BRP vs. MRQ & the OGL

[Atgxtg]

PArt 2

Was I trying to prove a point? I didn't realise. Sorry about that. I'd better check first to see what the purpose of my posts should be.

Well, technically, you were trying to disprove my point (MRQ is RQ for the D&D crowd). But a statement to the contrary, such as MRQ definitely is RQ for the D&D crowd, needs something to back it up.

Which, of course, means they can only do more D20 stuff. they couldn't possibly do something new or different.

No, it means that they are going to look at the rules from a different point of view than those who have experience with other types of RPGs. If you've run RQ with D&D players, you should probably get what I'm saying. D&D players take certain things for granted and assume that other RPGs have to work the same way. I.E. So now MRQ elves have infravision.

And is he the author of the RQ line?

He is the author of the MRQ core book, and it's updates.

Reduced lethality is a symptom of modern gaming. I'm even using it in RQ3.

Spell casting is not limited to dedicated spellcasters, quite the reverse.

Improvement awarded by the GM is something I've used for at least 15 years with absolutely no influence from D&D. HeroQuest uses it as well. It avoids many of the pitfalls of the skill-chase and allows PCs to be focussed on what they want to.

1) Reduced lethality isn't a symptom of modern gaming. It's been around for years. It is also the bane of good tactical thinking and leads to players acting stupid, since they can just pick themselves up later and carry on. It's value depends on what sort of genre/campaign being run. But it's inclusion in MRQ was so that D&Ders wouldn't drop like files they way they did when they played RQ in the past. It is also a matter of degree.

"Hey Fred too a 30 point hit from the Dragon and fell off the cliff. Good thing he didn't get hit in the head or torso. Oh wait, never mind, he'd got Resilience at 145%, he'll be fine for a few rounds).

2) Only dedicated spellcasters start the game with spells. A radial departure from RQ, especially for Glorantha. The new costs for magic and "rune chasing" makes magic spells much less common. Magic items are now much more common, however. Ferwer spells, more items...

"Quick get the cleric to heal up Fred while I check for magical weapons!"

3) Improvement awarded by GM removes one of the best features of RQ/BRP. There is no skill-chase pitfalls in RQ. Checks are not awarded for frivolous situations, and if a master swordsman want's to drop his sword and fight with a spear at 25%, he fully deserves whatever (final?) reward he gets. Awards doled out by the GM doesn't help the PCs to focus. It retsricts them into improving a limited number of skills, since any other improvement comes at the expense of those primary skills.

"You work on your Peception skills, you're the thief. I'm a fighter, so I'm putting my IPs into weapon skills. Fred's a Barbarian, so he's going to save his IPs so he can take the Battle Fury ability. That ought to level him up with the rest of us."

I'm sure that Chaosium would love to tap into that demographic as well.

Chaosium has tapped that market. Dragonlords of Melnibone for example.

Both Mongoose and Chaosium have a (small) security blanket in that many of the old RQers will buy both RQM and D100, both to support the systems and to see what they are like. They won't all buy the supplements, but a lot of them will buy some of the supplements.

Probably not that many with be buying from both. MRQ seems to have divided the community. I think only a small percentage will be buying both. Most RQers don't seem to like MRQ's supplements. I know you'd like us all to be one happy semi-compatible family, and there are some good economic reasons to do so, but I think it isn't turning out that way. Most of the Gloranthan sites/groups I've look at that existed prior to MRQ are sticking to RQ or HQ, and passing on MRQ.

[Trifletraxor]

I hit the SIZE limit! :eek:

Must continue in second post.

Hehe, congratulations! I think you're the first!

SGL.

[Nightshade]

Reduced lethality is a symptom of modern gaming. I'm even using it in RQ3.

Some of the changes in RQ:AIG ran in this direction too; as I've said, I didn't really consider the degree of sudden-death in RQ combat one of its virtues. It could cause a bit too much character rotation. Naturally, there are degrees and degrees here, but I suspect that on the whole RQ's level of lethality was never a big selling point for it; whether that means the degree of fix done in RQM was necessary is another issue, and one I don't feel qualified to talk about since I've never seen the final product.

Improvement awarded by the GM is something I've used for at least 15 years with absolutely no influence from D&D. HeroQuest uses it as well. It avoids many of the pitfalls of the skill-chase and allows PCs to be focussed on what they want to.

