Al.

I wasn't really paying attention but i kinda recall a post on another forum that Newt is on holiday at the moment. So any small wibble in the code running his website might cause it to be down and he's not around to fix it or to explain the situation publically. I'd relax for at least a week and see what happens. Al

IMMO Jason and Sam dropped a bollock on this one. The random and fixed AP scores do not even remotely tally. I am surprised that more house rules for stitching the two together have not been posted here. Al

Top of me head Insane starting equipment rules which actually started as quite a clever high level system and then gets fiddlier and fiddlier before one's eyes Easy, Medium, Hard skills LOTS of extra Lores including 'Area' Lores a la GURPS Adding PenDragon style combat styles (good) as a separate skill for each style (bad) Groovy flavoursome cult writeups replaced by a list of cults each with a list of game terms and not much else. Making Sorcery even more complex (no mean feat) Which is NOT to say that I don't like ANY of the new rules, as some of them are rather good. And the IDEA of giving background info and character gen rules for in and around Dragon Pass is a winner. Al

Ta muchly, saves me the embarassment of posting a table full of typos! Al

In BRP you can have human characters with INT of 5 (by rolling the minimum of 8 and then using the optional rule of transferring 3 points to another characteristic). The discussions on this topic have been many and varied. I shall (unusually for me) resist the temptation to hold forth on my views and why my alternative rule which addresses the same issues is far superior and leave you to trawl through the archives. Its in Elric! as well. If no one else beats me to it I shall post it here at some point this weekend. Al

Mongoose RuneQuest (often abbreviated at RQM) is the one inspired by D&D. The never actually published RuneQuest:Adventures in Glorantha (abbreviated as RQ:Aig) was inspired by GURPS and was much more of a wargame. Amusingly of course D&D3 was massively inspired by RuneQuest. So RQM was inspired by D&D3 was inspired by RQIII was inspired by RQI was inspired by D&D 1st edition. Now I'll go on record as saying that the RQM playests left a bad taste in my mouth, some of their public utterances I find to be arrogant and insulting, I despise Mongoose's publishing strategy and some of their business practices. BUT if you have already found some of their rules to be a good fit for you (and you are happy to play that favourite of BRP sub-games, picking and choosing which rule to take from which game) then I would not let their family history concern you unduly. Al

Our scuttly friends carry their skeletons around on the outside and have molasses-like pseudo-blood. So I'm happy to wear them being signiciantly denser than dull old mammals. Add in the extra legs and something not much longer than a human is tall and I can see it being MUCH more massive. But not THAT MUCH more massive. However tbh I don't quite get the worked example of square-cube Assumption: double length = cube mass Exhibit A length = 6mm, mass = 0.000003kg Exhibit B length = 600mm therefore approx. massb = massa x (lengthb/lengtha)^3 approx = 0.000003 x (600/6)^3 approx = 0.000003 x (100)^3 approx =3 kg 3kg ain't SIZ 55! Where am I going wrong? Al

By a bit of guesstimation. SIZ in BRP is explicitly a measure of mass (the author of BRP's predecessor RuneQuest slapped me down - politely - in a playtest forum and told me so straight) One problem is that SIZ progression is non-linear (I confess I don't quite understand why but wiser people than I have said that otherwise it would just explode out all control) so any equation will be either fairly complex OR only valid for a small range of SIZ values. The other is that density is going to have a BIG impact. For animals no doubt one COULD draw up a chart of SIZ - mass - estimated height/length. 'Simply' (hmmm) plugging in the length of a real world animal with a mass similar to that in the mass column. Al the not very helpful

The cumulative -30% penalty came from Stormbringer I-III and was needed in part I believe because masters (90% or higher with their weapon) could riposte (get a free attack) after a successful Parry. Without that cumulative penalty Mr(s) Master swordsman becomes a veritable one-person killing machine. I agree that the cumulative penalty is a bit of a pain book keeping wise. In PenDragon I give a +/- 5 penalty for superior numbers (so if 6 PCs gang up one poor Giant they gain +25 skill and he suffers -25). Since combat in PenDragon is abstracted to one roll per character this works rather well. I read a set of houserules (hosted on Tal Meta's website IIRC) which introduces the concept of 'tactical advantages' if you have an advantage then your level of success is boosted by 1 (failure to success, success to special and so on) and if you have a disadvantage you drop by 1. I have used this and included superior/inferior numbers as one advantage. (Along with height, attacking from the flank, armed vs. unarmed, shorter weapon vs. longer upclose, longer vs. shorter at range and so on) Or as suggested earlier in the thread just treat the extra ROLLS to hit as advantage enough. Al

