify by taste, follow, hide [environment], sneak, disguise etc) while if that's not the focus you might just have Perception, track and streetwise.