Conan MRQ

[kintire]

I think your actually supporting my case. MRQ core may not fit Conan well, but that doesn't mean the system can't be tweaked to get the job done.

d20 is based on D&D, a lot of people felt that D&D would be a very poor fit for Conan, but with the proper tweaks d20 Conan seems to get the job done for a lot of players.

It would take more than tweaks. You'd need a whole different system, which looks only slightly like MRQ. And why bother when there are systems already in existance that do fine?

MRQ is a BRP derivative and BRP had been used to publish fantasy, modern, sci-fi and even supers games long before d20 came along and was used as a tool kit for multiple genres.

I know that. I was playing BRQ derivatives ten years before d20 was even published. Some of them were a damn sight more successful conversions than others.

I'd also like to add that we're talking about Conan here, not the Forgotten Realms or some other fantasy world specifically created to support a given system. Conan has been done by GURPS and had it's own system by TSR. I don't think there is any question that the Conan license will outlive d20, if Mongoose doesn't do a different version than some other company some-odd years down the road will. It's such a powerful IP that it will continue to resurface in RPGs and many other markets.

I daresay. Several people on this board are playing it in Savage Worlds, and I myself have run it in FUDGE. That doesn't mean converting it to MRQ is a good idea.

 

[Deleriad]

I haven't read this thread in detail but I have been running a lot of MRQ recently and it seems to me that a lot of people are discussing older versions of RQ (ORQ). MRQ makes a lot of small changes to ORQ that change things signficantly.

FWIW I started running MRQ with new players at a new game club last year. After first session, I asked the players (none of whom had played RQ before) what was good about it and they said "It felt like playing Conan."

Fragility. Characters in MRQ are nowhere near as fragile as old RQ (ORQ) characters. This is because there is no total HP stat so a character can take a LOT of damage to different locations before falling over. Conversely a single critical axe blow to the head can kill instantly.

Hero Points. All PCs start with a small number of Hero Points. Hero Points let you survive that which should kill you. Conan taking two blows that would kill a normal man is actually Conan burning two Hero Points to stay alive.

Legendary Abilities. These kick in once characters reach 90% plus in a skill and require gaining through play. There's a small selection in the main book. If someone were to write Conan RQ you would add in genre emulation abilities.
E.g. "Indomitable" requires CON 15, Resilience 90%+ and barbarian cultural background. Effect. You can ignore the first 2 points of damage for every attack. If you would take a serious wound to a location without any worn armour you can make a resilience test to only receive enough damage to reduce that location to 1 HP. (That's just made up off the top of my head.)

Skillz. You can probably assume that Conan himself has around 150-200% combat skills - i.e. the "legendary hero" range. Most of his strength will come from legendary abilities and Hero Points. If Conan starts acting against his nature then he will gradually run out of Hero Points and become more killable.

Magic. MRQ will work effectively without requiring all PCs to have magic. In fact, MRQ tends to assume that most NPCs don't have access to magic. This is quite different to ORQ.

The actual system. Different strokes for different folks. People like what they like, etc etc etc. I would only say that MRQ is as capable as emulating Conan as it is in emulating Elric or Hawkmoon or Lankhmar. I suspect that if Elric had been first done in d20 by Mongoose then there would be a whole forum of people saying that it is impossible to do Elric in MRQ for a million reasons.

 

[warzen]

leave MRQ Conan to those that care to play it

Well I would. Except it MRQ Conan would represent a diversion of resources from d20 Conan, which is well established and is a system well suited to the particular needs of the genre. It is now at a stage where there are a few issues that could do with resolving to make it a very good fit indeed.

Well, except one of the "few issues" mentionned by Matthew is that d20 is non beginner friendly. I'm wondering how you can solve that on a system based on multiclassing and dozens of feats but if you find a solution, sell it to MGP.

I suspect that if Elric had been first done in d20 by Mongoose then there would be a whole forum of people saying that it is impossible to do Elric in MRQ for a million reasons.

LOL
So true !

W.

 

[kintire]

Well, except one of the "few issues" mentionned by Matthew is that d20 is non beginner friendly.

Its a good deal more beginner friendly than MRQ. Class and level based systems always are.

 

[warzen]

Well, except one of the "few issues" mentionned by Matthew is that d20 is non beginner friendly.

Its a good deal more beginner friendly than MRQ. Class and level based systems always are.

Yes, it's feats and multiclassing that makes it far more complex than any other systems (and I'm not even mentionning prestige classes...)

W.

