sdavies2720

So we are still discussing "wayfart"? Somebody needs to find the BRP one ring to " Rule them all.....and in the darkness bind them".

Like I said in a post to Peter Nash MRQII had such a nice ring, like BRP.

I only just now (that it's too late) realized that MRQII could be pronounced as "Murky." Better voicing than "Burp."

Steve

GURPS Glorantha? Broo & Burrows?

Broo & Barf

Yes it will, the systems are balanced differently in this respect. BRP has a 1/5 chance special success for an impale, which does extra damage, and a 1/20 chance crit that does maximum damage and ignores all armour. MRQ2 has a 1/10 chance crit that, if the opposition doesn't parry, gets you two manoeuvres, from which you can choose Maximize Damage and Ignore Armour, or Choose Location and Max Damage, or Impale and Ignore Armour, or any of a variety of other combinations. But the "double maximum ignoring armour" can't happen in MRQ2, and "ignore armour" is much less common in BRP.

So, if you want to adopt part of one system and part of another, you will have to consider the balancing factors.

Also, armour levels are slightly lower in MRQ2, weapon damage... not sure if that is different, MRQ2 has higher locational hit points but no general hit points, all these factors affect game balance, and (in theory) are designed to be balanced relative to each other.

And there are subtleties of MRQII that change the feel: For instance if the attacker crits on his attack, but the defender parries successfully then no damage will get through. The attacker still gets a Combat Maneuvre for his greater level of success, but choosing "ignore armor" isn't going to help him (0 damage getting through is still 0 damage). The attacker should pick something like "Disarm" or "Trip" or whatever. There are subtleties here that I like, but that are definitely different from traditional RQ & BRP.

Steve

For most of us, but there are surprisingly many people who have serious problems

with numbers, at least as many as those who have problems with spelling. I had

some of them as players, and I soon realized that I was really torturing them by

asking them to do calculations, even simple ones. Since games should be fun, not

difficult (for them) work, we others also switched to tables.

I have one player whose refrain is, "I was told there would be no math," said in his best whiny-student-before-a-test voice.

Steve

Actually, I just had a look into the BGB. It's still the AHRQ3 rule - looks I used a house rule for the last 15+ years, without knowing

LOL! I can't tell you how often this happens to me. I read something, I read it again, I think I know what it says. Then someone asks a question about what's written and I realize I've still misread it!

Steve

?!

5%= 10% halved

20%= 10% doubled

never thought it is challenging ...

Try it late Friday night, after a long week of work and several beers...the game comes to a screeching halt

Actually, it's not a big deal, but just having one threshold is working smoothly for us, and the combat maneuvres (CM) are really working well for my players. Talk about coming to a screeching halt -- we typically have to wait a couple of minutes while the player drools over his CM options before deciding which one to apply!

Steve

While I wish that Mongoose hadn't used the RQ name without committing to it for longer, I've lived through this before and my campaign will survive.

I wish I really knew what killed MRQII in the market, but honestly the problem is too many smoking guns, not too few: MRQ1 was...not good. MRQII I think is brilliant, but the first two supplements had problems (understatement!), lingering fan disgruntlement over past Mongoose performance, the RQ name, and treatment during the MRQ1 "playtest," too many competing variants of the same game (BRP, oop RQ, MRQII, OpenQuest, CoC, others), connection to 2nd age Glorantha, and a shrinking RPG market.

It feels like this should be a table that also includes "roll twice", "roll three times", and "roll four times" on the table.

Steve

Combined? There is already enough trouble keeping licensor and licensee happy together. Would having a group of licensees make things better?

LOL, I think he meant the "RQ name" and the "Second Age setting" either singly or combined.

Given the chaotic heritage here, I can't begin to imaging how a consortium could be successful.

Steve

We may have found the answer (over in Gringle's Pawnshop). The example of previous experience through apprenticeship in the back of the book clearly shows the character (Devora the thief) learning her guild skills with no breaks for experience. So, looks like you were right and we were wrong, all those years ago.

