simonh said:
Also previous RQs were not affraid of having layers of rules complexity to allow it to cover wide varieties of situations, where MRQ strips things down to the core. Compare the complexity of the damage systems, RQ3 was very much more complex, but MRQ covers most situations perfectly well with just a few annoying edge cases.
I'm sorry in advance for being contrary, but I simply don't agree with this statement at all. RQ1/2/3 had one of the easiest game systems ever designed. Combat was a snap. You rolled against your offensive skill. Your opponent rolled against his defensive skill. The results of those rolls were incredibly logical and "simple". Damage application was equally simple. Everything worked, made sense, and made for good, scalable, balanced playing.
One of the key features of RQ was that aside from fumble charts (which were "fun" rather then tedious) you never *ever* needed to look up a chart to know what happened (you rarely if ever needed to look in the books at all once you'd read them through). The spell system is point based, so you never had to look up a rule to see how spells interacted. There were no saving throws (and certainly no charts for them). Everything that acted as a "save" was a simple STAT*X roll on percentile dice.
In MRQ, they've taken away the fumble charts and replaced them with combat charts. They've removed the simple process of applying damage (location and general HPs system), and replaced it with one where your HPs matter less then your resiliance skill (and added yet another die roll to the combat process). They've removed the elegant (and simple!) stat rolls and replaced them with skills, but then replaced the equally elegant skill based combat action system (splitting skills over 100% to gain extra actions) with one where the Dex stat is all that matters. Oh. And they added in extra combat moves that can use up those extra skill points, but only for attacks, and those themselves are riddled with flaws, questions, and inconsistencies.
The changes made have not made the game simplier, but more complex. There are more rolls/calculations on average for a given combat action (hit roll, defense roll, location roll, damage roll, perhaps some math to damage or APs, then resiliance roll. And that's assuming we use a single roll system, which is still unclear based on how the core rules themselves were written.
We have division in opposed skills where before we had subtraction. That's not "simplier", is it?
And after all of those changes, the game isn't "better" then RQ2/3. It's not even "different flavor/mechanics but similar quality". I think the problem that many people are having is that the changes we see in the game rules seem arbitrary and almost made for the sake of being "different then previous editions of the game", but in virtually every single case, those changes not only make less sense then the previous rules, but don't actually work as well as game rules either. Skill rolls for strength contests? Why? Was there something wrong with simply comparing strength stats and rolling the die? Same deal for resisting damage, poison, and disease. These things make absolutely no sense as skills and introduce all sorts of problems in a game with that mechanic.
I would argue strongly that MRQ handles fewer cases, less accurately, and with more complex rules then every single previous version of RQ. While I wasn't really looking toward MRQ as an "improvement" on RQ, I was kinda hoping there would be some neat ideas I could introduce into my own game. Heck. When RQ3 came out, even though it did have some significant changes over RQ2, we changed our game to that system. Why? Because it didn't break the things that were "good" about RQ2, and it added new stuff that wasn't "bad". So the net effect was positive.
I guess the problem I and most other people are having is that we're looking at a core rule set. Nothing else. So. In the absense of any campaign flavor, or world history, or backround "feel", one would expect that these core rules would actually at least work all by themselves. MRQ does. But barely. And the fact that it "barely" works is very obvious and immediately apparent to any reasonably experienced player or GM who reads through the rules. The combat tables are broken. The opposed skill rules are broken (and dont those two basically make up 90% of the game mechanics?). Amor tables are wrong (or just fraught with errors). Sections of the rules contradict eachother (and not just the examples). The few rules that don't have gaping errors in them don't make sense the way they're implemented, and present huge scaling problems (what does happen once characters get a 95%+ in resilience?).
Perhaps some of the 'advanced rules' will resolve some of these issues. Perhaps a new edition down the line will fix the problems. Perhaps the 'open content' approach and extensibility will give birth to some well hones variant rules sets that are compatible with it and will cater to various tastes.
Except that "resolving combat" is not and should not be an "advanced rule". Resolving skills should not be an "advanced rule". Figuring out how listed combat moves should be resolved should not be an "advanced rule". Those are core rules. They should be in the core rules of a game. They should *work* in that core rules set. People customize games with house rules, but they don't expect that they have to redesign the entire game instead. So far, I've barely seen discussions about how to add on to the core MRQ rules. Everyone's still debating how to inteprete and change the existing rules so they are playable.
Open content is not an excuse for creating a starting point with so many problems. How can people build on MRQ when the foundation is so riddled with cracks and flaws? The core needs to be solid first. And it's painfully not...
Players are frustrated because many of us have waited literally decades for someone to make a "new" RQ game. Don't get me wrong, I want this to succeed. Mainly because I'd like to see new source material appear, but certainly I'd be interested in adopting anything "new" that might come of this version of RQ. So far, I've not seen a single game mechanic that works as well as the original RQ mechanics did. The CA system interests me, but not the way it's actually implemented in the core MRQ rules. The spell system is virtually non-existent (and also riddled with problems just with the whole rune integration scaling thing).
I guess the real problem is that we're left with a core system where the core doesn't work very well. And when that's all that you've got, you kinda can't go anywhere. Why should I apply houserules to "fix" MRQ? IMO, it should not have been "broken" in the first place. Give me a working product that I can build on and I'll be happy. Honestly, unless Mongoose just scraps their first edition and rewrites the entire thing from cover to cover, I'm not seeing enough "core" to bother adding on to.
That may sound like harsh criticism, but I think it's
fair criticism.
