Joseph Paul

And what I think I am groping towards here is the idea that there is so very little of BRP that is essential for there to be a game that everything else is optional because if you take it out it doesn't crash the game. It might crash a setting such as CoC if you did not have SAN but that is just an example of an optional rule that doesn't affect the rest of the rules when it isn't present. Triff's point is well taken. The defaults given will be what is supported so we all might need to sharpen our pencils to make those corrections to fit things into our own games. I wonder if it is easier to provide bare bones 'default only' stuff or go whole hog and use all of the options for describing an NPC/equipment/whatever and let the GM pare it down to what they want to work with. I think Runelords did that.

Atgxtg- I think I wrote poorly for the first example. I was thinking in terms of CON to survive a round to a limb affecting the CNS. Obviously it isn't a great chance but there is research that records shock waves impacting and disrupting or damaging the brain from shots to limbs. I like some of your ideas but I think that your chart needs to be turned the other way in the interests of PC survivability and just roll vs 5x CON. CS=1hp/day SS=1hp/hour Sucess=1hp/MIN Fail=1hp/MR Fumble= 1hp/SR

Not worried about it.

I think a photo mosaic of past Chaosium covers would be neat.

WhooHoo! Only 54 men will decapitate themselves! Making the battlefield a safer place since Humakt cut himself shaving with Death. Murphy's Rules, "Cutting mistakes": In a thirty minute Runequest battle (Chaosium) involving 6000 armored, experienced warriors using Great Axes, more than 150 men will decapitate themselves and another 600 will chop off their own arms or legs. Joseph Paul

No the frequency of the severity is the problem. That sort of thing is so very rare even for weekend warriors that it makes for apocryphal tales. Joseph Paul

Yes the RQ fumble tables were drawn from the authors' experience with fighting in the SCA. Those experiences are 30 years old and that table could probably use some updating.I am with the camp that says fumbles happen too often. It is because of this- Murphy's Rules, "Cutting mistakes": In a thirty minute Runequest battle (Chaosium) involving 6000 armored, experienced warriors using Great Axes, more than 150 men will decapitate themselves and another 600 will chop off their own arms or legs.Now I haven't replicated the math for this but it sounds plausible given the rules for RQ. And that tells me that something is wrong. I may have to dig out "Innumeracy" for the math.Joseph Paul

Some of the Tri-Tac games ended up with a system like that taken a step further. Hit locations were blown up into 6x6 grids to determine exactly where the round hit and then you could find out if you hit bone, severed arteries, smashed organs etc. You could also just nick the shoulder. One of the ways to make things like this work faster is that the aggressor throws multiple color coded dice to determine hitting, location, and damage. It gets pretty easy to read fast. Joseph Paul

Hmmm. Good point and yes you are dating yourself. Further you have 'outed' me for knowing what you are talking about. As useful as the resistance table is if you take it away do we not have any other way to resolve things. For that matter you can still compare stats, figure the percentage, and roll so I am going to disagreee that the table itself is necessary. Joseph Paul

I don't think that you are getting the point of the exercise Badcat. This is an examination of what is the bare essential of BRP that has to exist for the game to function at all. Anything else is in fact optional whether a designer designates it as a default condition or not because if it was removed it would not crash the game. Do you have something that you want to add to the list or challenge the "essentialness" of? Joseph Paul

While we all eagerly await the release of the new BRP there is, I note, some apprehension in the posts of some of us concerning what rules will be alternative and what will be part of the core rules and presumably unable to be ditched if they are not liked. It made think about BRP and what had to be minimally part of the core rules for it function at all. Stats of STR, CON, SIZ, DEX, POW, INT and APP Hit points, loss and recovery Damage bonus Action rank/DEX rank Skills Task resolutionCan anyone think of anything else? Fatigue, any powers, weapons rules are all alternatives because not having them does not affect the essential rules but those rules affect everything else. Anything that I forgot that does affect the other rules? Having pared BRP down to this essential list I am amused when people make a distinction between an alternative rule and any rule that is not actually essentiallike those above. Like not being branded 'alternate rule' would keep any of us from modifying or excising it on the spot if we didn't like it. Joseph Paul

