Quote from: Simlasa;829051I'm kinda in the same boat... I've always liked the lighter versions of BRP... Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer... but Runequest 6 has so many good bits I keep annexing into my Magic World games that it seems inevitable that at some point I'll be running RQ6.

Count me in as another BRP-"lite" fan. Call of Cthulhu and Elric!/Stormbringer are big favorites of mine.

I still have a lot of fondness for RuneQuest in its many editions. RQ2, MRQ2, RQ6. And I played a hell of a lot of MRQ2 a few years ago. But, in recent years I've shied away from the greater complexity for options that don't require as much book-keeping/management.

OpenQuest/Renaissance seems to occupy a middle ground, and there are features of both that I like to incorporate into my "BRP-lite".

Quote from: Bilharzia;829005Legend v RQ6

But Legend has one thing that Runequest 6 doesn't and it may be more important given the original poster mentioned building your own system, it's all open gaming content.

For what it's worth I have MRQ2, Legend, Runequest 6, OpenQuest 2, Magic World, Elric!, CoC, and the BRP Gold Book all sitting on my shelf so it's not like I'm against buying them all. :-)

Quote from: ptingler;829080But Legend has one thing that Runequest 6 doesn't and it may be more important given the original poster mentioned building your own system, it's all open gaming content.

Does that make a difference for a homebrew system though? Does OGL mean more supporting material? RQ6 supplements have been original, substantial and a lot of them, Legend material has been mostly conversions of questionable quality and the volume is a trickle. It's ironic that if you've stuck with Legend you are more likely to be picking up RQ6 supplements than Legend ones as the material is pretty useable as-is, the only Legend publication I've bought was Spider God's Bride which was awful, not saying they all are, but that thing was poison.

With RQE out now I can't see why anyone would stick with Legend and if you want to hack RQ6 around a bit for your game, there's nothing to stop you, it's explicitly encouraged.

Quote from: Bilharzia;829086Does that make a difference for a homebrew system though?

It may or may not matter to the poster and his group, but it's worth pointing out in case it does.

Quote from: Bilharzia;829086With RQE out now I can't see why anyone would stick with Legend and if you want to hack RQ6 around a bit for your game, there's nothing to stop you, it's explicitly encouraged.

Who said you have to stick with just one of them? I already said I own both of them, plus a bunch more d100 variants.

Since the thread is focusing so much on BRP-related stuff, I'll mention that Chaosium is having a 30% off sale on PDFs through 5/9.

Quote from: ptingler;829090Who said you have to stick with just one of them? I already said I own both of them, plus a bunch more d100 variants.

You can of course mix & match, I'd point out though that RQE/RQ6 is really the first major revision of Runequest since RQ3 which 'gets it right'. In this sense it is not just-another-d100-brp variant like all the others, it's created with a view to consistency for the first time in 30 years that nothing else matches.

Quote from: Bilharzia;829094You can of course mix & match, I'd point out though that RQE/RQ6 is really the first major revision of Runequest since RQ3 which 'gets it right'. In this sense it is not just-another-d100-brp variant like all the others, it's created with a view to consistency for the first time in 30 years that nothing else matches.

What do you mean, specifically, I never got to play the original RQ except for MRQ, so I have no idea how it worked.  I'm genuinely curious.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;828954Totally off topic, this tells me that the character you (the generic you) want to be is a 'Thief/Rogue'.  Which frankly, is more of an 'everyman' than a 'Fighter' ever was.  Most of what you described, Ravenswing, are easily gained with a bit of training or more likely personal experience.  Sneaking around we learn as kids, weapons training is a little harder, but knives and clubs are relatively easy to pick up, comparatively, and if you adventure and survive you learn tricks that could be adapted to the short sword.  As for survival, both city and wilderness, all you need to is listen to others who have lived there and keep an open eye and mind.

Nope, I don't agree -- it seems you're still thinking in the lockstep character class paradigm of D&D.

Follow down to the next paragraph in my post, where I tie all of that into being a powerful wizard.  My point is that there's nothing -- and shouldn't be -- mutually exclusive by definition about wizardry and stealth / weapon skill / streetwise / survival, except in so far that the time I'm improving one skill is time not spent improving another.

