deleriad

That's probably GM fiat time rather than a rule. Alternately I can't remember if RQ2 had incidental knockback rules. If not, then it's standard in RQ to say that for every 5 damage over a person's SIZ they get knocked back 1m. E.g. SIZ 14, damage 21 equals 2m of knockback. Parrying a giant may result in taking more damage from the knockback than the attack.

already happens in RQ2 effectively. Remember that a parry is reduced by the attacker's percentage over 100. If you were to replace that with the MRQII rule you actually slightly worsen the problem. E.g. in RQ2 115 attack vs 110 parry ends up as 115 attack vs 95% parry. IN MRQII It becomes 100% attack vs 95% parry. Bottom line is that if you have two combatants with almost equal skills and both over 95% then you may wait a long time for a missed parry. Given that you want to stay as close to RQ2 as possible and don't want to track weapon breakage the quickest fix I can see is expanding the results of specials and criticals vs a parry. Special attack success vs normal parry is the same as normal success vs failed parry critical attack vs special parry: same as normal success vs failed parry critical attack vs normal parry: same as special success vs failed parry. That way you'll get something happening much more quickly.

The outcome of this roll would be that no one would ever use this CM. Think about it. You get a CM, you can use it to aim high or low or to Impale or to trip, disarm, damage a weapon and so on. I can't think of any time I would ever use that as a CM. The other thing is you do not choose a CM after you have landed a blow. You choose a CM when your foe is has been opened by an attack. i.e. attack and parry have been rolled but damage and location have not. At this point you know you can land a blow, the question is - what will you do with it? Will you go for a vulnerable location? Will you perhaps spot a point where you can impale or perhaps you notice that the person is off balance and can be knocked over as well as doing damage. That's what you are deciding.

I do think that people are tending to forget that Choose Location is just one of several manoeuvres and that in pure rules terms it is on a par with disarming, impaling, tripping and so on. i.e. when an opening presents itself because you just outfought your opponent it is one of the options you choose. It's not even always the most useful. For example, in a critical attack against a normal parry where the parry weapon is large enough to block the damage then choose location is pointless. You may have wanted to hit someone in the head but they read your attack well enough to get a parry. In that case you would either try to slide some damage through to a random location (bypass parry) or you would notice that in blocking the attack that they are off-balance so you might trip them or disarm them, setting them up for the kill. Similarly against someone in a full plate suit then you're far better off trying to knock them off their feet or disarming them than battering away. Phil mentioned a big boss fight where all the PCs focused fire on the same location. Great. That's smart thinking. If you look at the cave troll fight in Fellowship you notice that it went down after several blows to the same two locations - head & chest including what looked like a final killing critical to the throat. The only reason it too so long to go down was that the rest of the company is hard pressed by goblins so they can't focus on the troll. If you watch, as soon as the goblins are mostly dead they focus their attacks on it and hey presto it is down in seconds. In Phil's case, the big boss is all by itself. When I ran that scenario my PCs ran away as fast as they could primarily because it was big, angry and there was no guarantee that they would survive. Basically as a GM you have to play very smart if you put a single large creature against a bunch of skilful, prepared and fearless PCs. That, surely, is as it should be. No PC in BRP/RQ willingly lets itself get outnumbered after all.

Well, it only matters if you fail to parry for some reason. If you fail to parry and leave yourself open, the enemy will take what they see as the most effective option. RQ has never allowed you to defend one location more than others so there's no change there. The main effect the system has is to make combat less random and make skill matter more. For example, with a 60% vs 70% battle. Previously if one hit and one missed then your skill *made absolutely no difference* to where you hit your opponent so it came down to a d20. Using the CM model, if you succeed and your opponent doesn't then your skill has opened them up. So if they are wearing a helmet you might choose to strike at their weapon arm to disable them. Alternately you might choose an impale to try and maximise what damage you do in which case the choice of location is random or you might try and disarm them while also damaging them in a random location. It has been my experience that RQII combat tends to require fewer dice rolls to achieve a significant attack than other versions of BRP. The last few sessions I've played (The Pavis Rises campaign) PCs have been largely unarmoured and I've noticed that they avoid combat at all costs. In the last session they were ambushed by people with self bows. Three of them almost lynched the fourth player when he didn't immediately give up. What you will find with historical combat I suspect is that it will probably end within just a few actions. As far as I know, that's fairly accurate. However a knock-down big boss fight will see your players burn through Hero Points to re-roll parries, Resilience tests, force opponents to re-roll criticals and to convert major wounds to serious wounds. A big boss fight will depend on just how many Hero Points the PCs have.

