Nightshade

And I don't generally have a problem with that, but I do think people who wonder why the game isn't more popular and then grumble when someone tells them are being disenginious. Its quite possible to like some aspects of the game and not like others; as an example, I still greatly admire RQ's transparency (how much what is being done mechanically seems to connect with what's going on in-game), lack of lockstepping, and many aspects of its combat system. I don't admire how much can turn on one, rather linear die roll (specifically how easy it is to get killed outright through, really, no fault of one's own except one bad die roll). As such its not a case where I want another game; I want this one with slightly different mechanics. And in the end, that's pretty much what _anybody_ with an issue with a game system they like wants.

Again, not in my experience, but then, I rarely have seen anyone who uses published adventures at all (and that's not counting the non-Gloranthan campaigns where its largely moot).

Though I'm unable to find it in the book, I'm almost certain there was a requirement to keep a power of 15, unless I'm confusing it with the old Rune Lord requirement. However, even if I'm misremembering, its impractical to let it get too low, so you're still talking at most cases at most a 50% chance of gaining power per session. Not in non-Gloranthan games, nor, to be honest, the Gloranthan ones I ever saw. Well, that's a _very_ long campaign; far longer than any I ever saw, so I don't think it can be treated as typical. Most campaigns don't last beyond a year or two.

I suspect because it requires more detail than virtually any of the BRP games have bothered with on _any_ topic. BRP ranges from a light to medium crunch game, and hardcore gearhead subsystems tend to go in heavy crunch games.

In other words, your way or the highway. Lovely.

Simple, really. One's entirely arbitrary, one is systematic and regulated. Again, the latter is a systematic fix to the problem; the former is a brute force solution, much like constantly ignoring a rule because it doesn't do what you want it to.

Why shouldn't they? If you ask someone why they don't play the game, you should expect they'll tell you their reasons; that you don't like their reasons is no reason for them not to be honest about it. Given that less sudden-death games have been progressively more dominant over time since the 80's, I wouldn't go holding your breath.

Sure. But over the course of a campaign, its not hard to catch a head, chest or abdomen shot, and if that happens to be the crit (just about as likely as not), that's pretty much that in many cases. And that's certainly an alternate approach to the hero point style mechanics, but I'd argue I'd rather have a core mechanic that isn't as forgiving and a limited bail-out mechanic in many cases. Note that's not much help until one starts running into runic characters, though.

Unless you avoid combat entirely--and that's an odd choice in most campaigns--that isn't always an option. Armor does nothing against RQ style crits. And as long as dice are involved, killing your enemy first is at least in part as dependent on luck as getting the damage in the first place. And that's fine, but most people _don't_ like that degree of hazard; its offputting. Now, you can always say "Play another game", but then no one should be wondering why BRP is a corner of the hobby.

There's no need to play the dozens on people who don't happen to like sudden death. Its not like doing everything right is a guarantee of survival (or even makes it exceptionally more likely) in some BRP sets; in RQ one critical hit from a longbow arrow in the wrong place was sufficient, and there could sometimes be next to nothing you could do about that. This is particularly true with lower powered characters where simply fighting someone with a shortspear had a relatively high risk of this sort of thing over the course of multiple combats.

Depends on what you mean by the caster's power (among other things there's a big difference here between 3.0 and prior editions); and honestly if it works (and it often does if you pick the target right) most people simply don't care whether the caster's power matters or not. Not that hard, honestly; there's some issues with save gusting and so forth, but there's also ways to ramp up save difficulty pretty obnoxiously. Its not certain, certainly, but then, if you're up against a target with a high POW, you can't reliably do it in RQ either, usually. Well, as of 3.5 that's true to some extent because its also damage capped, but the numbers are high enough that's only safe for some classes of opponents (enemy mages are still quite vulnerable to things like Disintegrate, for example). I really have trouble picturing any but pretty extreme campaigns providing more magic than mine did; if nothing else, the simple mechanics of power gain are a limiting factor here. Fireballs are not harmless to compareable characters when you get them; in fact, its not particularly hard for a given arcane spellcaster to be killed by a fireball equivelent to his own. That's true of most of the others, too. There are, obviously, some issues created by the durability differences present in D&D classes as compared to RQ and other BRP characters, but even when accounting for that, there are simply areas where the magic does better; there are very few things that _do_ deal with slightly weaker opponents en masse in RQ for example, but that's certainly not true in D&D (and not the emphasis on _slightly_ here). They'll also take out quite a few only slightly weaker characters, however. A large number of 3rd level D&D fighters is normally still a significant problem to a party of 6th level D&D characters, and a Fireball will likely take out most of them; there's no equivelent I can think of that will effect a group of somewhat weaker, but still threatening opponents in RQ.

Of course it depends on group style, but its still something many people dislike to the point of it ruining the game for them; even I don't much like some of the sudden-death aspects of BRP anymore, and I was a very early adopter.

Of course they are; after all, they're almost always an explicitly metagame mechanic to minimize the sometimes anticlimatic effects of random rolls. In particular, many people consider there to be little virtue in walking out and dying or being taken out of a fight outright early on.