 

[Demetrio]

BRP is easier for a beginning GM I think but I really don't think there's much in it for beginning players , as you say for a player d20 might well be easier. What's perhaps daunting is the number of Feats but any decent GM should be able to guide novice players to something they want. Novice GMs though, they have more work to do.

By the time you get into prestige classes and beginning to metagame feat picks, you really should have a handle on the way things work. Or take up ludo...

 

[warzen]

BRP is easier for a beginning GM I think but I really don't think there's much in it for beginning players , as you say for a player d20 might well be easier. What's perhaps daunting is the number of Feats but any decent GM should be able to guide novice players to something they want. Novice GMs though, they have more work to do.

By the time you get into prestige classes and beginning to metagame feat picks, you really should have a handle on the way things work. Or take up ludo...

AD&D was fast an easy because the choices were limited and where less important (excet the race for multiclassing).
Now imagine telling your new player: prepare your level 1 character but be aware than any choice on stat, skills and feats will have long term impact on your PC - do you want to read the rules ? and presenting him all the rule books you're using.

That's far different than playing D&D were you just have to select a class/race (not both, a race is a class) and that will define you character for all his life, or using Starwars d6 where you choose a type (ie sort of class defining your stats) but where your skill developpement is free.

But again, d20 (ie 3rd edition and after, up to 4th) is a game were you design and build your character. An experienced player will not make the same choice if the DM is runing a short campaign or he already stated that the PCs are exepected to reach level 20 by the end of the story.
This spirit of the system is what is giving d20 this unique customization feel, but also this possible unsatisfaction for begginer where they are lost in all the options.

W.

 

[Demetrio]

but be aware than any choice on stat, skills and feats will have long term impact on your PC

Red herring.

This actually applies to most games. Your stat choices are very important because few games allow much improvement, or restrict the improvements you may make. Skills less so - in any system, including d20, poor skill choice is rectified over time. Feats, yes they have a long term impact which is not found to the same degree in some other games (though many games now use Trait systems where a poor choice can be even more devastating than a bad feat choice). Any decent GM can guide a new player in their feat choices for the first few levels and only a completely anal GM would refuse a player who had made a poor choice through ignorance the chance of swapping it out.

But most players, in my experience (which is not nearly as vast as some people's but spans a good few years and several groups) will read the rules pretty comprehensively within a few sessions. It's quite easy to grasp the 'good feats' with a little guidance and after a few sessions play. And otherwise there's always ludo...

 

[Deleriad]

Coming up really quickly with some sort of Conanalike character with just basic skills; i.e. I don't know all the ins and outs of Conan as a character so this is going off cliche.

STR 21 CON 21 DEX 17 SIZ 18 INT 13 POW 11 CHA 16
Combat Actions: 3
Strike Rank + 15
Damage Modifier: +1D6
Hero Points: 31
Hit Points per loc
Rleg 8, LLeg 8, Ab 9, Chest 10, RArm 7, LArm 7, Head 8
Attacks
Greatsword 175% 2D8+d6
Skills
Dodge 100% Resilience 150% Persistence 100%

Legendary Abilities (RAW):
Battle Fury, Decapitating Swing, Skin of the Bear

Legendary Abilities (hypothetical)
King of the Hill: you gain 2 additional reactions per round but they can only be used as parries and must be used against different attackers.
Swing Low (sweet chariot). Only usable with 2H weapon attack. If you cause enough damage to severe a location you may immediately attack an enemy adjacent to the newly severed enemy.

Conan and 15 hyenas. I don't know the set up and assuming that Conan is trying to defend a pinch point so that only 3 hyenas can get there at once and any other must move over the slain body of their comrades.

Round 1:
Action 1: Conan kills hyena 1 . Hyena 2&3 attack, Hyena 4 moves forward. Conan reactions (1,2) to parry hyenas. Conan Reaction(3) attacks and kills hyena 4.
Action 2. Conan kills hyena 2. Hyenas 5&6 move forward. Conan reaction attacks (4) hyena 5 and kills it. Hyena 3 attacks Conan parries (react 5), Hyena 7 moves forwards.
Action 3: Conan kills hyena 3.

By the end of the first round Conan has killed 5 hyenas and taken no damage - assuming average rules and using a made-up genre emulation legendary ability. Without that ability and assuming normal hyenas - bite 50%, damage 1d6 - he is likely to have taken 2-3 damage to one location (skin of bear).

I'm not going to keep running through the actions but as you can see, using MRQ and tactics it is possible to hold off 15 hyenas without having to invent new rules. Without using tactics (did Conan stand in an empty field and let the hyenas charge him from all sides?) then Conan is going to have to burn some Hero Points eventually for idiocy.

