Our HARP most wanted tweaks:
- Flat DPs on levelling, not based on stats, like: 40 + (level * 2)
- Have a real look at character advancement beyond 12th level. Give the players more options to spend their (many) DPs. By example : advanced skills, needing a minimum number of skill ranks, more talents, etc. Something beyond multi-classing.
- Extend the combat tables in the basic book so that characters with huge bonuses don't have to reach the top end of the table nearly anytime. And give us an official rule on how to deal with this issue.
- Make a very simple combat system in the rule book, and then some additionnal PDFs or extensions to use more sophisticated ones. This has been done, but it was never complete, like by example spells modifications when you change armor rules, or healing options if you go with a more detailed wound system.
- Remove over complicated things from the core, like armor by the piece. Make it an option in the Options book.
- Make attack spells more interesting, with less specific rules and better integration of the scaling options.
- Publish a spell compendium online tool where I can have all spells in one place, and be able to filter by spheres and professions. And print my spell book.
- Unification of the resolution systems is required too, an issue mostly appearing in the combat actions & combat styles: sometimes you add ranks, sometimes stat bonus, sometimes something else. It's over-complicated.
- The actual way of handling a pure stat based roll is crap (1d100 + (stat bonus * 2)). Can't reach 101 most of the time, it's pure luck. Doesn't work. Find something else
- Give us ways to handle all specific damages (stuns, bleeds, penalties, OB-DB choices, etc.) for large scale combat (5-6 players vs 5-6 NPCs is a nightmare). Computer tools, simplification of the rules?
- Remove some skills that are not really useful or regroup some of them. The amount of skills needed to search, crop, prepare plants and to make potions is too high, by example, and some of them are confusingly identical.
- Keep options and non-core rules in a separate book, but try to give advice on the impact they will have on the game, and include all necessary changes needed to use them.
Overall, I liked HARP a lot, and had a lot of fun with it. I even tried to make a version that took many of the above issues into account (plus middle earth specifics, as it's the setting I am using with HARP). But I stopped after many months of work, as I am not a game designer and failed to adress all these issues in an elegant manner. I was at the same time translating and trying to use Arms Law combat system, and drowned... Maybe too much at the same time.
My players now want much more simple systems, as they don't have time anymore to read hundreds of pages of an RPG book to understand how the system works and how to develop their characters.
To end this long topic, and just to let you know, we're playing Fudge/Fate/Legends of Anglerre at the moment...
Excuse my poor english, I wanted to share but had little time to do so.
