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Message: <blockquote data-quote="arkham618" data-source="post: 2033996" data-attributes="member: 6419">Okay, I wanted to walk away from this thread for a few days because I was getting progressively angrier as I responded to certain posts. My past experiences with Mongoose have left such a bad taste in my mouth that I find it hard to speak calmly about the company and its products. To answer your question, though, I would like to have seen a streamlined combat system in the Conan RPG, one that captured the frenetic pace of the fictional battles, in which Conan and his companions cleaved through platoons of disposable minions en route to the evil demon/sorcerer/whatever. Something like the combat rules from Mutants & Masterminds, not the kludgy, grit-obsessed chimera Mongoose presented. (The grittiness of Conan rested in the fact that people died quickly and without ceremony, not that the combats were described in excruciating detail.) I would also like to have seen sample NPCs (major and minor), better art, an even more restricted magic system than was presented (sorcerers in the literature were exceedingly rare, extremely powerful, and usually quite solitary -- a case could be made for disallowing magic to PCs altogether), more extrapolated background material (I've seen the Howard essay already, thanks), an accurate map, fewer instances of obvious cut-and-paste from the SRD, and a mass-combat system (in the core book, where it belonged, not as a doh-woopsy web enhancement). Looking into the matter further, I'm being told that some of these issues were addressed in the Atlantean edition. That's fine. Better late than never, I guess, but my money and time are limited, and I've been burned too many times by Mongoose to risk either on them again. They'd have to churn out a real gem to get me to change my mind, and so far I've heard nothing to indicate that they have.I feel that GURPS Conan provided a broader base for adventuring, perhaps because it drew on the pastiches as well as the original stories, which increased the available background material. Yes, the non-Howard stories themselves were stylistically inferior, but they fleshed out whole sections of the Hyborian world for which little or no information was previously available. (When writing serial fiction, it's okay to leave big chunks of the setting undefined, but not so in an RPG.) The GURPS version also presented magic as much more esoteric and rare than the OGL version, IMO, which seemed to be trying for a compromise between its D&D (high-magic) heritage and the subject matter. The GURPS combat rules were too involved, but it would have served OGL Conan to move away from that example, not toward it.</blockquote>

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