Joseph Paul

CON 16. Joseph Paul

Do the Edge of the Sword conversions make more sense than the BTRC G3 ones? Do EotS conversions give you the same stats for the guns in CoC? Joseph Paul

Zane I agree with you about the issues you and your players raise. Several players of my regular group in the 80's did not like the rules or stats for the guns. We were involved in some playtesting for cthulhu by Gaslight and pretty much did things by RAW. I admire the crunchiness that is availible in games like GURPS or with BTRC's G3. One answer to your question comes from using G3 to find a rational formula to use for creating or redacting firearms in CoC. CoC (and by extension BRPCore) appears to fail to have any rational reason for the damages given. I had hoped that BRPCore would be able to set some standards for damage and a host of other things but it looks like that was not the intent. I agree that this issue will probably get mentioned in reviews. I hope that it is enough to cause Chaosium to start on a set of upgrades that will culminate in a game that can span rules lite to hardcore crunch. I am serious enough about the crunch that I just bought several GURPS 4th ed books because they have what I want. When BRPCore comes out I will give it a look. I always liked D100 better than 3D6 and I may just look into porting the vehicle and firearms over to BRP. Joseph Paul

Rod, I feel very differently. I feel that rules should be used to evoke the genre. Ignoring them or tacking them on a list as an afterthought doesn't help with showing how the author expects the rules to be used in his setting. I can't really condone that. I can condone listing rules that should -not- be used whether they are innappropriate or are genre-busters. If the GM still wants to, so be it. What you are describing are the guidelines for submissions for particular genres. The final decision about what is right and proper (either for everything BRP or by genre) will be set by Chaosium. That decision may very well include allowing the writer to do as he wishes or it may not but it most definitely rests with the publisher. Since Jason has (or will have) experience with that from his work with Interplanetary I hoped to find out if I was in for a load of having to fill in all the blanks with every Chaosium product. That would be a turn off for me as I like complex, elegant rules and want to use nearly all of them (as appropriate to genre) to get the most verisimilitude that I can. It is much easier and consumes nearly no time to ignore the stats that refer to rules that a GM is not using while it is very time consuming to add those to each and every stat block in an adventure book. I think that it would be damaging to BRP to allow many different levels of complexity within a particular genre. Compatability would definitely suffer and I would not fancy having to sort out simplistic Pulp action books from ones that used more of the rules. How would that be articulated to the potential buyer quickly and easliy? Joseph Paul

Jason, Since there are core defaults for BRP mechanics do you have an idea of what the standard for supplements will be, particularly in regards to NPCs? For example if the combat default is general HP and uses the major wound table is Chaosium going to want to see that in an adventure rather than Hit locations? Personally I think that defaulting to the more complex write up is a service to the GM in that it is easy to cut things down and tedious to bring them up to a more complex level. How are you handling Interplanetary right now? Regards,

I think the way to get to what you want is to do the fiddly, math intense, simulation first and then abstract it so that you get very nearly the same results. What Chaosium seems to be laying out for us is the ability to make what we want of the game but that shouldn't end up with games that are vastly different in outcome for common actions like getting shot. That of course would mean that Chaosium would need to actually define some things like what a point of SIZ is (target area or mass?), what encumbrance is, how much energy a die of damage actually represents or what thickness/material of armor will stop a point of damage etc. Joseph Paul

You are correct. I have been in and out all day and haven't been able to address your last couple of posts. Hopefully tomorrow. Joseph Paul

