Nightshade

Limited availability of magic points would certainly have made some of the long duration boosts harder, but not impossible; you'd just have needed to do them over multiple days so you could recover them. But since it was quite possible to run long duration spells for weeks, that wasn't going to make the problem go away. And it would have made some of the problems with getting use out of a dedicated sorcerer _during_ combat worse.

This was the first half of the problem; unlike casual spirit magic users, casual sorcery use was almost pointless; the chance of getting spells off was so low that the utility was almost nonexistent in many cases. And this got incredibly ugly once you had a sorcery professional who either rolled well or had progressed considerably; Damage Resistance was somewhat tolerable when cast on everyone because of the way it worked, but moderate levels of damage boost running on everyone for weeks was really problematic.

I know Steve would still like to do more work on SPQR (he did a spurt of it a few months ago) but he tends to get busy with RL and bog down on it. It probably doesn't help that the local groups he plays with aren't as a group, big BRP-style system fans.

Personally, unless I'm running in a setting-specific game, I usually consider fluff a waste of time--depending on what one means by "fluff".

Well, even if they don't, there's the problem that the variants used aren't going to be all the same, and I can't expect that too many are using something like the RQ:AIG skill difficulties (which you obviously are, and I probably would be were I running any BRP). So at best we can talk about the standard optionals in conjunction with general use, and even that's pushing it.

Well, as others have noted, you don't always end up with the bow appropriate for your Strength. In reality you can also underpull and overpull (though to only a limited degree). But really, my point was that if you're not going to apply damage bonus in some fashion to muscle powered missile weapons, you need to represent things by having a significantly wider range of bows than most BRP games have traditionally done; just having a self bow, a composite bow and a long bow doesn't cut it.

The problem is that BRP doesn't have a sufficiently detailed/sophisticated approach to missile weapons to really cover this; there's a significant difference in the punch of, say, a 30 pound pull bow and a 90 pound pull bow, but all BRP does is to paint them in broad strokes based on bow type (there are some limits on this--you're only going to get so much pull on a simple bow for example--but even within those there's considerable variance). I'd prefer something that defined bow damage by Strength within certain ranges myself, but its not the tact BRP took, and as long as that's the case I think Strength needs to factor into damage somewhere on them.

That's the approach I prefer (and it helps with this situation since you can kick up the difficulty of the more sophisticated "martial" skills) but its not a tool people using vanilla BRP have.

Yeah. Honestly, the power system is the court of last resort for solutions to this sort of thing. The problem is that BRP doesn't typically handle distinctions like this that well. The easy way would be to have separate skills for the higher order more scientific forms of weapon training, but there's two problems with it: 1. Vanilla BRP doesn't deal with differences in difficulty of learning skills, so you end up with everyone migrating to those to the degree its possible because they're no harder to learn or increase than their cruder equivelents; 2. There's not a lot of crossover benefit to learning related skills in BRP so you're starting completely over with the "martial" skills (you can make some argument that there are sometimes issues of "unlearning" some bad habits that can come up, but I don't think that says that there's no benefit to prior training at all).

In RQ I'd have said its fair enough, given the strong benefit of having a shield; with BRPs somewhat less attractive shield rules, I'm not sure.

Though I might take issue with some of the individual numbers, that's the sort of approach I'd prefer too.

I never quite understood the problem with this; unless you shifted skills for temporary alterations in Power (which we never did), it always seemed easy enough to remember that when you improved or decreased Power you needed to adjust all of (category) skills by X amount. I suppose if you had extremely frequent changes here it could be a problem (in our local experience, people got up to whatever Power they thought they wanted and tended to threshold at that, sacrificing any Power above that for divine magic or other benefits).

Well, that's one reason I prefer a smaller die-step approach; you can make smaller increments matter. And of course I wouldn't run the game without category bonuses. But then, I'm an RQ grognard.

Its a common disease. I've been in the hobby for more than 30 years now, and I have immensely more games than I'll ever use. Even in the last few years when I've gotten more frugal, I still buy things that are just as likely to sit on the shelf and be admired after I read them--just less frequently than I used to.

I always prefed the dice based approach, though I understand the attraction of the fixed adders; they just seem to produce a little too predictable a damage output for my taste. That said, I prefer to break down the steps as finely as possible (I'm not averse to using a D2 for the bottom step for example).

I couldn't actually answer the poll because the answer is "It depends." Depending on the exact campaign and its focus, sometimes I want detailing in skills that I don't in others (though I'm firmly of the opinion that BRP style games with a lot of skills benefit from some defaulting to other related skills the same way weapon skills often have).

Just a difference of perspective and conclusion. It'd be a non-issue if this was some sort of charged contact weapon; at that point AI would be clearly right. My opinion is the timing issue is more critical than the force issue; he thinks its the other way around.

Well, like I said, with most skill checks its pretty much just pointless silliness anyway. However, there can be reasons to want to build up a few separate weapon skills, at least in RQ; weapons get disarmed, broken or otherwise lost, and wanting to be able to use a backup effectively can actually be valuable before its come up. So someone can have a reason to want each cycle to get ticks in, say, a primary weapon, a smaller backup weapon, a dagger (for close in encounters) and a missile weapon. On a gamist calculation, those make some sense even if the process doesn't. Other stuff--not so much, unless you're just desperate to have the skills for rare contingencies.

With smart players that means they'd just use the other weapon when they were disengaged and/or in the next fight.

That doesn't mean it isn't an area where there's a lot of room to game the system; it just means that players trying to do this try to judge how close to the line they can get and still get the tick, and try to construct situations that justify it. The real issue is that its, well, silly; if you don't have an organic reason to use the skill in the game, why bother? If you never use the skill, why do you care how high it is? Yet people get a complex about this sort of thing where "more ticks=better" even though they don't really care about the skills involved. Its a real phenomenon I saw too much in my old RQ-intensive days (when we had an extended group of about 30 people who all played/ran RQ with each other) to write-off.

That works to a point with firearms because the truth is that handguns are intrinsically inaccurate, and most of the times longarms are in use, they're being pointed vaguely in the direction of someone and used to make noise. Its far less clear it should apply to melee weapons, however. Even with firearms, its unclear it should be the case when rates of fire such as often used in the game (i.e. one shot every 10-12 seconds) are being used; one reason so many shots are wasted in firefights is people are firing relatively rapidly. But as an example, even for an untrained user, missing someone two times in three with a shotgun at relatively short (but not point blank ranges) when firing it only once every ten seconds is a bit odd.

This is something that gets ignored on here more often than I think it should; BRP fans are biased toward a gritty/simulationist view of games that is, as far as I can tell, not particularly typical for the hobby.

As I noted, the problem is you don't have to just get the barrel up against them; you have to get it up against them and pull the trigger before they've moved away again. After all, there's no reason for a creature to just stand around as you're poking it with a handgun barrel. Doing this right is, I'd expect, not trivial.

If there's one thing that BRP can sometimes take a hit on, its that it assumes a level of difficulty among the unexperienced--even fighting the unexperienced--that isn't clearly correct, and is certainly counter-intuitive.

While I do agree there was a certain amount of leaping at the bait, I have to admit I'm a bit boggled about Mike's players. There are any number of critiques of BRP style systems I can understand, but "sameness" is just pretty alien to me; it seems far less same-old-same-old than almost any version of D20, for example.