Joseph Paul

Who said the target had a .45? Just place two PCs side by side and let them fire at the same kind of targets. In a round the .22 gets the opportunity to fire three times and the .45 only once. Absent any other optional rules and assuming equal skill the .22 will outperform the .45. The other arguments are all reasons to choose the .45 but they don't mitigate the disparity in actual dice-o-damage on target. That is where I am saying there are consistency problems.

Jason wrote: Well what Chaosium solicited does not seem to be satisfying the cravings of some of the fan base. Of course once it hits the stores we all may find that it does handstands. I can also certainly see that those who have paid for BRP0 are probably already pretty much in agreement with what has been wrought so this dichotomy shouldn’t be a surprise. I do have most of the legacy source material and your assertion that you did not want to be innovative at this point puts a pretty good limit on what might change. I don’t think that my criticisms have been out of line or substantively off base about what the BRP0 rules actually allow. Concerning fire arms: Jason: Well I wouldn’t mind a 2d10+4 Barret but an average damage roll of 15 is just survivable by someone with 6 pt armor (and no I don’t think that is right either). People pick up large caliber hand guns because they will presumably be better at stopping a target right now. The damage for the .22 plus the high rate of fire made this gun perform better in that role than the .45. This is why I suggested reducing the damage for the .22. You get more believable results and more believable use out of it ie a stealthy weapon or one used for pests like snakes. Alternatively kick the .45 up to RoF 2. That way it will also outperform any RoF 3 1D8 automatics in the .32 range. Most gamers aren’t willing to bet on a 20% chance of an impale as a means of coping with a threat. Given equal skill the .22 is putting more points on the target than the .45 is in any given combat round. Under CoC rules it also has three separate times to roll a special or critical- of course that may change in BRP. If you know you will face body armor that changes things. In the time frame of the .45 and the .22 it is only recently that body armor for people has become much of a possibility. That is why the 1920’s players were choosing the .22 as the more effective weapon. It was purely a function of the way that the game chose to model firearms. Want a different result, change the model. So a big guy with a 3D6 halberd and a 1D6 DB can penetrate a WWI tank on a good roll? Hmmm that doesn’t snap your suspension of disbelief? It does mine. What happened to the idea of BRP games being gritty and realistic? The modern tank has 24 AP and can be damaged by an average shot from a French 75 HE shell. Since 6” of armor (that is 6 times the 19AP in a steel plate minimum for a bad model of armor thickness) is pretty common on the 1960s-70s vehicles ie not really modern, I have to think that this is another symptom of the game straying further from its realistic roots. You say that like it is a bad thing. I do not think that being internally consistent with the modeling can be bad for a game. It is inconsistency that makes for a bad game. I think that Atgxtg captured my position on this when he wrote: Because I don’t think that it is a bad thing to express a dissenting view about the design phiolsophy of BRP. I am not alone in being less than satisfied with the choices that appear to have been made. Questioning them promotes dialouge about what different sections of the fan base want from a game which may prove valuable for future supplements or revisions. From earlier: Except that it is not internally consitent with the modeling of many things that will be part of those new intelectual properties. I don’t think that wanting a tank that functions like a tank is too much to ask of BRP. Nor do I think that creating the systems to do so would break the game. As stated in Atgxtg’s quote above it doesn’t have to even be present in the game as long as the end results are. I certainly don’t want what we had before which was a mess of variant and sometimes contradictory rules spread through several different game sets or supplements. I am assuming that is from the BRP0?I didn’t have a problem with the speed of the succesive attacks for a .22 but with the damage from it making sequential succesful attacks more deadly than the .45 and the low rate of fire for most of the larger caliber pistols. What is the paradigm for a combat round? Is it set or elastic? Either way most of the firearms rules defy the experience of many moderately skilled shooters. Ultimately this can be traced back to the legacy rules in CoC. It appears that they were intentionally crippled to make sure that players brought the right attitude to the tableie investigate don’t detonate! This bias is inappropriate in a game that is supposed to be generic enough to be a vehicle for other games because it certainly precludes many historical settings, as well as modern and Sci-Fi adventure, from functioning as their genres demand. So you are agreeing that the dynamite shouldn’t be –half- the damage of the four times larger explosive correct? Is there a formula for expressing a quantity of explosive in dice of damage? If not why not? I seem to have been unclear about my point. I am not griping that the steel plate is not RHA but that there seems to have been -no- standard selected to use for calculating what the value of the armor should be. Like you I would expect a modern tank to have much better protection than that offered by 1” steel plate. It actually has all of 5 points more. Lets look at that a bit closer- the last tanks to use homogenous steel armors instead of composites have 150mms or more of steel armor that is hardened. Tell me how only a 5 point increase is justified with a 6 fold increase in thickness in materials that are far and away better at stopping penetration than 19 AP 1” steel plate? With AP=24 you can damage such a vehicle with a WWI 75mm explosive shell (avg dam=35pts)? Does that seem right to you? I disagree that BRP was never designed as a world model. All RPGs model the world (real or genre limited). The systems involved in chargen model human attributes, the combat resolution mechanics model combat, the skill system models the use of skills etc. There are certainly abstractions in the models but they are still models. There are several genres where the examples I have cited are definitely not fun for the players. True! However models that are based on some sort of actual research will fare better than ones that handwave such essentials and dismiss the attempt at accuracy as being unimportant to the play of the game. SDLeary Actaully Simon was responding in a new thread to a question I asked him. I thank him for his frank and earnest posts here, they have been most informative. Actually I would like to thank everybody for their very civil responses.

