Nightshade

You can chose to not believe I've encountered large numbers of GURPS and Hero players who play for the system as you like, but at that point you've effectively said I'm a liar and any conversation between the two of us is pointless. The difference is, I'm not doing that to you; all you've said is why you have played those games. My statement is that if you take both of us in good faith, your statement is less relevant than mine, because yours involves smaller numbers. If you don't take us in good faith, anything we say is irrelevant both to us and anyone else. Past that, if you provable statements are the only evidence you want, no one can bring anything to this, because provable reasons people buy games are not available to anyone. So basically it looks to me like you're either using a double standard, or just holding your own statements up as a higher value. In either case, I'd rethink your position or ask yourself why you get in a discussion about this sort of topic at all.

I don't think that matters, really; it just changes the question of what "power" means. Even if its the only healing magic in the game, players are not going to go to too much work for something that heals a D6 hit points; they'll either work around needing to do it, or find some other method depending. It'll sometimes be valuable for things that are qualitatively impossible in other ways, but at that point the effect is powerful in any meaningful way.

What I meant was that they effectively were selling Glorantha to a big part of their fanbase and Fantasy Earth to the others. While this sort of thing can kind of work sometimes it does dilute your product output. I agee about Griffin Island (in fact, I thought it was superior to its predecessor Griffin Mountain), and Vikings was pretty good, I think Land of the Ninja got distinctly mixed reactions at the time, and Monster Coliseum was, as you say, pretty so-so. Given Griffin Island came out pretty late in the day, I'd say that doesn't really contradict my statement; the support products for Fantasy Earth were at best a mixed bag (that even assuming you consider Griffin Island a support product for Fantasy Earth).

Note I've never argued support isn't necessary; I've argued against the idea people buy systems for settings. Those aren't the same statement. If the latter was the case, people would chase a setting across systems without concern for the system its attached to, and that's not been the case to any significant degree in the cases I'm aware of.

1. I'm not required to accept that. 2. You only quoted your personal reasons, not the reasons of other people. I'm doing the latter. Your personal reasons aren't a trend; large numbers of people's reasons are. So have a lot of setting specific systems that had fairly solid support. Some of them resurface from time to time, but when a game keeps crashing and burning, its not a sign that a setting will keep something alive by itself if people don't like the system. But the key is "multiple"; its not any single setting that's necessary, nor is a flagship one.

I don't think that changes Charles point that once it gets more than a little complex, you have to have pretty dramatic benefits to it before people will bother.

Note that there wasn't any one setting that dominated the line, though. I don't think it was as much that as three factors: 1. For the time, the RQ3 books were very expensive, and did not appear of very high quality; Avalon Hill's boxed-set-focus did the game no good here. 2. Some of the changes made simply sat badly with some of the extent fanbase, and RQ was setting specific to a number of people (I wasn't one of them, but the Glorantha fans were heavily ensconced in it). So they'd effectively done the trick TSR did years later of splitting their fanbase. 3. The non-Gloranthan material produced for the game was, on the whole, mediocre to poor. While I don't think setting is the god some people seem to here, I'm not going to claim that supporting material doesn't matter. When you get something like Daughters of Darkness...

However, the offshoots came considerably earlier. And as I noted, Champions didn't have a setting worth mentioning for a long, long time; it was simply a generic superhero game with some villains used for its villain books. Ideally, because they sell in and of themselves. The fact someone picks a game by system doesn't mean they won't buy support for particular genres or settings; it just means that isn't the primary reason they buy it. And I'm not writing off your experience because its just yours; I'm writing it off because of having spent enough time around GURPS and (particularly) Hero fans to know its atypical. There are certainly people who like those game lines because of particular settings for them, but the majority of fans of those games like them because of the system, and any individual setting comes second. And I'm sorry, but I just really can't agree; both of the games I referenced got their foot in the door well before they had any particular "setting" most people would identify; GURPS didn't even have a particular genre it was identified with early on (though it had a few most people didn't think it was ideal for).

I'm sorry, but when you start conflating genres with settings, I really think its more than simple semantics. Given that is the commonly accepted usage of genre, especially in the gaming field, I'm really puzzled why you'd say this. Are superheroes the Wild Cards series or the Super Friends? There's a rather large gap there. Similarly, the style of something like most of the Bond movies and a gritty police adventure vary considerably, and more importantly for this topic, require pretty different kinds of support; the former requires a lot of super gadgets, information about the fantastic organizations involved, and rules for the somewhat over the top action involved, while the latter requires more real-world information about drug gangs, firearms and probably the law. People are just as willing--or not--to run fantasy games in pretty generic settings as they are with superheroes IME; they did it for years in the early days of D&D.

While its true Hero had Champions as its parent, and first played with specialized sub-versions of it (DI, Fantasy Hero, Robot Warriors and others) it wasn't like most of those had much "setting" either; Champions had villain books and some adventures, but nothing like what I think most people are thinking of when they say that settings are what attracted people. I won't disagree that supplimentary material helps, but its wise to remember all the early Champions material that really sold was the equivelent of D&D monster books and about as setting-specific. Now if you want to argue BRP could use more of that, I'll not gainsay you.

