Barak Shathur

I have been running a MERP conversion campaign off and on for the last two years. I started out with RQ3 because I felt the grittiness and the character building fit the world quite well. After a while I started adding elements of BGB to it, like the multiple parries, weapon specials and fate points. I felt the sweet spot was somewhere there, though now I've switched over almost entirely to BGB. I've been using the fan made MERP-BRP conversion that I got from this site, although I found some of the creature stats (e.g. elves) were a bit unbalanced. I liked the magic system, but since I'm using actual MERP modules I got tired of converting the spell lists to suitable spells from the magic supplement, so I started just adapting the MERP spells to BRP. As a whole I find BRP is a really good fit for Middle Earth.

I think this from the QA under “Shields as passive armor” is the best use one can have for a shield within the RQG rules: The adventurer will receive no benefit from the shield unless against melee or missile fire that happens to strike that or an adjacent hit location (see p219) AND comes from a direction that would reasonably have a chance of hitting (gamemaster discretion). In this case, the shield will protect for half its usual armor points (as per the rules for a slung shield on the back, p219). It would be nice if they could just write that “holding a shield in place without using it to parry actively provides half its AP to the locations covered against melee or missile attacks coming from the facing direction” or something.

That makes sense, thanks!

Follow up! In the Bestiary, it says an average dwarf is 115 cm and 45 kg. Average SIZ is 7, which is slightly over half of the human average of 13. So is an average human just under 230 cm tall?

Yup. I made a fan edit of the Rings trilogy for myself where I tried to edit out the worst of Gimli’s nonsense to make it a little more watchable. And book-Gimli is one of my favorite characters!

Good catch!

The later contributions here have been truly awesome. Again, the information contained in this thread alone would seem to justify a dwarven supplement. Just to clarify: I too have no interest in the Jacksonian dwarf, scottish-spouting, beer-frothing, rage-clowning. That is something quite far removed from Tolkien's Khazâd. Maybe that image is more in line with the Warhammer Fantasy universe? It's plain to me that Gloranthan dwarves are a different kind of bird. More machine-like. An iron dwarf adventurer would in my mind be an Individualist, maybe due to some freak accident in the process of creation imbued with a kind of self awareness that sets him/her apart. Kind of like the Tin Man, wandering the world searching for his heart. Or individual soul.

By Mostali I meant Gloranthan clay dwarves rather than True Mostali.

Yes. This is one of the aspects I love about Gloranthan dwwarves, and it is obvious from one glance at the illustrations in the Bestiary. Though the example there is for a typical Iron Dwarf encountered above ground, and as such it is perhaps less likely to be SIZ 2? Again, slightly different stats for the different subtypes could be something in you were to make a dwarf supplement.

