I personally think you are wrong, specifically in the case of MRQ which, I believe, you have not actually played.
I have played it, and I have run it. My weekly campaign that I run uses MRQ. the weekly campiagn I am in uses MRQ.
The modifications to MRQ may not look that significant but having been running it for a while now they make a huge difference in terms of character competence and survivability.
It is more difficult to actually kill characters now, due to the lack of total hit points. Damage bonuses have also been toned down. They are still very easily overwhelmed by numbers.
MRQ also assumes that anyone can use magic but most people don't. Even in Glorantha - see that stats in the Blood of Orlanth campaign for example.
My experience is quite clear. If you are going into battle, you have two options. Magic, or heavy armour. If you have neither, you're doomed. Perhaps not in your first combat, perhaps not your second, but you won't last long. And if you are outnumbered, specifically if you run out of reactions before your enemies run out of attacks, then unless you have magic AND heavy armour, you're doomed.
And this never changes. You can have as high a skill as you like, if you run out of reactions it doesn't matter if your skill is 880%, you have no reactions, you can't use it, so you're hit. And since your hit points can rise only slightly, if you're hit, you probably go down. You are almost certainly not actually dead, but you are out of the fight. This is slightly better than RQIII, for example, where you got one defence per round, so if you were fighting two people that was it, but its still not going to cut much ice against the swarm-o-mooks that Conan can reliably defeat.
However I presume a level 20 d20 Conan warrior facing the same 15 were-hyenas would prevail, as would the equivalent "Legendary Hero" in MRQ. (I ran a quick simulation up thread somewhere.)
Your quick simulation used an impressive sounding number of foes, but with a carefully limited number capable of attacking at any given time. Try the scenario from Queen of the Black Coast: Conan has boarded a corsair vessel, but his crewmen have not followed him (largely because they've all been slaughtered). He is armoured (and this is noted as mattering) and at some point about half way through he gets his back against the mast. Say 5 opponents at a time, armed with spears. See how that works.
Learn to read. I said ORIGINAL post. You even quoted it! Once again, you're trying to deform what I said... how like you.
Ah, I see. So insults only matter if they are in your ORIGINAL post. right. I didn't understand that.
Once again, you're trying to deform what I said... how like you. And the brain damaged stuff was a joke to someone that nicknames himself 'flatscan'.
You never fail, do you Herve! Everytime I think you've demonstrated your double standards as clearly as possible, you do it even better!
No, Herve, the joke to flatscan was a followup. The original insult was here:
Who's trying to "deform what you said" again?
Am I misunderstanding something or you're trying that BRP wouldn't fit for a Sword & Sorcery game? What about Lankhmar or Elric. Don't they fit in the genre for you?
Sword and Sorcery is more general. I said Conan. I have never read Elric, and i don't have the game, but Lankhmar is considerably grittier than Conan. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser deal with superior numbers by trickery and maneuvering, not furious charges. They are formidable in a fight, but they use cunning to even the odds.
As I told in the original post, BRP is easily tweakable and playable at higher power levels than the average RQ or CoC game. It's perfectly possible to run BRP in a more 'heroic' way.
Unless you "tweak" BRP beyond easy recognition, its basic assumptions will remain. Amoung those are that superior numbers will prevail, and that armour is essential to any fighter. Combine that with low hit points compared to damage - even the ultra high hit point example above can only absorb a couple of good hits - and the tweaks you will have to make amount pretty much to a rewrite from scratch.
To my eyes, it's really the D20 which is the system 'where numbers count'.
But that's not the case. they help, of course, but your difficulty to hit does not decrease with numbers (apart from the penalty for being flanked). If you are very hard to hit for the first attacker in a round, you are very hard to hit for the 20th (assuming similar skills). It just doesn't have anything resembling the limited reactions problem. And while in both systems your enemies will occasionally get lucky, in Conan they can get lucky considerbaly more often before you keel over.
As for the 'gritty' aspect, many people here have employed this term to describe the Conan D20 rules. Now it's the BRP that's gritty...
Everything is relative. Conan is gritty compared to normal d20, but MRQ is grittier yet.
Why not? What would prevent playing in Glorantha using the D20 system?
Glorantha has a number of basic assumptions that D20 Conan doesn't model. Among others, everyone has access to magic (although not everyone takes up that opportunity, most do), everyone is part of some sort of religious organisation and gains benefits from it, magic is closely integrated into society at all levels. The class system models this very poorly, the magic system doesn't fit.
RQ is quite high magic. Magic is not the province solely of specialists, and is integrated into society in a way that d20 can't model.
Oh by the way, to quote your good self, learn to read. I said d20 CONAN would be a poor system to model Glorantha, partly because it is a low magic system. Although I don't think basic D20 would do a very good job either, as it happens.
