Chaot

There are no stats for Cats in the Bestiary, yet there are Dogs. An official cat writeup can be found in one of the Dreamlands supplements. I'm just thinking of all those poor Magic using witches out there who want a cat familiar.

Rendered fine in Preview on my iMac when I downloaded it just now...

Hmmm, I'm using a Powermac G5 running Panther. It's coming up blank in Preview.

Right now it appears to be two links to the same BRP 0. One for $39.95 and one for $25.95. Did I catch them during an update and they're changing BRP 0's price to clear out inventory? Did they forget to take the second link down?

Also, when downloading the BRP Character sheet from the free downloads section, I get a pdf with two blank pages. I doubt it's my set up, since I've downloaded this file before.

hmm...

Tal Meta's psionic rules here, here, and here.

The psi rules for the new book are taken from the ElfQuest books. They cover subtle things like telepathy to overt things like pyrokinesis. I won't go into more detail because it's late right now and I don't have the book here, and I'll probably misquote it if I tried to give you accurate info.

I don't view it as poor design. I view it as having options to choose from.

What excellent news for a tuesday .

Looking forward to it.

* Polymorph will be changed to have. Baneful polymorph (frog, rat, snail…). And various “form of the…” spells. Example : lvl2 : form of the wolf, lvl5 : form of the raven, lvl9 : form of the bear : lvl 12 form of the troll etc.. (Polymorph will potentially draw from a list as summon monster does now)

*in unison* "Wonder Twin powers, activate!"

"Form of an eagle!"

"Form of, uh, water!"

So Jan was just a much higher level than Jace? I had always figured Jace had a much lower Int score than Jan....

Hey Peter. I must sheepishly admit that I've just printed out your pdf. First glance through looks good. I'll have a chance to really read it and comment latter.

Highly skilled fighters (such as most PCs) pretty much only need worry about critical attacks.

Don't forget about weapon breaking rules and closing rules. Unless you're sword and board, you'd better have a second weapon on you. One versus many opponents also puts the high skilled character in a difficult situation. Then there's that whole issue with missile fire.

It may seem heretical...

Heretic. Remember, Fafhrd once deflected a lightning bolt spell with a long length of wire! Fafhrd and the Mouser used to wade through their enemies, Graywand, Heartseeker, Scalpel and Cat's Claw dripping crimson with blood. The difference, Fafhrd and the Mouser used Spot Rules while Elric just stood there chopping with a howling demon sword.

Ooh, I don't believe I didn't mention Chain of Being. For whatever reason, my players never used it. Their opponents certainly did. Nice way to send a powerful demon or two to muck about with their plans.

Also, the "Magic" system (as opposed to "Sorcery", etc) provides rules for Wizard's Staves, which are effectively POW crystals built directly into the rule system

Just a note, the Sorcery system sort of does this as well. Difference is the Sorcery POW storage device has to be massive and stationary. More for use in ritual summonings than for day to day spell slinging.

Interesting. I'll take a look.

In the past, I've stolen/converted the AD&D spell system for BRP.

I've used Spell level equals MP expenditure plus a pyramid scheme. To know a second level spell you had to know two first level spells, etc. Make a Luck roll to get the spell off and include a MP:MP or POW:POW as needed for the spell.

I've also used spell skills, breaking it up into the various schools of magic: abjuration, conjuration, divination, enchantment, evocation, illusion, necromancy, and transmutation. MP= Spell Level. For spells that had more than one school there was only one skill role, but it had to equal a success for the given schools. Say someone was casting a spell from the evocation and illusion school. Say they had evocation at 60% and illusion at 40%. Say they roll a 10. Their evocation critical is at 12% and their illusion critical is at 8%. Use the lesser of the two to determine actually success rate. Said PC would have gotten a Success, not a Critical.

The other caveat in the skill system was that for every spell you learn, you had to have 20% per spell level of the spell you wanted to learn. So learning a 4th level spell would require the PC to have 80% in all the schools that the spell entailed. Learning a ninth level spell would require an 180% skill.

It worked really well.

EDIT: For the skill system:

Special: Spell goes off, no MP loss.

Critical: Spell goes off, 1 MP loss.

Success: Spell goes off, normal MP loss.

Failure: Spell doesn't go off, no MP loss.