What would be the difference between that and two people fighting on a cliff edge where on2 "bash" CM is instant death? In that case by the same logic even though I might fail a parry I would take precautions. Or say I'm using Evade. Can I be really good at dodging my head out of the way of a blow or is it only a failed shield parry that allows me to block aimed blows? Or say my sword is the only weapon I have and I really don't want to be disarmed, can I take precautions against that happening? I just don't see the problem that you are trying to fix and furthermore I see that your suggested fix adds more complication and opens up further questions. If the problem's that your players believe that a head shot is always the best option, be creative against them rather than trying to change the rules in an attempt to change their behaviour. From the sounds of it, if you make choose location harder then they'll simply fixate on the new "best in all circumstances option." Finally, if your players like being able to hit things in the head, what's the problem? Are they saying "it would be much more fun if I wasn't able to hit them in the head?"

I don't know but this doesn't make sense to me. "I failed my parry but stopped him from hitting me where he wanted to." Unless of course he randomly hit you where he wanted to. I mean you could invent a new class of CMs which only work on criticals or unopposed attacks but why would Choose location be the only CM in the class? Is Choose Location really harder than managing to Impale someone or disengaging from combat?

I would have thought that if an enemy has left any locations uncovered that they have by definition failed a parry. Funnily enough I was watching Fellowship of the Ring for the first time in a couple of years and found myself looking at the cave troll fight in terms of CMs. Legolas hits the troll several times with arrows and it's pretty clear that it's not even trying to evade. Interestingly he impales it in the body several times, clearly choosing Impale over Choose Location (presumably trying to get some damage to stick). There's also a sequence where the troll attacks with his hammer several times in a row at the same person who clearly evades successfully but is not able to attack back due to lots of rolling around. You also see Frodo evade a few times until he finally fails and gets Impaled for his pains. At this point I suspect that the player either gets lucky with the location roll or spends a Hero Point to reroll the location. It actually looks like you could recreate most of the fight in RQII terms with relatively little fudging.

That's all well and good but I think it takes an overly literal approach to the game. RQ/BRP has a series of random steps which you have to make sense of post-hoc. So if you say "I attack" then you can't figure out what happened until after the dice are rolled at which point you then have to make sense of it. "I attacked and saw an opening to get the head but the swing only glanced lightly off his armour." (random rolls of attack, parry, location and defence). In addition, to choose a tactic (such as deciding to try and disarm an opponent or to aim for leg for example) you have to make it more difficult for yourself and don't take the opponent's actions into consideration. It would be like being in a real fight and deciding "right I'm going to swing at his head now, no matter what he does." No one would ever fight like that. RQ isn't granular enough that you can say "ok he's defending himself that way which means I should get a blow to his head if I feint then attack slightly from the side." A post roll system acknowledges this lack of granularity. Between two masters, there'll be a series of inconsequential attacks and defences until either someone makes a mistake (fail/fumble) or someone outmanoeuvres the other (critical). At that point, just like normal, you decide what happened after the dice rolled. "I attacked and he left himself open, I swung at his head but my aim was poor and my sword merely glanced along his helm." (Attack success, parry fail, choose hit location, random damage). From a purely game based perspective as well it prevents players from being penalised for trying to do interesting stuff and tends to resolve fights slightly quicker. As you say, it's a matter of preference but the above is why after my initial misgivings (both mine and my players who initially preferred to stay with my house rules) I find post-roll modifiers more satisfying both thematically and in game terms.

As Rosen says, what happens is that CMs become vanishingly rare; rarer even than specials in RQ3. In RQ3 you get a special result if you roll 1/5th. In your system you have to roll a special result and your opponent has to fail a parry. Note also that in MRQ if your attack is 120 vs a parry of 100 then the extra 20 is deducted from both sides making it 100 vs 80, increasing the likelihood of failures therefore increasing the chance of a CM. The final result is that combat becomes far less tactical and cinematic because CMs virtually disappear and you now have no way of trying to disarm, damage weapon and so on. Personally I think you need to use the skills over 100 and crits on 1/10 if using CMs. The only other option that might work is to have 3 bands of CMs. Crits, specials and normal CMs. You could have special CMs be: Choose Location and the weapon-specific CMs.

I must admit that any sort of RQ2 clone seems at best a perfectly reasonable vanity project. Gamers have been working on vanity projects since the year dot and clones seem to have become a new type of fantasy heartbreaker. Personally I find it backward looking and I can't imagine any significant interest in RQ2 with the name filed off beyond the small core of people who currently play RQ2. I certainly don't see any market for supplements and if people want to play RQ2 supplements with the RQ2 rule set then it's still not exactly hard to get RQ2 off ebay. In between MRQ, OpenQuest, BRP and Classic Fantasy it's hard to think of what RQ2clone offers. The difference between the different editions of RQ is minimal compared to OD&D and D&D4e.

