Quote:
Originally Posted by Atgxtg
As for why MRQ came out the way it did,
Well, I had heard from some people from the playtest groups as well as some Mongoose employees that the rules were much more BRPish up until the last draft, when Matt Sprange rewrote everything. I also heard that pretty much all the complaints about the system were pointed out by the playtesters, too. If you can mug a playtester and look at some of the playtest drafts you will see a RPG that looks a lot more familar. MOngoose orginally advertised the game as the return of RQ, and played up the involvement of Stafford and Perrin in the desgin on the new edition. I don't know why Stafford doesn't write anything for MRQ, or why Perrin left the playtest. But neither had a hand in design of the game as originally advertised.
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There were two playtests.
The first was a Yahoo Group that had various versions of the rules, of which the last version was the closest to a BRP-style game. Earlier discussions were on things such as "Do we need a D100 or should be use another dice rolling method".
The rules that I saw were so full of holes it was unbelievable. I couldn't take anything from those rules and use them in RQ3. In fact, I started a RQ campaign using the playtest rules but my players asked me after the fourth session to use RQ3 as the new rules just didn't work. I kept a variant of Hero Points and Experience Points and a variant of Steve Perrin's magic system which needed a lot of work and isn't satisfactory even now.
Steve Perrin was invited on board to create a magic system based on Runes and Questing for them (Rune-Quest, geddit? No, neither did I) and he came up with a half-arsed system that didn't work as written, in my opinion. (For example, he wrote the cults of Uleria as a Moon Goddess because she had emotion-affecting spells and emotion came under the Runic Powers of the Moon and Waha the Butcher as an assassin cult) There was then a period of playtesting dead time, enlivened only by an exchange between Steve Perrin and Matthew Sprangue where emails were meant to be sent privately but accidentally sent to the forum. The gist of it, as I recall, went something like "I haven't been consulted or paid" and "Did you expect to be paid for what you had written", then things went downhill quite badly.
The second was a closed group for specially invited people, of which I wasn't one, that rewrote the rules and developed them into what is now RQM.
The DBRP Playtest went a lot better, I thought, with actual dialogue between playtester and co-ordinator and ideas being written back into the rules.