Nightshade

When I mentioned BRP in passing over there, one of the developers mentioned that at some point here its going to have support for BRP, but he didn't give a timeline.

Its a good program in general, and one of the better ones for getting into the guts and editing for house rules and the like, though like most such things, the more radical the change the more work it is. The M&M version is excellent.

They aren't necessarily contradictory; in some versions of RQ, it was pretty much like Solkass says; racial maximum was an absolute maximum (the 21 for humans) but individuals could be limited lower; half again for Dex and App, the highest of Str, Con and Siz rolled for Str and Con.

I just wish they had listed what's assumed to be the standard for racial maximums for nonhumans.

I can accept that a long bow takes a full combat round to release an arrow at normal accuracy, but I can't accept that it takes 24 seconds to fire and chamber a new round with a bolt-action rifle at normal accuracy without any special attention paid to aiming. Well-trained soldiers could fire muskets at a higher rate of fire than amounts to roughly 2 rounds per minute.

The problem is that, like most games, BRP is generally pretty kind to the accuracy of in-combat ranged weapons fire; a rifleman who actually hit an opposing target 50% of the time (barring some special cases with sniper fire) is an astounding level of skill in the real world, let alone the same issue with handgun fire (the typical rounds to target in police related fire fights has been estimated at 1 in 6).

So if you up the rate of fire without applying much more severe penalties for the situations in combat than BRP does, you effectively make things unrealistically lethal, via realistic rates of fire and unrealistic levels of accuracy. But if you do things to correct the accuracy, you spend a lot of time slinging dice around to no real purpose, since most shots will miss.

RQ3 uses hit locations - so when you grapple someone, you only grapple that hit location. The danger of grappling an armed man is he can still attack you with his other arm, or leg, or whatever. Trouble is when you remove hit locations from the equation, it's harder to model this.

The problem is that one of the manuevers for a following round allows you to immobilize the target (basically controlling his torso). So the procedure goes like this:

1. Round one: initiate the grapple. If you're good with it, the only useful defense is Dodging or a grapple parry, since any other defense just changes the nature of the initial grapple, not its general success. You're still vulnerable to attack for the following round, but the rules don't actually put you at a penalty to dodging, and it isn't even clear at this point you can't parry (note that there's contradictory statements about how many hands are involved). Even if you couldn't defend, if you're well armored one round's worth of potential hit isn't necessarily that problematic.

2. Round two: You make the second grapple roll, then the STR vs. STR roll to immobilize the target. At this point nothing but grapple parry helps (since you've already got a hold) and by a strict reading of the rules, not even that may (its not actually mentioned). The STR versus STR roll is another point of failure, but again, contrast a couple of tries at this with trying to put down, say, another armored opponent with a weapon.

3. Round three plus: the target is immobilized with no obvious rules for escaping (except, perhaps a grapple roll of his own, and even that perhaps (the note about "if two hands are free" seems to imply not). The attacker is presumably tied up doing this, but if he's got a friend, at this point the target is easy meat for a coup de grace.

Rinse, repeat. The only real defense against this seems to be to give all serious opponents (who aren't too strong for it to be practical) high levels of Grapple skill.

Addendum: and not to forget, a special or critical grappling roll allows you to do this in one round.

I can check the RQ3 one myself (and should) but I know there wasn't as much detail, so I wasn't sure it was applicable.

Part of the issue is that there probably should be some risks to trying to grapple an armed man, and other than simple failure, there isn't. But part of that is probably opening a bigger can of worms than we care to.

As you note, with good skill this could take a long time.

We're considering a number of house rules here (because it became obvious that this was a little too reliable a way to disable someone and keep them disabled) but I'm trying to make sure we didn't miss something. The problem with the opposed grapple roll is that, frankly, most people, even most combatants, aren't going to have much grapple skill, and if ties go to the guy controlling the grapple--well, we're back to situation A here.

The problem seems to be that other than the extra time to set it up, there's little downside to attempting a grapple, and for a character set up for it (high Grapple skill and a good strength) it seems a rather reliable process.

First, I'd like to state that I actually like the BRP grappling system in the rough; it appears to have tried to make it both useful and not overpowered in a way that isn't common in RPGs.

Unfortunately, an experience last session seems to indicate that either it failed, or we're missing something.

The problem seems to be that once you've successfully immobilized (which requires essentially two rounds of successful grappling, and a STR versus STR check) there's no obvious way for the target to ever escape. Some of the other grapple results are similar. There are other problems (like some apparently confusing references to whether it needs two hands or not).