Come to that, I've an anecdote.  The last time I played any form of D&D was about 25 years back when I played a rogue in an AD&D game.  The problem was that I had a lot of unwanted skills -- and was compelled to improve those unwanted skills.  See, I wanted to be a certain type of thief.  I wanted to be stealthy.  I wanted to know how to climb.  I wanted to be able to pull cons, and have good sleight of hand and bluffing skills.  Pickpocketing, sure, that was useful too.

What I didn't want was knowledge of disarming traps.  I had no use for lockpicking skill.  I wasn't interested in backstabbing.

In most skill systems, that's easy to do.  In D&D, it wasn't.

Quote from: Bilharzia;829052It also misses out lots of things RQ6 expands on and adds - much fuller character generation and background, passions, cults & brotherhoods, gamemastery advice etc.

I'm kind of new to the whole BRP family, having recently picked up RQ6 and the BGB (which also has a free Quickstart Edition), then discovered that I had a copy of Legend sitting around from some DriveThru bundle deal or other.  After reading through all of them, the passions and cult/brotherhood system are the two primary things that I really like which are only found in the full version of RQ6.  (Legend does have a "Guilds, Factions and Cults" chapter, but the RQ6 "Cults and Brotherhoods" material is more extensive (32 pages vs. 10) and feels more coherent to me, as well as more complete.)

Quote from: Bilharzia;829086the only Legend publication I've bought was Spider God's Bride which was awful, not saying they all are, but that thing was poison.

Being "poison" does seem appropriate for a spider god...  

Quote from: Ravenswing;829135What I didn't want was knowledge of disarming traps.  I had no use for lockpicking skill.  I wasn't interested in backstabbing.

In most skill systems, that's easy to do.  In D&D, it wasn't.

Well you could have ignored those abilities or I guess just crossed them out on your sheet. Of course you wouldn't be any better at the things you wanted to do just because you chose not to be better at the things you didn't want to do. So probably not a very satisfying solution for anyone who is used to games like Runequest/CoC/BRP, GURPS, or HERO games where you can choose what you focus on as well as what you don't focus on.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;829103What do you mean, specifically, I never got to play the original RQ except for MRQ, so I have no idea how it worked.  I'm genuinely curious.

Well, ok, RQ2 from Chaosium is the one probably most fondly remembered, and I think the most successful to date, you could see RQ6 as a hark back to that in terms of spirit and objectives ("a complete game in a book"). RQ2 was firmly set in Glorantha and lots of things about the design followed from that - strong and easy to use magic, Cult affiliation was very important, and a sense of place in a specific world. RQ3 was supposed to be the 'setting-free' version of RuneQuest without Glorantha as a setting, it introduced cultural backgrounds, fatigue, sorcery, and erm, ships into the rules, it wasn't very successful under Avalon Hill management.

So RQ2 and RQ3 were still married to Glorantha for the most part, character backgrounds and cultures were there in RQ3 but not very developed, this got expanded in supplements, Battle Magic (common magic) was strong, I think in RQ3 even stronger than RQ2, Sorcery as a system was virtually impossible to use for PCs - very slow to learn, convoluted to use, combat styles did not exist - every weapon a character used was tracked separately as a skill, no traits, a separate 'critical' (5%) and 'special' chance (20%) were calculated (for each skill...) the 'impale' was the only special effect in RQ2, combat maneuvers/special effects are completely new to MRQ2 and RQ6. Fatigue was handled differently in RQ3 and effectively unusable from memory, same goes for sorcery magic. Cults & Brotherhoods is a revision of the use of cults in RQ, it's now much broader - only religious cults existed in RQ2/3, and in general were very much focused on Glorantha without much attempt to make the structure work outside of the setting.

One of the big changes in RQ6 is the switch to Folk Magic from Common Magic, the rationale being Common Magic (if it really is supposed to be common) overshadows the other types for being powerful, cheap and easy to use. You could run around in RQ3 with Bladesharp 10 on your sword, and heal yourself with Heal 6, presumably dragging around power crystals to power your spells with, this super-magic-power-munchkin style of RQ I don't think fit with the sword & sorcery vision for RQ6. I think that's one of the reasons I think it's worth using RQ6 as a whole and resisting the temptation to graft on bits from earlier incarnations or from odd BRP sources - the re-write is an attempt to make the pieces compatible and work together in a unified whole.