Again, something that showed up RQ: AIG, too, though it still allowed you to only apply it to skills you'd used. It just eliminated the need to succeed, and stopped the proliferation of rolls for those set up to roll a million different skill checks.

[Nightshade]

:mad: Blasphemy!

He's essentially correct, though; the only virtue of the RQI and II percentage was it allowed the resolution of special results with one roll.

I'd say good, good, good. The more the better. Having loads of volume of BRP stuff to sort through would be a luxury problem easily solved by a review section.

SGL.

I can't help but agree; if more product produces more crap, well, it also produces more of value, and in the day of the Internet, there's usually enough discussion of products its not hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.

[Atgxtg]

Hehe, congratulations! I think you're the first!

SGL.

I dunno, I feel sort of dirty now.

[Atgxtg]

Well, it's still blasphemy! D20 is the enemy! :eek:

Note, when I say RQ2 could be D20 based, I mean using 20 sided dice, not using the D&D/D20 Game System.

So you prefer a trinkle of supplements from Chaosium and the 3rd party publishers who buy the license from Chaosium, instead of a trinkle of supplements from Chaosium and a flood from 3rd parties?

If the Chaosium products have the quality that the RQ2 stuff did, then yes. I'll take a trickle of good stuff to a flood of crap. If I want crap, there's tons of D20 stuff out there to fill the need (there are also some decent and even good D20 products too). Crap is easy to find. THe hard thing is to avoid the crap and get the good stuff.

If BRP was OGL, the system would spread. Chaosium would continue to produce their quality products weither a OGL was in efect or not. Take MRQ f.ex., the supplement from Sceaptune games are said to be of higher quality than the official ones. Instead of searching through individual 3rd party supplements, you could see which companies got the rumour of producing high quality content, and got consistent high reviews. OR, you could ignore it fully, and just buy Chaosium stuff. I can't see anything negative about a BRP OGL.

SGL.

I doubt it. MRQ is OGL, and the system really isn't spreading from 3rd party products. I'd say RQ's closed gaming system spread at least as far with all the BRP inspired/variant RPGs that came out in the 80s.

Yeah, I've heard the same about Sceaptune's products. And even I had a favorable reaction to the preview for the Ducks book, and have said so.

I can see a few negative things about BRP going OGL. For one thing, people tend to make snap judgments about things based upon what they are exposed to. If someone is interested in a particular setting or genre, they might even pick up a supplement for a different RPG and fli[p through it. If that supplement sucks, they will most likely assume that the game does as well. :shocked:

Secondly, there is the issue of shelf space. RPG stores have a limited amount of shelf space, and a lot of products fighting for it. More publishers for one system means that other systems get pushed off the shelf. Since D20 is the most successful system, OGL undid the progress that was made in the 90s when other RPGs started to get shelf space. My local gaming shops can't carry every RPG or every company. So we could loose out on good Chaosium products to make room for bad 3rd party products.:eek:

Again, I'll mention blind buying. Back in the old days, I used to be able to flip though books and see what I was buying (or at least read the back of the box). OGL makes that impossible. Only a handful of the new products will be on the shelves. So consumers are forced to buy blind, or limit their purchases to what is in stock. Thats not a good environment for us buyers. Online previews suck to the point of being worthless. Reading the table of contents and the the first three pages of the introduction with "SAMPLE" written across them reveals nothing about a game other than what font is being used. If I had any say in it (and I don't), I have any RPG with a useless preview removed from sites like DriveThru and RPGNow, or enforce a full refund policy.:mad: Decent previews are few and far between. It's like the companies only have a half dozen decent pages in the book and are afarid that if they let people see them they will have no reason to buy the rest of the book. That or they know they are selling crap and trying to hide it.

Sceaptune's got their act together here, too. They know how to write a preview.

So I'll take quality over quantity. Hopefully, the new BRP stuff will be of the high quality, like the old RQ2 stuff was.

[Trifletraxor]

If the Chaosium products have the quality that the RQ2 stuff did, then yes. I'll take a trickle of good stuff to a flood of crap. If I want crap, there's tons of D20 stuff out there to fill the need (there are also some decent and even good D20 products too). Crap is easy to find. THe hard thing is to avoid the crap and get the good stuff.