Oh yes you can have homogeneous metals. They are materials that have the same composition throughout and therefore have the same physical properties throughout. They are no weaker at one point than any other which is what I was trying to stress. There are non-homogeneous materials like pattern welded steel or mokume gane which is a fusion of non-ferrous metals that retain their individual properties. Poorly made metals that have inclusions of slag, carbon, or other crap are not as homogeneous and can exhibit flaws. I am well aware of the need for particular properties in armour. While I am not an engineer several of my friends are and we have had looooong conversations about materials science. Like days worth.:eek: I have been pursuing knowledge of medieval armors for some time and have been interested in their composition and the effect that has on combat. My point about the minutiae was that it was minutiae even to them and not worth worrying about. The evidence is that it seems to have worked as an armor for quite some time. As for random protection making sense I have already laid out my arguments for why the rule as written doesn't make sense to me. I have not seen a counter argument more substantial than it gives the results that people want or expect. Badcat is partially right that games are about 'feeling realistic' or verisimilitude. What feels realistic is dependant on a persons experience and education in a subject. The rest of the time they are about wish fulfillment which ought to answer Badcat's question about why D&D stays on top. For me such methods snap my 'belief suspenders'. Some people like it and it works for them, giving them the results that they want. It falls short for me. Thats all. I do not understand your intent with the rest of that passage as it was never brought up before. Can you clarify?

RMS wrote: I imply no such thing. However, there is no doubt that armor varies in strength from spot-to-spot (basic physics there) and that it only covers a portion of the body throughout most of history. You give some examples, but those are very late examples of armor. There's 3000 years of hard armors that precede those that don't cover the complete body. As late as the Norman invasion of England, there are significant portions of the body not protected by heavy armor. This is two different concerns. I have serious doubts as to the validity of your first point especially as expressed in the variable armor rule. I suspect that anything that would be expressed as a difference in a homogenous material would be far below BRP’s granularity. I don’t want to have to roll for the shot traps in a musculata cuirass catching a thrust for instance. Likewise while there may be some bad links in a hamata it certainly is not enough to warrant the kind of wide results that the present mechanic exhibits. I reject the first idea that a homogenous material has to have a weak spot relative to the rest of the material. It does not have to be any weaker in any portion of it than any other. This idea in modern peoples stems from the conceit that if it was done long ago it had to be an inferior product. There may be differences between pieces such as a helm and a vambrace but the relative thickness of material in a piece of armor has been proven effective by battle and the expected frequency with which that location will be struck. Claiming the variable armor rule simulates this is unreasonable as that mechanic makes a mockery of materials science. I don’t believe that the strength of the material varies enough to bother with representing in a game with the resolution of BRP. Hamatas, squamatas, and plumatas as well as nearly all medieval armor have very even construction to my knowledge unless they were deliberately produced as shoddy products. Second is the idea of incomplete coverage. The mechanic pimps attackers and defenders depending on which armor is used. It does a bad job of representing proportional coverage by homogenous (all one value but not in every location) and mixed value armors. For instance arms and legs make up 70% of the target area in BRP. Give someone 2 points on the limbs and 6 points elsewhere and derive the weighted average which is 3.2. So why should the random roll ever give results of more than 6 or less than three? I would be comfortable just using the weighted average knowing that it was reliably pegged to both the coverage and the effectiveness of the armor. Mentioned by others is a third idea that the variable armor represents the angle of attack of the weapon or other innumerable factors. If you strike the armor the same way each time there should be no difference in how it resists the action of the weapon. I posit that the weapon is the active factor in this and that it already has a mechanic that represents striking a material for outcomes from the best to the worst, namely the weapon’s damage roll. I do not see any reason to further penalize the attacker by making him face armor that randomly gets stronger nor the defender for the reverse. RMS writes: IMO, I never, ever think of RQ/BRP and late medieval at the same time. The two don't go together, so heavy armor should have significant open spots. Also, what you are describing is a very, very limited time period compared to the hundreds of years of armor that preceded it, so I'd consider it an outlier that should be the exception rather than used to form the rule. The plate being mentioned comes from the description of Full Plate in SB which is modeled on European armors. It is specifically covering everything but gaps at the joints. Since the random armor mechanic comes from this game I thought it meet to deal with this example and the logical inconsistencies of it. It is the example that is used to prove the rule. A different but no less pertinent example is a futuristic power armor that may not have a uniform AP but does cover everything. The idea that part of the variability is open spots is therefore negated. Regardless of our personal tastes, for BRP to fulfill its mandate of being useable for any genre it must be capable of dealing with the institutions in those genres. It cannot be limited to only doing well in a few. Re: MRQ’s rule for bypassing armor- Too low a penalty in my estimation if it doesn’t involve immobilizing the opponent. Re: MRQ’s rule for skill loss in armor- Yuck! Jason writes: “The mechanic was first introduced in Stormbringer, a game where a character can start as a blind, limbless, leprous beggar from Nadsokor, or as an assassin-noble-sorcerer from Melnibone... variable armor is a perfect extension of that.” And Stormbringer is ruled by the idea that pure random chaos infests everything. As such this mechanic fits beautifully with that theme. However it is not my cup of tea and the math doesn’t support its use as a mechanic that gives equivalent results to using hit locations and fixed values. As a mechanic that provides more tension at the table it does fine. I just don’t like getting pimped in that fashion. I agree very much with Nick Middleton’s assesment and I have very similar experiences to his. Several people have lauded the variable armor rule for speeding play. How does the fixed armor rule slow things down? Would a weighted average value help speed play?

