deleriad

There are several problems with the "beat" a number approach. It gets used in Legend quite a lot for delayed and indirectly opposed rolls (i.e. where one roll is later than the other or can't actually affect the other.) For me the most significant difference is that it doesn't change the critical or special chance which means that your proportion of specials to normals changes significantly. E.g. Your skill is 40%. You have to beat a number of 40. This means that every success is either a special or critical. So if you have poorly skilled person vs a number created by a highly skilled person then every victory by the poorly skilled person has an extra benefit of being a special or critical. There's also the reverse issue of what happens when someone with a skill of say 140% faces a number of 40? The extra 40% is *somewhat* lost. For those reasons I prefer a standard skill modifier. Admittedly I don't like multipliers and never use them. I also don't particularly like stacking modifiers so I prefer to use a version of OpenQuest's big, unstacking modifiers. (Basically +20, +40 and +60, and -20, -40, -60, -80)

Thing is, if doing a roll over system then you want the difficulty modifiers to apply to target numbers rather than affecting the skill. Otherwise you remove some of the rationale for using roll over plus target number. For example: roll under. hard task (-20%) means roll less than equal to skill-20. Roll-over. Hard task means roll+skill to beat 100+20. Those two are functionally identical; the question as Mr McStern said, is how do you manage degrees of success (and failure). BRP has 3 degrees of success and 2 degrees of failure and they're all proportional to chance of success. I don't know any way to painlessly (or even painfully) replicate that in a roll-over to beat target number system (RO-TN). The natural way for RO-TN is to is base degree of success on multiples of how much you beat the target number by. (e.g. beat it by 20 is one degree of success, beat it by 40 is two degrees and so on). That's a robust system that's been used in many games but would require a thorough overhaul of BRP degrees of success results because the balance of probabilities is quite different and probably also requires exploding dice. By which time you have to wonder what you've gained.

The biggest impact is on the combat system, especially melee combat. Generally speaking, specials and criticals are the crucial moments in a fight and these are based on proportionate chances (1/5 and 1/20 respectively). Changing those to non-multipliers massively changes the dynamic. Say for example, that to get a special result you have to exceed the target number by 40 then someone with a skill of 60 and a target number of 100 will score a special on 80-100, which is to say that 1/3 successful hits are specials as opposed to 1/5. On the other hand, anyone with a skill of 39 or less can't score specials. This is why open-ended rolls then become popular because they give relatively unskilled characters a chance at greater degrees of success. E.g. roll 96-00 means roll again and add. Keep going until you roll 95 or less.

On one hand, very simple. Roll d100 and add skill to equal or beat a task number. Standard task number is 100. E.g. Skill 62, task number 100, you need to roll 38 or higher to succeed. For a more difficult task the task number might be 120 or 140. For an easier task the number might be 80 or 60. Mathematically it's functionally identical to a roll under system. On the other hand, it completely changes specials, criticals and difficulty modifiers as they are all multiples so you have to reinvent them. For example, succeeding by 50 might be a special.

Never noticed it as a problem. The system generally doesn't require much in the way of POW or Magic Points: deliberately so. On the other hand, the cost for characteristic gains is so prohibitive that it effectively takes them out of the game unless you're giving out a lot more Improvement Rolls than suggested.

The only way to increase POW in Legend is improvement rolls. Legend doesn't have the resistance table so there is no POW vs POW roll anyway. Nothing in Spirit Magic changes that.

Well previous reply was lost in the mist and I'm wary of being trodden on in the clash of the titans but on the general point, I find generic resources quite useful as a short cut for my own uses. Yes it is nice to have bespoke, deep, well-integrated material for a particular setting but that is a rarity and requires the setting in the first place. Something like the idea listed by the OP has the virtue of giving me a little bit of text and some mechanics that I can reskin as I like. That said, as friendly criticism, I didn't find the example to be particularly engaging or have anything in the mechanics that made it stand out. It wasn't 'bad' but was lacking, in my opinion, in inspiration. I wonder if another way that it can also be expanded is a bit like Traveller's 101 patrons (or how ever many they are now that inflation has hit) where the organisations have some random plot twists attached. As to what will happen next in the BRP/RQ/Legend/d100 etc market, I of course know and am about to go and make my myself rich beyond my wildest dreams. I just need to get some really wild dreams first.

oooh

Free irregular magazine. Excellent. 2012 is shaping up nicely.

Second Age Glorantha is definitely on my wish list even if I have to write stuff myself and pitch it to Loz and Pete.

