Nightshade

I completely disagree with you here. I believe that " if I'd seen multiple players, in different groups, do the same thing over the years" and they keep dying for it, then the fault is with thier behavior.

If its common enough, I couldn't care less if its their behavior. I just want to fix the problem, and I don't have any faith in fixing human nature.

Help, whom? Frankly, the GM protecting players from bad decisions is a moreimportant itopic than just about anything else on this forum. It'S one of the worst things a GM can do. If you protect them from bad decsions then there is no point in thier making decesions!

Protecting other people from their decisions is more important to me than trying to fix the people, which I have little evidence will happen. I'm perfectly comfortable saying that a rule that creates enough bad results is a bad rule; acknowledging human nature is something I think a rule set should do if its doing its job correctly.

Or, put another way, I'm not interested in fixing people; I'm interested in setting up the game so that it doesn't cause problems, and I think that the open ended tick system does that often enough to justify changing it. If yours is otherwise, that's your gig, but I'm a mechanic, not a theologian.

Well I haven't. All I recall seeing is praise for Pendragon's innovative traits system, and people using it for other settings.

Were those critiques from players who'd prefer to forget the RP and just 'burn stuff', perhaps?

Nope. Most were objections that the trait system is a coarse tool for the job, and overly mechanistic. In other words, most of them were on the part of people who thought it actually got in the way of roleplaying, rather than helping it.

Others, as I said, basically added up to not feeling it should be the GM telling people how is proper to play their characters; that that's the one thing a player controls in the game, and that having the GM get into it is tantamount to turning the players into just actors following the GM's script to one degree or another.

And I don't recall anyone saying Pendragon is the GM 'puppeting' players...

I've seen many, many criques of Pendragon's traits system on just that grounds over the years.

There is a easy and simple solution to the train-a-holics. Make them play it out. It get especially good if you make them sit out some game time while other characters are adventuring. Chances are, if you make training and studing just one one hundredth of the pain it is in real life PCs will stop abusing it and decide to play instead.

If you're going to do that you might as well just remove it as an option rather than being passive-aggressive about it. And in my experience, when there's time to train and money to do it, everyone does it, not just one character; they'll just do it in different areas.

Raising the number of rolls certainly helps, no doubt about that. It still chyannels the character but is not nearly as restrictive as the 3 roll limit. It is still an artificial limit, and I don't see it as an improvement over the tradtional method.

That's your choice, but it still means your concern about excess channelling isn't a consequence of limiting rolls, but limiting them excessively. Its not an objection to it as a system but an objection to a degenerate case.

Yes it does. If players are limited to a certain number of development rolls then they can only advance in a certain mmber of skills. So what you end up with are characters who decide to develop as a fighter, thief, mage, or whatever. You end up loosing the diversirty and breth that go with a skill based game.

This basically says that GURPS, the Hero System, JAGS and every other point based, skill centered game is a class based game. Are you really sure you want to go there, Atgxtg? Because I think that's ludicrous on the face of it. Nothing forces you to shove all your points into one narrow focus in those games, and nothing does so with development rolls. It may be attractive to do so, but a BRP game with any appreciable training time is attractive in exactly the same way.

The idea wasn't to make the roll a GM reward, but to prevent every signle use of a skill, no matter how trivial, from resulting in ia skill check. It also helped to discoruage some silly forms of skill check hunting, like someone wrting his name of a piece of paper in order to get a check in Read/Write, or increasing his Spot and Search skills by finding his car keys each morning. Otherwise, we7d all have Computer at 2000%+ just from all the posts.

And yet, if you're concerned about a GM gaming process to provide rewards and penalties, it allows him to do that with the process just as easily.

"It" doesn7t create the problem, the players do. Look, if you had a player who repeatedly did something self descrtuctive, would you change the game system to prevent it?

If I'd seen multiple players, in different groups, do the same thing over the years, damn right I would. I'd conclude the game system was passively encouraging a behavior bad for the game as a whole (which I consider most self-destructive behavior to be, because it inevitably splashes on other people).

How is it harming the game as a whole? If the players keep dying and can7t figure out why, tell them. If they argue about it, keep reminding them whenever they get killed for it.

Groups are dependent on each other. If one character goes down from this behavior, he's not available when he's needed. In addition, he's potentially not the only one who pays for it up front; if someone has decided to try and sneak into a guard post in the middle of the night that everyone else has decided to bypass just to try out his stealth and perception skills, when the post is alerted, they're not going to not look around to see what else might be about.

Characters don't exist in perfect, encapsulated worlds distinct from one another.