Almost all mythological monsters are chaotic in that they are the chopped up, left over bits of other animals and are therefore an affront to order and law. Joseph Paul

I can see that applying to the half-plate since it implies that half of it is missing but I see no reason for that to apply to leather armor just because it is leather. Vambraces, rerebraces, cuises and schinbalds were all made from leather at one time as well as scale and lamellar armors for the body. You could be in leather from head to foot. How would you rate an Age of Mail knight that had an homogenous armor of mail in all locations? None of it is any lighter than the others and there basicly aren't any areas that are unarmored. Would this end up like the Melnibonean armors with a huge plus?

Me, I am having fun with math, contrasting my own experiences with a medieval combat group, historical research, and other game systems with this. This sort of discussion, for me, forces me to examine my own experience and biases and prejudices. It also causes me to have to examine a game system, possibly from angles and PoV that I had not considered previously. Joseph Paul

It results in more PC death. Do the math- succesfull hits on skill or less, weapon damage stays the same but PC armor does not protect as well. If your fixed point armor is supposed to stop 6 points of damage and it now will only stop that on a 6 on a d6 you are getting pimped 83% of the time. If you are using specials then you are also making "mini-criticals" out of this. 5% of all succesful hits are crits that bypass armor. If your variable point armor is on the order of 1d6-1 then 16% of all succesfull shots have become crits (but not specials) plus those that would have been crits anyway. Look at specials-20% of all succesfull hits are such. Now 16% (1 of 6) are also ignoring armor like a critical in addition to the 5% that are crits. Effectively you are adding (with d6-1 armor) a crit 16% of the time and a crit plus some armor half the time and only getting your full armor value 16% of the time. How can this not kill PCs faster? Edit: for Badcats example of letting players roll for armor protection even against criticals- You have replaced a 1 to 5 percent chance, depending on the skill of the attacker, of bypassing armor with a flat 16% chance of not having any armor protection for every blow recieved. That is three times as effective as someone with 100% skill getting a crit. The goblins better like it! Joseph Paul

