Nightshade

Well, hmmm. Apparently I've conflated MagicWorld sorcery with some other magic system I've seen used in BRP or RuneQuest over the years, because you're correct; I can find no such rule. The only limiting factor is time, power available and Intelligence.

I believe if you look upthread there was already a discussion of this.

Sorry, Jason, I meant Magic, not Sorcery--the one derived from MagicWorld.

My apologies if you mentioned this elsewhere, but could you tell us what that is?

Thanks for the extended summary, Jason. Do I gather from you discussion of sorcery that the rank of effect is no longer connected with the skill level in any way? I know in MagicWorld you took a 10% penalty for every rank over the first.

Well, keep in mind that at least in the vanilla case, that's pretty much dumping all your magical resources in one shot; it also sounds like it has the classic S&S idea that while he's building up the spell you go up and hit him. That doesn't mean you aren't right to some degree, though.

This is a fair cop, I think; you run into this problem with pretty much any "counterfactual" subsystem; its why games with embedded magic systems always make assumptions too. That said, often the specifics of space combat aren't that important to a setting, or at least are within broad parameters. That doesn't mean the combat and ships themselves aren't important, but that the details can be fit into a number of worlds without otherwise impacting the world, unless the system is extremely quirky (a Star Trek-like ship construction and combat system will be able to be fitted into more settings than a system where all FTL travel is dependent on psionic pilots and peculiarities of mindspace, for example). This also parallels magic systems where some are more portable than others; its why I always thought D&D's fire and forget magic system could be problematic, not only because it was specific, but because it was quirky.

Sorry, Jason, that's my fault and I'll stop responding to posts on it. My apologies.

That's only true if you want to bias the use of your system toward fantasy and away from SF. Or put another way, its true in a fashion, but not in a fashion I think serves a multipurpose game well; in particular, since it has two magic systems, I suspect pulling one would have still served that audience while leaving room for at least some basic vehicular combat rules and possibly a simple spacecraft building system such as they had in Amazing Engine: Bughunters.

Well, I was one of the people on the first playtest list, so I'm, shall we say, not unbiased. Sometimes it just means the publisher actually has a realistic idea of scheduling. It will probably explain a lot if I mention the company I've done work for is Eden Studios. Good people at heart, but about as prone to biting off more than they can chew than anyone in the hobby.

Well, he _is_ a mathemetician by training, after all. I recall finding the one time I tried to engage with starship creation that it defeated me, but its been 20 years or more so the details are fuzzy. I don't think they're essential for an SF game per se, but the lack of them can constrain the sort of SF games you can run fairly seriously.

Tell me about it. I have to admit after my last experience with doing work for the game industry, I'd also be prone to looking at someone else and going "You go first." One of the things that will be somewhat telling to me is how long it actually takes for it to get out. In the game industry, releases tend to run to about five tiers: 1. "We're more or less on time" 2. "We're late, but at least here it is" 3. "We're backed up because of product in the pipeline/cashflow/personal problems, but it is coming out" 4. "We're going to try really hard to get it out" 5. "We've cancelled it/gone out of business". Outside of a couple big names, I almost expect the third; I'm pretty much astounded when I get the first.

No, I just didn't want you to take it as a "If I was writing the game _I'd_ have done it right." I'd probably just have left out something else more important. (Ironically, none of the games I'm considering running with BRP likely really need a starship creation game; one's based partly on FutureWorld (and therefor uses interplanetary gates as its primary travel method), and the other, while it has a spacecraft as the origin point of the scenario, it crashes during the lead in and is never seen again...)

I don't know how I forgot Other Suns, given I used to know Nicolai. I think both it and Space Opera suffer from being rather more complicated in execution than most people probably want to deal with in BRP typically, though.

And please note that my response was a disagreement, not an intended slam. On the whole, I've heard nothing but good things about the job you've done with this from playtesters, and I think your willingness to spend your time answering fan questions is admirable.

I was refering to their mythological, rather than anthropological origins.

I'd argue that's entirely an issue of focus, however; for example, I don't think it would be possible to not place some emphasis on vehicles in some subgenres (Star Wars style games, for example, have too much involvement of small vehicular combat for that not to be relevant, even if the focus _was_ on characters. Same for any mecha game). Your explanation of your thought process however, is noted. I somewhat disagree with the conclusion you came to from it, but you're the author, not me.

Well, truth is, the refinement and placement of them all in one place is a useful thing. I have some BRP books, but by no means all of them, because some of their topics didn't interest me. Having the useful crunchy bits available to me in one place _is_ actually what I'm pretty much looking for. I'm unlikely to use it for anything but a homebrewed setting anyway.

By that argument, I'd think things like the sorcery and psi systems don't belong in the core book either; either is as campaign-specific as a spaceship combat system. The real truth is, I expect, that Jason tended to use the material he had at hand to refine and include, and there's been far more fantasy implimentations of BRP than SF; to the best of my knowledge, the only published ones were Ringworld, FutureWorld and Worlds Beyond; the first two had no spacecraft systems for reasons that would be self-evident from their focus, and the latter isn't something he could work from because it was third party.

That's only true until you look into their origin, though; most of them are deliberate efforts on someone's part, and are at least consistent within type.

I'd say for certain sorts of settings you not only want to, but need to, or you can't run the setting properly. If I want to run Hiero's Journey as a setting, I distinctly need both.

Do they include some psychic-like abilities? Otherwise I can see situations where you pretty much have to combine them with psychic powers. And this is good to hear, since I know of several settings (such as Witchworld) that have both some form of magic and apparently distinct psychic abilities.

But that's an issue of the presence of magic in the system, not an aspect of the combat and armor systems themselves. And 5-6 points was fairly low in our experience; the expected damage was usually closer to 8, and that was assuming no impaling weapons were present. On the other hand, while the roll means you could get very little protection, you could also get rather more than you got in RQ1 and 2; 6 points of armor was a fair bit, barring magic, in RQ1. In fact, it was full plate as I recall. I might believe it was more common than severs, but not than location take outs, which I usually saw multiple times in a given fight. I agree the magic made a difference, but that's an issue of magical availability; as I said, it doesn't have anything to do with armor or the combat system. You obviously never encountered PC ogres, trolls and even great trolls in RQ.

I saw quite a few 8 point hits drop people. All you needed was a torso hit for that to take down an average character; after all, you were usually talking 3-4 point hit locations in the case of anyone but the buff, and it wasn't hard to have 3-5 points of armor. No, but you did have to deal with the potential for limb loss, which could be in practice as severe, or by the RQ3 period, blood loss. Barring the demon equipment, I'm really just not seeing the huge difference here (well, that and the fact SB armor availability tended more toward the low end more frequently).

Its only been used, to the best of my knowledge, in versions of the game that used magic systems too different from RQ for that to be a meaningful question.