Chaot

It's easier if I mock something up, which I'll have to do later. I think the content is great.

I tool a quick peek at the Marvelous Marvels one this morning. Didn't actually have a chance to read through. But to your questions, the maps are great. I think the success level stuff could work well, but as is it seemed to take up a lot of precious real estate. The layout could use some tweaking as well. If you're interested, I wouldn't mind helping out with the layout. I'm not professional grade, but I'm pretty decent with that stuff. The characterization stuff was great and you are able to set a mood in a very small amount of space. Granted, I've only read up to the water rune, but I think you have a nice touch of the mundane and the bizarre going on.

Fool and his Gold does not seem to be there.

Ah, I see the disconnect. I'm quoting the Magic World book, which does have a few different rules options from the Big Gold Book. The subsystems in Advanced Sorcery can easily be run with the main BRP book but were written with an eye towards the MW flavor. Increasing a stat by way of Resistance Table requires four things be in place. 1. It's a dangerous fight. 2. The opponent has a higher stat then the character trying to increase their stat. 3. The character trying to increase their stat succeeds against the more powerful opponent. 4. The character trying to increase their stat rolls under their species natural maximum for the stat (actually, 21 in the rules as writ. I'm extrapolating a bit when I assert that it would be a roll of 21> for humans and 26> for elves. So the real limiting factor for a powerful mage is finding someone more powerful to beat. Of course, when I really think about it, this whole thing screams Wizards' Duel to me!

As for limiting increase, the rules state that the Pow : Pow (or Int : Int) roll needed to increase the stat has to be in a dangerous situation and against an enemy with a higher stat that the PC. These are pretty limiting factors right there.

Both Int and Pow can be raised via the Resistance Roll as per page 53 in the main rules. As per page 12, both Int and Pow do not have a cap.

I don't bother. For a combat encounter I choose attack %, damage & DB, Hit Points and Dex. Anything else can be derived or made up during play.

While it's not exactly written towards S&S, The Green could be an excellent addition to an S&S game. Dinosaurs, tribes, magic, ancient creatures...

Sounds fantastic and much needed. I did some work on this a few years ago. I would just send you the documents for you to take what you want but I don't seem able to find them. I totally agree with you that simple is best. At one point I was looking at something that was heavy on time and resource management. It felt all wrong and overly complex. If doing it again I would probably look at recipes as spell lists and give them basic requirements. One thing might need common ingredients and a travel alchemical kit. Another might require uncommon or exotic ingredients and maybe a full lab. Another might require a philosopher's stone. I'd also probably build off of the Potions skill. Anyway, I look forward to seeing what you do!

I seem to be adding size points, but mostly around the belly region.

Oh dear... Stoatbringer, it can never be. I'm married to my gaming.

I salute you sir! Thank you very much.

Ha! I say, if you don't mind it in your game, go for it. Talk to your player a little bit more to see what they have in mind and come to some sort of agreement. It sounds like the makings for a great story hook. I assume there aren't a bunch of half vampire children running around. So what was different that spawned the PC?

Howdy all. The link seems to be dead now. Anyone have a copy of this?

It sounds like it would work fine. Out of curiosity, what would you estimate the average skill increase at your table per character per session? I would imagine that beginning play under these rules would show characters gaining skill points often until they hit the 60-80% range. Then things will slow down significantly. It seems like your rules fit in well with what you are trying to model. One might ask about learning modalities here and question the difference between the bookworm and the person who learns best in the field (for example). I agree with you though. If you're going to have a stat, make it do something. I totally dig this!

You could leave it up to the players to decide. At experience time tell them to pick a skill they haven't used recently and reduce it by 1. For myself, I've been using success and failure to trigger checks because I think we learn by both. I tied it to a very rudimentary experience system, which kind of simulates what the PCs are paying attention to. So in a given session a PC may have used seven or eight skills. These skills could have been successes, failures, criticals, whatever. They get marked on the sheet. At the end of the session, the players get 3 checks. They can assign these checks to any of the skills they attempted to use and have subsequently marked. Or they can bank the checks and use them to increase a Stat. Granted, I like games where the PCs have very high skills and are really dicing for criticals. Therefore I don't make them roll to see if a skill increases. If they commit a check to it then it's going to increase. I do let them divide whether they want to roll to see how much it increases or take the average of the die type (sometimes I use a d6 for experience, sometimes a d8). Banking the points creates a pool of experience that they can use to increase stats. If the PC has a Strength of 12 they need to bank 13 points to raise the Strength to 13. If they wanted to raise it again they would have to save up another 14 checks. How it works in play: I think it relieves a bit of stress from the player. They know that their character is going to develop mechanically speaking as a result of play. There's a sense of fairness about it since they know that the dice won't cheat them from gaining skills. It also cuts down on players who look for opportunities to use skills just to gather a bunch of skill checks. I've been doing it for years now and overall I'm exceedingly happy with it.

What roll is LEA augmenting? is it 100% -20% for the PC with LEA 16? I think in general the system sounds like it will give you what you want, slow skill progression. I also like that you've made space for a skill category which the PC excels in. I'm going to suggest that you actually don't need LEA. Without it, the nerd will still have higher scholarly skills, the jock will be physically skilled and the face will be charming. Instead, it could be a failure to be able to make a check at the end of the session, and then the player has to roll higher than the PC's skill. The 100% limit is now hard coded in and it's much less likely that a PC is going to be hanging out at the celling but rather remain at a healthy skill with some chance of failure. I've actually been awarding skill checks on failures for years and I think it works great, but my aim is high skills and my systems a bit different. I'll expand on it when I have a moment.

I hear you, and it's really a call for you to make. If you're allowing summoning though you're going to want some heavy guns to bring that sorcerer down.

I'm all for them. My limited experience with it is that sorcerers will build up a bunch of low level utility spells where as magicians will have a few heavy hitting spells that they can reliably cast.

Are you referring to your quest-bird.com page or something different? One of the things that has kept me from the plunge is aesthetics. I like to have a lot of control over what things look like in order to set a mood. I've always thought your page looked rather sharp though, so if you did that through Obsidian Portal than my interest is piqued.

It seems an opportune time to refer to this document. Charlie Seljos wrote some great house rules that expands on the versatility of what was to become Deep Magic. Here are those rules.

It's ok. I'm sure I'll find a way to humiliate myself some other way. I'm actually a bit happy that their gone for two reasons. While I appreciated the notification of a post being 'liked' I always worry about systems like that becoming popularity contests. Second, I noticed that I hadn't received a 'like' in a very long time... was starting to feel unloved.

Good memory. Yup, mostly Pages. A bit of stuff in GIMP or photoshop when needed. They've put out a new version of Pages but it hasn't won me over yet. I splice PDFs on occasion too. Not only does it narrow the focus for the players (who aren't going to read the thing anyway) but it makes me feel better knowing that if the player wants the book they still have to go out and buy the darned thing. I have been wanting to use a wiki for the longest time. Haven't actually sat down and done it. Most of my time is sunk into futzing with fonts and stuff and writing text. If you have your text ready and you have an idea of what you want your document to look like you can actually move very fast. It's all just manipulating text boxes really. When I have a chance I'll post a picture with the layout visible so that you can see what I mean a little better.

It's pretty but time consuming. Like I said, it mostly happens when I'm trying to procrastinate. It also helps that I try to stay with a setting for a while and so don't need to mock one of these up every month or so.

Huh. I just noticed that likes are gone.