Mikus

Well, here is the thing from my POV. Take a guy who picks up a bat. He gets a basic skill of say 25% attack and parry. He swings at a highly skilled fighter who is also an acrobat. He gets a 25% chance to hit. His tendency to **** up is 75%. Then he swings at a drooling moron and his chance to hit is 25%. His tendency to **** up is 75%. Defending does not change his tendency, it interposes something to block the path or to get out of the way of what would otherwise be a hit. Now do you really think that someone would miss both these guys 75% of the time due only to his unfamiliarity with a bat? Thats all was was saying about percent being a questionable way of looking at it. Now lets take this baseball bat wielding noob. He never gets any formal training or even knows a moronic trainer in baseball bat combat style. Yet he stands outside of bars and gets really at beating up on unarmed patrons. Over time he becomes a master of smashing them and other unarmed, (but certainly dodging), critters with his bat yet never gets trained, (like many RQ adventurers who learn by experience only). Also, he never has to defend because they never fight back. (This bar caters to followers of Ghandi). Anyhow, he gets so good at smashing people, critters and things he is now a master at 100%. His tendency to **** up is gone. Yet never once was he forced to parry a drunk or kitten with said bat. The first fight he gets in with a trained martial artist, who delivers a smashing blow to his face, is lithely parried at 100% by his bat? Hum.....????? You see, you are making broad assumptions about combat but the old rules made no assumptions. They were geared to what you did. What your saying is like the leveling up of skills in D&D. You go up a level, you gain in skill even if you never used if. As for consensus I have always felt that is like taking a poll of 'Should the drunk driving laws be stiffer?' at the local pub. I suppose lemmings also work by some form of consensus but I'm not sure about the wisdom here either. The Earth is flat was also consensus at one time, (and may be again LOL). Under the old rules if you used a trainer you would train in attack and parry and get better at both. You became experienced in what you actually did. If you ever trained in any martial arts I'm sure you have met people who were lacking in offense or defense. You see it all the time in MMA fights, especially back when it began and fighters were from hard fighting styles, not todays MMA style. Anyhooo, just my thought and way of looking at things. As usual, milage may vary. Thanks for the comments!

Thank you. I'll take a look at Revolution. As I said I love BRP but that does not mean there are not some things I would like to try tweaking. If someone has done it and made it work thats great.

Some century I shall create PerfectQuest and then you will see! You will all make your O mouths. It will be the bestous quest EVER! No matter the circumstance the rules will have the perfect solution and best of all, every player will agree that nothing could be finer. It will be so cut and dry that these Forums will have nothing to discuss at all and like the One ring it will rule them all.

I guess I get that but % was a bad term and linking it to roll under on a non-exploding die seems to have caused some of the issues RQ has been battling for 30 or so years. I maintain that 100% means perfect. When was the last time you scored a 100% on a test and failed? If 100% does not mean the whole enchilada than it is not a percentage based game. This is not an opinion, just basic math. Most of the problems would have been solved by target numbers, (Difficulty), and score over. Need to score over x to hit. Roll a d00 and add your skill. Highest result in opposed tests win. Exceed by x = special, exceed by y = critical or some such thing. Open Ended rolls means you cannot get locked into a no win situation. You can always roll higher or lower than someone else without making x = always hits, y = always fails. Actually all the various systems to determine results would then basically fall into this one mechanism. Attack, resistance, magic, etc; It would slip right into BRPs other mechanics very well I would think, but it would not be BRP anymore. I love BRP but the skills over 100 and rounds vs time are the only things I am not enamored with. That and dropping the Parry skill. AHHH! Pluto fights sword and shield for a year but always uses shield parry - sword attack. One day, for the first time ever, he decides to bash with his shield and parry with the sword. Same level of skill? This was one of those lets dumb it down decisions that seems to plague us today in every area of life. Can't comment on the Combat Styles yet but if Sword and Shield style has the same chance when the sword is broken and the style now becomes Sword and Glove then I would whine about that as well.

Thats good to hear and I certainly did not mean it as a slight to Chaosium. Heck, they gave me Stormbringer 1st Ed and I LOVED that game. It was a player killing field and really promoted some dark game play. Memorable.