You can scrap making it consistent with the rest of the game. The game stats for vehicles are not consistent in themselves already. A vehicles or SF supplement would be the way to go with people overwriting the inconsistent material already published.

Doh! You are absolutely right about what I asked. As for the abstraction I think that those that wouldn't mind it also wouldn't mind if the rules more accurately represented any endeavor as long as that accuracy was tranparent to play and not a burden. RQ was pretty good about that. I am also concerned that the idea of being inconvient to some genres doesn't ring alarm bells for a product that is supposed to be generic enough to support many if not all genres.

Yes,Yes, Yes! You get it! Atgxtg you are my new hero!

All fine ideas but they do not address the problems of a set of messed up firearms rules designed for a specific genre. Perhaps I am misunderstanding but your previous post sounded like you wanted to steer players away from certain choices of firearms just because the rules made them inconvenient to a particular genre.

:eek::eek::eek: Wait a minute! Unless you have a militaristic genre where PCs are issued specific weapons how are you going to plausibly restrict the choices? It seems like a less than ideal way to cope with a set of problematic rules.

Venomous Pao wanted to know- Here is my problem- it looks like the numbers for several different parts of the gameworld/system don’t work out. And I have to admit that I am just guessing on some of them because I don’t have BRP0. But I do have what people have posted here and the fact that Jason wasn’t supposed to bring about any great changes so I feel safe in making some assumptions about some systems. If you have a copy of BRP0 let me if I am wrong OK? For instance I am betting that not much changed in the firearms from CoC. That would mean that the .22 still does 1d6 but can be fired 3 times a round. That lets you put 3d6 on an opponent in each round while the .45 only did a single shot of 1d10+2. Hmmm, which is the manstopper here? Had a GM that couldn't figure out that the game system was dictating unconventional choices. Atgxtg has pointed out that the AP for some of the tanks can be penetrated by firearms. That is a fault of not setting standards for the material world that make sense, are appropriate to the weapons in use and scale well as materials increase or decrease in size/mass. Thicker steel gets a lot harder to penetrate and thinner gets easier. But a ¼” plate shouldn’t have fewer AP than say a brigandine. I think that it will if a 1” plate has 19 AP and you apply Real World scaling to it. And if it does I am augmenting my AFV with brig plates! Look at the response to the weapons table thread to see more about missing crunchiness. Another example from CoC that may have changed in BRP0-explosives. A stick of dynamite does 5D6 damage. A 75 mm shell does 10D6. The 75 has over 4 times the explosive in it (about 800 grams to 136 grams). Even accounting for different qualities of explosive (60% nitro in the dynamite and ammonium picrate in the 75) I don’t think the numbers jive. One is too large or one is too small. Again I see this as a situation where the original designers eyeballed things and never did get around to setting a standard to work from. These are all examples of things that should have been integrated into the original games better but were not. Some of them, maybe all of them will be present in BRP. It speaks to the fact that the very foundation of the game is not set up to accept being played in a crunchy gearheaded manner. In a genre game it can be forgiven. However BRP is no longer a genre game, it is a generic platform for many different games and styles of play. I feel that standards should have been set and systems created so that as new material was being developed it would fit into the overall structure with out straining things. Do all the crunchy stuff up front –even if it isn’t going to show. That way when it does matter you have a system to go on rather than having to eyeball it and hope that it fits. I like RQ- I am not so thrilled with Glorantha. I like crunchy, gearheaded play, lots of tactical options, and involved chargen. RQ was a good basis for that and it could have been set up so that it was easy and did not break the game if people wanted simpler modes of play. Doing it the other way around seems to be a bit problematic to me. I have really liked the design philosophy that I have seen out of the GURPS game. Armor has a standard-1”RHA will stop 70d6. Firearms and explosives have their own formulas. Are they in the books? Does SJG expect you to figure something on the fly? No. The design formulas are used to set up all of the material world stats so that I don’t have to eyeball it myself. It provides a consistent, rational approach to things that are modeled from the real world. Does GURPS have its problems? Certainly. But modelling that doesn’t work isn’t one of them. Except for hiking.