Well, a trinkle og good stuff OR a flood of crap was not the options mentioned here - a trinkle of good stuff and a flood of stuff with various quality was the ones mentioned. You could still elect only to buy whatever Chaosium produced.

SGL.

[Enpeze]

Well, a trinkle og good stuff OR a flood of crap was not the options mentioned here - a trinkle of good stuff and a flood of stuff with various quality was the ones mentioned. You could still elect only to buy whatever Chaosium produced.

SGL.

Maybe the reason why some of us would not like to see OGL products is that they remember the good old days when Chaosium was the only source which released the RQ2 material and other BRP games like Ringworld, SB etc. We just want these times back.

[Trifletraxor]

Maybe the reason why some of us would not like to see OGL products is that they remember the good old days when Chaosium was the only source which released the RQ2 material and other BRP games like Ringworld, SB etc. We just want these times back.

But Chaosium blew it horribly! They were number two, and had an extremely loyal fan base buying whatever stuff they published, and still managed to almost totally kill the system.

Think about where RuneQuest would be now if it had been made OGL back in those days. Fans and commercial publishers would have produces stuff to keep us going, the system would have been widespread, and we wouldn't have had decades with no products, ending in a Mongoosed horror with pricey ultraslim hardbacks of extremely poor quality. ;-(

SGL.

[Atgxtg]

But Chaosium blew it horribly! They were number two, and had an extremely loyal fan base buying whatever stuff they published, and still managed to almost totally kill the system.

Think about where RuneQuest would be now if it had been made OGL back in those days. Fans and commercial publishers would have produces stuff to keep us going, the system would have been widespread, and we wouldn't have had decades with no products, ending in a Mongoosed horror with pricey ultraslim hardbacks of extremely poor quality. ;-(

SGL.

Yeah Chaosium blew it badly. But not with RQ2 or OGL. What killed RQ was letting some other company, namely Avalon Hill, have control over the RQ line, and then the long string of reprinted material. Five years of Glorantha reprints at a time when all the Glorantha fans wanted to see how the HeroWars were going to turn out. The Fantasy Earth line was variable quality (Vikings was good, Ninja was not). When AH started writing their own RQ stuff is when I stopped buying all RQ products. Eldarad was worse than the stuff Mongoose churns out. So it wasn't keeping the property closed that killed RQ, it was not keeping it closed enough.

OGL in the 80s wouldn't

have helped RQ in the least. Look at how many companies used RQ-based rules? And Judges Guild did release some RQ stuff.

IMO, I think the way to go is to keep things closed, but allow limited third party vendors to produce products. That way, some sort of quality control could be maintained.

[Trifletraxor]

IMO, I think the way to go is to keep things closed, but allow limited third party vendors to produce products. That way, some sort of quality control could be maintained.

You think there will be quality requirements for the third party vendors who buy the license? I kindoff doubt that. It's more of a money issue I believe.

SGL.

[Atgxtg]

You think there will be quality requirements for the third party vendors who buy the license? I kindoff doubt that. It's more of a money issue I believe.

SGL.

No, I don't think there will. That's one reason why I don't like OGL. With the parent company you know that at the least the guys writing the supplement know the rules for the RPG. I've seen some 3rd party stuff written by people who were not familiar with a system, making their supplement less that serviceable.

[Kloster]

Yeah Chaosium blew it badly. But not with RQ2 or OGL. What killed RQ was letting some other company, namely Avalon Hill, have control over the RQ line, and then the long string of reprinted material. Five years of Glorantha reprints at a time when all the Glorantha fans wanted to see how the HeroWars were going to turn out. The Fantasy Earth line was variable quality (Vikings was good, Ninja was not). When AH started writing their own RQ stuff is when I stopped buying all RQ products. Eldarad was worse than the stuff Mongoose churns out. So it wasn't keeping the property closed that killed RQ, it was not keeping it closed enough.

...

As far as I understood, AH never controlled the editorial line on RQIII. Chaosium retained it.

But I agree on the quality comments!

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

[Kloster]

Even if I don't like RQM, they at least propose official HeroQuesting rules for RQ, a point Chaosium and AH never managed to cover.

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

[Nightshade]

No, I don't think there will. That's one reason why I don't like OGL. With the parent company you know that at the least the guys writing the supplement know the rules for the RPG. I've seen some 3rd party stuff written by people who were not familiar with a system, making their supplement less that serviceable.