I've played RQ and BRP systems for longer than I care to remember and whether by luck or design, MRQ is probably the system that would emulate Conan best of all the BRP systems I've seen.

 

[Demetrio]

They were were-hyenas actually, not especially tough in the hit point sense but tough enough to bear Conan to the ground when they close.

Conan seldom uses a 2h sword (or a 2h weapon of any nature) by the way. This isn't carping at your write up, which is interesting, it's just a point of information.

Conan generally takes the fight to his foes, so being surrounded on all sides (like when he leaps aboard the corsair ship earlier in Queen...) is not an uncommon experience for him, though he also fights back to the wall on occasion. Tactics in the sense of individual combat are not his forte. He relies on his strength and speed to overwhelm superior numbers of foes (numerous examples in Howard). Many roleplayers would regard him as being played in a recklesss, even a silly manner.

 

[Deleriad]

They were were-hyenas actually, not especially tough in the hit point sense but tough enough to bear Conan to the ground when they close.

Conan seldom uses a 2h sword (or a 2h weapon of any nature) by the way. This isn't carping at your write up, which is interesting, it's just a point of information.

Well it was cliché Conan. In MRQ the best weapons to use when facing multiple opponents is sword and shield as you get an extra reaction to parry with. Against that, a 2H weapon is far more likely to disable with a single hit than a 1H weapon.

If you are part of a horde the best thing to do is to try to grapple but the first few who try it will probably die.

In MRQ, the genre emulation tends to come in the magic system, legendary abilities and frequency of Hero Point awards. Tone down Hero Points and reduce access to LAs and you get something like Thieves World. Do the reverse and you get into Conan country. Surprising though it may seem to old school RQers, it is actually pretty simple to make a Conan-style genre emulation out of MRQ.

If I were to

 

[kintire]

Yes, it's feats and multiclassing that makes it far more complex than any other systems (and I'm not even mentionning prestige classes...)

Prestige classes and multiclassing will be completely irrelevant to the beginner, who need worry about only one level. Feats will consist of one or two choices from a reasonably short list in the basic book (obviously you don't load a beginner down with all the splatbooks). Unlike MRQ or similar, where you have to design every aspect of your charcter, d20 characters come in neat clearly labelled packages with a limited degree of customiseation. By the time you have to confront multiclassing and growing lists of feats, you are no longer a beginner. And Conan d20 doesn't have prestige classes, with their complex prerequisite lists that you have to build for from day 1, so early choices will not hamper your character.

AD&D was fast an easy because the choices were limited and where less important (excet the race for multiclassing).

AD&D was terrible. Yes, it had fewer choices, but some of them were Right and some of them were Wrong. You could utterly destroy your character with a couple of perfectly legitimate seeming choices. Then again I am slightly bitter: my first AD&D character was a human thief, a combination which sucks so hard it makes a vacuum cleaner look like a hair dryer.

 

[Demetrio]

In MRQ the best weapons to use when facing multiple opponents is sword and shield as you get an extra reaction to parry with

Conan seldom uses a shield either, which would be something else to consider. To be fair, d20 Conan mde a royal botch of the genre appropriate balance between 2hw, 1h + shield and plain 1h. But that's what I meant when I said no system gets things write first go. Reluctant as rules writers are to tweak broken rules though, generally one tends to be stuck with it.

 

[Deleriad]

Conan generally takes the fight to his foes, so being surrounded on all sides (like when he leaps aboard the corsair ship earlier in Queen...) is not an uncommon experience for him, though he also fights back to the wall on occasion. Tactics in the sense of individual combat are not his forte. He relies on his strength and speed to overwhelm superior numbers of foes (numerous examples in Howard). Many roleplayers would regard him as being played in a recklesss, even a silly manner.

As a GM there are two ways to approach this.

Cowardly mooks. Conan is faster, nastier and stronger than them so even though they could attack with optimally efficient tactics and overwhelm him, each mook is afraid and, to borrow a phrase, each one dies alone as Conan picks them off one by one.

OR

Legendary Abilities. E.g. one which gives you two additional attacks per round but only when surrounded kind of thing.

My GMing style leans towards the former. Basically Conan's reckless agression so unnerves those around him that they fight without discipline, get in each others' way and between them hardly manage more 3-4 significant attacks a round - something that Conan can probably deal with. This is basically a system independent choice but it's how I prefer to run things.

 

[Deleriad]

Unlike MRQ or similar, where you have to design every aspect of your charcter

It does? This is news to me.