Does the .22 pistol do 1D6 in this and get to fire 3 times a round? If so drop damage to 1d4 or 1d3 or even 1d2. We found that .22s rule when you can pump 3d6 into your target and the .45 can only do 1d10+2 per round. And yes that is the sort of "crunchiness" that I think is missing - getting the simulationist aspects right.

I have something but I don't know what. So yes a link would be handy just to compare. Thank you.

Do any of the grognards here know what the staus is of the RQIV/RQAIG project? Who actually holds the copyright for it? Does anyone remember what the major sticking points with it were? I just saved all of the digests I could so that I could go through them but getting a synopsis would be appreciated.

Rurik I agree with you. Some how what I am seeing so far isn't giving me the game I want. I wanted BRP for a future space setting but the design choices so far seem to have been made to intentionally limit the "crunch" available. I am not even seeing options that allow more crunch to be enabled. As a resource for running other Chaosium games it has to be suspect in that the rules that were cribbed from those other games may very well have been altered to fit other parts of BRP. Jason, I don't mean to be such a downer or to be overly critical of a work that I haven't seen yet. However what I am reading on this forum indicates that what I want from games is not what Chaosium wants to supply at this time.

Thank you Soltakss and everyone else for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate it. Anybody else want to voice what they know they don't like/find disagreeable/are mildly annoyed with about BRP? Jason- Why start with WoW and SB? What did they offer that others did not?

Soltakss- Would you care to elaborate on the parts of your post that I bolded? I would be interested in hearing more about what people found dissatisfactory in the current incarnation. You may want to open a new thread or just email me off list if you are more comfortable doing that.

I have never played D&D. Just sayin'

Wildcard Blackjack? As is the usual fate of analogies they break down as you make finer comparisons. But at that point you have gone past what an analogy is supposed to do anyway which is to help understand how something works by comparing it to something else in the audience's experience. Exeptions, additions, deletions, provisos, caveats, and quid pro quos come free.

For those struggling with the wording of the 'roll under skill but as high as you can' I believe I have seen it called a 'blackjack' mechanic. It works the same way that the game does- stay under a threshold (your skill, 21 in blackjack) and have a higher score than your opponents. I move that we adopt the term "blackjack mechanic" or "blackjack roll" to describe this. Who's with me?

Oh I understand why they couldn’t. I am just bitter about, but in a good way.:shocked: That may have been the sale/trade of the Moorcock license to Mongoose. Or not. I noticed that they had a flurry of CoC stuff come out also. I casually fault them for not doing these things but I do have to say that I don’t know what the cost to a company is to set up and ride herd on a bulletin board. They should have some idea because that is how a great deal of the RQ:IV project was conducted. I don’t know when that occurred in the history of Chaosium’s downsizing so it may have come down to actual manpower things. But even at that you would be amazed at what fan resources can get you. I believe and some one correct me if I am wrong, that the Traveller Mailing List is hosted voluntarily by fans with the resources to do so. Hey wait Triff is hosting this one! Thank you Triff! I have comepletely missed SotC, I will have to look up a review. Agreed. Hopefully this forum will allow some productive debate, idea swapping and allow some people with relevant skills and experience to speak up to help with that. Agreed! He has plowed his field and deserves to be lauded for it. I have no problem with what I have seen of Jason’s work and I understand that he was working to the specifications of Chaosium. And I am looking at doing that. Fo my project I was looking at GURPS and HERO as options. Then I found that BRP was coming back out. When it arrives is when I can make a decision about what is best. Pretty much you are right. Which while I am an apostate I have no desire to be a dead one, martyred to the cause of contrariness. I fully realize that this project has too much inertia to be held up now and I really don’t want to incur the wrath of the faithful that have been waiting for this. It may take producing a supplement that will be geared towards detail oriented, gearhead gamers. Who knows? It may become the next set of Perrin Conventions! You’re on S! Joseph Paul

For those with edition 0- Do the firearms have any inherent accuracy modifiers that affect skill?

There's some reality tested feedback!