Quote: Originally Posted by Joseph Paul I find variable armor points to be terribly unrealistic and they are one of the reasons that I never did get into Stormbringer. I can't see anyone investing in armor that has as large a spread of vulnerability as represented by a random die roll. Real warriors did not spend the equivalent of a modern house for armor that didn't protect reliably. When you write “armor is full of strong and weak points” you are implying that the two exist in equal abundance. This is simply not true. If for every strong spot there was a weak spot the armor would be only 50% effective. Just looking at the coverage of a hauberk will show that it covers much more than half of the body with a consistent armor. Even plate armors cover so much to the point where the fechtbuchs point out the weak spots of armpit, inside the elbow, under the gorget etc. However those are so small that it is very hard to target them. The random rolls severely overstate the risk to the wearer in a fashion that I am at a loss to explain. What I see is that with every blow from my opponent he is getting a random chance to by pass the great bulk of my armor. This flies in the face of the hard experience of veterans that found armor hard enough to get through that they had to A) invent new weapons to do so and developed systems of combat that allowed them to close with an opponent, throw him to the ground and then look for weak spots in the armor while he was immobilized. As in real life armor represents a major investment on the part of the warrior. It took much sacrifice for them to afford the harness in the first place and armor was looked upon as a major component of one’s ransom in Europe. My feeling is that role playing charcters make in-game sacrifices to be able to afford the appropriate protective gear and that the effectiveness of that gear should not be diluted with out some sacrifice or effort on the part of the attacker. Simulating angle of attack and other tedious ephemera of a succesful blow by randomizing the protective quality of the armor is to be double dipping against the target. The attacker already gets the possibility of specials that incur more damage as well as crits that bypass armor altogether and do more damage in some iterations. Is there really a need to raise mortality by denying the defender his armor with no more work from the attacker? Come on I paid for plate defenses and only 10% (10 on a D10) of the time am I getting plate defenses! I disagree based on what the comparitive cost is. The armor was a major investment, we seem to agree on that, and was often priced at a significant fraction of the warriors annual worth. Men-at-Arms and Knights are professionals and today the most analogous purchase for a modern professional is a house (or a sports car if they are in a mid life crisis and looking for a trophy wife!). Compared to many modern professionals’ salaries there are many houses whose cost is a significant portion of the (pre-tax) base salary. So for instance $100,000/annum salary and a $75,000 house gives some idea of the worth of the harness to a warrior. First I would be interested in seeing how MRQs system works and how it falters. Can you supply details? Secondly I do see how to do so by merely assigning a penalty to attempts to hit a chink in the armor. Thirdly the argument that the system hasn’t done this before merely reinforces my belief that perhaps Chaosium should have been looking to update the system rather than just republish it. Just what do you see as so variable in the armor? In BRP damage is already tied to skill in that you have to first make the roll to have any effect and then BRP does give bonus damage to particularly good skill rolls i.e. specials and criticals. The damage roll is a better place to subsume any question of the attackers ability to place a weapon effectively on target not the armor. Again such a mechanic lowers the utility of armor to far less than what it was historically. Warriors knew that their harness was trustworthy and that the possibility of a wound arriving through some deficit was remote. Vegetius comments to the infantry are to allow the armor to take the blow and press your attack. There are many examples of armors being praised as proof against all but the most vigourous attacks. Did people get wounded through chinks in the armor? Yes but not nearly so frequently as this misplaced mechanic suggests and generally by action of the attacker. Such actions are better modeled with the current ‘bypasses armor’ ability of the critical or by a deliberate targeting mechanic IMO. Joseph Paul

I find variable armor points to be terribly unrealistic and they are one of the reasons that I never did get into Stormbringer. I can't see anyone investing in armor that has as large a spread of vulnerability as represented by a random die roll. Real warriors did not spend the equivalent of a modern house for armor that didn't protect reliably. If you are going to get past the armor roll a crit or work harder for it by targeting gaps or thin spots at appropriate skill reductions. Here is a tip for reducing the pain of using some of the options all together-roll all of the dice at once. That's right- color code a pair of D10s as the percentiles, a D20 (red) as the hit location, and the damage dice as appropriate, perhaps they should be steel colored. Throw'em, read the percentiles and decide if it is a hit. If it is a failure play progresses to the next player. If it is a success you have all of the info you need already in front of you, hit location and damage. Want to avoid the math for figuring if the hit is a fumble, crit, or special? Add another D20 (don't forget to make it a different color!). The percentiles are then used as pass/fail while this D20 is used to determine if you have critted on a 1, specialed on a 2-4, and on a 20 you have fumbled. When RQ came out it was lightyears ahead of other games in terms of tactical play and verisimilitude. I can't help but think of variable armor as the antithesis of that. Joseph Paul

Talk about unpredictable! Perhaps this needs to be on the author thread but it came up here first: Jason do you have any idea why Chaosium shifted gears and wanted to pick up BRP now? They have had the base material for quite a long time. Were they missing other resources that were needed for this? Why does it look like a profitable project now and didn't 10-15 years ago?

Hmm. SIZ as mass (how heavy something is) increases as an exponential function. At least in some iterations of BRP. You are warned to not just add two SIZs together but instead convert them to true weights add the weights and refigure the SIZ from that. I wonder if SIZ as area follows a different progression?