I figured you would, Godtime conservative that you are. Joseph Paul

It may be time to refine and define the question(s) better. It may also be time to move this to its own thread. 1) A review. In discussing possible design sequences for BRP it was put forward by me that firearms have anomolies compared to other games that rely on RW data and not on the needs of the designers. Specifically that pistols are overpowered compared to rifles and that damage done by other long arms seems to follow no rhyme or reason. 2) Point made that it is within current pistols' game capabilities to supply a major wound that will stop a human target. 2a) Point made that in BRP it is hard to kill humans with pistols in the game at least in one shot. 3) First thing to decide- Is the goal to kill (bring to 0 HP) or stop (render incapacitated) a human target? RW data looks at stopping a target. Shot at, stopped, and still living is the norm in armed conflicts. This is because there are many ways targets are stopped. Physical force, pain, psychological stresses, and disorientation are some of them. I would opt for stopping a human target to be the reality check here. It has been pointed out that as in real estate the primary concern in wound ballistics is location, location, location. However even this is not as straight forward as we would like (is anything as complex as this ever straight forward?). The concensus in the wound ballistics community appears to be that stopping a human can happen several ways. Disorientation by the firing of the gun. Bright flash and loud noise actually stunning a person and rendering them incapable of action for a time. Pain from an otherwise non-life threatening wound causing the target to be incapable of continuing. No structural damage (ie to organs, arteries or bones), just pain. Damage to the body resulting in bleeding or loss of pumping efficiency. Deprived of freshly oxygenated blood the target will faint soon and then bleed out. Damage to the central nervous system that results in unconciousness, paralysis, or death. Bullets stretch and pull on surrounding tissue creating temporary cavitation. A bullet does not have to hit the spine for instance to jar it hard enough to affect the spinal cord. Bullet/body interaction are complex but I think that what needs to be modeled are targets' reactions to having small bits of metal forced through their body at high speed. We see examples where round after round is fired into a target to no avail. Apparently the rounds are not hitting organs,arteries, bones, or the CNS. In game terms the targets HP need to be ablated. We see examples where an underpowered round drops a target. Apparently it did affect organs, arteries, bones, or the CNS. Currently we can not get this result in BRP/CoC. I am currently working out a system where the target takes the HP damage but rolls d20 vs CON or HP in a location to avoid being dropped by damage to the CNS, which is after all a distributed system. I chose CON as a representation of the toughness of the tissues and to link it to the target. Same idea can be applied to determining damage to organs, bones, and arteries by rolling d20 vs POW which would determine bleeding. I am working out simple modifiers for hit location (currently limb, torso, and head) as well as the amount of damage to those locations modifying the roll (limb- none, torso- damage). A point of damage from a .22 to a limb is very survivable. Roll vs CON to continue to act. A 5 point shot to the torso. Roll d20 vs CON-5 to avoid incapacitation A point of damage from a .22 to the head. Roll vs the HP in the head (CON/3 if you don't want to use hit location HP). If you make it no incapacitation. If you fail you drop and go unconcious. If that is to complex then you could abstract the ability of firearms to incapacitate by rolling d100 vs 5x(POW-damage). Success- take HP damage. Fail- take damage and incapacitated. Fumble- Take damage, incapacitated, and bleeding. Use POW because hitting the CNS is more luck than anything else at this level of resolution. Oh yeah do this for each round that hits. Multiple shots gve multiple chances for incapacitation. I need to run some numbers on this stuff to see how it performs. It should allow pistols to be effective at stopping a human target with out requiring them to be overpowered in relation to other weapons. Joseph Paul

There is a Murphy's Rules carton that addresses this exact question concerning RQ. It was frightening how many combatants managed to cut off their own heads in very large battles. Joseph Paul