Ok, I’ll try to do this one more time (hopefully the last). It is not a matter of min-maxing. It's about logical world building and simulation of 'reality' (which all BRP systems clearly strive for). It’s *not* that I don’t agree that dwarves would be culturally predisposed to turn their tools into weapons of war - I think this is a cool and believable concept. In fact, the first time I came across this was in MERP circa 1986. At the time, it seemed new and original, but at the same time a bit weird since the canon that the game was based on so clearly established other weapons as cultural for dwarves - axes, above all, but also swords, spears and war mattocks. The background skills for dwarves in MERP were so heavily focused on concussion weapons that it was pretty much guaranteed that a dwarf player would choose those over anything else. This was at least true for almost all the premade dwarf PCs that came with the ready-to-run adventures. Now hammers for dwarves was not illogical in itself, but it's an example of where the rules incentivise player choices that implement a game world that is somewhat at odds with the goal of the game, which in this case was to simulate adventure in Tolkien's Middle Earth. Now Glorantha doesn't have this literary baggage, and dwarves could be dreamed up any way Stafford and the other creators wished. Thank god, because they made something very original and creative out of them, as with so much else. So hammers for dwarves actually make more sense in this context, and for the iterations of RQ before RQG, it also made sense from a rules perspective. But as of RQG, blunt weapons have become decidedly inferior to others (zero or negligible special effect if you have no or low DB, as will be the case with most dwarves thanks to their low SIZ characteristic), and slashing weapons have become decidedly superior (double damage on special with no drawbacks, unlike impaling weapons that can get stuck at least). In fact, in the years since I started playing RQG and other BRP games, I’ve never, ever seen anyone choose a blunt weapon. For good reason. At the same time stats for dwarves, including weapons, have been carried over from earlier editions, while with the rules changes they no longer made sense. It's really a matter of statistical survival, from an almost Darwinian point of view. Think of how weapons developed in the real world. How some fell by the wayside as armour improved, while new ones were invented to counter the better armour. Do we agree that dwarves are a highly technically advanced culture? Do they have vast amounts of wealth, compared to others? Are they highly pragmatic, and are the different subtypes highly specialised for their tasks? Are iron dwarfs specially produced to produce weapons and use them in war? What seems logical to me is that iron dwarves then would use the most effective weapons available to them, and the way warhammers were implemented in RQG, before I pointed out that they should be able to impale, given that according to their description they 'punch through armor', they were decidedly ineffective. Impale has now been added to warhammers as a correction, and have become a logical weapon for dwarves once again. So as for my original issue, it has been resolved. Your real world analogies don't hold up. An M60 to a M16 or whatever US soldiers use is more like a great weapon to a hand weapon. Not the obvious choice for all soldiers in the real world. Battle axe vs the earlier iteration of a RQG warhammer is more like an automatic rifle versus a single shot one. An impoverished army might not have enough M16s to go around, but the world's most technologically advanced culture? Would they choose hunting rifle for sentimental purposes, or because they liked to shoot ducks in their free time? And don't tell me that the dwarves don't know how to use axes or swords. It says those were the first weapons they learned to use when defending themselves against elves and trolls. They've known how to use them for millennia. Battle axes aren't that long hafted and could well be used in cramped spaces, and swords can be used to stab with. Spears or halberds might be more logical though, alongside one of those one handed weapons. And using a tool a lot does not make you proficient with it in combat. I use a saw sometimes. I don't think I could use it well in a melee. Maybe the motion would train my arm for stabbing with a sword or spear. And military war hammers are very different from smith's hammers. The chopping motion of hammering steel on an anvil all day would predispose you equally for using an axe or a war hammer. I think the main reason most players don't seem to choose great weapons is that they just haven't figured out how superior they are in RQG to everythig else. A shield is mostly good as a missile screen in this game. Coming to it as a player, I think we all (including me) just assume that a shield and sword is the safest bet. Another reason is that great weapons aren't cultural for many of the most common cultures. To finish up, I agree that it would be incredibly boring for everyone to choose the most optimised weapon, or for all dwarf PCs to be the same. Hell, if a player wants to handicap himself for role playing purposes, go for it I say. But for a species as a whole to be constructed in a way that contradicts what the description and the game world implies about them, is worse. Sorry to take up so much space with this topic. I hope this will be the end of it as far as I'm concerned.

Given that the Mostali are so specialised, shouldn’t the stats for the various types be different? Since they’re produced for specific functions, maybe the spread should be smaller for the relevant characteristics. Maybe it’s time for a Mostali sourcebook…:)

Hah! Now there’s an eye opener, and no mistake. Or maybe they are making swords for jolanti 😉

Ok, I hadn't seen those late revisions so I assumed it came with RQ3. Thanks for updating me on that. I agree humans shouldn't be too small, but not too big either! Wish they could have solved it some other way, as I said. Should dwarves be smaller than ducks though?

No, dwarves and humans have the same amount of hit points, 12, on average. So I guess dwarves became more gnome-like between RQ2 and 3, which is fine. What stands out to me is that the description didn’t indicate this as far as I can tell, and again, that the same size relationship was replicated in other BRP games.

Average human hit points is also 12, both in RQ3 and RGG. So after RQ2, Dwarves became decidedly inferior to humans in combat stat wise, though in RQ3 they at least held an advantage in Fatigue points. I wonder if this was intended, or more an accident of the increased human size, which was done in order to get rid of ridiculously small human PCs as I’ve been told. I would prefer to put humans back at 3d6 SIZ, and resolve the tiny person problem some other way. Re-rolling 1s does it. Another version would be to set a min SIZ and re-roll everything under it. I think it’s just incredibly awkward rules wise to have every average human just 1 point shy of DB. I It doesn’t seem like a conscious design decision, especially since 1d4, when most hand weapons do around 2-8 points of damage, is huge. Again, it seems like an unintended consequence of trying to solve the SIZ problem. Some added thoughts: I think something in the Machine got a little out of whack in another way when human size was increased. A fantasy dwarf is typically about 2/3 the size of a human. 4-5 feet vs humans’ 6. And this was the case in the early iterations of RQ. With RQ3 this changed, and dwarves became half the size of humans. Now, was this a deliberate change in the human-dwarf relationship, or an unintended (or simply not considered) effect of the SIZ change? You might say yes, we decided Gloranthan dwarves are smaller than conventional dwarves, but this relationship carried over to BRP/BGB, so I don’t believe this was the case. Rather, an unintended consequence of a change to an established rule system that had deeper structural impact than the original purpose motivated. Like, I would assume, the increased proliferation of DB (now practically all humans have it) leading to the damage inflation that gave RQ the reputation of being ‘the game where PCs get their limbs chopped off’. Later versions of the BRP family, such as Open Quest and Legend/Mythras, seem to have recognized this problem and increased dwarf size and, in Legend/Mythras, reduced DB.