That would potentially work quite nicely. Using the 7 hit locations for humanoid bodies only really has one solution if using units as the hit location: R Leg 1, L Leg 2, abdomen 3-4, chest 5-6, r arm 7, left arm 8, head 9-10 I would say having to use an odds/evens split would overload the amount of stuff you needed to read from the roll. You could treat damage bonus in a similar way: e.g. +1 for STR+SIZ 25+, +2 for STR+SIZ 30-45, each +15 equals +1 damage etc I suspect the difficulty with this is that it actually gets oddly slow having to read multiple results off the same dice roll and there's a certain pleasure to rolling dice for specific purposes. I would say Special: damage equals maximum for skill (e.g. skill 73 implies special is 7 damage) or you can ignore a parry effect or a source of armour Critical: damage equals maximum and choose one from ignore parry effect or ignore a source of armour or choose a hit location.

It's not so much that I think Carcosa would be better as BRP but that the mechanical changes the author is making to it are basically BRP in disguise. Which got me to thinking that a lot of "old school" interest in OD&D is about how it is mechanically simple, relies on GM fiat and is pretty close to classless. Carcosa seems to have taken that to an extreme to the point where basically the author might as well have taken Call of Cthulhu rather than mangling some form of D&D into the form. Again, one of the tropes of old school is that characters are vulnerable for a long time and die easily until they get enough experience. Another one is that there is no attempt to match the encounter level to the PCs and that most PCs try to avoid combat rather than wading into it. When you look at it, they're basically trying to pretend that they were playing BRP all along...

Though I haven't read Carcosa yet, it seems from what I know of it that it's a classic case of desperately trying to shoehorn something into OD&D when it would work far better under a simple BRP version. It's basically classless and the increasing power of levels is undermined by the random combat generator so you can never be sure if one hit will kill. Anyone can cast magic because the sorcerer "class" is essentially the fighting man class with the ability to cast magic. So basically it's D&D mangled into BRP.

As you say it probably depends on what options you use. The 'lightest' version (Call of Cthulhu) is really simple but versions like RQ3 and Ringworld were always promoted as comprehensive and detailed simulations. I think unfortunately that the Big Gold Book makes the game look complicated. Far more complicated than it actually is. You could get a perfectly good comprehensive generic BRP core-book into a book the size of Savage worlds if you focused on the core.

Well, basically the Legend core book is almost the same as the RuneQuest II corebook and is the same price. The differences are: Monsters and Spirit Magic have been removed. You'll need to buy Monsters of Legend to get any creature stats. Spirit Magic might turn up as a free web download one day. The errata from RQII has been incorporated. All Gloranthan references have been removed. Cults have been broadened into a range of organisations. The charging and running rules were overhauled but still don't work. There are no other changes. None of the known rules issues that turned up after the errata document have been incorporated. If you know RQII you know what you'll be getting with Legend.

On the point about using category modifiers as a bonus rather than skill element. I personally don't like it. That's because I think that the big advantage of d100 roll under is simplicity and I don't want to have to add a bonus to every single roll. Especially a small one. Effectively it would turn BRP into a skill+stat+modifier system. That works ok in systems like d20 roll-over. Finally it means that when you look at a character sheet and see "hide 73%" you don't know what your normal chance of hiding actually is - you have to consult a second number first. I tend to prefer the RQII method of using two characteristics though that it has its own problem of fiddly skill value changes when it comes to altering characteristics. Not sure there is a system without drawbacks. If there was, I suspect someone would have found it.

Well published stats should be based on the rules as written, that way GMs and players know what the baseline is and can adjust accordingly. Same ought to be true of examples in rulebooks. This goes all the way back to the original RQ2 rulebook where Rurik had significantly better than average dice rolls but was actually presented as, if anything, a little sub-par. When I first started playing RQ I used to wonder why none of my PCs where anywhere near as good as he was. This was particularly important in RQII because it was so expensive to improve characteristics. I know in the campaigns I've run, I've basically halved the increase cost and still the PCs have no more than 1 or 2 points more than when they started 3 years ago.

This is one of my bug bears. It's only a minor one but it is irritating nonetheless. When I did the stats for Blood of Orlanth for MRQII I went over the whole lot with a spreadsheet and redid them so that more than 90% of the printed NPCs had stats that you would expect to get if you used the official points-based cha-gen to create them. Meant that the human NPCs were all built on 80-90 points depending on their expertise equivalent. There were some deliberate outliers, both under- and over-pointed but only for specific reasons. I suspect that nearly everyone who has looked at it hasn't noticed this, but it made me happy.