In addition, when someone gets lucky and this works out for them, the behavior tends to be contagious, and since people, as you note yourself, have rotten senses of probability in most case, when it then does blow up on them, they're not going to automatically associate the problem with the behavior, but in many cases just with "bad luck".

Do you believe the GM should have altered the game system to prevent iai strikes just becuase this guy kept messing up?

If I kept seeing people do it over the years inappropriately, and found a way to modify it a way to discourage that while doing no appreciable harm to anyone else, you bet I would.

I don't see anything that supports your argument here.

It would help if you would engage with what I'm actually discussing rather than focusing overly on some idea I'm protecting individual players from bad decisions, rather than trying to address what seems from observation more than an isolated behavior, and one that often hurts more than just the person indulging in it.

Its hard to say how its working; as it turns out, only one character in the group uses a shield (the setting is sort of borderline post-renaissance in technology, so a lot of people use longarms and among melee skills its worked out that three of us use two-handed weapons) but what we do is simple: add 5% per each shield size. This means a typical medium shield adds 15% as a modifier, which at least makes it have some point when used against melee weapons as compared to an off-hand weapon.

Ahh, I see. Arguing for the sake of argument's sake. Very good.

Well, it is a method I've planned to use if I ever get around to the RQ:AIG/RQ3 hybrid house system I occasionally bash on, so its not entirely theoretical for me.

(On the other hand I didn't find the need to introduce that into training, which from the sound of it MRQ does).

Then there is the ALL MRQ=BAD! attitude. Which Mongoose kinda brought on itself with the initial release, but there were some changes that weren't all concentrated pure evil. Fully errata'd (as in the errata to the errata to the update to the clarified version) it was perfectly playable (not to everyone's taste, but no longer broken).

Well, as you say, Mongoose bought a lot of that up front; as one of the playtesters, they didn't exactly make positive brownie points in how they handled that either.

But all reports I've heard is that MRQ2 is a pretty good game, even if not to everyone's taste, and as you say, even a generally problematic system can have good features in it.

I could be wrong, but I'd always felt that MRQ design choice about handing out Improvement Rolls had more to do with giving the GM's more control over improvement than 'fixing' skill check hunting. It is a way of allowing the GM more control over the rate of progression/improvement and can be used for rewarding good roleplaying (as can Hero Points).

Well, that's entirely possible; during the playtest of the original MRQ, what was going through the designers minds was fairly opaque to us "down on the ground". I'm more commenting about one possible reason and what I consider its virtues. In a way I'm talking more about a theoretical model than whatever MRQ actually ended up with.

I don't have a strong preference either way, I use traditional skill checks with BRP and IR's with MRQ. I don't feel the skill checks in BRP are broken (I always had a bigger problem with the practice rules - once characters became wealthy enough they wanted to spend all their down time practicing and training, 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. Sheesh...), but the MRQ way has some advantages.

Since I'm ambivelent on the whole issue, I guess I'll just fan the flames by calling you both wrong.

Heh. It is to be noted that I'm currently playing in a BRP game using pretty much the traditional open-ended method. I don't consider it hideously broken, but then, as I noted, I'm a grognard too. I just think people are in too big a hurry to blow off other methods, and I'm reasonably sure some of that is simply out of habit.

It actually makres a rather radical change in the game.

With a limited number of imrpovment rolls instead of a variable number of skill chekcs, players end up focueing on a small number of skills, and let everything else slide. The net effect is "classless" character classes. PCs just can7t imrpove of magic and weapons and horsemanship, and stealth.

That is one reason why MRQ has a fairly small skill list, comapred to RQ/BRP.

This is only the case if you set the number of rolls too low. Set it at, say, six to eight per check cycle, and normal users will almost never even notice it, and it won't noticably channelize people.

No, it isn't grognardism, it's where or not you have a classes RPG or not. It also has the effect of making character develpment a rewaed from the GM rather than one of natural progression.

Oh, and this? This is silly. Limiting the number of rolls does not make the game a classed game, and BRP has always made development effectively a reward from the GM, since the GM always got to decide if the roll was relevant. As such he always could say "Not a meaningful roll". This was particularly easy to do with all kinds of non-combat skills.

The people who are opposed to the skill check system ususally claim that it prmotes skill ckeck hunting. You case history, with higher mortaility rates disproves that. If players want to "play the lottery" with thier PCs lives, and start suffering lots of casualties, yet they stubbornly continue doing the same thing, they have no one to blame but themselves.

Frankly, "blame" is to me, completely irrelevant. If its common enough, it creates a problem and I see a virtue in fixing it. Given there's perfectly good ways to fix it without harming anything else (you just set the checks such that they'll cover the normal range of expected skill usage) there's no argument I see to counter that other than its change and someone doesn't like it.

