Nightshade

One of the most noticeable flaws almost all games have is that they don't represent the reality of extended battles well; there's almost no reason to pause, manuever (often pointlessly) and do other things that are a constant element of real battles.

In regards to missile weaponry at least, I wish that was only true, but "friendly fire" exists as a term for a reason.

Again, that's not frequency, that's severity.

Note that few people will have seen Superworld, however, and I still maintain that its system works more in conjunction with the powers system than with the main BRP character generation. But most people don't take a system and hack it into shape if it has what seems like a signficant failing to them; they just move on to another system. It depends on how common you think them to be, and whether you can maintain the fundamental nature of the game while satisfying them. I don't happen to think the fundamental part of BRP is "what you roll is what you get". Its the resolution mechanic and the lack of a lot of abstraction. I'm not going to deny that there's a contributor there; certain RQ was helped to its grave by the excessive cost and apparent flimsiness of the AH edition. I think, however, that ignoring the ways RQ doesn't match the general tastes of the hobby is burying your head in the sand, and its all too common a habit in the hobby, especially among fans of older systems. Whereas I think that's a false dichotomy. I think trying to assume its _only_ exposure or _only_ system is lying to one's self.

I think, on the other hand, real combatants have a lot of extra problems to deal with that SCA guys don't, like blood in the eyes, really crappy conditions, damaged equipment and more. But in the end, I suspect the percentages were just sort of pulled out of the air and written down; it wouldn't be hard to make some of the more extreme results less frequent, even if it meant going to a separate table.

That may be, but I suspect most people either used them as-is, or wrote new ones.

Its still an accurate perception of their reasons, whether you disdain them or not. I frankly don't much like your attitude here, but I give credit where its due.

I'm not actually convinced that's a bad model; in real combats, or even sparring outside of incredibly controlled conditions, all kinds of things go wrong with suprising frequency. The problem isn't the frequency of fumbles, but their severity. I had my foil get out of line because of slipping or my glove slide fairly often over my years of fencing; something like it could be counted on to happen at least once a match. Having my bell catch on the other guy's bell, the knob on the end of the foil come off, and the whole thing come apart leaving me standing there with only a piece of nylon grip in my hand, on the other hand, was a once in a fencing career situation. So I'd say its not the fumble mechanics that are a problem so much as, perhaps the tables used.

There certainly are some benefits in terms of transparency. My caveat has always been that it also narrows the communication bandwidth and makes it fundamentally arbitrary; the GM explains what has happened to the character _as the GM sees it_, which turns entirely on his perception of how much a character can tell about his level of injury, fatigue, and other issues. To be honest, I think many GMs, perhaps most, are bad about conveying environmental information properly; adding in doing the same about personal information just doesn't seem an overall virtue to me. But then, I'm only intermittantly immersive as a player, and am quite good at firewalling, so I'm perhaps not the ideal subject for such techniques.

The first is true, but I think it pays a price in terms of making the game more about the GM than what the players do as someone else said. As to the second--I don't entirely agree; it was entirely possible to lose a character in high level AD&D, it was just very difficult to go from "unhurt" to "dead" in one round. Its actually harder in D&D3 because unlike prior editions resurrection magic by the book is infallible and essentially unlimited. I have to point out that by the book RQ3 had low chances of DI outside of Gloranthan characters, and Resurrection was a non-reusable spell, and not likely available at all until priests came into play. None of that's liable to deal with a low ro mid level character who just has a bit of bad luck. I've never been really arguing for it to be a default rule; what I've been arguing is that the lack of it has been a serious reason to not play the game for some in the past, and rolling my eyes a bit at some of the tough-guy rhetoric some people have used in disparaging the idea. Now its perfectly possible what the real question at the start of this thread was was "Why don't more people like the style of play BRP promotes"; in which case the answer is rather different. But as it is, the answer at least in part is that, whatever other virtues it has, BRP style games (and RQ is one of the more noteable here specifically because of the crit and impale mechanics) tend to produce, all other things being equal, more character death (and to some degree crippling) than other games, and they don't like that. Its just a simple reality. Can one mitigate it by caution? To some extent (though as I've noted, short of not finding yourself in the situation at all, getting in an arrow's path isn't something you can do much about). But excessive caution also isn't something a lot of people play for, either, and if the game forces that on them, that's another downside. So the bottom line is, people should ask themselves if they're actually looking for more BRP players, or more players who like the style of play they do. If its the former, some modifications to the system can help. If its the latter, you're pretty much on your own, and I suspect, by evidence of what's been successful in the market and what's died, out of luck.

