Barak Shathur

Yet you used a fighter as your example. Anyway, spells in MERP barely function like skills at all, so the comparison is halting at best.

BRP skills also suffer diminishing returns after 95%, so that functions as a reasonable equivalent for me. No. Just no. I spent way too much time flipping through MERP/RM tables back in the day, and besides I feel that a skill-based system like BRP is a much better fit for Tolkien’s Middle Earth than a level based one. Also, maybe offensive spells over 100% could be split into several spells per round, like physical attacks.

Correct. I know how to convert the skills. No and I'm not sure if it makes much of a different. I mean what do you get for a crtical a spell list roll? If you get something (like a discount on the PP cost) then yeah it could be an issue. Otherwise not. I expected character to be rolling under base Spll OB and such . I don’t know what @Atgxtg had in mind, but my idea is based on a skill for each spell list, which applies for all spells on that list. What would specials and criticals confer? Yeah, maybe reduced magic point cost, maybe maximum damage for offensive spells, maybe increased range/duration/spell effect for others. Here I would probably follow BRP/RQ, where offensive spells tend to do 1d6 per spell level. Might have to figure out a way to implement BRP spell levels vis-à-vis MERP spell levels to enable more powerful offensive spells.

I think under the above system, I would give NPC’s 10% skill in their spell list skills per character level, so a 25th level character would have 250%, giving higher chance of critical and special successes, and able to absorb considerable negative modifiers without difficulty. Maybe every 10% over 100 could give 1 extra magic point too, allowing them to cast the more powerful spells.

Good point. I was thinking in terms of conversion, since Essence using characters in MERP typically have high IG but not necessarily high IT (which would be the equivalent to POW). This creates a problem. Either I’m going to have to let Essence users increase INT instead of POW, or give Essence users higher POW than what their IT would be equivalent to. Or switch INT and POW stats for them. None of which feels particularly satisfactory. Thinking out loud here.

These are some excellent suggestions. I think I’ll run with this.

Yeah, I’ve been using this mod for a couple of years but since the magic lists only vaguely correspond to MERP’s spell lists, and also are arranged alphabetically instead of by list, it turned out to to be a real pain to convert.

So I have this campaign where I’m converting old MERP modules to my RQ3/BRP hack. I’m trying to come up with a good way to adapt the MERP magic system for BRP, with a minimum of headaches for me as GM when converting NPCs. I have this idea and am looking for comments: Magic using characters learn spell lists as skills. You can cast spells at levels up to half INT for Essence users and half POW for Channeling. Each spell level costs 1 PP (Essence users use INT for PP instead of POW). Question: does this make magic using PCs too powerful from the start? I’m thinking of adding a penalty of 5% for every spell level above 1 to mitigate this (also to make a meaningful difference between magic users of higher and lower MERP levels). I want to keep as close to MERP as Thoughts?

That’s the one I have then. Thanks! Got to say it again, the layout and illustrations are beautiful.

Will there be a new pdf available with the second round of corrections implemented before release of the hardback?

@Jason D clarified in the BRP discord channel last night: armour ENC does not count when worn.

I’m currently playing with it (as a player). It seems to work mostly fine, though there was some bug with some dice rolls.

I must have misunderstood something I read somewhere. I don’t even remember where. Thanks for clearing that up for me!

There is actually a functional, if a bit rudimentary and incomplete (and somewhat buggy) fan made character sheet for BRP in Roll20. But an officially supported one would be gold.

I read somewhere there would be support for Roll20 in connection with the new BRP. This is really exciting. Is there a possible guesstimate for when this may transpire, if so? Thanks.

Reading it in the context of the whole paragraph does not indicate it applies to single weapon use. However, now I saw there’s an errata for parrying in general, that changes the general parrying rule to you can’t “attack and parry with the same weapon on a single strike rank”. I have to agree on your assessment of this set of errata. The one thing I really like is that it makes blunt weapons halve the protection of flexible armour.

The way I handled skills during chargen was I gave PCs 7 years in their background occupation, and then 1d3+3 years of freelancing on top of that, where they could allocate 30% freely each year but with the hard limit of 75% as per BRP.

