Chaot

What about having the group of mystics starting out aligned with the balance, but over a generation or so, drift towards law. Suddenly it was not enough to preserve the creatures, but they needed to be the finest specimens. Then that wasn't enough either. The lawful monks began bending their considerable mental powers towards he creatures, molding them to their own standard of perfection. It is then that the mentalists realize that their brothers and sisters do not yet meet perfection and they start in on each other and their is eventually a slaughter at the monastery. The few survivors, forever changed, join their place amongst the creatures of the ark. Now, many generations later, the things are stirring. Strange dreams afflict those who live nearby. The lesser creatures have awakened and are hungry. It is a matter of time until the two or three surviving mentalists rise from their stupor. For the sake of all that is sane and natural, the mystics must remain in slumber!

I think I'll use this thread as a brainstorming/prep work area. The start date is not set yet. I'm finishing up a masters and have too many job obligations right not to make time for gaming. I expect the game to be rolling March/April. This leaves plenty of time to fiddle with stuff. Player's resources. Magic World, Authentic Sorcery and Enlightened Magic. They can also use parts of The Green, Dragon Lines and Lords of Tarsa (it feels like I had one more in here, but I'm coming up blank). I'm likely to substitute out the magic systems present in The Green and Lords of Tarsa for ones present in MW, AS and EM. If tooley1chris' book comes out between now and then, enchantments and alchemy will go in. I have a couple of other homebrewed cultures the players can choose from. They can also come up with their own nations. Things will be left loose on purpose. I want to let players have as much input as they feel comfortable with and have a host of options available if they just want to pick something. In prep, I want to go through the items and prepare quick blurbs for the players. They can choose from the blurbs and dig deeper if they wish. I'm also going to prep magic system cheat sheets. The magic cheat sheets are something I've wanted to do for a while anyway. Play will take place on the boarders of a devastated empire. Once thriving, it fell to calamitous magic, an incursion of demons and it's shadows are haunted by passages to the fae. It is now populated by survivors, opportunists, criminals, petty warlords and wizards gone rogue from the mage's guild. This will be the first time in ten years (I think) in which I haven't run a human-centric game. All cultures are on the table here. Player's will be encouraged to come up with additional background information. So what's the point of this thread? It's for me to brainstorm and for anyone else to throw out ideas as they occur to them. I'll be posting stuff here as I go. Probably not really heavy systems stuff like the magic cheat sheets, but supplementary stuff I come up with will likely land here.

One of the systems that uses this dice trick is Unknown Armies. They get around the low damage crits by making any successful doubles rolled be critical successes and any failed doubles rolled be critical failures. They also have a funky trick where you can flip the ones and the tens place on occasion to turn a failure into a success. I love Unknown Armies, but one of the reasons I love BRP is that it runs silently. All the dice tricks in UA are a bit too much in my face.

That sounds very excellent.

Some quick responses. I did indeed pick up RQ6. It's a great book. I'm hearing rumors that Classic Fantasy RQ6 is on it's way soon. If this is true I'm very excited!

I think that would work great for an automated system or even a group that are a bit more mathematically mentally quick than I am. Applying various bonuses and then multiplying them is out of my league. An easy dice trick, if you want to get rid of the damage roll, is to add up the tens and ones for the attack roll to determine damage. If I hit with a roll of 73 that's ten points of damage. If I hit with a 23 that's 5 points of damage.

I think it only requires a slight shift in perspective. Often players are conditioned to hit the nails with their hammers. The trick now becomes staying ahead of the crushing boulder while the GM hints at Watchers and Ultimate Nulifiers.... or something.

I tend to do a quick zombie when I take the kids out trick or treating, which is what I did again this year.