I have never looked at it. And I most likely should not! LOL

I hear you but it seems to me that Chaosium dropped the ball on RQ quite a bit in the past and LW and PN seem to be the ones with the fire in their belly. "living and breathing" in this age are really up to the players. Right now we have BRP, RQ1, RQ2, SB, CoC, (7 iterations?),RQ3, Elric!, MRQ, MRQII, Legend, RQ6, BGB, Mythras, OpenQuest, MW, RQC,... xxxQuest....OMG!!!! .... all at our keyboards for download or purchase. Not sure we needed another 'quest' but hopefully I will open it up and go OMG!!!! THIS IS IT! Either way WE will buy it because thats what WE do..... Never having any particular interest in Glorantha makes RQG a curiosity for me. It would have to be modified simply because it is designed for Glorantha. It looks to me that it is going to be RuneQuest 2 played with Elric! rules. For that a source book for the BGB might have been the better choice. I have come to terms that I will never be 'happy' with one system so I'll just have to buy them all! whhh haaaahh haaaa rubs hands evilly ....

I shall did deeper into the BGB. Unfortunately they made it a big GURPS like monstrosity and that turns me off a bit. It would have been great if it was something you could check off what you did not want then print on demand. Ala carte printing! That would be cool. My issue with over 100% is that it becomes ungainly because percents were never designed to go past 100 when the die is pegged from 1-100. Thats why it is hard to come up with a good answer. IMO that is. Games like Rolemaster add the skill to a d100 roll, (not a %) and Hackmaster adds combat modifiers to a d20. Highest result is the best in both systems. No intrinsic caps. Although I love BRP in general I have always thought that the Roll under your % chance inherently places a logical cap which is why skills over 100 are the red headed bastard of the system. MRQ1 seems to have chose to blatantly ignore that and I personally think that might have been one of the major problems. Think 200% and 300% skills in a roll under on a d100 system!!! Thats like having to roll under 40 or 60 on a d20 in D&D. If D&D did that we BRPers would be jeering and howling with glee. Although I get 00 always fails, 01 always succeeds, special and critical go up as percentage goes up, it still feels ungainly to have skills so high. At least to me. Anyhow, if over 100 is to be common than I think the system would have been better off adding your skill to a 1d100 roll. Make it open ended where 99-00 means roll again and add and 01-05 means roll again and subtract. More math but no over 100 problem. Rolls of a double, (11, 22, 33, etc are Critical if you succeed and fumble if you fail.) Other than silly high skills with no good way to resolve them why does MRQ get such a bad wrap? I know it has some clunky bits but scanning through it I don't see it deserving the horrific reputation it has. Now I have never played it so perhaps things come up in game that are not so apparent on the surface.

I do get the SR not being time but the round is still 10 seconds and you get a 1 per 1 attack every 10 seconds regardless if any given SR equated to 1/12 of a second or 7 seconds. It still equates to 10 second actions blocks. SR is actually just a fancy form of initiative. The 50 SR circle is a neat idea but I agree that you cant just extend the number of SRs without making some adjustments. SIZ would only be for initial engagements. After that SIZ is not really a speed thing. Once the perimeter is breached the SIZ advantage can actually shift, especially if STR and DEX belong to the smaller combatant. This is in fact is a way of trying to sequence, and the most natural way to sequence is using the same time we use for everything else. Now anyone who has gone through a drive thru often enough, or the line at a grocery store, knows that people move at greatly varying speeds. I am one of those people who usually is getting finished around the time the next guy is getting going. At least with short term goals. LOL For me most people move painfully slow, be it walking, doing dishes, raking the yard. Really doesn't matter. You can take a 3 second task and some people will get it done in 3 seconds and others take 10. Consistently. I would have a base time modified by adding seconds, minutes or hours depending upon the normal length of time necessary. This would be like the SR for weapons only flipped. A great-sword would be slower than a rapier. So a task like making a sword attack might be 5 seconds. Time modifiers for humans might be from 0 to + 4 with most being +2. A really slow guy would then take 9 seconds and a really fast guy 5. Most would be from 6 to 8 though, so the difference would only rarely be a 1 for 2. Something like.... DEX Rank DEX DR MOD Task Time Adj <5 5 x1.5 5-9 4 x1.25 10-12 3 x1 13-17 2 x.75 18-24 1 x.5 >24 0 x.25 With a sheet with combatant down the left and seconds on the top it does not seem it would be to difficult to note when someone acted by shorthand or symbols. Of course I would use graph paper. A-ATTACK, P-PARRY, M-MOVE,.... Actor 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 etc Bogart the Rat A A Pompous Snide P A P P-20 Zippo the Flame M A But ya, I can see how that might slow the game needlessly. One can always go with the 1 attack means the total of what you were able to achieve in the last 10 seconds based upon skill and luck. Just mulling things over.......