Another way of looking at it is, is a person who is a brilliant baseball player a brilliant cricket player? What about an American Footballer and a rugby player and so on? Or chess and back-gammon. Or is a fencer any good with mace and shield in a suit of armour. There is clearly the fact that people who are superb physical specimens will be better at all sports partly because the training to get good at one sport probably increases characteristics. Personally I find any kind of half-ability with related weapons to be a bad idea because then you get the issues of what happens if you try to train in it, do you suddenly become worse. I don't think there's any sort of play-friendly way of capturing the nuances of relationships between skills, and between skills and characteristics. Personally I think you have to remember that BRP paints in broad brush strokes. You can go for a heroic, pulpy game where skills are very broad or a 'gritty' (and I detest that term) game where skills are narrow and don't provide much in the way of cross-benefits. Those are matters of emulation and preference rather than any measure of accurate simulation if you ask me.

I guess at the moment that no one knows what direction Loz and Pete will go. Combat styles are, in my understanding, a more general mechanic than weapon categories. For example you could say that 1H slashing weapons is a form of combat style or 1H slashing weapons plus shield is another combat style. You could dial them all the way up to what Open Quest does and have just two combat styles (melee & missile) or all the way down to just one weapon or combination per style. Like several things in RQII, the mechanic was under-explained and what was explained wasn't given a good editorial polish so there are legacy mechanics left in the text. On the CA front, I'm one who doesn't like skill-based breakpoints for extra CAs. It seems simple on paper but in practice you get all sorts of CA inflation and other issues. E.g. if someone is 95% at sword & shield but is prone and getting -20% do they lose a CA? What about someone with Bladesharp or coordination who gets to the breakpoint? I can see a bonus CA for a heroic ability. As Rosen states, higher skill makes CA more effective anyway and with the over 100% skill rule in RQII someone with 3 CAs and 120% vs someone with 3 CAs and 80% will usually end up with the 120er having a free CA at some point. In addition, the more I've run RQII the less I've liked the bonus CA for dual wielding. It's a superb way of making shields brilliant but it opens up all sorts of "but why..." type of discussions.

There is a difference between what are (in my opinion) the failings of the Big Gold Book and what are the failings of the BRP system. For example I'm not keen on the Resistance Table but I play TGFKARQII which does without the Resistance Table. Similarly I prefer 10% criticals and always rounding up to the default system presented in the BGB. So there is generally a form of BRP that works for a particular set of preferences. On the most fundamental level the only issues I have with BRP are that I find the breakpoint between sub-100% and 100%+ to be awkward and there's never been a skill contest system (i.e. stealth vs perception) that has felt natural. Finally, for a "Basic" game it gets awfully detailed at times, especially when it comes to 'high levels.' Otherwise I find it a beautifully intuitive system 95% of the time. On the other hand the Big Gold Book is probably precisely the opposite of what I would have done if I had been Chaosium.

Sad though I am personally to see the end of Glorantha Second Age for RQ/BRP I can't say that I've seen any significant interest in the setting. I suspect that if anything more people were playing 3rd Age Glorantha with some form of BRP than 2nd Age Glorantha. Still I will keep my second age campaign using RQII into its 4th and final year as the PCs become players in the fall of the Clanking city. Here's hoping that someone finds some way to produce some more 2nd age material.

It does say explicitly "instead, you may freely use anything that appears in the core book range" and they have previously said that instead of creating a SRD that you can just treat the book as if it were a SRD so it seems that might be the way they're going. That said, I don't know any more than anyone else here. From watching how they operate this looks like a bit of a "hail mary" approach. Throw the rulebook up in the air and see who runs with it. As for what happens next. I have no interest in the reprints. I have them already. Spider God's Bride might be of interest. The only thing worthwhile about the Deus Vult setting (in my eyes) was Gareth Hanrahan's writing. Personally I reckon TGFKARQII will stand or fall by 3rd party products. The more open the text is, the more the chance that something compelling emerges from the crowd. Assuming there is a crowd. One thing that might be an issue is that RQII was fairly complementary to BRP. Neither was open and both had their niche. I always got the impression that sales of one had the potential to help the sales of another. If Legend is completely open then there'll be an immediate opening for adaptations to other genres and self-publishing. Should that start to take off it risks competing BRP rather than complementing it.

TGFKARQII appears to be the game that will probably be known as Legend. Planet Mongoose blog goes into detail about it. Most interesting thing, trying to parse it, is that they are using an 'open' licence for Legend. A very open licence. Want to use the text? Then do so.

It seems to me that Mongoose are the epitome of a Garbage In, Garbage Out company. If the author's manuscript is a good one then the resulting product will be competently laid out and contain a random number of editorial foul-ups. If the author's manuscript is a poor one, the final product will be just as poor with the added bonus of editorial foul ups. If Mongoose actually hired someone (ideally Pete or Loz) to put together Wayfarer it could be very good because there is a non-trivial amount of work to be done. For example, Pete Nash made some tweaks to the system in Wraith Recon which should really be in Wayfarer. What I suspect is that they'll do it in-house and copy/paste the errata document in. That way they can claim 100% compatibility and do it on the cheap.