Mind you, the militia training in the same chapter might be a bit buggy, because it doesn't mention anything about the restriction on combat skills under the same circumstances. Going by the number of rules examples in the text which manage to conveniently avoid such situations, I'm beginning to conclude that the writers knew very well about these issues, but picked examples which would not have to deal with them ...

My fuzzy memory of one of the original versions let you train up to 25%, or 50%, or 75%, but that crossing over the threshold required experience. So you had to be field tested at least a couple of times in your career. But maybe that was a houserule along the way -- too many variants, names, and years to remember clearly.

Steve

Advanced Readers copy, Softback (albeit I got that complimentary from the play test...), PDF, Hardback... And EVERY game the BGB is derived from (and several of those in multiple editions and in some cases, multiple copies of individual editions). No, I'm not a BRP obsessive at all.

Nick

I'm more or less the same. I don't have all the preceding games, but then I switched to MRQII for my current campaign, but still bought the hardcover BGB. I just don't want it to go into hibernation again.

Page 176 clearly states:

You can spend five power points to re-roll any percentile dice roll when the results are unfavorable.

Your player characters must have had loads of fate points to be able to negate every fumble!

I used an alternate system that used fewer points for a reroll and had a bunch of other uses for points. Players usually horded them to make sure they had enough points in case they got hit badly. Fumbles that matter only occurred once every few sessions, so they would often just burn the points to make them go away.

I am a HUGE fan of MRQII, having picked up some of the books for it recently and falling in love with the game. My local face-to-face group is getting ready to start a new campaign for this game the week after next. The system is simply awesome, in my opinion.

If you have fallen in love with MRQII, run it. I doubt that other systems will match that.

I have also heard good things about BRP so tonight I picked up the BRP big golden book at my local FLGS. I have a bit of worry though that if I learn BRP as well as I can it might get difficult for me to distinguish between the 2 systems when I am playing one of the other.

Are any of you very familiar with both forms of D100 and if so, do you find it difficult to remember the intricacies of each when playing one or the other?

Having GMed almost every version since RQ1, I find that it's hard for me to remember which was which (and even sometimes difficult to read what's written instead of what I expect to be there -- I think some playtesters expressed similar challenges). With only two systems to keep track of, if I were you I'd use the one I love (MRQII) as reference, and just remember which things in the BGB are different.

Can you build supernatural creatures like vampires or werewolves with BRP and use them in an urban fantasy game? Can the BRP golden book handle sci-fi, modern, and historical, like pirates, etc?

The BGB is really flexible and covers all the ground you are asking about. In some areas that breadth means that it is not as deep -- but it's actually a simple system and the coverage is at least good everywhere.

I ultimately went with MRQII for my campaign because I was running fantasy (which MRQII was specifically written for) and I could just hand the core book to players. I didn't have to give them the book and a list of options and modules that we are using or not. But, I just bought the hardcover BGB and it's beautiful. My fantasy campaign is pretty high powered at this point, so I'm continually going back to it for power ideas and different options. And I miss the Characteristic rolls so much, I just use them ad-hoc when it's appropriate (e.g. a hero is tripped in the pub while carrying drinks and the player asks, "is there any way I can fall so the beer spills on the Fop at the table?" Agility check handles this easily).

One advantage of the similarity of the systems (and past works too) is materials can be used across systems without a lot of work.

Good luck with your new campaign!

Steve

Moved over to the Mongoose forum, where the same ground is being covered by that community.

Steve

...I'm more inclined to let Fate be used for Fumbles if the player-characters really want to, although it would be sad to see every fumble negated like this, as many of our most entertaining gaming moments have come from combat fumbles...

This is where things ended up in our game: Every fumble was negated. This was an outgrowth of too many Fate points, and rerolls being one of the most powerful uses. We never had more than 2-3 used in a session, but they were inevitably either for re-rolls or to reduce damage effects.

I've rectified by reducing the number of things for which Fate can be used, correspondingly reducing the number of points awarded, but making Fate more powerful in those situations (we're essentially using the MRQII system now) . It was a new change as of two games ago, and so far the results are good.