Quote from: nDervish;829154Being "poison" does seem appropriate for a spider god...  

touché

Quote from: Bilharzia;829177One of the big changes in RQ6 is the switch to Folk Magic from Common Magic, the rationale being Common Magic (if it really is supposed to be common) overshadows the other types for being powerful, cheap and easy to use. You could run around in RQ3 with Bladesharp 10 on your sword, and heal yourself with Heal 6, presumably dragging around power crystals to power your spells with, this super-magic-power-munchkin style of RQ I don't think fit with the sword & sorcery vision for RQ6.

While RQ3, did remove that caps on Bladesharp-4 and Protection-4, so that in theory someone could cast Bladesharp-10, in practice I never saw anyone get close to that powerful of a Bladesharp spell even for Runelord/Runepriest PCs with years of adventuring. Personally I like the limits from RQ2, but more from a theoretical concern with Bladesharp-10 than any concern that it is in practice possible for anyone to cast other than a munchkin NPC. That sort of highly stacked spell casting was more of a problem for sorcery as I recall.

Fatigue was perfectly workable, it just was a pain to track in the same way that many people find tracking arrows and torches a logistical pain.

Quote from: Bren;829191While RQ3, did remove that caps on Bladesharp-4 and Protection-4, so that in theory someone could cast Bladesharp-10, in practice I never saw anyone get close to that powerful of a Bladesharp spell even for Runelord/Runepriest PCs with years of adventuring. Personally I like the limits from RQ2, but more from a theoretical concern with Bladesharp-10 than any concern that it is in practice possible for anyone to cast other than a munchkin NPC. That sort of highly stacked spell casting was more of a problem for sorcery as I recall.

Fatigue was perfectly workable, it just was a pain to track in the same way that many people find tracking arrows and torches a logistical pain.

Pretty sure I'm exaggerating with the bladesharp-10, fairly sure though that published NPCs had 6 to 8 levels of heal, bludgeon and bladesharp, which is +30% to +40%, +6 to +8 damage, matched against similar levels of Protection was just....uhhhhhnnn. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that if you want a highly magical battle, and maybe it fits Glorantha, I just think it's an awkward fit outside of that. The major 'problem' with battle magic is there didn't seem much use for the other magic types beyond some Rune magic "I win" spells which admittedly is what it's for. The Folk magic change makes sense to me but I know a lot of old grogs who didn't like it.

The issue of fatigue with me was having an armour set and equipment which made you start out 'fresh' ...already suffering fatigue, don't think we ever used it.

Quote from: Bilharzia;829193Pretty sure I'm exaggerating with the bladesharp-10, fairly sure though that published NPCs had 6 to 8 levels of heal, bludgeon and bladesharp, ...

I don't recall those levels for NPCs outside of Dorastor, but I may have just blocked it out of my mind. Outside of the stats for the Poor, Average, Good, and Excellent warriors in the Vikings pack, none of whom had spells anywhere near that powerful, I didn't use NPCs from RQ3 so it is possible I am misremembering.

QuoteThe major 'problem' with battle magic is there didn't seem much use for the other magic types beyond some Rune magic "I win" spells which admittedly is what it's for. The Folk magic change makes sense to me but I know a lot of old grogs who didn't like it.

I don't understand what you are saying here. Could you give me an example of what Folk magic does that you like better?

QuoteThe issue of fatigue with me was having an armour set and equipment which made you start out 'fresh' ...already suffering fatigue, don't think we ever used it.

Yeah, that was counter intuitive. Not necessarily bad or wrong, but definitely counter intuitive. Fatigue did provide a solution for a high level vs. high level fight where neither party can hit the other without an impale or even a critical hit.

It also simulated a fight where the lighter armored or higher stamina fighter could wear down his opponent to the point that he could score a telling blow after his foe was exhausted. The fact that the fatigue cost for a round of combat was the same for a 30% attack/parry poor militia levy fighter as it was for a highly experienced excellent 80% attack/parry warrior was not very realistic though. And as I said, tracking the -1 Fatigue per round was a logistical PITA. A simpler house rule would be to only refigure Fatigue every 5 rounds rather than every round. Less arithmetic that way. Simple counting slashes would make it easy to track when to adjust Fatigue by 5 points.

Quote from: Bren;829197I don't understand what you are saying here. Could you give me an example of what Folk magic does that you like better?

It's less powerful, simple as that.