Barak Shathur

I'm against the kind of solution where the parrying weapon gradually degrades because it penalises player characters. They will always face opponents with weapons in mint condition, unless the GM randomises some kind of damage to them, which would be onerous. Better to have a breakage system like in the Swedish Expert Drakar och Demoner, where each point of damage in excess of a parrying weapon's HP gives it a 1/20 chance of breaking, or optionally, 5 pts of excess damage causes it to break automatically.

So the sentence I replied to, should have read "finding THE artists". Got it. 😉

I'd agree. https://nickalven.weebly.com/

Nope. The rules that I want are not included as options. Some things: 1. A succesful parry absorbs damage equal to the parrying weapon's HP rather than all the damage. There should be a difference between parrying a dagger and a great axe, not to mention a troll wielding a troll maul. BGB suggests disallowing parrying attacks from creatures of double or more the defender's size, but this seems arbitrary and clunky to me. Also, in BGB most weapons have 15-20 HP, which makes weapon HP completely meaningless since they're practically indestructible. 2. The weapon tables. BGB:s weapon tables seem poorly balanced to me. For example, there is no reason other than fluff to choose a broadsword over a battle axe there. They are identical in most respects but the axe does more damage. No upside to the sword. In RQ3, the sword wielder can choose to impale on a special success, which makes the sword a powerful weapon indeed, and justifies its historic popularity. The warhammer can also impale, making it a useful weapon against heavy armour. And crushing weapons halve the AP of flexible armour, making them particularly effective against chainmail which edged weapons have a hard time penetrating. And there's a troll maul. 3. I like intentional knockback, where one can simply match one's STR and SIZ vs a defender's SIZ and DEX to see if you can knock them back or over. In BGB you need a special success with a shield attack which will amost never happen. 4. I like the background culture occupations, they give lot of uniqueness and flavour to characters. I use a combination of these and free skill points. But that's just me. 5. I hate the damage bonus in most BRP games, except for the unpublished so called RQIV:AiG. The jump from 0 to 1d4 is just too great, and it's absurd that a human with just one point greater STR or SIZ than average does about 50% more damage with most one handed weapons. RQIV has a smoother progression which goes +1, +2, +3 etc. 6. I also like RQIV:s move characteristic, which is based on DEX and SIX rather than a fixed number for each species. The above points pretty much summarise my modifications to BRP in my own game, and I think many of them could at least have been included as optional in BGB but weren't. Oh and do something about shields to make them more useful.

You know what I would love? A BGB version based on RQ3 instead of Stormbringer. I would pay for it, and I'm sure many others would. Kickstarter anyone?

In that case I think the simplest option, that still stays close to the rules as written, is to count an attack with a weapon as one of the actions that adds a cumulative -30% to subsequent actions with that weapon. So first attack and then parry at -30%, or parry first and then attack at -30%.

It's frustrating, to say the least, that the developers chose the current model for parrying when there were better alternatives to choose from. For me, again, the simplest solution is to interpret the first line under "Parrying" on page 191 as meaning just what it says, "A character armed with a parrying weapon or shield can block the damage from an attack", i.e. a "parrying weapon" means a weapon designated for parrying. The wording implies a difference between a "parrying weapon" and a weapon not used as such. I would extrapolate that any weapon can be used for parrying, naturally, but not for both that and attacking in the same round. Would love to hear input from the devs.

I do illustrations sometimes and would be interested in this job. Please take a look: https://www.deviantart.com/art-history/gallery Cheers, Nick

Yup. What I'm most curious about is how to deal with the additional skills, like Bargain and Act for example. Suddenly there's a bevy of extra skills (most of which are quite useful) for the characters to be incompentent in. I'm wondering if I should let my players move points freely from old to new skills if they wish, or give them a skill point pool to distribute to the new ones. The second option seems icky.

The default skill for shields in BGB is 15%, which is the same as for most weapons. The default skill base is however nullified since you can raise any starting skill to 75% during chargen.

I see now that I wasn't the first to have this epiphany: https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/326-rq4aig-advice/ I'm curious as to how it went. Btw, my pdf copy of RQ4:AiG is missing the appendices and I'm curious about the one about converting characters. Does anyone have access to this?

This has been discussed a lot here recently, and seems to be a real issue with BGB since it keeps coming up. I feel exactly like the OP. My solution is to interpret the first line of the paragraph headed "Parry" on page 191 of BGB, which reads "A character armed with a parrying weapon or shield can block the damage from an attack", as indicating that only a weapon dedicated to parrying can be used for parrying, i.e. a weapon you're not using to attack with. So if you want to parry with your 2H weapon, you can't also attack with it in the same round. That gives a big defensive advantage to shields. In the unpublished RQ4:AiG shields provide half of their AP to body parts they cover passively (one body part for small shields, two for medium and three for large shields) if they're not used to actively parry with (which could happen in RQ4 since you have the option of attacking twice if you don't parry). Something like this could be implemented in BGB too as an alternative.

