Nightshade

I don't see it as strictly necessary to have most of the "culture" stuff there. You do need to have something in terms of background social class for the money and such, but in terms of the initial step of character generation, you could just let people pick ten standard skills and three professional skills and move on, and I doubt it'd break anything.

Just to show you how different people are, there were people who thought the whole system should have been based more on something like the resistance table than the skill rolls.

I just wanted to mention I had a chance to read Steve Perrin's copy of this a couple weeks ago, and wanted to mention that it sold me on it enough that when my finances recover a bit I'm going to buy the PDF of it (I don't buy physical books any more unless and until I actually get around to running the game, and that isn't liable to be for quite a while). Good work gentlemen.

Just as a comment, the biggest problems we had with Sorcerers were actually wrapped around Duration; the progressive duration system made it possible to relatively painlessly spend a few days down during downtime building boost spells of very long duration. Yes this required a rather intelligent and skilled sorcerer to do it well, but you only needed one of those for it to become problematic. Naturally, the easy fix was to get rid of the long term durations, but that also got rid of some more reasonable uses. In the end the latter were probably not worth the problems with the long durations.

Shows how different people are. The original Superworld was way too sketchy, and even the full boxed set wasn't a really complete game until after the Companion was published, IMO.

No. The only penalty for parries/dodges is on successive defenses; whether you've used it to attack before doesn't matter. And honestly, if you instituted such a rule, it'd excessively penalize people using two handed weapons IMO. The real problem is there: there are three basic modes of melee combat, single weapon, dual weapon, and weapon and shield. Making these all useful is difficult, all the more muddied up because not all of them are equally useful in all situations.

I'd probably use them in a game where I wasn't using hit locations myself. Once I've gotten rid of the hit location roll, a roll for armor instead isn't going to bother me.

Ironically, I'm actually more likely to pick this up now that its been de-Gloranthafied. While I was always a big RQ fanboy, I found Glorantha quickly palled on me (which is ironic, since viewed from a distance (in the form of Red Moon, White Bear for example) it looked pretty cool to me, but up close and down in the trenches, not so much).

Except its not just an issue of reach, as I can attest from the time when I used to do martial arts and some martial weapons work, or the judoka I was sometimes up against would have won every time (most of the weapons I was using weren't particularly long, such as the bo). Even if your premise is that reach is the issue, unless you have particularly robust rules for that benefit, the result is still going to be that if you know how to grapple, that's what you'll always do, and I don't think that's what the sources you're quoting indicate happens. If that is your belief as to the situation, I guess we don't have anything further to talk about.

I'll turn that around; if its that easy and that good, why didn't grappling supplant everything else in environments where single combat was common? The answer I'd give is that its a pretty unsafe thing to try to do to an armed man, and only done in desperation. But if you don't like that, really think about whether you want, generically, grappling to be the winning way to deal with any other human sized opponent that isn't similarly trained, no matter what else he is trained in or equipped with.

We used to use maximum plus minimum, but I always thought that was problematic with high adder races. I'm more likely to use option three these days.

Even that seems overstated in the case of things like thrusting daggers and broken off spearheads.

You don't seem to address the issue of how easy it is to start a grapple in the first place; given that once you start one, just as with the current rules, a person without a decent grappling/unarmed skill is going to be in a seriously problematic situation, that's a rather important issue unless you want the ideal tactic against most opponents is to grapple them.

The simplest answer, as someone said, is that these two rules were really not designed to work together; they came from different BRP games originally, and they aren't particularly compatible. In general, if you have an optional rule (which SR are in BRP), its not too well integrated in various parts of the system. I've observed some problems here with hit locations on occasion, too, and there's at least one problematic are with category modifiers (Mental assumes another optional rule--Education--is in use).

[Deleted because I didn't realize how old Dragonewt's post was, as I hadn't realized only Icebrand had necro'd here.]

But that's the point; currently it doesn't make a lick of difference if the opponent has weapons or not, or pretty much anything else other than having a high defense. There's no discouragement against this succeeding no matter whether the target has a bared blade, is trained in unarmed techniques (and having had some martial experience, its not like the judoka were automatically p0wning the karateka every time in that, either) or much of anything else; once they could land a hit, the target was done, and there was no more risk in doing so than any other kind of attack.

I think its actually better to use the whole set from there, largely as-is. Jason made what I thing were some questionable decisions when porting over the Superworld I powers (his decision to break down defense into indefinite subcategories rather than the three that Steve used is particularly bad in its effects).