Little thread necromancy here. I haven't played in a little while because a new job has taken all of my time. However, I'm itching to do a little something with Magic World and since I'm chronically unable to run something directly without dabbling I've got a new scheme. I've used Brawn and Finesse to determine damage bonus now for a while and it works well. I've taken Combat Styles from RQ6 and think they're the bee's knees. I still want to deemphasize the weapons the PC is using and tie it more to ability. So I'm thinking about adding a Prowess skill. Weapon Skill (05%) This skill measures how proficient you are using a given weapon or combat style. It applies to technique and form and shows how proficient you are in combat with the weapon. This is the skill used when rolling attack/parry. Prowess (05%) This skill is an overall rating of your effectiveness on the field of battle. It rates your ability to wade into battle and cause damage to your enemies. This skill partly determines the amount of damage you do in combat. 1-60% - 1d4 61-90% - 1d6 91-120% - 1d8 121-150% - 1d10 151-180% - 1d12 So now there are three factors that affect combat. The first is tied to Stats, with the Brawn/Finesse damage bonus. The second is the Prowess skill, which sets the damage you do. The third is Weapon skill, which determines whether you hit or not. Thoughts? I'm looking forward to testing it to see how it holds up at the table.

Elric! and Corum, how I love thee.

Oh neat. I need to get this.

If you want your PC to dance with gnarly-hotep you have to figure out why the PCs don't get squished. This could boil down to temperament, hidden knowledge, rules and limits the big bad live by, weaknesses, strengths, obligations, alliances or something else. These things can be intellectual, social, physical or magical in nature. The PCs should have one or two tricks that are secret from the big bad that let them get away once. After that, play should revolve around the PCs gaining another trick or two for the next encounter. Big bads with godlike resources have secret agendas too, as well as many irons in the fire. Some of the PCs interactions can be through flunkies of the big bads, or with rivals of the big bads. You might want to let the PCs have some sort of Fate point system to give them a little mechanical freedom. Be careful about rolling the dice too often, this can kill an otherwise well organized plan. Allow enough randomness to make it interesting but if the PCs come up with something clever, let them run with it.

Not all the Hobbits, good Atgxtg. The way I've outlined it, this whole thing only kicks in for PCs, and even then only when there's a large disparity between creatures played. The points distributed are different if the 'most powerful' creature is an elf or if it's a giant. As far as how it affects the discrepancy of skill levels in the group, it seems like a fair trade off to me. One PC has a special ability of higher stats and the other has increased skill level. I've run for PCs with a wide range of skill before and I find it easier to let the PCs do the work. The PCs should know their relative effectiveness in the party, even if it's just a vague 'That PC likes to mix it up in combat more than me and is a bit of a bruiser. I'll run support." Regardless, when I have an encounter ready it will have a range of toughness. I describe the opponents, giving hints or flat out telling the PCs who's tough and who's weak, and the PCs design their strategy from there. When the question of 'why should I play a halfling when he gets to play a giant?' arises, the answer is generally 'because you want to play a halfling.' All that this system does is recognize that there is as difference of power level between a halfling and a giant and gives the halfling a few extra skill points in compensation. This isn't a universal equality mechanic, it's a It's also a way for the player to hear that they matter, and it would be a way for me to get them to shut up and let me start the game! It also assumes some things about play. A lot of people prefer BRP when the skill levels are low. Some versions of the game cap skill levels at 100%. I'm of the tradition of high skill levels for beginning characters so the extra skill points are a nice addition in my game that doesn't swing the power level too far. For games where this is a bigger difference, or where the GM doesn't like the idea of extra skill points, you could easily substitute a special ability or special item. Whatever meshes with your gameplay. Remember, my thought was that you don't bother balancing all of the creatures, but give them a generic rating. You only need to give some points if it's necessary, like the extreme giant and halfling issue. I think the bottom line is, both sides of this discussion are correct. BRP creatures don't need to be 'balanced' for play and BRP creatures could be more 'balanced' for play. I don't see the question as, "should I or should I not?", but rather, "if I were going to, how would I go about it?".

So good. Very very good. I have a deep love for T&T.

I love that you call them underwhelming and yet you've generated more hard content than I have in the last, what, year? than I have in the past ten.