You seem to be focused on the idea I'm talking about what problems it causes for individual players, but they aren't the only ones I see this as hurting; I see it as harming the game as a whole when it occurs.

I agree with your sentiment, and like I mentioned earlier, I considered adopting the MRQ1 system for skill improvement. The thing I can't conceptualize is the skilltard being that big of a deal in the first place. Minor irritant, for sure, but when I think of problems I've had with gamers over the years, I don't think more than one or two rules issues make my top ten list, and they were straight up cheaters.

It probably isn't in the ordinary cases; if it was, this wouldn't be a big topic of discussion here, as most people would be using some method of addressing it. But as it is, most BRP longimers have learned some passive methods of discouraging it, and as such this rule seems intrusive.

But new users aren't BRP longtimers. They may not even be particularly experienced GMs in general, and may have various local issues to deal with where having to wrestle with this, even in a small way, may be annoying. Given this gives them one less thing to have to worry about, I'm just failing to see why some people are hostile to it.

I see it as a player problem not a game mechanic problem. Stupid kills.

I don't believe for a moment you can separate those off the way you want to here, since I've seen this problem on a lot of otherwise good players over the years, and heard considerably more. It didn't exactly used to be a big mystery that RQ games suffered from this. That doesn't suggest to me that its an issue limited to a small number of poor players, but a not uncommon property of players as a group that the open ended number of possible rolls brings out.

If they did it not matter the consequences, then they had no right to complain. It looks like you need better players. Sure there are risks inherent in all actions in a RPG. But that doesn7t mean that players should ignore those risks, or expose themsevles to greater dangerblindly.

Again, you seem to think they'd complain about it. They wouldn't. That doesn't mean it was good for the game. Nor do I buy "better players" is the answer, as I saw way too many people over the years exhibit tendencies in this direction. I have to conclude its a disease quite capable of coming up in an average player group.

If the players keep doing the same thing and expect differernt results, then the problem isn7t with the game system.

If it happens with enough players enough times, I'm afraid I can't agree. Dealing with the reality of the psychology of gamers as a group is one of the things I do, in fact, expect a rule set to address. The fact the problems it can create aren't universal is, honestly, not a good enough answer in some cases; at least not good enough for me to be tolerant of blowing off rules changes that do indeed address such problems. Especially since the objections to the change in this particular case seems little more than pure grognardism, since the number of permitted rolls can easily be set so that its not a problem for normal advancement.

Or put bluntly, some people have no need for this? That's not a good enough reason if enough people do, especially since it can serve them and not harm you.

This makes sense to me. If I remember right the main problem I had with this was Pow gain rolls. That is where my player learned to go check hunting. Pow gain rolls were so important and sometimes during adventures characters would cast spells like Disruption instead of hacking the enemy with an ax just to get a Pow gain check. This did not work for them long though because if the check was gained for goofy reasons I just told them that they did not get credit for that.

Well, the problem with that is that you just end up getting people who argue it wasn't for "goofy reasons". Breeding that sort of argument is a problem in and of itself. And you could make an argument that as relatively weak as they were, almost any battle magic attack spell was "goofy" to use if you were a capable combatant.

But yes, power gain rolls could be particularly egregious here.

Indeed. Well, perhaps it is just because our other system is Traveller, which does not have

any experience system.

That could well be. I can't imagine anyone who's comfortable with old style Traveler with its training-only advancement (and that fairly limited) running to this problem.

The problem is that check-hunting isn't limited to weapon skills, though the weapon-caddy became sort of a running joke back in the RQ2 days because that was the one that tended to be most blatant. But over the years I've seen people go out of their way to get checks in social skills, non-combat physical skills, and in versions of the rules where this gave you a roll, knowledge skills.

As I said, its just a complex of some kind. It really doesn't have a rational basis most of the time.

I've seen limited check-hunting in the form of weapon use.

Recently, I had a player who started with a spear and then picked up a sword he liked. He would use the sword in combats where he didn't feel too threatened just to build his skill. As a GM I didn't have a problem with this - I'd probably do the same in real life if I wanted to improve with the sword.

By the end of the 2 year campaign, he had a sword and spear skill which were both lower than the guy who only used the spear for the whole campaign. He knew how to work the system to get a very well-rounded character, but he wasn't 'the best' at any more skills than his fellows, and thus not dominant.

For the most part, check-hunting isn't especially profitable, in my experience. But then we set a very measured pace for skill improvement rolls (typically every 3-5 sessions) and stick to the 'stress situation' rule.

The only way you should lose on that deal is in terms of training. Otherwise, its strickly as good or better to get ticks in two weapons rather than one, no matter how frequently you actually permit the advancement rolls.