Yeah, the vast majority of knockdowns actually seen from smallarms, are "reaction", that is to say, someone jerking away after getting the feeling of being hit and falling over.

Oh, yes. In fact the study I was refering to concluded that bleeding out was actually the commonest way next to shock that firefights came to an end. It also, if I'm remembering right (there was a much wider range of discussed results given the focus of the data, so all the bits have stuck less well in my mind) the single biggest cause of ER transported fatalities in the material I found at UCIMC, mostly because of inability to get bleeders stopped. That material was instructive because it convinced me that many "dead" (in RPG terms) characters really should be saveable if you have a skilled medic on scene with even modest medical gear (and lets face it, with dedicated PC groups, the equivalent of this is often the case); things I've read over the years about the golden hour and the platinum minute seem to just reinforce this. But the overall takeway I got from the whole thing is that one-shot-kills the way people think about them (you're hit, you die, and nothing can be done) are far rarer in reality than many people seem to think there are, because they're conflating those with cases where injuries were done that couldn't be treated in time to help them, one way or another. But that includes people who died minutes, hours, or even days later, and there can be some pretty important practical differences between that and "died instantly".

But at least with the FBI study, even automatically being disabled didn't seem to be the case (there's no way to tell with the old medical data I had, since that applied to people brought to ERs, and by that time in many cases post combat sequelae have set it; all you could tell was who was and wasn't DOA, but how much the other injuries impaired someone immediately was impossible to tell). But the FBI study pretty much indicated that across the board, including the heavier rounds such as shotgun and rifle attacks, there wasn't a lot of interim impairment; the target either stopped fighting (from physical shock, psychological shock, or bleeding out) or showed no apparent impairment. There wasn't much of any middle ground between the two. That was what was so interesting about it. You'd expected some decrease in effectiveness in cases where people stayed up, but there wasn't (beyond the fact even apparently trained combatants in firefights spend an inordinate amount of time putting bullets into pretty much anything but their apparent targets, whether because of stress, adrenaline impact, or combinations of the two). But that's the point: these weren't about survival (in fact it wasn't even in the study); it was about people continuing fighting. I may have confused the issue with my reference to the data I found when at UCIMC, because you appeared to also be talking about survival, but the two sets of data were looking at exactly opposite ends of the stick. The fact is, even the BRP handgun values show too consistent a takedown capability according to that study; several of their results wouldn't have even been possible in the game as written. Part of that, is, of course, that every game ignores outlayer results (this tends to be most visible in falling rules which will almost never actually model the range or real results), but part of it simply is that an accumulative hit point model is a generally poor one for human damage, outside of possible emulating the effect blood loss has. You'd almost always be better off using something like a "match damage, factoring size in and do a Con roll" kind of thins with various output results. But that's fussier than a lot of people would want to deal with.

The problem is that the studies involved included a large number of exchanges of fire, including shotguns and some rifles. There was nothing to indicate that the longarm strikes were automatically lethal with upper torso hits. Neither, I might add, did some statistics I managed to acquire when I was working at the UCI Irvine Medical Center Library some years ago. Admittedly, more of those were what we think of as hunting rifle rounds than assault rifle rounds, but if you aren't automatically killed by catching a .30-06 round in the torso, I'd require some serious convincing that you will be by a 7.62 round, let alone a 5.56. So at the moment, I have to assume your acquaintence has either had selection bias come up or has overgeneralized from too little data points.

Well, truth to tell, that's a description of an awful lot of even vaguely serious combat styles. As far as I can tell, shield techniques are an exception here because they're defense tilted.

That's one reason that even the single metric of muzzle energy (the best one I've found to use if you absolutely have to try and simplify it) isn't perfect.

The problem is there's still enough rifles and shotguns in that study that if that was much of a factor you'd expect it would have turned up on some of the data at least, but it was functionally nonexistant. So there's obvious a problem somewhere here. The best I can assume is that the issue tilts when burst and autofire is involved in some way, because otherwise the data can't be reconciled.

The only problem with that is that's somewhat true with any two-weapon style (given a shield is, in essence, a second weapon optimized for parrying); I've certainly seen other two weapon setups with the bring-out-of-line-then-follow-through-with-the-main. A shield isn't even necessarily the best at this; a second blade with a swordcatcher or equivalent might be.