Nightshade

Can't argue with any of this, but I do have to repeat that at least according to the information in that study, actual limb impairing hits are extremely uncommon; even ones you'd think that would didn't seem to have an immediate effect. That said, this included a range of weapons including handguns, shotguns and some rifles; a situation where the mix is one of primarily rifles through medium machineguns could have provided a different result. (And again I have to emphasize this is not discussing longer term effects; the same people who walked out of the fight bleeding but operant might well fall over dead fifteen minutes later and/or be unable to do much effective two hours later.)

Its possible, but as I said, the data I had included some 5.56 and 7.62 data, including some from fully automatic weapons, and it didn't seem to change anything (of course this was presumably assault rifles, where with the typical users in the typical situations tightly spaced hits are very unlikely; it may indeed be a different beast with light machine guns). That was lumped into the shock and psychological result in the report. As with other such elements, it was extremely inconsistent. Well, that's the other half of that; it was inconsistent both ways. You'd get some people who would suck up 4-5 high caliber rounds with no apparent impairment at the time, and some would take one small caliber round and immediately fold up. Single shots from assault rifle rounds are extremely unlikely to severe a limb (I make the qualification because you have a point with tightly spaced autofire bursts, but that's unlikely to come up when fired from an assault rifle, as compared to the situation with light and medium machine guns).

Yeah, this. The surprise was that it apparently doesn't even seem to impair them much, most of the time. That was pretty counterintuitive.

And to be clear, I was referring to small arms in my post; .50 calibers and up are starting to get into a whole different ball of wax (though even there from what I've seen from WW2 references, the results aren't completely consistent; one of my uncles had a WW2 era scar where he'd gotten a friendly fire hit, and apparently kept going (though it was a hell of a scar and if it'd been more dead on I can see how that could have been a disabler). But apparently that doesn't apply to anything much smaller (since the study I saw even included some 7.62 and 5.56 data)>

Oh, yeah. I expect similar problems apply to people used to two-weapon techniques.

Even if you make them separate, there's no real benefit to not making it sword parry, since shields don't do any better a job of parrying weapon attacks than the sword would. All the worse since the benefit the shield does provide against missiles isn't skill dependent.

This is an old problem; back in the RQ2 days, the only people in many groups I saw who used a broadsword were those too weak to use the bastardsword one-handed.

I beg to differ. All you have to be doing is having a fight where someone does not roll a higher quality result than the other. That's not that hard. A skill of 95% can go a long time before the attacker rolls a higher quality result than the defender, and if he doesn't, the attack does nothing. Edit: From reading comments you made later, I have to suggest that the rules you're using may well not be the by-the-book BRP rules. One problem we always have on this board is that most people who've been using BRP based systems for a long time have house rules they've long since forgotten are house rules, rules from any number of separate incarnations of BRP, and so on, all of which may differ from what the Yellow Book actually says, but people don't even consciously realize that.

One problem with that is that even hit location isn't the complete answer here; people are notoriously idiosyncratic in how they respond to gunfire. One study I read said that, in essence, there were four possible results (during the course of an actual combat; afterwards all kinds of other things set in, but they were very rarely a factor during the actual fight) of getting shot: shocked out (which could mean either physical shock or psychological reaction), bleeding out, nothing noticeable, or the (actually surprisingly rare) traumatic organ disablement. Everything else, including meaningful disablement, didn't actually come up during the course of a firefight; even things we'd think would impair tended to get lost in the up and downsides of adrenaline surges (i.e. the adrenaline helped you in some ways and hurt you in others, but between the two it tended to to make even things like tendon damage largely unnoticeable until you'd had time to come down off it). Presumably this applies to melee combat to a large extent too, but the study didn't look into that, being based primarily on law enforcement shots fired afteraction reports. Edit: Sort of lost my point, which was you couldn't predict which one you'd get from, well, much of anything. There was a general tendency toward the stronger effects with higher caliber weapons, but even there it wasn't consistent, and even headwounds (where hydrostatic shock is an actual issue, unlike the rest of the body) weren't particularly consistent.

I've indicated before that I find the benefits of shields in BRP a little underwhelming, but there are all kinds of pitfalls with making shield skill too much better, the simplest being that it can produce semi-eternal deadlocks in one on one combats, something BRP is already a tiny bit prone to.

