[Strange Visitor]

Originally Posted by Tori Bergquist

I hated Strike Ranks in 3rd and 2nd edition, let me get that out of the way: it was damned annoying. But despite preferring the streamlined system of MRQ, I found the real issue turned out to be Combat Actions. CAs are defined entirely by one's attributes, so the CA value is going to be high for quick, nimble types like elves and low for slow lumbering types. But in actual play, this is where player started dumping skill checks to try and improve attributes, to get that golden number that grants 1 extra CA. I think that, given a chance to do it my own way, I'd simply make CAs a flat number, say 2 or 3 for everyone, and then just let quickness for Dex and such be reflected in the initiative. This will also help avoid the "guy with slow tank sits back for 2 CAs while all the quick little people run around." In actual practice, the quick guys tended to be low damage dealers anyway, and the big guy with one good hit tended to demolish things when he got his chance, but the net effect of a set number of CAs would (to me) seem to do nothing more than insure all players were equally involved over the course of play.

We told them even in the early playtest that the action rules were a problem; from what I can tell, they made it a little less pervasive (at that stage of the playtest, someone who wanted to be a combat monster and nothing else could probably pull off max actions and still do and take a lot of damage) but not really addressed the problem.

Because MRQ (and all previous editions) are stat-based for race creation, in actual play I can safely say that letting someone run a...oh, say...minotaur can guarantee you have one player who can cause serious damage while everyone else hides behind him. This has always been an issue with RQ and BRP, though, not sure how to "fix" it beyond restricting options for players (and thus the campaign) which I'd rather not do. On the other hand, because the group had a minotaur in it, I often let loose with some pretty formidable opponents, and the minotaur came close to dying....many times.

Like you said, this has always been a problem with RQ (and other games where stats actually matter); the one problem with your last solution is that if the bruiser does go down, whatever took him down will likely scythe through everything else. When running an RQ:AIG variant I varied available skill points at start by how much attributes value a given race had, but that only slows the problem down.