Thoughts?

(If this is a little incoherent its the consequence of waiting a week to post this...)

That's a rather big negative though, given the range of Physical skills.

The problem is that other than the things that mismatch between their physilogy and most of the rest of Pandora's fauna, I'm not seeing much that doesn't make sense about them. There's nothing there that doesn't seem reasonable given what else we've seen. It honestly seems the objection is based more on them resembling some ideal that people are finding annoying than anything coherent I've seen in objecting to them on their own merits (there are some things you can object to on a purely hard-SF grounds perhaps, but its not a purely hard-SF movie).

I don't think its Cameron's job to make avoid making his world serve its purpose just because its also the way some people mistake the real world as working. In fact, setting up his world so he shows you how it does work when he wanted to do that is the honest way to do it.

I don't think I entirely agree; its better to see Strength as the degree of Strength proportionate to his Size. Otherwise the tendency to have them semi-lockstep as is the case with most creatures is kind of odd.

Exactly! The image your average "spiritual" housewife has of tribal peoples, which couldn't be further from anthropological reality. Heck, even the Ewoks made more ethnographic sense! The Na'vi suck and so does their planet and if some idiot GM would present me with them in a game I'd have trouble refraining myself from trying to destroy them . (I have the same gut reaction to elves, by the way.)

I have to disagree somewhat; given context, the Nav'i make perfectly good sense given they have a planet with a collective mind that they can converse with. Its just a mistke to read that as any kind of useful comment on our own planetary habits, since neither of those statements are true there.

There is a lot of truth to that statement. I recently started up a Pendragon (BRP realted RPG) campaign. About half of my players have played the game before and the rest are new to the game. Character creation took a lot longer than I expected. Surprisingly,it wasn't the newbies who were slowing things down. They went through things fairly quickly. The experienced players, however, took a lot longer, as they were very finicky in spending their skill points. They spent quite some time moving points back and forth, debating on if a 5% difference in Faerie Lore, Folk Lore, Awareness, Flirting or Hunting would be critical to their characters.

It was ironic that in the end the inexperienced players ended up covering some things that the "old pros" failed to consider.

This is always an issue with even partial build systems; in the hands of the decisive, they can be very quick, in the indecisive very slow. Its why you get such radically different ideas of how long character generation in games like Hero is from talking to different people.

Indeed. Just look at our own planet 65 million years ago. It had a very nasty range of deadly predators too.

In fact, I've commented that Pandora clearly has a biosphere much more like prehistoric Earth than the modern world in its general level of fucundity, and that tends to support a large predator population better.

Started in 1978/9 myself with the blue box Basic D&D and B1 In Search of the Unknown. Shortly thereafter it was AD&D,

Top Secret, Gamma World, Gangbusters and Boot Hill.

I also still own this, complete with dice and miniature:

Ian

So do I, along with its SF companion, Space Smuggler.

solves those problems. But the reputations of rpgs are pretty fixed. And, lets face it, making a character in BRP is time-consuming and thought-consuming. Especially if you are new to it. There needs to be some more stream-lining, for starters.

While I don't necessarily disagree, compared to what? The basic version of BRP characters doesn't seem any more time consuming than is typical for the market; you roll up the attributes, distribute two pools of skill points, modify a few skills based on orientation, and that's it. It might be a bit more complicated than D&D 4e, but that's not the whole gaming market and I'm not sure that level of simplicity is a pool useful to fish in.

Ah. I didn't see any actual reference to the star system in the movie; must have missed it.

Steve's personal and professional life have been a bit up and down, and I suspect he simply can't motivate himself to do the work on SPQR that it needs. It also doesn't help that the local game groups vary considerably in their appreciation of BRP style systems, so getting things properly playtested locally would be a challenge.

From an RPG point of view Avatar is a mix of Hard SF & Space Opera elements.

1. Explicitly STL travel

Was it explicit? It clearly took a long time, but a "slow" FTL travel could do that depending on the distance (10x speed of light still takes years if you're anything but pretty close, for example).

Three things came very prominently to mind as I watched the film - Jorune, Andre Norton's Janus and LeGuins "the Word for World is Forest". Some of the stuff in the film is scarily like how I tend to run Jorune's isho and the Glispeen...

Now, Pandora is NOT, exactly, any of those worlds: but there are a lot of parallels and in particular the story has a LOT of similarities to the Norton and LeGuin stories - but then, Cameron's never been a hugely original story teller. The LeGuin story is (by her own admission) very much influenced by the war in Vietnam (during which it was written) - but it too in the end is about wider issues of economic and cultural imperialism...

