Seldak

Ah, good catch! Thanks! That gives me a perspective on the designer's intention at least.

At the end of the description of the wrestling skill the Magic World rules state: But I cannot find a wrestling fumble table anywhere in the book. Neither here nor in the ELRIC! rules, from which these lines were taken. (No specials table either.) Am I missing something here or should it simply be amended with "Just make up whatever seems appropriate."?

Cool, I didn't even realise there were skill mastery rules in AS yet as I'm concentrating on the MW core book at the moment. Looking forward to these rules once I played a while and my group is starting to look for more character advancement options. I guess the b) part of my question is now answered as well. Thanks for sharing your opinion!

Sounds reasonable. But it raises another question in me: do you believe that parrying a weapon using wrestle (or brawl for that matter) is an equivalent defense to using a weapon? Speaking from my personal experience in different martial arts (some of them also using weapons) I would refrain from trying to parry an attack from an armed opponent unless the circumstances are actually that inconvenient for them that using a weapon would actually hinder them more than help them. I was thinking of house ruling this. You can try to parry a weapon unarmed, but your success level has to be above the attacker's. If you then succeed, you also get to grab the attacker's weapon or weapon hand (your choice) and can use a wrestling maneuver on them right away with your next action. Do you think this is too harsh? I just feel that it is such a suboptimal choice that ist should be more of a gamble. That is what I thought it propably wants to express as well, but I wasn't quite sure. I guess that would be an appropriate to handle wrestling armed opponents, given the potential risk discussed above. In other words the wrestler's success level has to be above the target's success level. Makes a lot of sense to me. That is how I will handle it. As a side note: that somehow also enforces my Idea for house ruling the wrestle skill to parry weapons, as it basically comes down to the same. I've yet to see great wrestling rules in any RPG. It propably comes down to the need of having really abstract rules (so they don't hinder you at the gaming table) for a really complex and technical task withs lots of important minutiae which are usually not of importance in different fighting styles. It is simply easier to whack someone with a stick than to grab and twist them into submission while also making sure the same is not done to you at the same time. I would most likely make wrestling a sort of minigame with contested skill tests, where success levels could shift the "state" of the wrestle along a scale. Or use success levels to choose from a list of maneuvers with certain outcomes, depending if you want to submit your opponent or hurt them. Just my 2c. That is a D10 sanity loss right there, given the clarity of the rules ;o)

While trying to make sense of the wrestling skill I'm not quite sure how wrestling an armed opponent is supposed to work. As far as I understand it, there are two possible scenarios: a) You are faster than an armed opponent and can wrestle them before they would be able to attack. b) The opponent is either faster than you or is holding you at bay with a long weapon, so wrestling could be used instead of parry. In case of a) per definition of the wrestling skill, the opponent could try to parry you and/or would still be able to counterattack you, for example by using a knife. This is only possible in the first round of the wrestling attempt (propably because after that, the wrestler has seized control of either the weapon or the hand holding it.) If the wrestling attempt is parried or broken off from, it fails otherwise the opponent is subdued and you can start using different options on them. Some questions come to mind: 1) If the opponent chooses to parry the wrestling attempt, for example with his sword, how would you handle damage to the wrestler, if the parry succeeds? 2) With which weapon are you allowed to counterattack? Only with other hand? The same weapon that was just grabbed? 3) When is the attempt broken off from? After a successful counterattack? 4) Could the wrestler use his wrestling skill to parry the counterattack, effectively rolling twice for wrestling in the same round? For clarity's sake I'll ask my questions for scenario b) in a later post. For now I'm interested in your take on this wrestling attempt.

This sounds very reasonable, though I will ignore the success level bonus for now to keep things simple. I specifically chose MW for simplicity's sake and to get a grasp on BRP Fantasy, before propably switching to the BGB later on, once I have a better understanding of the consequences of the optional rules. I still have some questions regarding my interpretation of the wrestling rules in general but I'll open a seperate thread for that. Thanks for the input so far!

Seems to me like a little bit of colum a and a little bit of column b. I think I'm going with attacker's STR vs defender's SIZ, since it's not just a normal wrestling attack and heavier people are harder to push around. The same resistance propably should apply to the attempt to knock back using a shield. So the usual sequence for a knock-back attack would be: 1) Attack roll (either shield skill or wrestling). May be dodged to avoid knock-back though not parried. 2) Resistance table roll (STR:SIZ or whatever you prefer) 3) If not resisted, defender is knocked back for (attacker's STR - defender's SIZ) meters (or yards, text doesn't seem to be too sure about that) and must succeed at an agility check or goes sprawling. 4) If attack was made with a shield also apply damage from shield as a weapon. To quote Jubal Early from Firefly: "Does that seem right to you?"