It's nice bantering these ideas around like this. It gives me a chance to think about long cherished beliefs, why I hold them, and if they make any sense. Sometimes change is not so good but resisting change for the better because it is uncomfortable is not so good either. When I first saw MRQII was was appalled at what they had done to RQ3. After time I warmed up to the 'skills without category' and who knows, perhaps I could even come to appreciate the dropping of the resistance table. Yet for now I still think it better than one or two skills to cover the same ground. Although it did not always scale so well I think it worked well and was an elegant way to handle nearly any situation.

Back to my original issue with dropping the two tables. Seems more of an ease of use than a realism choice. For RQ I'm not sure that is the way to go. If I want ease of use I could do something else. That opens the 'why %d vs d20' which was valid in RQ2 where everything was in 5% chunks. I think I also like fraction of skill vs linear. For example: Darkness Spell causes a See Skill to be reduced to 1/10th. Master with 107 has a 11% chance and Noob with 28% has a 3%. This verses a -90 where Master is 17% and Noob is -70. As long as the fraction is a 1/x type it is easy. Just divide the skill by x and round to the nearest whole number. I think Mythras does this but I wont say for sure.

Thank you for that list. I just scanned through it and will read if fully here in a bit. I agree with using the Resistance Table for opposing skills and have thought the same thing myself. That or opposed skills like in RQ6. No need for separate systems. Also, I would make getting skills over 95% difficult and over 100% very difficult. Diminishing returns on experience rolls and such.

This being said were you to have no irons in the fire and knowing what you now know which set of rules would you use as your base platform? Looking through all the rules it seems to me I might have to fiddle with any a bit to get what I really THINK I want but what I think I want VS what works best and most consistant during play is most likely not the same thing. I imagine some RQ3 derivative using real time, melee and missile hit tables, MRQ type skills, no Luck, Hero or Feats please, experience rolls for skills used and training, study for those not used, (RQ3 again), Parry and Attack separate. Looking through the rules sets it seems RQ3 is actually the closest to what I think I like but I do find MRQ skills a bit more sensible than categories. As for 'supported' that is basically a non-issue. Between PDFs of old rules sets, RPGNow reprints, eBay and Amazon there is hardly anything OOP. (Or at least unobtainable). One could easily argue that never before was there such an availability and the actual problem is making a choice. I just noticed you can get Empire of the Petal Throne and all the Swords and Glory stuff in Hardback. Something you never could before! And those have bee OOP since before most RPGers were even born. I have been messing around with the MRQ SRD and some of these ideas so perhaps I'll just concoct my own and then Lulu it. Its so easy and inexpensive to print your own books today that is a perfectly reasonable option for people to end up with their own codified house rules in a printed manual. I remember playing white box D&D when it came out. We loved it. We had fun. Many of my great gaming memories revolve around it and AD&D it and yet they were so primitive and lacking by todays standards that one would think it impossible. Same with Traveller. Those original 3 books in a little black box opened worlds.

I have yet to play it but Mythras is so cool in its presentation and so obviously a work of love that I bought two just to help support the team. Really a beautiful book in my opinion.

Sounds like there is a lot of options hid in these rules which might not be apparent at first glance. I think I need to write out a cheat sheet with all the options and modifiers. The exercise in doing it as well as the finished project might be very instructive. Thanks again!