Ok. I would also bump iron dwarves’ strength, but that is purely up to GM discretion. Someone who didn’t bother to think it through might just go with the printed stats, and wind up with dwarves who are surprisingly ineffective in melee. And even with 1d4 db, crushing weapons are an inferior choice to slashing or piercing weapons due to the rules for specials. This has now been resolved since war hammers got Impale (as they had in RQ3. By the way, even though humans have lower STR they are as a whole more powerful than dwarves physically because thanks to their SIZ, they are on average just 1 pt shy of db, while dwarves need 4. This discrepancy arose in (I believe) RQ3, where human SIZ went from 3d6 to 2d6+6, while dwarves stayed at 2d6. IMO, dwarves should have gotten 1d6+6 SIZ following this logic. These may be minor details to some, but they do have a subtle but meaningful influence on world building and outcomes.

I think you too are missing the point of my original post. The stats are given as an ’average’ iron dwarf you might encounter. He/she has STR 14 and a 1H hammer as his highest skill weapon. Now, in RQG a weapon with crush special is really only a meaningful choice if you have 1d6 or more in DB. Otherwise impaling and slashing weapons will give you much more bang for your buck. It just doesn’t make sense that a creature as focused on war as an iron dwarf wouldn’t choose the most optimal weapon available. It’s a matter of logical world building, really. Now Impale special has been added to war hammers, which makes sense since they are supposed to ‘punch through armor’. And voilà, war hammers are suddenly a good choice even for characters with low or zero DB. So problem solved (although battle axe would still be the better option). I think part of the problem is that it seems the weapons and stats were imported from RQ2/3, but with the new rule for slash specials, some high damage weapons like battle axes and great swords became much more powerful compared to others, where in previous iterations they didn’t have the double damage effect on specials. I think the weapon system was originally structured with the idea that only the impale special caused double damage, and therefore it breaks down when you change that. Another example of this is the Swedish BRP system Drakar och Demoner from the 80s, which pretty much lifted the weapons tables straight from Basic Roleplaying, but removed the Impale function. In this game, only swords and axes made sense to use since they had the highest damage dice, and in practice this is what happened.

Lately I've come to think of the 15th century poll axe as the perfect dwarven weapon. It has an axe, a hammer, and a spike - a weapon for all seasons, useful in narrow tunnels as well as in the field. It's quite heavy, but dwarves have great strength so they're well suited to handling it.

From the Q&A thread as of today: Change RQG page 209, W&E page 60: Hammer, One-handed (1H) Hammer, War, Type C or I Problem solved. I feel like I repaired a bit of the World Machine today 🙂

Yes. My post could have used a 🙂

I just got a moderator warning for this comment being too sarcastic, and I see now it can be read that way. I want to make it clear that was not the tone intended, or the way it sounded in my head! Rather I was trying to express, in a joking way, my incredulous delight at there being a QA thread.

Another example of when development actually is devolution. So often, new versions of games ‘fix’ things that aren’t broken, in the process breaking them. Wait, I can point out problematic rules and I’m not just yelling into the void? Somebody cares? Smiths use hammers for smithying. For combat, they use the best weapon available to them. In RQG, this is not hammers.

It’s worse than I feared then. At least in RQ3, you couldn’t parry with a one handed weapon you had attacked with, and vice versa.

Something must be done. This is a travesty. Regarding this, have I got this right that you actually sacrifice POW to cast dwarven sorcery? In which case it's something to only use in exceptional circumstances? In the Bestiary it says "expend" rather than "sacrifice", but I take it this means the same thing?

Well, it’s been a few years. Just for fun, what are some things that work less well and could do with a bit of tweaking? I have a couple of candidates. Change Slash special to something more modest (keep Impale as it is, the risk of getting your weapon stuck balances it). Change the Passion effect to +/-10 with simple success or failure. 20 is just so extreme. Give shields some kind of defensive bonus, such as add half shield AP to the locations covered. And finally my bête noir of BRP games, reduce DB somewhat. +/-1d4 is too big a jump from 0, while large animals like bisons doing +3d6 is just insanely excessive. +2d6 is enough, when human limbs have only 4-5 hp.