Well, that is always the question, isn't it? Among other things, I'd hate to get people hepped up on the idea of Doorways in the Sky and then run out of steam doing the detail work halfway through.

It doesn't help that many players are used to getting, bluntly, no help from the GM in getting the kind of game they want, so they simply try to turn any game they're in into that sort of game. I tend to write that off as another side effect of the top-down bias of the hobby, but that's probably just me being cynical.

This is why I say that for the most part in-game responses to behavior you don't like are, fundamentally, pointless; if the player was the sort to really respond to that, you wouldn't need to do it. Players who want to play a particular way are going to continue to do so; all you'll do is turn it into a continued power struggle with them which no one really wins. The only really functional thing to do is talk to the player and either come to a common ground where hopefully both can get what they want out of the game, or part company.

Was it worth the work? I'm asking this because one of the things I've been doing in odd moments is, effectively, a project that's more or less a modified update of the old FutureWorld setting; an exploration based campaign set in a future where people explore alien worlds through stargates. It uses a somewhat different backhistory and such, but most of the same aliens (with some extras) and technologies and the like. I've already done a considerable amount of mechanical work, and I occasionally toyed with the idea of trying to turn it into a full blown monograph and see if Chaosium would like it, but I'm not sure if the amount of work and hassle is justified. How have you felt about the ones you did? (As an aside, how many people would be interested in such a product?)

It also seemed to decrease the value of having a decent modifier, which didn't seem benign, either.

I agree with the premise, but I do have to note using a term like "despot" isn't exactly keeping it down on issues. And what I consider heated and what other people do often aren't the same anyway (usually in terms of my being comfortable with a more intense exchange than other people are).

Any manditory traits system with teeth is going to produce that as a result. Because it still says that the GM is the final arbiter of the character's personality, not the player.

And yet, somehow, I'm betting it was the GM deciding what those traits applied to and what they didn't. Not the players. When there's an objective mechanism to tell when someone is "violating" thier trait (i.e. when the trait roll was to be invoked) I'll buy that. When there's an objective mechanism as to how the society knows in every case that someone has made a decision against their mores, I'll buy that. Until then, its still just a tool for the GM to tell the players how to run tiheir characters. Otherwise they wouldn't be needed; all you'd have to do is say "This is the expectations of your society; if your society sees you're not meeting them, they'll respond badly." But those traits were far more than that.

I make it a habit of not doing that. If its too heated a discussion to have in public to me, its too heated a discussion to be having.

Well, training time in games that permit it is a goody; if fact its often the best one as it can't easily be taken away. To get anything comparable that's better you need to be in a transhumanist game where you could outright buy attributes, skills or other capabilities up-front.

Still focused on this only affecting the player involved, I see. Long as that's the case you're driving right past my point and there's not much point in my responding, A. This assumes that people will learn from it, want to learn from it, and won't do harm to the game and other's enjoyment while doing so. Like I said, I'll do the practical solution here, and if that upsets your ethos, that's your business. Someone who apparently thinks its better to let a recurring problem keep going than fix it because its "good for them" really doesn't have much to talk to me about on ethical grounds.

Well, I'd argue the reasons for one of MRQ's rules was at least somewhat on topic, but I'll agree its bloated up something fierce. Which, I suspect from the reports I've seen may be more than a little unfair to MRQ2. But as you say, some of its genuine dislike of some of the features of even this edition, some is "once burned, twice shy" and some of its, well, to be blunt, kneejerk emotionalism.

I'd argue that for rich people, most of the challenges aren't things we pay attention to in any game. I don't disagree about having events eventuate while they do this, though; that's usually the limiting factor on training time IME anyway.

Yeah, but if you can't stack them up (i.e. by the time you can try a roll again you'll have the point to do it again) then its not going to channel people much. (The reason I use the term "degenerate case" is that's the term used for outlayers in other fields that are sometimes pointed to as problems; you can find problems in almost anything if you focus on the extremes of the process).

GURPS has a primitive training system as I recall, but Hero certainly doesn't, and few others do (I don't recall if CORPS does or not). The majority of point build systems are stylized enough in their assumptions training would be nonsensical, because the costs aren't based on difficulty of ability but presumed utility anyway. That's more an argument about progressive cost systems than points or not, though, or alternatively an argument about degree of resource. You get that result in any system that limits experience strongly; as I've noted, limited training time in BRP will do the same thing. And I simply degree that's even close to adequate in many cases.