Nightshade

Two things: 1. That doesn't always work; sometimes high magic units in the board games were individuals. 2. That wouldn't mean anything for the matter at hand, since it _is_ individual power. As to comments others have said; for the most part, it doesn't matter what you _can_ do with the system; of course there's nothing intrinsic in a BRP style approach that prevents a high-magic setting. What matters is what's there already. People tend to forget that most people aren't major league game mechanics; they don't want to have to do system work, and to the degree they will, they don't want to do much. And the _majority_ of BRP magic systems people will have been exposed to aren't high magic, and as such won't have attracted them to it.

Correct. You see some very high magic things on a heroquest type level, but the actual RQ rules don't support that; even higher end sorcery and rune magic wasn't particularly spiff compared to even moderate level D&D spells.

Got just one big question for you at this time, as its been a bit of a sore point in adapting BRP based games to more general use in the past. How did you end up setting up character generation? Some simple build/roll attributes mode and a skill point distribution system? Or something else?

I suspect a combination of issues (including just the lack of broad support from Chaosium) are involved; 1. First off, its fishing in a different pool than D&D; you can view this in a negative light if you want, but D&D players want a particular sort of high magic, generally over the top fantasy, and BRP and its kin have not, generally, supported that very well; its roots in the relatively realistic RQ have pretty much made that true in any version of it I'm familiar with. 2. While the system as a whole is relatively flexible (as in, easy to add and remove modules for) individual games approaches have often been very paroquial with character generation and subsystems designed to support their particular setting and not easily converted to anything not particularly close. 3. Simply presence of undesireable features for some, or lack of desireable features for others. Once you get into people who want advantage/disadvantage system, bell curve resolution, seperate tracks for lethal and nonlethal damage and other properties that either aren't supported by current versions of BRP or would require actively changing the core structures to support, you exclude more people. I'm not getting into an argument about whether the game should, but those _are_ features some demand, and if you don't have them, you've lost those players. Individually, most of this wouldn't screen that many people out, but in combination, its not suprising that by the time its done, the market doesn't have a lot of love for BRP. If it gets proper exposure, the new version could help with some of these, but its not going to do much about the issues in #3, and I suspect it can only do so much about #1.

I believe Jason was who said you could get pretty close to RQ with the right options.

That seemed to be the way it defaults, but apparently if you toggle some of the optional rules it gets awfully close to RQ (I don't know whether that's RQ2 or RQ3, though).