Fumble: Spell doesn't go off, normal MP loss.

Damn. If I had time, I'd photoshop a BRP Ape.

Hey, davidae. What systems have you used in the past? BRP is a roll under percentile system with lots of bells and whistles, but nearly invisible during play.

I've never really started with a Rune Lord, apart from said Centaur who was rolled up with enhanced Character Generation (+20% to skills and incredibly lucky characteristic rolls) and just scraped in.

It's funny. The RQ crowd and the CoC crowd have a very different idea of what a high skill percentage is than the Elric!/SB5 crowd. I think I can honestly say that I've only had one player with under 100% in the primary combat skill role since I've been running it. Of course, it comes down to the various rules for each game and RQ1-3 read to be very different than SB5.

Thanks, we had a blast playing it.

It shows. And thanks, I had a blast reading it.

so a powerful Stormbringer character will have a lower pecentage skill than a RQ character of similar game ability/effect.

Hmmm, not sure I'm following you here. Are you referring to Stormbringer 1-4 or Elric!/SB5? The later start off at a much higher skill pool.

I found those files and posted them. Enjoy!

Jason, on behalf of myself and everyone else here, could I just respectfully request that you post your entire hard drive? Um, please?

Ahhh, nicely done sir.

I'm very much looking forward to read/buy this.

The magic system, however, is full of straight-damage spells.

Yeah Tywyll, you're looking for the Magic/Wizardry rules which were taken from Magic World from the Worlds of Wonder boxed set.

Sorcery remains much like it was in Elric!

Ah yes, that makes sense. It's funny how game mechanics effect play. Using Elric!/SB5 as a base, it seems to be most effective for the PCs to gang up on a given individual per round, the weaker the better. Those -30% add up.

Oddly enough, most of my players haven't clued into this. I don't know why, and I'm very happy they're playing through the story rather than gaming the rules....

Edit: Oops, I began the post and got busy with other things. The above response is to badcat.

To Lord Twig, that makes sense. I've read, but have never actually played RQ3. I'm coming from the Elric!/SB5 rules.

Split attacks are great, but I rarely actually see them in play. My players don't really care about the -30% on secondary parries. They'd rather go for the higher chance of rolling a critical.

My games routinely have skills above 100%, usually at character generation. It doesn't break the system at all, even without the multiple attack rule. It just makes the characters more effective. The Success Matrix scales nicely.

Now, if you *really* want to know how well high-level skills work, ask Simon (soltakss)... There's a campaign that pushed the envelope!

Indeed. Here's a link to the overview. Follow the links in the article to read more. Fun stuff.

These are taken from Stormbringer5.

Riposte

This occurs only if using two weapons or a weapon and shield.

Not more than once in a round per combatant, a critical parry allows the parrying character to make a riposte with the weapon (or shield) that didn't parry. The riposte is a free attack that does not count against DEX rank position - it occurs in the DEX rank of the parry. This free attack can be parried or dodged, and armor defends normally against it.

Also...

Two Weapons

Two hand-to-hand weapons can be used, rather than one weapon or one weapon and a shield. Moonglum almost always fought this way, counting on his armor and dexterous parries for protection. The weapons need not be of the same class. Any adventurer can be declared ambidextrous, so any fighter can try this style. Skill for the second hand starts at half of the current skill. Make a separate adventurer sheet entry for it.

Besides ripostes, fighting with two weapons offers the advantage of having a second weapon in hand in case of breakage or a fumble. Two weapons can be advantageous in dark places, when a fire brand could be wielded as a weapon and give light by which to sword fight.

The riposte rules aren't in BRP Zero.

Really!? Shame on me, that's two things I should have mentioned during playtest. (The first is that the cat stats from Dreamlands weren't included when dog stats where.)

Riposte rules??!

I'm at work right now. I'll post them when I get home.

By the way, 3d6, check your PMs.

I'll have to check, but I thought the riposte rules made it in there.

A previously mentioned black and silver cover would have been very sharp. I agree with you though, it doesn't really describe the contents of the book well to those unfamiliar with the system.

Are there a few people on this board who are interested in writing short scenarios for publication? I don't think I have the time to write a full book, but if I and a few others (say four) are willing to put in the time, we could put a nice supplement together.

We could split it up into different genres. Highlight the flexibility of the system. Anyone up for it?