Ya see what happens when I forget my emoticons? I assumed that the very tenor of post would shine through as a comedy over reaction. Sorry it fell short. There is a definite art to balancing 'enough skills that the characters can all be interesting' against 'WTF have I got all these irrelevent skills at 01% on my character sheet?' Thelaba's campaign utility model strikes me as being a good starting point. I can see a value in Appraise (groan) for the exact reason you mention; checking how many shekkels to expect from Finbar the Crippled Fence for the emerald flower vase found in the High Priest of Set's bed chamber. Since the heroes do this sort of thing all of the time you COULD call for an Idea roll instead and give them more skill points to put into Weapon skills. If you are going to include skills with no benefit in a fight to the death or for climbing into Temples and nicking the holy gold and ivory could I tempt you to give PCs an extra pool of skillpoints to spend on such 'flavour' skills? That way players who choose to make their PCs a bit more interesting don't then have to roll up a new character each session. And those who wouldn't normally choose to make their character more interesting might be tempted to especially as it won't cost them owt. Could you combine the thoughts on training and healing inbetween episodes? For each wound get back 2 hp naturally and for the rest it costs (100) gold per HP for the apothecary to heal it Then (1000) gold per additional skill check (being a kindhearted old duffer I think I'd just roll for HOW MUCH the skill improved by rather than making this an extra chance to see IF the skill improved) Anything left over gets turned into a temporary bonus to APP (next episode only) as the character has for once got a clean, non-blood or vomit stained jerkin, has had a bath and probably has some tasteless jewellery and/or decorative hangers on of the opposite sex as well - say each (1000) gold unspent gives +1 APP? Al

In the Mouseguard RPG (and maybe Burning Wheel in general, I've only ever played the Mouseguard flavour and have never managed to read through any of the other flavours of BW rules) improving a score requires a certain number of successes and failures (exact number of each escapes me), since players can elect to fail a roll (which CAN then give the GM control of the storyline as well as have immediate game effects) this doesn't make it impossible to raise a skill or trait but can lead to some interesting decisions. Al

Yeah either of those could well apply if you wanted! This one's a matter of gut instinct I reckon. Nowt wrong with your logic, just doesn't quite fit for me. Al

Grrr geek sacrilege 'tis not Law vs Chaos which is the holy influence in MM's writings (the Lawful chaps are just as batshit crazy a the chaotics) its the dear old cosmic balance vs. Law and Chaos which offers attonement. If it helps old Squidface and the rest of Lovecraft's gang are VERY lawful...... Al

The rationale for Int+Pow is certainly sound enough; 'if you are bright enough then you' ll look in the right places and if you're luck enough then you'll be drawn there anyway' or some such. I like Con+Pow partly coz in Ringworld the <word I can't remember but had to do with how high skills could go before specialising> for Perception skills was Con+Pow and partly coz a combination of physical health and spirit seems right to me. Int+Pow means that Wolves (for ex) have worse BASE Perception than humans, which is silly IMMOO. I know any number of very bright people who regularly fail to notice things. Remaining within species one could obviously argue that this is due to them concentrating on acquiring knowledge rather than developing their senses ('allocating skill points to Lores not Perception skills in gamespeak)'. Also (and again of value or not as you see fit) Magic Skills easily fit to a base of Int+Pow in my view and I don't want two categories using the same combination of characteristics. Fair comment I'm not sure that I'd have plucked that out of the ether or tried it if I had not seen it written by someone else! It does WORK quite well as a rule in play though (which is why I kept it) and can be narrated in all kinds of ways. Perhaps the term riposte makes it sound all rather too elegant and lithe but it does get across the game effect. Al