The problem is even there you can get things to crash during editing; I can think of several products for lines I used to follow that didn't show that the author understood the rules that well at all. But so many game companies have, at best, very limited editorial staff that this sort of thing can slip through all too easily.

[Kloster]

The problem is even there you can get things to crash during editing; I can think of several products for lines I used to follow that didn't show that the author understood the rules that well at all. But so many game companies have, at best, very limited editorial staff that this sort of thing can slip through all too easily.

Exemples? :innocent:

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

[Atgxtg]

The problem is even there you can get things to crash during editing; I can think of several products for lines I used to follow that didn't show that the author understood the rules that well at all. But so many game companies have, at best, very limited editorial staff that this sort of thing can slip through all too easily.

That is the drawback to pushing out product. One reason why stuff used to tricky out was that the same half dozen people wrote it. The best stuff for RQ2 is all written by the same people. That's why the quality is consistent. Open the floodgates and everything goes down except for quantity.

I'd rather buy one book like the Great Pendragon campaign then a dozen half-assed OGL Pendragon books. Same with BRP.

[camazotz]

Wow, very interesting thread. It's nice to see a bewlidering variety of opinions on which edition of RQ/BRP is better, worse, and so forth; I cam on over to these forums in anticipation of BRP eventually showing up at last, and am pleased to see that the BRP-fandom strife over the One True System is rampant in a more evenly spread manner, even if MRQ continues to be the red-headed step child of the lot.

I am one who enjoys MRQ btw, played RQ 2 and 3 and do not do Glorantha, never have, never will, and wish people would stop associating Runequest with Glorantha, in the same way I prefer not to have Greyhawk in my core D&D books. In fact, it's the focus on more than just Glorantha for MRQ that appeals to me the most. I also think accusations that MRQ is "D&Dified" are coming from old RQ fans who haven't actually played D&D in 20 years anyway and might be surprised at how incorrect and unfair this assesment is. That said, I can respect someone's view that, say, Legendary Abilities add a level to the game they are uncomfortable with, but I personally like their addition to the system, and feel it opens up interesting new pathways for players and GMs alike that allow MRQ to feel old school while having elements that can compete with more current systems like Exalted....which is what legendary abilities make me think of, to be honest. Feats in D&D are not, by and large, unique and heroic talents that provide the character with some sort of fabulous (though often duplicitous) trait that can be spoken of in epic poems....they are more like Magic:TG cards that you play at the right time to do an interrupt or extra damage. The Legendary Abilities don't work like that; they are heroic effects with a stroy-based purpose to the game. D&D feats are tricks, and can not be so easily described in game terms (for the most part; there were plenty of neat D&D feats that did work well in a story sense....but the combat feats by and large were all just interrupt/enhancement tricks with no real basis in reality. I mean, come on, you have to have the Cleave feat to ever have a chance of striking two guys in a row in D&D...such a thing in actual melee is better left to chance, or fortuitous circumstance, but D&D codifies it as a feat, which then unerringly happens with every oportunity that the miniatures say it can. I always hated that.)

Out of curiosity, for those who feel the OGL is a bad idea, do you really feel that the OGL option is really going to lead to a flood of products for a system that, while superior to D20 imo, is not so popular as to have such a high volume of spin-off. Likewise, despite assertions that there were no products for Glorantha over the last two decades, I have certainly seen a ton of fan-based material, small press, and of course the whole Hero Wars phenomenon, a game which I feel is truly worthy of the setting in an integral way (unlike RQ....imo!). Anyway, my contention is that the OGL option serves primarily to stimulate interest in the game by aspiring authors, but that the net output is unlikely to be large, an I think the last year of negligible output from 3rd party publishers for MRQ only proves it.

Anyway, all my griping aside, I will just summarize my take as follows:

1. I like MRQ, it's a great current iteration of the system, but while it may appeal disgruntled D&Ders it is not due to any game similarity (otherwise, it would probably not appeal to them, I suspect)

2. I was very fond of RQ 2 and 3 but prefer the sreamlined approach of MRQ, which also makes it easy to sell to my current body of players, who are all guys that never played RQ back in the day as it was perceived to be overly complex. Hell, they don't even like 3rd edition D&D for the same reason!

3. I am really, really looking forward to BRP, although I hope it's final system is closer to the BRP iteration seen in books like Stormbringer and CoC than in RQ3.