Sven noren wrote: 1) If he runs straight backwards yes. I am plagued both by spearman that can do that and shieldmen that know how to close fast. Things work better if you take a tip from Silver- retreat in the round, rather than a straight line. 2) Oh, absolutely! I also do SCA and have more recently begun to work in some of the WMA texts (I.33, Talhoffer, Fiore, and I read Silver many years ago). As for throwing, you are correct but it appears in the fechtbuchs and it has happened quite by accident with me. It is impressive the amount of leverage a 6 foot stick gives you! I have seen spears used as 'cut lances' in pas d'armes. We have some true "spear gods" that can do a very good job. With skill being equal what I see is combats that are over with very quickly or get dragged out as the combatants keep probing.

Gear head question- and that 24 point powered armor represents how much of what kind of material?

Lord Twig wrote: This has not been my experience. It takes more than a ‘step’ to close the distance. Using a 6-9 foot spear when I have realized that I have missed, whether by my own fault or my opponent parrying, I am finding a new zipcode. He will need to rush me hard to close the gap. The rigid ‘his turn-my turn’ game rules may support your point but it is not what actually happens since, with real people, both can keep on moving while doing other things. Even when the opponent gets to his ideal sword range I have seen many spearmen clock them with a small mace or short sword that they drew while retreating. The haft of the spear is used to deflect blows or tie up the sword arm. Are you talking about using a spear one handed with a shield or two handed? If two handed I would like to know how you are going to move the spear out of line while it is being held with two hands? There are two basic ways that you can use a spear two handed. You can grasp it firmly at the butt and the mid-point and thrust with it like a bayonet. The range is not great but it lowers the risk of losing the weapon. The second method is to use it like a pool cue (billiards –or is it snooker?- for you Brits). Hold it by the butt with one hand (under no circumstances should you let go!) and slide it forward through the other one eventually letting go with the guide hand and continuing to power it by whole body motion if you need more range- up to 12 feet with a 9 footer. The range is much greater, power and speed are good. Down side is that it can be pushed off line easier- upside is that you are far enough away to effect recovery before your opponent can do much about it. If he does close jam the haft into his arm so that he can’t swing his arm forward enough to get to you. Throw him to the ground or pull your own dagger and get inside of his attacks. Works for me. With one handed spear and shield (and why would you use a one-handed spear with out a shield unless you had no other choice?) remember to train up a shield attack to counter those that want to get close to you. Again I think that the turn sequence in RQ produces some artificialities. I believe that RQIV:AiG was addressing these with the Manuever skill and that perhaps should be looked into. Do spearmen get clobbered by swordsmen? Yes but not by a simple effort. They need to commit to a rush, which has its own problems if they muff it. In close order the front ranks need to concentrate on parrying blows and tying up the offense. The second and third ranks should be killing. In loose order give ground to maintain the distance and poke, poke, poke!

As firmly optional I don't see a problem with them.

Nightshade- Yep those are problems. But I think that the science of wound ballistics is getting better. We may have a better understanding - I just need to find it. Enpeze- Hmm, I admit that could have been written better. In short it has all of the sense in the world wrapped up in it. BRP has a gritty realistic feel to it. Creating rules sets that keep with that should be a primary consideration. However, any system in BRP will need to be able to function at the gritty level and at the heroic and cinematic level also with minimal differences. It is easier to simplify and distort a realistic system to those purposes than it is to try to get realistic results out of a system designed to be cinematic for instance. Realistic systems should be the default condition. I could see firearms in a cinematic system being reduced to just a couple of different types of weapons and damage resolution changed to fit the needs of the campaign. It was not a munchkin dream at all. Badcat- You have missed the boat again. Since the BRPCore rules are already in place you must realize that it is too late for any changes. At best there may be some possibility of a more realistic set of firearms rules added as an option in a future release or for such to be posted and used by whoever agrees with them much the same way that the Perrin Conventions came into use for D&D. Since you are not interested in such changes wouldn't it be more productive for you to post on positive aspects of the game rather than complain about people having different visions of what BRP can encompass?