That one is purely a matter of personal taste. My first BRP systems had Agility as a category so that is something which I am comfortable with. I know on in the BRP playtest Jason stated that he had changed 'Agility' to 'Physical' as he had already used the label 'Agility' for the DEX x5% roll. And he had done this as it made more sense to him to have high DEX characters as being more agile with gross-motor rather than fine-motor skills. So you are certainly in good company here. There is certainly a tension between avoiding excessive book keeping and allowing characters to be different. And having too limited a skillset can lead to very samey characters. Or to one's which are too specialised. With a bigger skillset a charcater can be highly skilled at Bargain but not Orate and likewise with a Rapier but not a Great Axe; whilst with a more limited set they are more likely to be EITHER a fighter OR a communicator. Indeed, and you know the needs of you and your players best. I have in the past had a short skill list AND lots of skill points to distribute and to be honest I might as well have given the players all XD&D multi-classed Fighter-Mage-Thieves to play as they all had high values for all possible skills. I chose 21 as the maximum for human scale in BRP (a roll of 18 and then swapping 3 points across from another characteristic). I chose to cap CON as MOST other charcateristics are capped at 21 for MOST species. And some of the uses for the CON roll put in the 'how generally healthy is my character' bracket. The huge escalation of CON values for big beasties just does not sit well with me. And certainly it didn't make sense to ME for CON rolls for normal, mortal beings to not follow the same pattern as most other characteristics (I am quite happy for a Gigantosaur to have a much higher STR and SIZ than a human though!) And that leads me to..... STR includes how much muscle a charcater has and one of the reasons that boxers (other martial arts are available) put on extra muscle mass is to absorb the impact of punches. I wanted to reflect that. I weigh more than many Cruiserweights but I don't kid myself that this mass is anyway near as good at absorbing impact! Putting STR into the HP calculation also stops big beasties losing out over my 'capping CON' rule. If you don't use that rule and if STR and SIZ values are similar then your probably have no use for this one. A fair point. STR already has a massive impact on how much of a combat monster a monster is. I am fairly sure that RQII did just that (POW appeared in most other calculations after all!) I know a few people use this, and it seems like a good rule if you are sticking to BRP's quite simulationist rules AND want PCs to survive (especially given Hyboria's low level of magical healing!) I'm liking Charles Green's 'Mook' Rules and so may not double PCs Hit Points as this combination would seem to favour them rather TOO much. That's not quite what I meant. But I may well nick your translation anyway! Steve posted a suggestion that rather than human characteristics being in the 3d6 range (nominal 'average' of 10) they be in the 3d6+40 range (nominal 'average' of 50) as this would give more room for smaller than human beasties. I like the IDEA (but haven't actually tested it) as it also removes the need to have a characteristic roll. No I wasn't clear was I? I like PCs to have a reasonable chance of success (high skill) rather a low chance of success (low skill) and thus as well as liking higher base skills like to allow more skill points to distribute. I also like to find ways to encourage players to boost skills which are not immediately and obviously useful in an adventure without penalising them. If my players KNOW that there will be a fight scene then its pointless of me to moan that they've all chosen to raise weapon skills. But if they have ONLy raised weapon skills then that does tend to limit the range of their likely responses. My idea is to have 300 points to distribute amongst skills for a profession (as standard) And 300 points to distribute amongst any skills they like (so doubling the CoC standard and for very much the same reasons you stated I don't want all members of a profession to be clones and I don't want a hackneyed mix of character professions in order to have a decent range of competence) And finally 300 points to be spent on non-combat-type skills as I say I want PCs to have a reasonable skill level in Art (Gourmet) or Etiquette (Ewok) without them having to have had sacrificed any chance of surviving a fight to do so That is undoubtedly THE simplest implementation. And one which I used for a while until Rosen's constant reminders of the value of Specials in making combats more interesting sank in. No reason why you should share my late conversion though! You take that back this instant! I agree with a lot of that. For the sake of completeness I have to point out that of course RQIII had half dice to roll as damage bonuses for thrown and missile weapons as well. Some players do of course just LOVE to roll buckets of dice There is much sense in that. I like to differentiate weapons by their damage on a special and the fiddly differences between weapons can be a bit silly. My comment was really laziness for all of their faults I have (rather sadly) internalised most BRP weapon damage and can pull them out my brain at a moments notice. Using another set of values require some effort! The one I nicked (again from a translated French language set of rules for Conan BRP somewhere on t'internet) is to allow anyone with a Shield a free riposte upon a successful parry (whilst someone with two 1 handed weapons needs to roll a Special parry and one armed with but a single weapon requires a Critical parry - to really complicate things I occasionally allow a weapon master to riposte on any parry regardless of weapon a la SBIII) Or simple allow anyone with a Shield a free extra Parry at full skill. I've never fully modelled the difference between Blocks (shields) and Parrys (weapons and body movement) That's actually even better. If no PC Sorcerers then you are free to do what you want with NPC magic and make it as nasty as you want without worrying about any numbers to back it up. Atmosphere can be king. Don't know. I am very ambivalent about capping skills (probably my experience with Elric! showing) My most common middle ground is that Every Profession has a most important skill, and this is not a weapon skill*. Players may boost that as high as they have skill points to allocate. However all others are capped at 75% if they can be raised by experience or 100% if they can only be raised by study. Likewise Al * Ride for a Cavalryman, Tactics for a Soldier, Credit for a Noble, Animal Lore for a Hunter and so on

