Game design has advanced a lot since Pendragon appeared, never mind RQ. OK, both are classic designs which still have much going for them even today. I hope G:tG retains Pendragon's elegant simplicity and neat bells & whistles like quick, descriptive combat and personality traits.
OTOH it would be nice if G:tG's mechanics were state oif the art. After all that's all that is really going to distinguish it from RQ as is. As a fan of powerful minimalist rules I would favour some sort of open-ended, difficulty based mechanic a la Shadowrun/Vampire.
Here's a suggestion. Human scores range from 1-10 (RQ stats/2, skills/10.) For a standard difficulty action the player must roll less than their character's score in the appropriate attribute to succeed. The GM chooses the die with which the player makes the test, any die. A really easy test would be made using a d3 or d4. An extremely challenging action might require a success on a d20, d30 or d100.
Opposed rolls would work just as in Pendragon. A critical success (i.e. a die roll equaling the relevant attribute score) counts as a roll of the highest number on the rolled die. Players can choose to roll a "bigger" die than that choosen by the GM in the hope of getting a higher critical.
To the good this mechanic requires one roll to resolve an action, unlike the buckets of dice in Shadowrun & Storyteller. The probability of success or failure is immediately obvious and you don't spend five minutes picking out succesful dice and cancelling out fumbles. Whatsmore you can use anything that produces a linear array of random numbers (such as a roulette wheel or pack of cards) as a "die". Also to the good it works as well with peasant farmers as with Argrath and Harrek unlike RQ or Pendragon.
To the bad I can't see it replacating RQ/Pendragon fumbles. Additionally
the probability differences between difficulty levels are not evenly
spaced. Earthdawn's attempts to overcome this problem are too ugly for
words. Also traditionalists who prefer multiple +/- modifiers to arbitrary GM
selected difficulty levelswould hate it. Given the vintage of most
Gloranthaphiles that is likely to include a big chunk of G:tG's potential
market.
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Andrew Behan
ajbehan_at_alf2.tcd.ie
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