That might be a reason to buy GURPS supplements, but it wouldn't keep the core game alive if that was it. Whether your cup of tea or not, I don't have any doubt that most of the people who buy Hero or GURPS do so because they like what the games bring to them systematically. More to the point, it counters the assertion that its settings that sell a game line, because neither game has really had a stand-out setting (unless you perhaps count the Champions Universe for the superhero end at Hero, and that's changed so many times I'm hard pressed to see it as the main draw), yet the two game lines have survived fire and rain. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you aren't the whole market. Neither, of course, am I, but the above two game lines seem to me to be pretty much the poster children for the idea a game system is capable of maintaining a fan base without some strong flagship setting.

Traveller also lost fans every time the system changed (it lost quite a few--or more accurately they didn't leave the old system--when it went to the New Era, but part of that was also setting issues. ) Originally non-RPG settings aren't much of an argument because people were looking for a place to play those settings and were drawn in by not having to do the work. There are people who are drawn to setting rather than rules, but I don't think that's enough to say that settings matter more than rules, or Hero and GURPS would not exist as viable product lines.

The only problem we had with it locally was the combination of it being a Physical skill and, by the book, impacted by armor and other encumbrance; given the values assigned for heavier armor that would have made it require mounted knights to have Riding excessively higher for fighting on it to be viable. If encumbrance (or even just armor encumbrance/penalties) are ignored for this purpose, the other penalties aren't a big deal; in most cases you'd probably get the same or similar penalties on the weapon skills in the same situation anyway.

Well, now that I understand what's happening, the way its currently done isn't that big a deal; it provides a bit of ability to game the system (train up using a lower base weapon and then shift to a higher base one), but the differences aren't so profound its a game-breaker.

That was what I told someone reflexively when I was asked, but once I realized I couldn't find anything that actually said it, figured I'd come and ask here.

Like you said, that's a bit weird, though. Well, I always thought it was sensible that Knowledges didn't improve by experience; after all, you don't learn more about something purely as a knowledge because you remembered the knowledge. Its just that most other skills have at least some elements of technique, and you can refine technique by seeing what works.

There's already a rule about this for general encumbrance, but it doesn't seem to effect the armor penalty specifically.

I'd be just as likely to assume the line you quoted is a cut and paste from an old version of the rules, as the Physical skills note is repeated in a couple places. But as you say, its not particularly clear which to look at, or whether even if it applies to all Physical skills, that effects the weapons cap (which could be based on the normal skill, not the modified). Maybe I should post this and my skill question over on RPG.net; Jason seems to be more active over there than here.

I think there's a tendency for people who don't care about rules to assume no one else does either. But I know plenty of people who will ask about what system a new campaign is going to use well before they ask more than cursory details about the setting.

At best its moved the target recently, but there's still a tendency for some BRP fans to froth at the mouth about D&D and its relatives (or with the RQ grogs to bash Mongoose) and neither of those is a positive element.

Yes, yes, so I don't pay all as much attention to my typing on the Net. Sue me. Yeah, but that's just your tic. There's a fairly common thread of D20 hate or hate for MRQ among BRP fans, and it doesn't actually do anything positive for the system. It would help, certainly.

In particular, the hate-on some BRP people have for D20 based games or, say, MRQ doesn't do the game any good. But more in general, acting like its a desert topping and a floor wax just makes people question whether its good at either. There are a couple of intrinsic limits for BRP that will influence some people's view of it: 1. Its not particularly well suited out of the box to high level play. One of the legitimate objections to how it handles roll-low is that it means you need a considerable number of special rules to deal with hypercompetent characters, some of which don't work all that well together. And that's just in the area of skills. It runs into some of the same problems with actual power that games like GURPS do; its hard to set things up so the system doesn't turn over easily when in high-powered play. 2. On a related issue, it is, on the whole, bloody deadly. The new edition does some things to mitigate this, but its very hard to mess with without getting some odd looking results. This is probably no surprise as its a game that got its start in part as a gritty reaction to D&D, and has made its best going on the rather grim CoC setting, but it doesn't seem to be what a lot of the hobby wants, and it isn't a selling point for it. There are probably fixes for both of these (the full-blown Superworld had some success with the second, though ironically, not so much for the first), but they haven't been explored much because they work against the play ethic of a lot of the extent fanbase.

Armor penalties and other encumbrance (I make the distinction because armor encumbrance isn't factored in, you use the specific armor penalty instead) affects all Physical skills, not just the old list. That's why the issue came up. (And I didn't mean ride was limited to your combat skills, but that combat skills were limited to their own value or ride whichever's lower). I can quite see being in armor or heavy encumbrance having some effect on ride rolls, but if the modified roll is what's used as the weapon limiter, that's a problem.

We've recently discovered a couple of missing or unclear things related to skills and training: 1. How long does it take to train a 0% base skill? There's no apparent discussion of it. 2. There's reference to skills that don't advance by experience in several places, but it tends to reference "skills that don't have a experience box on the character sheet"; the problem is that all skills have a box, except for the entry for the generic header for fill-in-the-blank skills, and the sub entries there all do. Classically RQ3 didn't do advancement with Knowledges/Lores so they're presumably in this category, but what else? Sciences (I can see this both ways)?

In the new BRP campaign that just started this weekend, we notice that if you're using the optional skill base modifiers that there's a conflict in what's listed as the modifier; the skill entry says Communication, but the table and the character sheet say Physical. While I can see an argument for the former, the latter seems the likelier case. Anyone know for sure? Also, given it appears to be physical, do I assume the rule limiting mounted combat to the weapon skill or the Riding skill is talking about the actual skill value, not the modified skill? Otherwise any armored knight is pretty much useless in combat on horseback because of the Physical penalty for his armor.