I like the improve the skills which you used model (partly as I came to BRP from Dragon Warriors, and in that game my Sorcerer would regularly run out of magic points, draw his sword and gain most his experience points from using that - at great personal risk as he wasn't very good with it! - and then when he rose in Rank his fighting abilities were unchanged but he magically, ahem, knew some new spells; which made no sense) I've never seen the golf bag of weapons issue, partly the loss of DEX ranks or strike ranks to change weapons makes this a really risky strategy and partly in MOST BRP games starting chances with weapons are low and its a real risk to drop back from Dave Danger to Karl Klutz against ANY foe. That being said one could certainly cap the number of improvement rolls (but what to use as the cap? a flat value? character's Int to reflect ability to learn? character's Pow to reflict desire to learn and discourage people swapping all their Pow for magical advantage? or APP to stop peeps using it as the dump characteristic? ) I have used ticks for successful use and crosses for Criticals or Fumbles with a X allowing an automatic increase. Of course that actually makes the system MORE generous which may well not suit you! Al

SBIII is NOT one of the worst BRP roleplaying games ever. It is a work of flawed genius (nothing to do with me looking back at it with indulgent nostalgia and rose-tinted glasses and forgetting all the little bits which REALLY annoyed when I ran and played it!) Of course I don't mind you commenting on my comments, that would be insane and grossly hypocritical. But I do mind you apologising about translation from French. You are doing us all the enormous courtesy of translating your ideas and posting them here. I can see nothing for you to apologise about. I only raised the FOR/STR issue as I wanted to make sure that it meant what I thought it meant. Will have a proper look through your post and get back to you in more detail tonight. Al

'tis in LoN as well (p 69 in my GW published all-in-one version) Al

As good as anything else d100 I've seen. Personal Foibles Personally I'd have done the following make base chances higher i.e. Combat = Dex+Str not (Dex+Str)/2 make Manipulation Dex+Int not Dex+Pow make Perception Con+Pow not Int+Pow call Prowess 'Agility' - as an aside presumably FOR is STR in French? give serious though to thinning down the skill list still further (my working hypothesis is 1 skill per old-school category and then any skills which currently have specialisations as extras) Roll characteristics as 3d6 treating any die roll of a '1' as being a '2' Cap CON at 21 Include STR in the Hit Point calculation Maybe use Steve Davies (not the Steve Davies obviously) idea of 40+3d6 for human scores which then throws out everything written above this point. Give 300 points for Professional skills Give 300 points for Skills with no combat application (i.e. Alertness might be used in combat and so does not count) Give 300 points to be alllocated as desired Simplify Special and Critical calculations (1/2 skill and 1/10th skill since you ask) Stick to previous weapon damages Use the Magic rules from BRP RAW but include something NASTY (i.e. lose 1 Con or 1 Pow or for the really generous only 1 Power Point permanently when casting any spell) to dissuade the goodhearted from working any kind of magic and provide a game rationale for baddies doing dastardly things to regain power) But all of that would be inflicting my houserules on you and moulding your game to the one which I want to play. On top of which no doubt things like the new weapon damage chart have come about through your group's playing and fit you and your players. I can't see anything in that lot which is awful or any kind of showstopper. Al

Agreed. Good ol' D6 Star Wars explicitly stated that Persuasion skills NEVER work on PCs. Players retain free will of what their characters do. And quite right too.

Hey I remember that, with rules for being overweight and gaining (Con or Str? can't remember) or underweight and gaining Dex. Are you intending to roll/generate ISHO and each colour then? For myself I'd roll/generate once and then swap (maybe rather than between POW/ISHO and Colour between Colour scores - each of which starts at same score as POW/ISHO?) Although if you are using SBI-III as a base then following my recent experiments with randomising everything I'm quite tempted by the idea of a bunch of colour rolls as well. Al

The BRP equivalent to XD&D's Sense Motive is Insight. And that makes sense for seeing through lies. I'd agree that a skilled Fast Talker ("never bullshit a bullshitter....") could use that to oppose rather than Insight. I'm stuck to standards from my first ever BRP game and so use Persuade as a meta-skill for all Persuadey skills a la SBIII Al

Plus one As a sort of aside Mouseguard uses the smallest font size known to man (or Mouse) and has fairly minimal stats to be shown on the character sheet and thus is able to fit tables and procedures for MOST of the rules on the (double-sided) character sheet. Al

The core of BRP is that competence in a skill is based purely off the % in that skill. Which is why it is very difficult to fit talents/edges/boosts/blah blahs in elegantly. Simply doubling base score for Technical skills (or is the base 01 - I don't have my book with - in which case that idea is tosh) or insisting that the +20% to X skills be spent on Technical skills fit in most comfortably with the meta-rules. I like the free level of success idea and have used it to differentiate named characters from grunts in BRP games. It works well but has a BIG impact, may not do what you wish and is not even close to canon. Al

In MOST cases STR is a pretty good indicature of SIZ anyway (especially SIZ as written as a mesure of mass, rather than SIZ as interpolated as a woolly indicator of length/height) Could you not stick to POW. Have Colour equal to POW but provide the OPTION for players of swapping points between the two? Al