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nDervish

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  • RPG Biography
    No real "credentials" per se. Been playing RPGs since Red Box Basic D&D at the tail end of the 70s and pretty much exclusively GMing since the early 90s.
  • Current games
    Currently between games, due to my ACKS group falling apart after the last Christmas break. Trying to pull a new group together for some post-apocalyptic RQ6/BRP.
  • Location
    Lund, Sweden
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    Expat former American, now in southern Sweden for the foreseeable future. Perl programmer by trade, general geek by inclination.

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  1. Well, RQ6/Mythras has Luck Points which serve that purpose (spend one to reroll any die affecting the character, or to downgrade a potentially-fatal wound to potentially-incapacitating, or to get an extra action in combat) and the number of Luck Points you get each session is POW/6, rounded up. So there's at least precedent for doing something similar to what you're thinking. Personally, I'd prefer to make them a per-session resource instead of a permanent POW loss, but YMMV. (Note that Mythras omits POW gain from routine play. If you're allowing POW gain on a regular basis, then burning POW permanently for Luck would probably work.)
  2. You're describing the RQ6 version. Mythras modified it slightly to allow use of Regain Footing while engaged, but you must win an opposed Brawn or Athletics test or the action fails.
  3. That's demonstrably impossible. Even if the skills are perfectly balanced mechanically, the specific campaign and specific GM will change that balance, often radically. If you're playing a campaign where the PCs are pirates, then Sailing is going to be a pretty important skill, regardless of how useless it might be in the kinds of campaigns you're envisioning.
  4. While Mythras is my preferred flavor overall, I do agree with both of these criticisms, to the extent of having bikeshedded some potential solutions that I'd like to try out, although I haven't actually gotten around to testing either one yet. For the first, the obvious solution is to limit which SEs are available on any given attack, which is made even easier with TDM's release of the SE cards. In principle, I could now print myself a customized deck of SE cards and, whenever someone gets an SE, deal them one card for every 20% skill (or whatever) and have them choose from those SEs. Or perhaps each player holds a hand of some number of SE cards, with a new combat action allowing them to discard and replace cards from their hand by "repositioning" themselves in the melee to open up new avenues of attack. Of course, before actually implementing this, I'll need to decide how many times each individual SE should be represented in the deck... For the second, I've been toying with ideas for replacing the AP economy with Magic World rules (skill over 100% can be split for multiple attacks; unlimited defense attempts at a cumulative -30% penalty for each attempt after the first), but a lot of combat Special Effects interact directly with the AP system (e.g., the Pin Weapon SE prevents you from using your next AP to attack) and I haven't come up with a good way of handling them if AP are no longer a thing.
  5. That's certainly the most common way to do it. The problem, in my experience (and my opinion; you may not consider this "a problem") is that nobody ever uses the tactical options when they're a special form of attack, declared before rolling to hit. This is partly because it's easiest to just take the default action (a normal attack), but, also, most game systems actively discourage their use by first penalizing the attack roll for these special attacks and then making them all-or-nothing. Except for highly-situational cases where the special attack is basically a desperation play to get the side-effect that you absolutely need at that moment, a normal attack is almost always the better option. Mythras turns that on its head in order to get (at least in theory) more dynamic combat. Instead of saying "if you want to stab through a gap in your opponent's armor, you have to roll a crit; if you fail to crit, you miss entirely", Mythras says "when you crit on an attack, you have the option of stabbing through a gap in your opponent's armor (or taking a different SE); if you don't crit, you still hit and do damage normally". The Special Effects are added on top of the normal effects of the attack and you never lose anything by using (or attempting; some can be resisted) an SE in Mythras, so they get used a lot more often.
  6. Given the context of it being a BRP-family game, if you want to replace opposed rolls with a single roll, wouldn't the Resistance Table be the obvious way to do so? Note that I like opposed rolls in general, and blackjack-style opposed rolls in particular, but, if you don't and you want to get rid of them, then why reinvent the wheel?
  7. He recently popped up in a related thread on Big Purple and said that he's "moved on from BRP games", with a pretty clear implication that he wouldn't be interested in doing any further work on MW-related projects.
  8. Ah, sure... Make me break out the actual rules... BGB, p. 13 defines a Special Success as "A roll of 1/5 of the required score for success indicates that your character performed exceptionally well and achieves a greater result than a traditional success." Note that it says nothing about the actual chance of achieving a special, only the roll which indicates that you have done so. p.11 defines a Critical Success as "This is the result of a skill check roll that is 1/20 (or 5%) of the regular chance of success." Again, it is defined solely in terms of the roll which produces it, not the odds of a success being critical. Since a roll under 1/20 of skill will always also be under 1/5 of skill, the 5% of hits that are crits necessarily come out of the 20% which are specials (20% of successes are superior, with 15% special + 5% crit). The rules do not support 25% of successes being superior (20% specials plus an additional 5% crits), as there is no bonus triggered on rolling below 1/4 of the regular chance of success.