I'm working through the combat spot rules in preparation and am puzzled by the knock-back attack rules. First, whether you have a shield or not, you roll to attack. So far, so good. Then the confusion begins. The example states "Bregdan...wrestles a SIZ 14 opponent on the Resistance Table". How do you wrestle an opponent on the Resistance Table? That table is only for comparing attributes, not skills. Is this a STR:SIZ test? Or STR:STR? The shield example also speaks of "A sucessful Resistance Table roll" without mentioning the minute detail of what actually to resist!?! Am I better off ignoring these messy rules that can never have been used as written or playtested and just make stuff up on the fly? How do you handle this at your table? Any insight would be appreciated.

So for example a critical attack against a critical dodge amounts to the attack being completely evaded, a critical attack against a critical parry probably still could hurt the defender if the parrying weapon's HP and subsequently defender's armor are overcome (though damage is rolled normally because the crtical success is negated by the critical parry!?), but a critical attack versus a special dodge would hit, even though the damage would be rolled normally and armor still applies (critical being downgraded through special parry) and a critical attack versus a special parry would lessen the normally rolled damage (downgraded through special) via parrying weapon's HP and defender's armor PLUS also damage the parrying weapon? I'll stop here, before I go through the entire array of possibilities, but if you would confirm this were true, I think I caught the drift.

I am still unsure of how parries are supposed to be handled. As far as I understand, you only parry an attack if your parrying success level is at least as high as the attackers success level, in which case you compare the parrying weapon's HP to the damage rolled by the attacker. Any exceeding damage either reduces the HP of the parrying weapon if it's designed to parry or simply breaks the parrying weapon if it was not designed to parry. Any damage in excess damages the defender. But what happens if the defender technically succeeds but his level of success is less than the attacker's? And is it different from utterly failing your defense roll?

Played some RQ3 back in the '90s and some Stormbringer but mostly Cthulhu out of the games using BRP. I like the general system enough that I'd like to try some Magic World/BRP Fantasy with my group. Not interested in Glorantha though. The idea is to use BRP in different settings if my group likes what it brings to the table. I'm writing up a rules summary since my group is more comfortable in German and not likely to read the original rules and I don't want to spend all the time explaining when I could be telling a story. Also I think that is a good exercise to make myself more familiar with the rules. I am not a fan of the Attack-and-Combat-Matrix. It feels way too clunky to be a regular part of combat. This is why I try to figure out the Ideas behind the Matrix, so I don't need it anymore because I can recreate the results in my mind. Doesn't really help, that identical results are written up in different ways. Can anyone explain to me what the difference in result between "partially parried" and "defender parries" is supposed to be?

So would you say that the results for "critical vs special" and "special vs success" are identical even though they are worded differently?

I'm trying to grasp the system behind the "Attack and Defense Matrix". I have a feeling that you could boil it down to a simpler, more managable representation. It seems to me that there is some redundancy in the results, where you could put a few of them together if you would simply reorder the success levels of attacks and defensive actions. For example I believe the the attack/defend tuples "critical vs special" and "special vs success" are identical in result even though they are worded differently. Are there any minute details that I am missing here? Is there a difference between "partially deflected" and "partially parried"? A difference between "achieves a success" and "achieves a normal success"? Please help me understand this.

Using SIZ instead of CON does seem way more intuitive. Hard to believe that in all these years this obvious inconsistency has never been adressed/corrected. Anyway thanks for your views on this issue.

Again judging from the descriptions in the monster's section, I would assume that being substantial is best represented by the SIZ attribute. CON rather seems to simulate being alive, being able to catch diseases or be poisoned. I am also an idiot since I somehow didn't get that skeletons actually don't have a CON score. But vampires, mummies and zombies (according to the BGB) do have a CON score. Aside from the necessity to justify higher hit points I cannot think of any reason why insisting on those types of undead having a constitution attribute results in better stories. The terrifying tale of the Monstrous Mummy with Measles? The Zombie who zonked out? The only poisoning equivalence I can think of would be attacking a vampire with garlic but I guess that could be handled with an attack on either POW or MP. Am I missing something? Can you think of a situation in which having CON would be necessary?