You roll stats.
You choose a background (e.g. barbarian or peasant) and get skill bonuses.
You choose a profession (e.g. mercenary, thief) and get additional skill bonuses.
You get 100 extra points to add onto skills (max 30 to any one skill).

Buy starting equipment and off you go. Usually takes about 15-20 minutes unless you have a chronically indecisive player. Nearly all the MRQ I have run has been with players who have never played any form of RQ before and it hasn't been difficult.

About the only forward planning I ever come across is making sure you have the right STR and DEX minimums if there's a particular weapon you want to use.

The most complicated characters are magic users, particularly sorcerers. I would expect them to take an extra 10 minutes or so because the player needs to decide which manipulations to focus on and which spells to learn.

 

[warzen]

Unlike MRQ or similar, where you have to design every aspect of your charcter, d20 characters come in neat clearly labelled packages with a limited degree of customiseation.

Or said differently: d20 is so complex that a beginner can't do anything except focus on the basics of his PCs and trust the GM to plan the long term of his career where in RQ you have some really difficult choice like 'do I increase my horse riding skill or my climb skill'.

By the time you have to confront multiclassing and growing lists of feats, you are no longer a beginner.

ROTFL
I've been gaming for more than 20 years now with some people who have never open a rule book and never will.

W.

 

[Demetrio]

Or said differently: d20 is so complex that a beginner can't do anything except focus on the basics of his PCs and trust the GM to plan the long term of his career where in RQ you have some really difficult choice like 'do I increase my horse riding skill or my climb skill'.

Um, d20 does have skill ranks you know. You still get to choose where you'll concentrate your skills.

never open a rule book and never will.

Choosing spells must be a right bugger for them if they ever play a spellcaster. Or does the GM 'plan the long term of his career?' And any traits/heroic abilities/feats/assets/whatever that the system uses. But maybe they don't play heroic fantasy where such things are necessary and actually reading the descriptions of such things and how, when and where they can be used (ie reading the rules) helps.

 

[kintire]

Or said differently: d20 is so complex that a beginner can't do anything except focus on the basics of his PCs and trust the GM to plan the long term of his career where in RQ you have some really difficult choice like 'do I increase my horse riding skill or my climb skill'.

This is not "said differently". Its a completely different point: and utterly wrong. A beginner can easily plan the long term of his career because all they have to do is pick a class, or combination of classes, that they are aiming for. There is no similar mechanism in RQ.

By the time you have to confront multiclassing and growing lists of feats, you are no longer a beginner.


ROTFL
I've been gaming for more than 20 years now with some people who have never open a rule book and never will.

This is a complete non sequiter. What does your response have to do with my point? Nothing.

You roll stats.

And are then expected to understand the results and apply them to the rest of the process.

You choose a background (e.g. barbarian or peasant) and get skill bonuses.

You choose a background from a list which then provides a template of bonuses from which you pick a selection.

You choose a profession (e.g. mercenary, thief) and get additional skill bonuses.

Which skill bonuses you select from a series of option ranges, and usually select some advanced skills while you're at it. You may also have to select runes.

You get 100 extra points to add onto skills (max 30 to any one skill).

And buy advanced skills from the list.

Compare with D20. Roll Stats, Pick class, allocate maybe 10-30 skill points to a fixed and quite short list of skills. Away you go.

About the only forward planning I ever come across is making sure you have the right STR and DEX minimums if there's a particular weapon you want to use.

I am aware that there are those who insist on detailed and complex character builds worked out from day 1. I have been playing d20 since it came out, and I have never planned a character more than a couple of levels in advance, and usually not even that.

 

[Deleriad]

Re RQ character generation. Have you actually done it? For real?

Anyway. The general process looks like this.

1. Pick a background culture.
That culture will tell you:
Add some mandatory skills.
then there is usually something like:
Pick 2 from a list of 6-8 non-combat skills
Pick 2 from a list of 6-8 combat skills
Sometimes you also get
Pick 1 or 2 from a list 4-5 advanced skills.

2. Your Profession tells you to add X amount of mandatory skills. More often that not you get to pick one other skill from a list of a few.

3. Your free skill points are yours to do what you want with.

If you want to play a magic user then you pick a magic user profession and some of your skill points have to be devoted towards magic casting skills.

You know, it's not difficult nor is it particularly time consuming. I'm sure some players who have never played the system before who insist on reading about every skill and every spell before they start creating a character would take a long time to create a character. Just like the same person who did the same in d20 would.

 

[Clovenhoof]

@kintire:
Oooouh, you forgot to include "Select a feat" in your d20 summary. Of course that makes character generation terribly complicated and virtually insurmountable.