Hello, I am trying to wrap my head around SR vs Time in the sense of why not just use real time like HackMaster 5? For example: DEX Rank = Speed Modifier Weapon Speed = how nimble weapon is DEX Rank + WS = time between attacks. (DR = 2, WS = 4, 6 seconds between attacks) Longer weapon get first attack upon initial engagement IF it is ready and you are not surprised. Lance > Halberd >Spear > Great -Weapon > sword> (dagger - hand) Initial contact equals S-1, count up begins here. Sword man with CS-6,(Combat speed for sword). Spear man with CS-8. Sword man closes with spear man. Spear gets 1st attack on S-1. Sword attacks S-2. Swords next attack is S-8 and Spear is S-9. (unless some combat damage causes someone to be stunned a few seconds). Then sword SR-14 and spear SR-17. In time the fast attacker will get more attacks but not 'x per turn', only over a length of time IF nothing changes. This is a smooth progression and not segmented bites. ........................................................... You can Dodge or Parry whenever you want however consecutive parries by the same weapon impart a penalty. -30 the next second, then -20 on the next second with -10 on the third second. 4 seconds after the last dodge or parry it is back to its original %. So....I dodge or parry on S-4. On S-5 if I dodge or parry I get a -30%. This continues until I stop dodging or parrying. Once I skip a second the penalty is -20, then -10, then I have recovered. Parry SR-4..., Parry SR5 (-30), Dodge SR-6 (-30), Parry S-9(-10), Parry S-11(-20), Parry SR-15(no modifier as 4 seconds have passed). Seems a lot but RARELY would you be attacked that often unless you were beset by multiple opponents, and thats a bad thing. Or some such mechanism. ........................................................ Getting hit might cause a time penalty,----"Stunned for 1d4 seconds, Parry or doge only at 1/2%" Armor and encumbrance imparts a speed modifier which could either adjust the DEX SR or be a flat out +3 seconds for Full Plate Male. +1 second per 10% encumbrance allowance. Dual weapons attacks ...not sure..both same second...1 second apart...??? ............................................. It does not seem that difficult of a stretch and get rid of the freeze frame SR. The key would be to not let it get out of hand where someone gets 3 actions to someone else getting 1 with the same weapon. By having a base weapon speed and adding a speed modifier that is fairly easy to do. You could still use the skills over 100% get 2 advantage. Split % for a flurry attack where speed is cut in half. If your time to attack with a sword is 8 seconds you can flurry every 4 seconds at 1/2 your chance. Split parry / Dodge - defend against 2 attack on the same second at 1/2 percent, 3 at 1/3 percent or 4 at 1/4. (This would involve making your opponents get in each others why, which is how it works in a real situation. You don't stand in the middle of three attackers, you try to get outside them and make them come thru each other.) Or maybe a success allows immediate repost at 1/2 percent or something. Anyhow, I am just kicking around the idea of getting rid of clunky combat rounds and just using time, (thats how I do everything else), but I want it to be easily implemented and more logical or else why bother. Any thoughts would be greatly welcome as to why or why not, and how or how not to make it worth while. The main advantage I can see is the play of all events during combat will make more sense than an arbitrary 1 attack every 10 seconds no matter the speed, size or source. And these in a ordering of 1-12.

Thank you, For number 3, the longer handed weapon has the option to keep the distance open by increasing his SR by 1. Now if both increase the SR by 1 they are effectively in the same boat in regards to each other, although some other attacker might now get a strike in. So why would anyone allow someone to close and become disadvantaged when in effect it costs nothing to maintain the status quo? I should think Closing and 'Breaking', (Disengaging is something different), should possibly require a skill roll or resistance roll if opposed. I can think of very few good reasons for someone with a great-sword not to take the 1SR to keep an attacker with two short-swords from closing when you consider the trade off. closer - 1SR gets strike rank advantage, limits opponent to 1 action breaker - 1SR maintains SR advantage, (effectively free), and maintains 2 actions. So in what circumstances would someone not keep the closer at bay?

Although I love the Owl-Head example it also indicates that the original intent of the '1/2% and wait to SR 10' rule was instead of using the SIZ modifier rule. Otherwise you could shoot the owl at say SR5 with C% while you would have to shoot at the head on SR10 with 0.5 x C%. Than makes no logical sense either. The SIZ modifier intent was obviously a way of adjusting the % based upon size alone. The halving rule was a simplified version and waiting till SR 10 was becaus although the entire individual might be targeted at any time in a random it what may fashion, getting an opportunity to hit only the left arm might never happen. I would think a more logical approach, although a bit more crunchy, would be to enforce the SR10 but use the SIZ of the area targeted rather than 1/2 the normal %. Think about targeting the eye from 10' with a squirt from a mustard bottle verses just hosing him down willy nilly.

I have to admit that makes sense. Most hunters take the time to aim rather than just winging it. Thanks for the input.