I need to address this in a different order so hang with me a moment. I believe that the setting-less 16 page BRP has been out longer than GURPS has. The problem that I see is that Chaosium didn’t do anything about making the original BRP into a full fledged generic for 20+ years. I inquired about the status of several of the out of print Chaosium games several years ago and the reply I got was that Cthulhu made them more money than the others so they were concentrating on that and did not have the resources to develop anything else. So they lose out on 20+ years of fan participation. “Reality testing” of the GURPS rules started with SJGames so I will collect on that bet. I was part of the playtest for GURPS Man to Man long ago. One of the things that was made clear to play testers was that SJG was interested in the material being right. Was the first edition rough around the edges? I thought so and I thought that some things were not right but overall they did get a number of things to work such that you were not surprised by system specific faults. I did not switch to GURPS because I thought that the BRP derived games still had an edge, I prefered D100 to 3D6, and I found the GURPS stats limiting. Fast forward 20 years and I see that SJG has continued the commitment to getting things right even to the point of making some very noticeable changes in the current edition. Those changes have taken care of most of the gripes that I had except for the 3D6 mechanic. Some have stated their desire for simplicity first and in-depth treatments of subjects to come later. They don’t want a toolkit. I don’t mind that at all as long as the game was made with a toolkit that will be internally consistent over a broad range of genres and give realistic results in those genres. I want the toolkit to be released later so that I can make internally consistent adventures/NPCs/settings/ etc that mesh well with the core materials and support how I think fantasy/space opera/westerns/historical/add-your-own-genre is supposed to run. Could I handwave or houserule my preferences into a game? Certainly, however I too am ‘of a certain age’ and I would prefer for that sort of rules wrangling to already be taken care of. That is why I am willing to pay for rules in the first place. What I question is the ability of the BRP rules to be internally consistent over a broad range of genres and give realistic results in those genres. As an example Atgxtg has pointed out, and I agree, that the hit point system in the BRP games could use a change so that you get results that match what actually happens when people are injured, particularly with firearms. That is something that needs to be done now, not later. If you mess with those core things later you get the same thing you have now with RQ/SB/CoC/RW/SW where there were differences in chargen and combat rules that made for a large differences in how injurys affected the characters. There are several other disconnects between the foundational materials and what we know can be done for real and I think that ironing those out ahead of time would bring us a game that satisfies a very diverse set of desires. It can be simple but the base mechanics shouldn’t break when more layers are added. It can support many different genres and modes of play ie gritty/cinematic/godly powers/slapstick etc with minimal changes to the core and remain elegant. Finally SD (is that an OK shortening of your handle?) I understand the point that you make about going ahead and writing up an add-on system. My concern is that it is the core rules that need to be looked at and it is no use writing anything that will seriously contradict those.

You mean hire an author with a grounding in the sciences and put together a list for dedicated gearhead fans of the system to hash out methods and models? GURPS didn't seem to have a problem getting that done. >:-> I am tired of eyeballing things. The eyeballing is breaking down pretty quick in some instances too. SIZ is an example, in that it can represent four different things: actual mass, volume, reach, and is a constiuent in HP. This causes problems with dense objects, large but lightweight objects, and other permutations. It needs to be restated and have some of the qualities of SIZ broken out into other stats. Does it sound like I want a D100 Gurps? Well I don't. I want a BRP that can handle what GURPS can and do so with the elegance I found in Runequest where nearly every rule had a coherent explanation for why it did what it did. What is wrong with that as an expectation?

Why bother flipping them? With armor of 6-14mm you could stab a spaer through them given the premise that 2" of steel=19AP (meaning what is the AP of 6MM plate if 2" is only 19 pts?). Once you get past using descriptors (Heavy, medium, light etc) and start applying RW numbers in the BRP games things start getting funky. Storytellers can handwave such inconsistencies away but I really want more consistency and a good grounding in RW physics and materials. Joseph Paul

Well put Atgxtg. Does everybody just type faster than me? Soltakss: I am a little more radical in my approach to this question because, like Atgxtg, I believe that it is easy to wound somebody such that they stop resisting and harder to kill them instantly. With that in mind I would probably play with BRPs definition of "death". Lengthen it into the negative hit point range and create a mechanic for staying concious below a certain point. Set a standard for firearms damage that is based on RW performance and go to town stating things up. I would want a value for how easy weapons are to aim, carry, how they malfunction, use of common accessories like scopes and rules for different modes of firing. The big thing for me right now is that I find the pistols to be too powerful and the longarms to be weak. Rundown one and increase the other. Then see if you get similar outcomes in game to RW perfomance. If the game stats for a 12 ga entry gun can't blow the lock on a door then something is wrong isn't it?

And there is one of the problems that BRPCore is going to have to overcome- adjusting it's rules to fit the foci of a universal game. The gun rules seem to come mostly from CoC. That game really introduced firearms to the Runequest/BRP system. The focus in CoC is on investigating monstrous, sanity wrenching, occult conspiracies to bring back long forgotten masters. Many of the minions of these masters are nigh on bullet proof to begin with so tactical use of guns is not too finely worked out. Guns don't hurt them much so why work out much detail on them? In a universal set of rules the focus is variable and the rules ought to reflect that. My frustration is that 20 years later I am going to get a set of firearm rules that still don't work well for a number of settings.