Charles Green published a little system in Gods of Law and later updated it in Dragon Lines that changed the way I run NPCs. His minion rules (and to an extent his genre guidelines) made me realize that I was over prepping and also maybe focusing on the wrong thing during game prep. My current stat block for NPCS generally look like this Skill %, Skill %, Skill %, Dex, Attack/Damage, Armor/Hitpoints, [MP, Spell] Anything else I can fill in during play as I need it.

That's the crux of the biscuit. I'd eyeball. How many advantages does the one race have over the other? How significant is each advantage, a little, middling, or significant? Assign bonus points (or penalize points) accordingly. 20, 40 and 60 depending on advantage (I'd probably do 30, 60, 90 but I like high skill points).

If I were going to even out the PC culture options I think what I would do is put a stat comparison together with Human as a base line. I'd rate them in simple terms, looking specifically at how far outside the norm the other beings fall in comparison to humans. Then I would adjust 'starting' skill points accordingly (and Fate points if that's something you want to include). I wouldn't worry about coming up with complex skill advancement schemes because it's just one more thing you have to worry about at the table. One thing that I feel would be good to throw out there in this discussion is the mp rule from Gods of Law. It boils down to a PC can use mp as Fate points. It nicely lets non magic using PCs find a sort of balance with PCs that do use magic.

I think it would be neat to use the Demon Summoning rules to do this sort of thing. Scaling up the Rune rules might also be an option to explore.

If I remember right, the limits of those three things are porous though. Invisibility or flight can be achieved by mucking with the aspects. For example, plane shifting is great for invisibility. Flight can be tied to plane shifting or mechanics, depending on how it's written up.

Sadly I don't think there was ever a pdf of Corum distributed. It's the one rpg book that I have two copies of because 1) it's a wonderful book and 2) I figured with it's limited run the info it contained might disappear one day. Best to have a second copy, just in case.

Most of my games tend to be human centric, however there is often a wide range of 'power level' amongst the PCs. If we break down the system like this, Stats, Skills, Special Abilities. These are the three mechanical aspects that we can adjust to make everybody happy. In general, I think Skills are more helpful than Stats. Special Abilities is a wild card and can range from minor to insanely powerful (think Fate point to Demon Weapon range). We could sit down and try to balance these out so that all is equal, but for me that way lies madness. Instead I think it's more important to gauge whether the imbalance bothers the Players. If it does, something needs to be adjusted. My rules are 1) don't punish fun and 2) figure out what the Player wants their ideal character to be. When you identify specific problems, make the changes that you need to so that everyone is happy. So, say you've got a combat monster. This isn't bad by itself. It can be fun to have a bruiser or two on a team with folks who don't pack as big of a punch. The key is to make sure that the others can do something. When you run your scene, make sure there's a range of things that need to get done. Stagger your opponent's effectiveness. Build in secondary and tertiary objectives. If this doesn't work, sit with the Players and ask how they want to tweak the characters. One of BRP's strengths is it's flexibility. If the PCs agree that one or two members are underpowered in some way, tie in a special ability or two. This could be as simple as giving a character extra Fate points or it could mean setting up some power system, magic or special items. I think that players start talking about game balance because they feel their in game actions are being overshadowed by others.

Oh, also note that while I tried to slave my examples to old D&D modules, you might want to look towards different formats. One that I really like is how they wrote up material in the MERPS supplements. Whatever does it best for you. Don't feel tied to a format that you don't like.

Been very busy, but I needed to procrastinate on a project so I did a little mock up. Nothing anywhere complete. The text page that I posted still needs a lot of work. I posted anyway because the text is justified and plays a little with fonts. Also, take a look at this segment from Lost City. It's a style thing, but Lost City definitely goes for sparsity of scene description. When I use these fantastic side treks you've put together, I'm going to be riffing on the interactions rather than reading them. Keep up the great work! I haven't had a chance to read you new one but I'm looking forward to it.