You only had to calculate the modifier once per skill category, so I didn't consider that onerous. Past that, you were adding three two digit numbers together, and had one step where you multiplied a single digit number by (usually) another single digit number. Again, I just can't get that worked up.

I was mostly curious if the equipment or aliens had ported over. Thanks.

Some of it does. Its a trade-off. Fact is, its just not something most people want to deal with (by evidence of the success and failure of games in the last 20 years; there's almost no games that don't either have a hero point mechanic, some other buffer mechanism (like D&D's or Palladium's escalating hit points, or where the inherent mechanism of damage makes it hard to really kill someone with one shot that are still alive in the marketplace. And its not like there never were (it wasn't an overly uncommon trait among less cinematic games in the early 80's)). Truth is most people want the illusion of danger to their characters, not the reality. Badcat had some of the right of it; most people, either because of what they play for or just because they have time and effort invested in a character, don't really want there to be all that much chance of losing it. I have to point out those could be recorded on the character sheet; you didn't typically need to do them on the fly. As for char-gen--well, it was adding two digit numbers. I really can only work up so much sympathy for people who can't handle adding together some two digit numbers during character generation.

I was just trying to find out if it was something other than fatigue or encumberance, since all the other modifiers tended to be five or tens, with the majority of them the latter.

Like Tweaker, I'll plead guilty to #1, and pledge to be good here. On topic, I know you extracted and modified the magic system from MagicWorld, and based the superpowers system on the original SuperWorld; did you use anything from FutureWorld in the design?

The only places I can think of where this should have been an issue in play (rather than during character gen and advancement) was with the fatigue and encumberance systems.

And how much fiction do you know that focuses on such people? Its fine to acknowledge that can happen, but there's nothing to require people to want to _play_ the guy who gets cut in half in the first scene to emphasize how dangerous the situation is.

For horror games I can sort of see it, but for most I think it tends to mean the GM feels he's a better manager of information than the players, which is why I think its a bit of a control issue. While I agree that's an issue, even if you're story oriented, it makes the assumption you're better at seperating yourself from the numbers than the players are.

Well, in some case that's okay; there are certainly games that operate on "script immunity", where the only time a character actually dies is when the player lets them. That said, beyond that if the hero points are primarily mechaniced so they minimize bad luck, the player simply can't prevent a sufficiently big problem or set of problems from doing them in. The simplest way is to limit them to one used per round; at that point if you've simply found yourself in an untenable situation, the fact you deal with the first problem in a round with a hero point won't stop the second from killing you. But it does eliminate the step-into-the-fight-and-get-killed-by-an-arrow situations. That's fine if you want to simply regulate GM fiat in this area, but I think that's putting the power in exactly the wrong place. I find that sort of thing generally a little control freaky, to be honest.

But that's the point; hero points are usually a finite resource, so players can't be indefinitely blaise. When properly implimented, its much like using magic points; you want to use them when you need them, but save a few for dire necessity, but that doesn't ensure you'll never run out at a bad time. What it primarily does is make it likely that if something bad happens it will happen after ongoing play and at a more dramatic moment, rather than anticlimatically in a minor fight.

If the game is focused in a way that you need one, I can and do. The fact less games are doesn't change that. My disagreement was with the "you can fudge that" argument; "you can fudge that" with almost any subsystem in a game. The question is how important and necessary that subsystem is to the course of the game. As you note, more games need a combat and character generation system because its more important to them, but that's an argument about frequency, not necessity.

Which is why I originally said a "general" mecha game. A specific one, where there's a finite number of defined mechs doesn't need one. A more general purpose one where the mechs not only aren't predefined, but may be player defineable I think does. You'll note I made the same argument earlier.

Because people typically want _both_; they want some control over the flow of the game, but don't want it to be completely arbitrary. Its not an either-or choice. Bah. That's a rule about like palming dice is a rule. The fact its an accepted part of gaming to many people doesn't make it a rule. If you're going to wait for me to champion carrot-and-stick experience systems, you've come to the wrong address. I do, because I don't consider fudging a virtue. In fact, to me, its an indicator the game system isn't doing its job.

And you could wing combat and character generation, too, but like those, the nature of a mecha is a bit to close to the point in the game for this to serve most people well. So I think either one has to argue that _any_ subsystem can be done without, or that for some sorts of games, vehicle construction systems are, indeed, necessary.

Actually, this isn't true; for a general purpose mecha game, for example, a mecha design system is about as necessary as any subsystem can be. But that's not what BRP is.