In RQ4/AiG, 1 MOV = 1 meter.

Well in that case, you lose a lot of balance. You could come up with a simplified solution maybe, say 5 ENC for weapons and light armor, 15 for medium and 20 for heavy, like full chain or plate. Plus 5 for typical adventurer’s gear. Or something. If dodging is as easy in full plate as in leather, it becomes truly broken.

Dodge is reduced by 1% for every point of ENC, so if you're wearing any halfway decent armour your dodge will be way lower than your parry, all other things being equal. But for an unarmoured person, yes dodge is somewhat superior. That's not ideal game design but not a huge problem for me. And since fighting unarmoured in BRP is a huge gamble, it makes dodge vs parry a meaningful choice instead of a no brainer.

That’s more or less how I’ve been running it until now, except I didn’t remove the penalty for shields because that would remove all disadvantage from being outnumbered. It still gives an advantage to someone with a dedicated parrying weapon.

I don't believe that the rules should incentivise exploitation that the GM then has do devise forced in-game tricks to sabotage.

It also makes twohanders less of a no brainer choice, since if you can parry as easily with them as with a shield (or a secondary weapon for that matter) they simply just do more damage, with no drawbacks. No one in their right mind would use anything but a greatsword or greataxe in melee. The only benefit to a shield is the base chance to parry a missile, and you could just carry a shield around for that purpose and drop it when you enter melee. This is a pet gripe of mine and I've discussed it before. Also with a twohander you get attack and parry for the cost of one skill, while if you use weapon and shield you have to buy two. If you on the other hand have to choose to either parry or attack with an individual weapon, great or small, you need to invest in dodge to have some form of defense. Also, dodge is reduced by encumbrance, so there's a tradeoff between armour and dodging. Which makes the choice between weapon style more meaningful and not just fluffy. ADDED: would it be possible to get the game designers to weigh in on this?

With errata, they can, but not on same SR. You are correct, I see now that according to the errata, when used in combination with another weapon, including a shield, you can do that. But not if you use a one handed weapon on its own? A bit strange. Anyway, I was talking about BGB. Is my interpretation of the wording correct? A "parrying weapon" is a weapon that is used exclusively for parrying in that round. Makes sense to me, I think I'm going to run it that way.

I was talking about BGB, sorry if I wasn’t clear about that. RQ3 is a bit different, there 2H weapons can both attack and parry in the same round (one handed weapons can’t). And also damage is rolled against a blocking weapon, unlike BGB where all damage is blocked on a successful parry. Besides, in BGB weapon and shield AP is about twice of what they are in RQ3 so they are virtually indestructible.

A somewhat related question: on page 191 under "Parry" it says "A character armed with a parrying weapon or shield can block the damage from an attack." I've taken that to mean that any weapon that is usable for parrying can be used for parrying, regardless of whether you've also used it to attack that round. I've always found this a bit problematic since it makes shields redundant in melee combat. But on closer reading it struck me that "parrying weapon" seems to imply a weapon that is used specifically for parrying, in contrast to an "attacking weapon". That is, a weapon that is used for attacking in a given round is not a "parrying weapon", though you could use it to parry if you don't use it to attack that particular round. In my opinion, this plays much better than my first assumption. Thoughts?

All I can find regarding that is on p. 74, "After all movement is done, all the combatants can freely adjust their facing (or take a free one hex facing shift if using a hex map)". But there's also this on p. 76: "However, players and gamemasters that do not feel the need for a system of movement resolution should feel free to ignore the Move and Post Melee Move phases, simply using the Declaration and melee phases instead, and deciding movement questions on a common sense, case by case basis." So your crunch may vary!

It's the formula for MOV from the unpublished RQ4, page 19: (SIZ+DEX)/5 (divided by 3 for quadrupeds).

I've looked at Mythras. At the moment I don't have the mental energy to read up on another rules system, but I'm curious about combining aspects of it with RQ3. How would you go about it? And by the way, where were you SCA active?

I somehow can't sing the praises of RQ4 enough. So much of it (at least the combat system) seems like the natural evolution that RQ3 should have followed. The reduced, smoothly progressive damage bonus table. Movement rate calculated on SIZ and DEX instead of a given species-specific number. Separation of combat movement and strike rank, so that the latter becomes simply the order of actions in a 'melee phase'. Death at negative total HP, so that it's not lights out directly at 0, instead you get to bleed out for a while. At the moment, I've incorporated all of this in my RQ3 and it's a great fit. I'd say RQ4 is the answer to many of the questions RQ3 poses.