Easy. Have a spell that does the same thing but removes objects (such as D&D Disintegrate) or does it in an area. That's more power than some people want in their game, but its still a higher level and what some people expect. I'm pretty sure you're confusing Thunderbolt and the Lightning spell here. Nope. Both it and Thunderbolt are small area single value 3 point spells. I'm now sure you're confusing the latter with Lightning, which is a stackable spell (which I specifically was not talking about). Stackable spells can gust a bit more in power than 3 point fixed spells, but, then, they also typically end up tying up a _lot_ of PC resource by the time you're done. I'm not talking about strategic spells, but large scale tactical ones. And as you note, those take a long time (and in the case of Cloudcall aren't that meaningful by themselves, as they're unpredictable and not very precise). Then we frankly, just disagree. Its not like I haven't run a lot of RQ over the years, but its magic system is clearly _not_ up to handling the upper range of power that a game system like D&D or some others do. That doesn't mean you couldn't make a magic system that would, but the extent one used in RQ isn't it. That's not true of most of them, however, which either make power rolls or are effected by armor, and in most cases you're only talking about the top end effects; even those are narrower in scope and cost more character resource to have them available. Then again, we just disagree. I'm still not seeing much that really even compares to a D&D Fireball (which isn't particularly any less likely to kill someone when first acquired than a Thunderbolt, which wouldn't expect to kill a typical RQ3 PC either (though it'd probably set him up for someone to finish him off)), let alone to things like Chain Lightning, Disintegrate, Meteor Storm and so on. To be honest, I'm a little baffled at your position on it. Edit: Went back and looked, and you're part right: Thunderbolt can be stacked to hit multiple targets (it in fact appears to be essentially unique in that regard for 3 point spells). However, at that point you're still tying up an _enormous_ amount of Divine Magic points to be able to effect more than 2-3 targets.

I think the distinction Jason is making here--and I don't think its _entirely_ valid, but I understand why he's making it--is that the new BRP doesn't attempt to provide a tool for every purpose. It gives a basic system, some optional rules, and some add-ons that might be useful for common uses of the system, but its not attempting to be a true one-size-fits all multifunction system. (The reason I don't think this is entirely valid is a I think toolkitting is a matter of degree rather than an absolute; as an example, at least prior to GURPS current edition (which I've not read nor own, so I don't want to comment on too much, but some have said its moved more in this direction), it only went so far in this direction; it had a psionics system and a magic system, but they made pretty specific assumptions, even if they had some toggling, and if you needed something that worked by different assumptions, or overlapped more, you were back to building your own. Hero goes farther in this direction, trying to make the build bits as atomic as it can, but even there there are always arguments that even those bits make assumptions themselves. And so it goes). That said, I think there's something to be said for both approaches; a core system designed to have dedicated subsystems made for it can make for a better fit sometimes than one that has a more generic subsystem maker attached. Its just more work, and gives you less guidance, so for most people there's a tradeoff.

Well, far as I can tell, yeah. I don't think the basic rules are any bigger than they've been for years; the book's main thrust was to gather subsystems and optional rules all in one place, from what I can tell listening to Jason on it.

Consider that its got the core mechanics, two magic systems, a set of mutation rules, a set of super power rules, and a lot of optional rules derived from RQ and other sources, how could it _not_ be on that scale?

It includes most of the most useful subsystems from the past 30 years of BRP games; its not just the core system. That's the whole _point_ in the new book.

Ah. Thanks, Jason.

But that is an issue for those wanting a high-magic system. I'm not particularly convinced this is true when compared to many post 4th level spells, honestly. The limitation usually is the fact that there's a functional cap on most rune magic in that there's no fixed power spells about 3 points; that means unless you're writing your rune magic to no common standard, there's a cap beyond how powerful a rune spell can go, and given that the exemplars here tend to be things like Slay Living (its been a while so I may be confusing the name with a spell from another system--the spell that's usually only reusable by Humakti in Glorantha) or Sunspear, those are functionally the top end of the power level, and those aren't compareable to 6th or higher level spells in D&D, or some of the more potent magic that can be found in other systems. Well, at least part of that discussion seemed to be discussing the absolute power of the magic systems available, so I still felt it appropriate to comment.

It didn't actually have an advantage system, justa disadvantage one, and it was only relevant in terms of the pool of super power purchase points. Even in Superworld, attributes defaulted as rolled; there was an optional point buy system, but that was true in RQ3 too, far as it goes. However, in general, any reference to Superworld is going to be moot for most people as its been out of print so long. While some issues of presentation can help, I think you're going to only get so far because, bluntly, BRP _isn't_ a game suited to many of those people. As I was trying to note, there are perfectly legitimate desires many of them have that BRP just doesn't supply. That doesn't mean it isn't a valid design, just that sensibilities have moved on in what's desirable.

Then you presumably don't care why the game isn't as popular as it could be, which was the topic of the thread. Lose the chip off your shoulder.

Pretty straightforward then, and much like the optional character gen in RQ3. Yeah, I'd figure that was probably the case since it was derived from Superworld.

The problem is to those people those _are_ essentials; that BRP doesn't have them _does_ make it more limited. Whether that's desireble to other people doesn't change the fact that's one of their needs.

There are two problems with divine magic in the paradigm of people who come from broad, high powered magic systems. 1. It's narrow. Even a rune priest with a large amount of rune magic doesn't typically have a wide range of it, because that usually requires access to multiple cults, and that's anything but typical; its often in practice impossible to combine some spell access options in some settings (as an example, a Gloranthan priest is, for self-evident reasons, going to not be able to access both Lunar and Storm magics in any way that I can think of barring possibly Illumination). 2. Its impressive in its own context, but not in an absolute sense by the standards many people are aware of. Using the most well known example, almost no rune spell compares to anything beyond a 5th level D&D spell, and even those that compare to lower level ones are usually weaker in at least some respect (there's essentially no significant area damage spells for example, and the few that there are have pretty small areas). There are perfectly good reasons why this is the case, but people asked why some people don't like BRP. That's one of the reasons why.