In RQ3 when a weapon with a greater SR, (shorter), closes with a weapon having a lesser SR, (longer), the longer weapon loses the SR advantage and only has 1 action per CT. This seems to indicate that a 2-handed weapon normally having 2 actions is affected but a 1-handed spear suffers no ill effect, other than to lose the SR advantage. Is this correct? From my understanding this places a 2-handed weapon on par with a 1-handed weapon, which also only gets 1 action per CT, except that the 2-handed wielder obviously cannot wield a second weapon or shield. Is this correct? For the 2 handed weapon to regain the 2 actions, (attack and parry), would they have to disengage then reengage? Thank you!

Just got a copy of the RQG-QS rules and I must say I like them. What I do have hopes for is the following. Hit locations for missile weapons separate from melee weapons, just as in RQ3. As any hunter knows you nearly always aim for the vitals in the chest. I can guarantee you that having only a 1 in 20 chance of striking the chest with a missile weapon weapon, including spears, is just silly. Thats why RQ3 had separate tables. Although I love the parry rules which are similar to Stormbringer, where you can parry in any SR in which the parrying object is ready with each cumulative parry at 20%, there is a big issue IMHO. Morg the Wicked is using his longsword and attacks on SR7. On CT1, SR3 he is attacked and parries at his full 87%. On SR5, (approx 2 seconds later), he is attacked again and parries at 87-20 = 67%. Morg attacks on SR7 and is then attacked again on SR8, (approx 3 seconds after the second parry this CT), and parries at 87-40 = 47%. Now about 4 seconds later on SR12 he is again attacked and parries at 87 -60 = 27%. Its now CT2 and on SR1, (approx 1 second later!), he is again attacked yet now parries at 87%!! For some reason in 1 second he regained his wind and starts all over again simply because it is a new CT. Might I suggest dropping SR and CT and use something we are all quite familiar with. Time. We have to count CTs and SRs and also calculate when you can strike or act so why not just determine how long an action takes in seconds and start counting from the time you get initiative? For example, it takes Morg 7 seconds to make an attack with his Longsword. He is surprised by a Troll and Combat Time begins. It is second 1 and the Troll gets to act because he surprised Morg. This is an ambush. Morg rolls a d6 for Initiative and gets a 6. He begins his turn on S6 which means he cannot attack until, (6+7), S13. If the surprise had been mutual they would have both rolled a d6 and added their Attack Time. If there was no surprise, such as cussing each other from across the room, no initiative is needed and they both attack on their Attack Time for the weapon being used. The Troll attacks on S1 but luckily Morg had his longsword ready so he can parry, yet at -20 due to surprise. If the attack had been on or after S6, (his initiative roll), then there would be no -20%. This makes his current chance 87-20 = 67%. Each parry temporally reduces Parry by 20. So after the parry, on second 2, his Parry chance with the longsword is 47%. Parry recovers at a fixed rate of 5% per second so he will be back up to full parry in 8 seconds, (8x5=40), or second 10. The Troll requires 8 seconds to attack with his club and will get another attack on second 9. If Morg were to parry that attack he would still be at a -5 to his normal chance. After the parry on S9 he would once again suffer a reduction of 20 so would be at (87-5 on S9, then -20 for the parry bringing him to 62% on S10. This is not that hard, just count up time and note who did what on a particular second...[ S9 - MSP ]..shorthand for Second 9 Morg sword parry 62. There are 2 types of actions in general, supplementary actions, which can be used along with a primary action. Like drawing a dagger while fighting with a sword. Although drawing the dagger takes time it does not affect time between sword attacks. Tying a shoe might take 5 seconds, during which time you cannot be counting down for your next sword attack. Tying a shoe is a primary action. Morg attacks with his Longsword on S13. He then must wait till S20 for his next attack. Drawing a dagger takes 2 seconds and will be drawn on S15 but it takes him 5 seconds to use the dagger so it will also be ready for action on S20. Yet on S17 he realizes that his shoe is untied and drops to tie it. It takes 5 seconds and is tied on S22. He gets up and will be ready to attack with the dagger on S27 and the Longsword on S29. Hackmaster uses a system similar to this and it really is no more difficult that abstract Melee rounds or Strike Ranks and is how people think. It really is second nature and only requires knowing when you did something and how long it takes to do something you want to do. These are really the only things on my wish list, and the combat time has been on my wish list since the 80's. I also like damage to location rules better than both RQ2 and RQ3. Seem a bit more survivable while still being wicked.