Nick

The nature of Pandora itself also made me think more than a bit of Planet from the Alpha Centuri computer game...

Most of the politicising of the film is also coming from people who have not seen the film and seem to have some basic misconceptions about it. I really can't see how one could have political leanings for the violent exploitation of a pristine natural environment and its relatively defenceless inhabitants. Is there some way in which personal beliefs can make this seem a good thing to do?

My advice is - go see it and then make up your mind, or don't see it but don't then try to interpret it based on some preview clips and other people's opinions.

I've seen it twice. The ecological grandstanding faintly annoyed me the first time (mostly because its set up to be lopsided; the Pandorans have an enormous set of advantages in being ecologically balanced), but then I shrugged and moved on, and since I was ready for it the second time, it didn't bother me at all, and I enjoyed the movie more.

I do have to say people who think it was badly acted or written (with the somewhat trite plot) were apparently watching a different movie than I was.

For the record, I didn't think that I would enjoy the film much going in, it was something to do on an otherwise unoccupied Saturday afternoon. But I really have nothing bad to say about it, having seen it. I spent about three hours being thoroughly entertained for a reasonable sum of money.

To get back to the setting ...

This is a good way to get a BRP science fiction game going without writing lots of additional rules, much like the original Future World. I personally prefer SF settings slightly more removed from the real world, but that's just me.

Well, that's one of the things I liked about it; it didn't require fooling with spacecraft or psionics, just a bit of advanced technology.

Hmmm, having actually seen the film I might comment on what it contains.

If you look at in terms of "good" and "bad", the mining company, or rather its representative, is a corporate bad-guy as is the commander of the mercenaries. They have a clear objective in the film and want to achieve this, on the whole, without violence. However, things are taken to the extreme and get out of control, but in a realistic and believable way.

The film isn't about the evil military killing defenceles aliens, far from it. Man for man, the aliens far outclass the humans and are not afraid of showing it, which is why the military reponse needs to be heavy or extreme. There is a tactical response that itself causes a counter-response and subsequent escalation.

In many respects, it is like Dancing With Wolves, in that a military man finds peace in another environment.

But enough of defending the film. Anyone who is anti-Avatar won't want to see it and fans of Sci-Fi and fantasy will go to see it anyway. Anyone else should watch it because it is really good. If you have the choice, watch it in 3D as it is the best 3D film I have seen.

Yeah. Its really not that simplistic. Even the corporate head has an expression at one point that indicates he may think things have gotten out of control. The only pretty much unmitigated villain in the piece (and even he's depicted as personally brave) is the military commander, and that's part of what drives the movie; he's let his antagonistic relationship with Pandora get a hold of him. Some of the soldiers even mention early on that working for the company isn't like working for the government; its just being mercs, but the money is good.

So people are projecting considerably more on the movie than what's said. It does have a blunt-hammer ecological message, and some comments about the rights of indigeonous people over colonial types, but that's about it.

I kind of disagree with some people. While the ecological message was done with the subtly of a hammer (and ignores the fact the natives of Pandora have an overwhelming couple of benefits compared with Terrans in "acting right" in this context), and the plot wasn't original, I thought the story pacing and most of the acting was excellent; in particular I liked the male lead in Terminator 4 and liked him here too.

Oh, and Vile? There's two issues in answer to your question:

1. Earth doesn't have FTL travel, so its probably going to be a good dozen years or more before they could find out what's happened, make up their minds what to do, and then turn around and get back here. This gives Sully and the others time to figure out the next thing;

2. While Earth is apparently middlin' screwed up, what the out-of-sight, out-of-mind corporation could do without direct supervision, and what they could get authorized to do on a bigger scale are--somewhat different. Note they had exceeded what they were authorized on as it was (without blowing the plot, note the somewhat improvised nature of the last part of this).

This doesn't mean there couldn't be further problems, but they aren't likely to be on that scale, and it requires a lot of resource investment that Earth probably just doesn't want to spare, the value of unobtanium notwithstanding.

Fantasy rules, Science Fiction rules, and Historical rules should be seperate volumes. I'd buy the historical rules in a heartbeat and I suspect quite a few

This suffers from the problem it always has; people who want things that overlap object to rebuying the same rules. Often they object quite a lot. Its not a coincidence its a model that's largely faded from view with games that share a core system.