I'm presently working on a RQII based pulp action based mod and have been toying with idea of making Sanity Points work much like Hit Points; i.e. you can lose them but they recover. E.g. You have X Sanity Points (say 10 for argument's sake). As long as you remain on positive sanity then everything's fine. If you get reduced to zero though you need to make a test to remain (mostly functional). Taking more than your sanity threshold in a single loss means making a difficult test or go badly dysfunctional. Reaching -X Sanity means a test to either become permanently insane (effectively dead) or flip to the dark side and become a pawn of the eldritch ones and so on. It avoids the death spiral issue while still keeping insanity as a threat.

That is basically how it works in MRQII. A dodge (called Evade) prevents you from attacking on your next action as it represents a last ditch attempt to get out of the way rather than a more orderly parry.

That's interesting. RQII currently uses Fatigue Levels pretty much the same way as you outline but I had never thought of using slots for encumbrance. It would be interesting to see how that works. Does Fate already have the mechanic or is this an extrapolation?

When I used to run RQ3 I tracked Fatigue Points religiously. Since I've started running MRQ and now RQII I've found I can't really be bothered. I occasionally use an ad-hoc fatigue system where I say "make a resilience roll, if you fail you gain a fatigue level" but on the whole I can't say that in the past three years I've thought "that session would have been improved if I had used fatigue points."

With the best will in the world, Simon's house rules are from 2002 and are focused on fixing the various RQ house rules for heroquesting that were floating around at the time. A lot of the fixes he makes simply don't matter any more.* I've not read the Companion yet but HQ and RQII both sing from the same hymn sheet: a ritual to enter the heroplane; a series of challenges to be overcome or experienced and a result. The HeroQuest in Blood of Orlanth actually shows just how easy it is to run a heroquest in RQ/BRP and it ought to be perfectly possible to simply translate the HQ descriptions into BRP skills and spells. The key is to forget the need for skills in the 500% range or ludicrous amounts of magic. The mythagos on a HQ tend to be as competent as the myths say they are. Thus Humakt might be experienced as someone with the skills and magical equivalent of an elite Rune Lord of Humakt. *the site is full of loads of great details and ideas for heroquest contents. It's just the intent behind the rules he uses (e.g. trying to keep a Free Will mechanic) isn't all that relevant any more.

Italian RQ gets love lavished on it like a 17 year old girl in front of Sylvio Berlusconi while we get The Age of Austerity. Figures...

And how is it that the Italians can manage to do a hardcover full colour version of the basic rules that's cheaper than in the UK?

OpenQuest is nothing like RQ3. It is based off the MRQ1 SRD but it is a radical simplification of it. It is nearer something like Call of Cthulhu in that it doesn't use locations or strike ranks however it retains the RQ tradition of three types of magic (common, divine and sorcery) and assumes that everyone has access to some common magic. The skills list is significantly pared down (for example all combat skills are replaced by just two skills - close and ranged - if I remember correctly) and it uses many of the MRQ innovations - e.g. Improvement rolls rather than experience checks, Hero Points, no resistance table, criticals as 1/10 normal success. OpenQuest is very much its own thing with a design brief to be faster and simpler than its ancestors.

There is this one on the MRQ wiki http://mrqwiki.com/wiki/images/4/43/Rqcharsheet.pdf It has most stuff one one page with just equipment on the back. It's pretty no frills but it looks ok. That said, it does things I wouldn't (e.g. putting all the advanced skills on the sheet and not leaving room for cult info etc)

This is exactly the way I think. It also makes it much easier to use the MRQ idea of common skills that everyone knows and specialist skills that you have to have explicitly learned at some time. It keeps the character sheet much simpler and more focused. Last night I ran the good old Haunting Scenario from CoC for three people, two of whom had never role-played before using a hacked together version of CoC for Sanity & Hit Points, RQII for skills & combat and Savage worlds for the card-based initiative system. The simpler skill system made it much easier for the new players to find the skills they wanted while having a small number of specialist skills foregrounded on the sheet made it obvious how their characters were differentiated. Good fun was had by all.

On the other hand you could say "my character is better at punching people than kicking them so there should be separate skills for that." It's a question of focus. I find BRP's default skill list to be overly long and prescriptive these days. I would rather just have one perception skill, one stealth skill, one brawl skill etc by default because as a GM I don't really care if an NPC heard or saw a PC or both, just whether or not they are aware of them. If then a player wants a character who is shortsighted but has good hearing then when it becomes important to the PC I can assign modifiers. I would much rather do that then clutter up a character sheet with multiply differentiated perception, stealth, athletic, brawling skills and so on. That way the differentiation between skills is significant.

With the exception of Dodge this is exactly what RQII does. All Perception skills are folded into one skill and all unarmed skills folded into one skill. Most agility skills (climb, jump, throw, run) are also folded into one all purpose skill called Athletics.

For a project I was working on I experimented with converting OGL monsters and worked up various types of Bugbears for MRQII. The stats are on my wiki at http://b5quest.pbworks.com/Bugbear if you're interested.