  9. While that's technically true, an attack vs. parry "tie" (i.e., same level of success) will still do damage if the parrying weapon is smaller than the attacking weapon, so it's still not necessarily a "no effect" result. The real point here being that RQ6 has more factors playing into this than just "crit or no crit?". Note that this makes specials more common than in the vanilla rules. In vanilla, it's actually only a 15% chance of a special, not 20%. (Special isn't just "under 20% of skill", but "under 20% and over 5% of skill".) The way I'd personally do it is: - Units die 5 or 0 = special - Units die is 0 and tens die is odd = crit Also note that any alternate method (including this one) may have 1% variations in the crit/special chances compared to vanilla, depending on the method and the roll's base success chance, simply due to things rounding differently between methods. And, as Mugen pointed out, simple non-division-based systems start to come apart when the base chance exceeds 100%.
  10. Can't speak to other editions, but the RQ6 Tap is characteristic-to-characteristic, at a 5:1 ratio. ("For instance if a sorcerer cast Tap (STR) at Intensity 7 on four targets, each of the victims would lose seven points of STR whilst the sorcerer’s own strength would be augmented by +6 points.")
  11. Am I correct to assume that this is coupled with a house rule that you can only spend one XR on a skill at a time? Otherwise, it seems that players who would normally say "I get three rolls, so one each to Combat Style, Endurance, and Evade" would just say "I get twelve rolls, so four each to Combat Style, Endurance, and Evade" for the same net effect, just chunkier. Also, doesn't this dilute the effect of the Experience Modifier from CHA? Getting 1 extra XR when 10 are awarded is much less significant than getting 1 extra when 3 are awarded. (Not that I think this is necessarily a bad thing... I've never particularly liked the Experience Modifier in the first place and may have houseruled it out entirely if I were using XR-based advancement instead of tick-based.)
  12. Not currently running anything, but bouncing back and forth between working on two homebrew settings and trying to decide which one I want to try to get people together to actually play in. The first is a post-technological, Dying Earth/Xothique-type setting focused around an ancient city on a fragment of the shattered Earth. Definite Tekumel-like influences in social structures and organization-centricity, but based in smaller guilds rather than wide-ranging clans. I think this is the stronger option, but tend to either bog down or waffle on a lot of the social and historical elements, so progress tends to be slow. The second is a more generic post-apoc Wasteland/Road Warrior concept, starting off with three or so potential PC origin settlements, then growing ad hoc from there as characters explore and learn about the world around them. This sort of organic, exploration-focused sandbox is what I've normally run in the past and has the advantage of being really quick and easy to get up and running, but they also tend to be somewhat generic. Either way, my core system is Mythras/RQ6 with bits and pieces from other BRP-based games and various house rules. The second setting would also involve a heavy dose of the Rubble & Ruin monograph.
  13. Check-based advancement can cover specialization implicitly: The one who wants to be the thief does thief stuff. The one who wants to be the spell caster casts spells. The one who wants to be the healer heals. If they're the ones using those skills the most, then they're going to be the ones getting the most checks on those skills and will be the ones who are most likely to improve in them. The thief is the best at climbing walls because he's the one who climbs walls most often. Also, training. Even if everyone uses all skills equally during the session, they can still choose to each train within their specializations during downtime. Although, if they're choosing to all use all skills equally during the session, I'd question whether they really want specialization anyhow. Yes, to both points! Using a skill leads to getting better at that skill and, conversely, if you're good at a skill, it's because you've been using (and/or training) that skill. That's what I like about check-based advancement.
  14. 2H swords within reach, you say? Time to stage a practical demonstration! "First, throw this sword at <insert target here>. Then hit it with the sword normally, and we'll compare the damage done each way."
  15. Not quite. The System Notes on BGB 83 say that you can add half your damage bonus to an improvised thrown weapon's base damage. Nowhere does is say that a greatsword has the same base damage as an improvised thrown weapon as it has when used normally. On the contrary, when you throw a greatsword, you're not using it as "a greatsword with range", you're using it as a SIZ 3.5 improvised thrown weapon. The fact that the object you're throwing happens to be a greatsword is largely beside the point. So set the base damage as you feel is appropriate for any thrown SIZ 3.5 object (which will surely be less than the 2d8 of a greatsword; maybe 1d8, given that a thrown short spear does 1d6+1?), with the possibility to Impale on a Special, since it's pointed. Also don't forget that, per the same System Notes, anyone under SIZ 14 has to roll on the resistance table to be able to throw it in the first place.
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