I think that muzzle energy looks good as it incorporates velocity and mass. Bigger mass equates to a bigger round except for some very odd circumstances. My whole point here is to create a design system for BRP that will do well when we get around to needing the stats for low tech bombards and high tech hypervelocity cannon. Once you have the ability to produce stats for most of the weapons you can go back and massage the numbers to fit a particular genre's world view. Like the .45 as a man stopper? Give it a +3 to do so. But you can do so knowing that you have made an informed choice. I think I may check some different deesign rule sets to get a feel for things.

Enpeze wrote: Well no that is not true actually and that is one of the rubs. "Stopping power" is a misnomer and leads us to think that more energy will always drop some one faster. The correlation is more complex than that. Understanding it is not helped by some of the material that is out there nor by the stances that some of the authors take. Here is a link to a paper that expresses the views of Martin Fackler who works in the Wound Ballistics Lab of the US Army. It is about what he thinks is wrong with the literature on the subject in 1987. http://teapot.usask.ca/cdn-firearms/Fackler/wrong.html Here are excerpts from Dr. Vincent di Maio's book "Gunshot Wounds" that expresses other views on what happens. http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/scientific_topics/wound_ballistics/How_a_high-speed.html Here is a critique of objections to the pressure wave data. http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0701/0701268.pdf It is agreed that there are reports, pro and con, for just about any cartridge. The problem is the huge variability in conditions under which shootings takes place. Out of the long debates on such things there have come some very rough rules of thumb. Location is very important. If you don't affect arteries, organs, or the nervous system you will fail to physically incapacitate your target. This is seen in hunting scenarios all of the time. Two bucks are shot under very similar circumstances; one drops immediately and the other bounds away to bleed out later -or not. The round needs to be able to penetrate the body an appropriate distance to increase the likelyhood of striking blood vessels, organs, or the CNS. Temporary cavitation may or may not have any serious effect on stopping a target. fragmenting rounds help with this by perforating tissues that then tear. In hand gun loads this does not seem to be a concern. In high velocity rifles it is. The permanent wound channel may be the only mechanism for damaging a target. It is caused by the round crushing tissue. It will be the size of the round plus expansion of the bullet or slightly larger for non expanding bullets that have flipped end for end in the target. Damage to the CNS via a pressure wave is controversial but seems to be gaining support.Given these guidelines it appears to me that most games are treating the resolution of firearms wounds in a very unrealistic manner. BRP rewards the use of more powerful handguns, ups the damage from smaller calibers to make them competitive in the HP-damage model, and does not model any of the other effects of gunshot wounds. It does not reward superior shot placement nor is the random shot given any bonus or minus for striking various parts of the anatomy. Some have advocated the rules for specials and criticals as modeling this. However the 20/5 % Special/crit rules are applied in a rigid fashion with no concern for RW data on actual frequency of incapacitation by particular calibers/loads/bullet types. As an "easy" house rule it may be possible to assign different special/crit percentages to various firearms. This could even be broken out as a 'smorgasbord' table where players pick the gun, the load, and the bullet type to suit their (percieved) needs. Each element would be rated for effectiveness and each would be additive with the others to arrive at a % chance for at least 'special' damage. This damage need not be extra points of damage but could instead be used to force a resistance roll on the target to remain concious etc. Regular damage i.e. 1d6+1 etc would then represent having to pick at the target and hope that you can reduce him to 2 HP (is that what it is in BRPCore now?) before he kills you. Further, my initial concern was that retaining firearms damage ratings that are not based on RW parameters makes it harder to do some things like create technological design sequences for BRP. I am in favor of adjusting damage of firearms so that it scales in a predictable manner and is tied to real world data. Once that baseline is set then working out the wounding mechanics to fit various levels of play (gritty, heroic, cinematic etc) should be fairly easy. I am confident that it can result in more realistic results with little to no sacrifice in playability.

Well there is plenty of minutiae to go around. And those aren't my only interests. I have bothered Jason with questions, looked at the settings problem, and dropped various comments here and there. So broaden your horizons and comment on everything. Or do what Badcat does and just tell everyone that things are fine the way they are.