Steve

My experience is it's much easier to get these meta-systems wrong than it is to get them right. I just abandoned one because I realized that the players managed their points so that they basically could never fail. And that's just no fun for anyone!

Steve

My copy arrived last week, and overall it looks nice.

I was curious if anybody else had a copy with the same issue as mine. Pages 378-379, 382-383, 386-387, and 390-391 are all mis-printed. It looks as though the paper slipped in the press while they were doing the four-ups or something, which would explain why it's pairs of pages separated by a normal pair of pages.

It's not a big deal. I was just curious.

Mine is printed correctly.

It is a beautiful book. I bought it because even though I'm running MRQII at this point, I really like having all of BRP's rules in one place. And this is so much nicer than the softcover version (not that those weren't nice too).

Steve

That's pretty cool, Steve. Thanks for sharing! Are you using any particular historical model for the designing of cities? What I mean by that is, if we follow your method, will we end up with basicaly a medieval city, a modern city, or neither?

I'm basing this off a city I built for my campaign, which has a mishmash of elements. One of the advantages of writing for gamers instead of a historical journal is you can pick and choose. So, for example, the city is inward-focused, so many of the blocks are full side-to-side with buildings facing a courtyard -- that's more common in the middle east than in say medieval england. But it's a temperate climate, so protection from cold and rain are going to be more important than heat avoidance. There's a big river that periodically floods, more like Sumer or Babylon in design than London.

So my hope is to provide a practical "do this, do that" level of tutorial for a fantasy early medieval city, while pointing out alternate decisions and styles along the way...assuming that Profantasy wants me to continue writing these!

Steve

Just had time for a quick glance, but it looks well worth reading. Building an obscure ancient city of minor religious importance are we?

You could call it.... uh, Kerusalem maybe.

LOL. I hadn't seen the connection, but you're right that it's clear -- especially with the temple mount. I'm using the process (and some maps) I used for one of the cities in my campaign. There's something buried deep and forgotten beneath the city. There's actually a passage that leads down to it, but it is protected by magic that turns away people who are not consciously looking for it. The players haven't picked up the clues to start looking, so the compulsion magic appears to still be working

Steve

Somewhat off-topic for BRP, but of interest to RPGers:

Profantasy posted my first two installments of an article on mapping cities. You can find it on their blog at http://www.profantasy.com/rpgmaps/.

I have a whole series er um, mapped out, but I'm sure that a few comments or traffic will help them decide to go forward.

The articles feature Profantasy's Campaign Cartographer, but a lot of the information is about where cities grow, where to start in laying out a city, that sort of thing, which is useful no matter what you use to make maps.

Steve

I've asked my FLGS to order a copy, so hopefully they will start to get channel buzz as well.

Not exactly. D&D 5E requires only some basic computer input ("I am an invincible

and handsome hero who wants to kill nasty things and take their stuff"), and the

computer then generates the character, the adventure and all of the action and

shows it as a 3D movie - just lean back and enjoy the game. ....

What's cool is they found out they only need one starting character with different pictures!

RQ has always been short on 'official' magical items. I think this was in part deliberate, to distance itself from D&D's item fixation (e.g. the tendency to define characters by their items, "I'm a fourth level hobbit bard with bracers of dexterity"), and part a reflection of the rules: Items that 'just' imbue a spell are great.

In addition to just a roster of items, I'd love general magic item tips. Here are a couple of mine:

• If using Hit Locations, give out armor piecemeal -- it reinforces the unique mechanic and makes characters look like the scrappy survivors they are
  
• Have most starting items powered by the wielder's POW/Magic points. For more powerful items, think about where the power comes from.
  

Steve

...We were using the SW system because Ari and Jeb wanted to use it and learn it, but after quite a few mishaps in combat, the unpredictability of the system got the better of us and I'm switching us to BRP...

LOL, I think that's the first time I've heard of someone switching to BRP to make combat MORE predictable!

Steve

I guess the only thing to do is get a couple of the American readers here to give it a go. They can probably buy a Taser from WalMart. All in the name of research... to turn myth into fact Oh, and don't forget to video it and post it here!

LOL. And to make it scientific, we should run the test, what? maybe 10 times?