It can make a limited amount of sense to pursue a few weapons that have separate functions--a bow, a longspear and a shortsword all serve better in different situations for example. Its when you see the guy who carries the battleaxe, the longsword, the shortspear and the mace you know its probably become a compulsion rather than making any sense. In some game systems the properties of these are different enough and have enough specialized advantages that it can make some sense, but BRP doesn't go that route.

By the by, just to elaborate on something since I didn't make it clear, outside of RQ cult needs, most of the time "roll hunting" is not a rational behavior; you want a high skill in BRP in general because you're going to need to use it; but if you use it regularly, there's no need to go out of your way to get rolls. The desire to get them seems mostly separate from any actual power-gaming mentality (which pursues ways to get maximum percentage in the skills you already are rolling all the time), but its none the less common for all of that.

I seem to be a lucky guy, because I have never had a player whose character knowingly took

a higher risk than he considered necessary to solve a problem. I suspect this is because our

general style is rather simulationist, and someone actively looking for unnecessary risks to ta-

ke just is not a very plausible character - at least not one any party would tolerate as a mem-

ber.

I suspect you've got people who are far, far more willing to ignore "PC glow" than is even vaguely typical in this hobby. People who take unnecessary risks are all over the hobby, and even gritty systems don't make that go away.

Sorry I don't see a problem with this, let alone two. If players want to take more risks just to collect skill checks that fine with me. When they get killed "skill check hunting" that's fine with me, too.

If you don't see the way an ongoing tendency in this direction can disrupt a campaign, I'm not sure what to say to you. Killing the character doesn't really help unless every new character starts at the bottom (and that creates its own sets of problems in my experience).

IMO if skill cjkeck hunting is a problem, the GM iss doing something wrong. Either he is allowing frivious checks, or he isn't applying the consecquences for failing under a stressful situation.

As I said, I've seen people who did this no matter the consequences. Over the years in RQ I saw quite a lot of them to one degree or another. The fact it had risks didn't seem much of a deterant in a game where no matter how careful you were, a 01 from a composite bow could make all your effort in vane, and given it tends to be irrational behavior in the first place, expecting potential bad consequences to fix it isn't understanding the problem.

I like to handle experience rolls thusly:

1) Ticks are given if a skill is used successfully in a stressful situation

2) At the end of a scenario, the GM can award each player a number of ticks to apply as they desire (I usually keep this to around 4 or so, but for much longer scenarios, I up it. Campaigns are treated as a chain of scenarios, so no need to add any more per scenario).

3) Skills can have two ticks at most.

This allows for growth through use, with heavy use potentially granting double growth, but also allows growth of skills that may not have played an important part, but the player decides that for whatever reason, those skills are important.

This method can help quell the need to just do things in order to get ticks.

Ian

That's certainly an alternate way to deal with it; its just inverting the process which may suit some people better than limiting the number of ticks possible, which is really what the MRQ method does.

Why would you get hit a lot more often? Barring missile weapon fire, its not like there's any particular likelyhood you'll fail a weapon parry over a shield parry, by the book.

This is not necessarily a problem, I think.

As the BRP rules say, the gamemaster should allow experience checks whenever skills are suc-

cessfully used in stressful situations. In my view this means that the character has to take a si-

gnificant risk to gain any experience from a successful skill use, he cannot just use this skill he-

re and that skill there to get an experience check - unless he is willing to accept a significant

risk of a rather harmful failure each time.

The problem with this is that a certain percentage of BRP system players develop what I can only call a compulsion about getting rolls. In fact, I think most do to a limited extent, but some just can't keep it down to sanity. Now what you talk about here deals with the issue of meaningless rolls, but it can't deal with the other half of the problem: rolls that are meaningful but didn't need to happen.

Lets say you have two ways of dealing with a problem, the more straightforward, and safer way, and the more risky way that doesn't really have much else to recommend it--but it does provide more skill rolls. Some people will take the latter just for that reason.

There's two problems with this:

1. Everyone else may not be onboard this approach, but that doesn't mean they don't get dragged along one way or another.

2. Even if everyone is onboard, it turns up the hazard level in a way that may not be attractive or good for the overall health of the game.

Now you may say "Well, I have ways of addressing that if it happens." Of course you do. Like most people on this board, you're probably a longtime BRP grognard. This means one way or another, you've gotten peace with any peculiarities of the system.

But not everyone is a longtimer. And new people aren't necessarily going to be similarly equipped, or, in some cases, feel like they want to deal with the problem. In the past, at least some of these have probably tossed in the towel and moved on to other systems.

So providing people a tool to keep this down to a dull roar does serve a purpose, even if its not one many people on this board feel like they need.