Hm. Was there more than one set of errata? I can find nothing on that. Though in the one I have it says under “Two weapon use” that he can use the same weapon to attack and parry as long as he doesn’t do it on the same strike rank. Which is a bit weird, since you can’t do it with a single one handed weapon. Not all of the errata are great in my opinion. For example, I ignore the one about the inner layer of overlapping armour doubling its ENC instead of tripling it, since that makes for some absurd exploits.

Another reason is that in RQ3, you can only use a one handed weapon to either parry or attack with in the same round, not both as in RQG and BRP. Two handed weapons can do both though (which makes sense since you two hands to switch the weapon’s direction with).

I use a combination of RQ3 and BRP (the previous version) and it works like a charm. RQ3 I find to be a very well structured game, and all I have to do is add some modernisations from BRP such as multiple parries/dodges, the weapon specials, and fate points which I feel is necessary to balance the BRP systems' extreme deadliness (unless your PCs are constantly souped up with magic as per RQG). If you want you can use the same skill for parrying as well as attacking as per BRP, I wound up doing that after a while. The new BRP has Passions as well as Allegiances from the old version, so you don't really need that from RQG, which although terrific in itself I find much too keyed into Glorantha to be great for a generic system. Overall, I can't recommend RQ3 highly enough for what you are describing you want to do.

One solution to the problem of over-heavy armour could be to have its ENC count for half when worn. If the warrior in the first example ditches the helm (mail protects almost twice as well anyway) and switches his full shield to a heater, he would be down to 14.5 ENC, netting him -1 MOV and -5% to Agility and said skills. Not unreasonable for someone moving about in full battle gear. If he carries other equipment, he had better drop it before entering combat, which is also realistic. An alternative might be to make STR + CON the carrying capacity (as per RQIII) rather than the average of the two. Then the above warrior would be completely untroubled by his equipment, which is perhaps realistic for someone with such good stats. It would be nice with a simplified fatigue system that uses the burden stat from the shield and armour tables. For example, instead of using fatigue points you do a CON roll every minute or so of strenuous activity, where “Burden” affects the multiple of the roll. Failure would indicate a penalty, say a cumulative -10% to all skills or so. Added: I support anything that makes CON a bit more important.

The way I understood it under the old rules, the base chance to parry missiles functioned more like cover than an active parry, i.e. the shield is simply in the way, rather than being used to parry actively with. If the penalty for multiple parries is applied, most shields will only be able to block one, or at most two missiles, greatly reducing one of the few benefits they have under BRP’s system. And it is particularly true if you don’t use hit locations. This is the way it makes sense to me, but I admit the wording is a bit ambiguous. Maybe there will be a Q&A eventually to clear things up. I absolutely love that they added the rule for cover as protecting hit locations (as in RQ), it’s an incredibly elegant solution. And it dovetails nicely with the rule for slung shields, which seems to me to be the best use for shields in melee as the rules stand. But that’s just me.

In a world where the game system represents the laws of physics, a PC will observe that fighters using x weapon will statistically be more successful than fighters using y. In game technical terms, +1 or +2 bonus will translate to incapacitated hit locations or major wounds that more often, especially if this is doubled for specials. Only a deeply irrational individual will choose anything but the best tool available in a life or death situation. A balanced system still doesn’t preclude players making sub-optimal choices for RP reasons. And I’ll posit it’s also a better selling point than an unbalanced one.

Ummm yes. In RQIII, the +1s and +2s were balanced in various ways, like for example battle axe (1d8+2) and bastard sword (1d10+1) did the most damage of all one handed weapons but could not impale, and also required STR 13+ (ball and chain also did 1d10+1 but had a really low base chance, and no one had it as a cultural weapon). Heavy mace (1d10) had a high STR requirement while war hammer (“only” 1d6+2) could impale. Remember that in pre-RQG, only the impale did double damage, but it also had a high likelihood of getting your weapon stuck. And while blunt weapons tended to do slightly less damage than edged or pointed weapons, with the errata they halved the AP of flexible armour. And so on. This weapon table was highly internally correlated and balanced, and if you take out these subtleties and simply have all these weapons do double damage on specials, the structure collapses and the weapons with the highest damage dice are simply best all round, which makes the other choices redundant and thus bloat. Oh and as I made clear, I was talking about the weapon systems specifically.

I willingly confess I am blissfully ignorant of Stormbringer 🙂