Saturday, May 5, 2012

Landing on OpenQuest

So why did I pick OpenQuest for my go to d100 gaming system over all the other competition?

1.  I ruled out the Mongoose Runequest and Legend systems due to their use of hit locations.  I really didn't like that option.  I thought it was unnecessary complexity.  They do have some really nice templates in their SRD that I think would be nice to show players of any of these fantasy d100 systems since the ideas are mostly transferrable.

2.  I actually pitched the use of the Stormbringer games to my players but none of them were familiar with the Moorcock's work and so I decided it wasn't really worth pushing the issue.  I'm also not really a fan of the Elric type magic system.  It is really great in the novels, but I'm not sure it would play out the same in a tabletop RPG.

3. I thought about starting from Chaoisium's BRP system and customizing it to what I wanted, but then I really read through the Open Quest rules and realized almost all the options they went with would be what I would probably try.

So that was how I navigated through about 9 very similar d100 systems and landed on Open Quest.

There are a few things I would add to Open Quest if I was to play it at the table (instead of over PBEM which is how I'm running my Greyhawk game).  I would definitely bring in the armor dice ruling from Stormbringer. The idea that your armor could fail you if your opponent finds the right spot is really neat to me.  Of course I would institute the same system for monsters.

In addition, the magic system in Open Quest seems to have a few small holes that if I played this game at the table I think would come up.  First of all, I would heavily restrict the use of Magic Point stores (maybe a wizard could only be "attuned" to perhaps 3 magic point stores at any one time?  And it would take ~ 1 week to attune yourself to a new one?  That would stop the obvious hole whereby a wizard with substantial $ resources could easily create tons of magic point stores that would give them 100+ magic points at their disposal...  I'm already planning to institute this rule for my PBEM game if anybody decides to try and "game" the system.


But that would be about it.  Otherwise, the Open Quest is a fully stripped down, fast and furious version of the game that allows for excellent PC customization, but also good "balance" in which most characters can do a bit of everything which is really good for small gaming groups where you don't have enough people to cover all the bases for a game requiring high levels of specialization.




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