4. I like OGL. It does more good than harm, and will benefit a less-popular system like BRP much moreso, I feel, than it did for D20. People say it's better to limit creative control of content to a handful....sure, but that can also lead to stagnation. Crap games may surface....but there could be some good stuff that materializes, too. It really boils down to being a discriminating buyer, I think.

5. Can somebody license Ringworld for the new BRP setting? Please? Or maybe Jack McDevitt's Priscilla Hutch universe....that would be awesome.

[Nightshade]

Exemples? :innocent:

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

I can think of at least one M&M 1e product, a couple of older Hero ones, and more vaguely (since its been a while since I dealt with them) some Storyteller items.

[Nightshade]

That is the drawback to pushing out product. One reason why stuff used to tricky out was that the same half dozen people wrote it. The best stuff for RQ2 is all written by the same people. That's why the quality is consistent. Open the floodgates and everything goes down except for quantity.

The problem is that small release schedules don't keep a company afloat; that's the harsh reality of all but the most cottage industry parts of our already cottage-industrial hobby. Its very hard to find a balance point between "We're releasing too little to stay solvent" and "We're releasing too much to stay on top of it."

I'd rather buy one book like the Great Pendragon campaign then a dozen half-assed OGL Pendragon books. Same with BRP.

Yeah, but you're not the one who has to pay the rent with their proceeds.

[camazotz]

That is the drawback to pushing out product. One reason why stuff used to tricky out was that the same half dozen people wrote it. The best stuff for RQ2 is all written by the same people. That's why the quality is consistent. Open the floodgates and everything goes down except for quantity.

I'd rather buy one book like the Great Pendragon campaign then a dozen half-assed OGL Pendragon books. Same with BRP.

Seriously, you don't have to buy them if they come out. That's why the D20 flood died...people stopped buying stuff that was bad, and the phenomenon dried up and went away. Personally, I think I'd trust an aspiring author who wants to produce a product for BRP a bit more than some D20 fan barfing out another prestige class splatbook. BRP-based setting have always been a bit more developed, story focused, and generally expected it's fans and proponents to be a "cut above the rest." Take an example at the OGL-MRQ/GORE based POD books at lulu.com, for example: The Stupor Mundi setting is a ver neat and well developed idea, and the other offering, setting during the cold war....whadda concept.

Still, I just proved that BRP probably doesn't need to be OGL, I guess, since people can use MRQ and GORE to net the same effect, I suppose.

[Nightshade]

Well, the truth was, the OGL was _never_ needed; GORE style reverse engineering was always possible, and very hard to potentially control. What the OGL and to a lesser degree the D20 license said was "We're saying outright if you produce product for this we won't try to take you to court." In a world where, as F. Lee Bailey said, "The power to indict is the power to destroy" (i.e. just going to court can destroy you whether you win or lose) that was non-trivial.

[Atgxtg]

The problem is that small release schedules don't keep a company afloat; that's the harsh reality of all but the most cottage industry parts of our already cottage-industrial hobby. Its very hard to find a balance point between "We're releasing too little to stay solvent" and "We're releasing too much to stay on top of it."

Yeah, but you're not the one who has to pay the rent with their proceeds.

But OGL isn't floating the boat either. WotC isn't making money from OGL stuff. The adnatage of OGL is that it gives WotC market control over the system, and allows them to sell the core rule books to 85% of the RPG market.

[Kloster]

Well, the truth was, the OGL was _never_ needed; GORE style reverse engineering was always possible, and very hard to potentially control. What the OGL and to a lesser degree the D20 license said was "We're saying outright if you produce product for this we won't try to take you to court." In a world where, as F. Lee Bailey said, "The power to indict is the power to destroy" (i.e. just going to court can destroy you whether you win or lose) that was non-trivial.

In addition to that, IP laws in non US countries is completely different, and if different words are used, it is VERY difficult to prevent usage of ideas.

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

[Kloster]

But OGL isn't floating the boat either. WotC isn't making money from OGL stuff. The adnatage of OGL is that it gives WotC market control over the system, and allows them to sell the core rule books to 85% of the RPG market.

Those 85% is giving money to Hasbro/WotC. Probably more money than the total size of all the world rpg industry outside of WotC combined.

Runequestement votre,

Kloster