Rurik wrote: You are right and I would put forward that we are, wrongly, compensating for damage to major organs and the central nervous system by inelegantly upping the damage of pistols. Yet strangely we have weak rifles in BRP. Do you doubt this? I don’t after realizing that a .45 ACP has 68% of the average damge that a .30 06 does (7.5 pts to 11 pts.) Arguments about energy transfer and overpenetration are moot in the face of such inelegant mechanics. For instance let us shoot a very large target, an elephant perhaps, such that the rifle round cannot overpenetrate and lose in the E-transfer lottery. Assume maximum damage from both rounds; 12 for the pistol and 16 for the rifle. The pistol does 75%(!) of the damage of the rifle. Hmm that is pretty good given the large difference in the RW energies of the two rounds, 412 and 2800 ft/lbs at the muzzle. Since pistols get more shots per turn than rifles we should hunt elephants with .45’s eh? I suggest that pistols be toned down so that firearm damage and later weapon developments can be rationally added as needed. Further the ability of high velocity projectiles to stop or kill a target needs to be based on where the shot lands. There are plenty of ways to abstract that so that we get any degree of lethality we want and yet don’t make super weapons out of pistols. Edit: and we keep the mechanics clean. Joseph Paul

Atgxtg- When I did that recently I found that CoC pistol damage was way overrated and that there were other anomalous figures. I would be interested in seeing your results as a check on my own. "+8 SIZ per doubling in BRP" What does this refer to? Joseph Paul

It looks like people are seeing two different models here. One is the make it from the ground up model whicj includes things like Tweaker's suggestion of EABA's Stuff and Flying Mices design supplements. Other things that would fall into that category are The GURPS vehicle design books, HEROs vehicle design books, BTRC's VDS book, and the various iterations of Traveller's design sequences. The other is the Rip and Convert model. Find a game that has the stuff you want in it and convert the stats to your game. The former gives you control over what you create - it is just right. The latter allows you to use all of the previously published gearhead stuff for your game with out having to wade through real world stats. The problem of course is jiggering together the formula that tells you what a T:2000 pennetration rating should equate to in BRP or how much 20 centimeters of Traveller bonded superdense stops. Any gearheads want to take a crack at providing conversion (how to) info on the BRP Wiki? Joseph Paul

And I am in agreement with you on that. Joseph Paul

I should have been more precise in my question and answer. What I meant was that in the whole history of BRP no one at Chaosium ever felt the need to lay out the baseline assumptions for such a product. I did not mean that the current crew was lacking in initiative by not cramming yet more stuff into the new book. I also am seeing that we may have a definition problem. BRP can stand for both the current project of core rules and the entire concept of what a Basic Role Playing system can encompass. I may just start writing BRPCore or BRPC to be more clear on that. Saying that the BRPCore rules did not need a vehicle design system is fine. I wasn't criticizing that decision. I was asking why people felt that the BRP system did not need it because I certainly feel that such a thing would be an incredible boon to the system. CbGl (Cthulhu by Gaslight) has an equipment guide out in monograph and it would be nice if the stats in that did not conflict outrageously with those in other equipment guides to, hopefully, come. Saying that the BRP system does not need technolgy/vehicle design rules is, I believe, a serious oversight and very limiting to the game as a whole because it makes several genres more difficult to put together. Handwaving stats for things will only take you so far before you handwave yourself into a corner. I sincerely hope that is not what you are saying. Long ago what I found in RQ was an elegance and rationality that held together well where other games did not. The mechanics were complex without being complicated and gave rich, detailed results. It was obvious that a lot of thought had gone into it and I don't see any thing in the system that would prevent that from continuing with an equipment creation book. Thank you again for your efforts in compiling all of the BRP stuff and for answering questions here. Joseph Paul

I take it that means that no one wanted to invest the time in designing those systems? Thank you for your answer. Joseph Paul

Why do you think so? I mean I can understand if some fans do not want to do that kind of work and are willing to fudge just what the capabilities of vehicles, and equipment are but there are others that would love to get down to business and work out reasonable (or outrageous) technological progress for different civilisations both past and future. Joseph Paul

And for some people the gun rules snap peoples' suspenders of disbelief. The math that I have mentioned that seems to be missing is not something that needs to be delved into at the gaming table. It is primarily a design tool to ensure consistent answers. And yes there are systems that have such maths as part of their design such as Traveller, GURPS, and BTRC products. Not they aren't out in the open as core rules but they are used to set the published damage values. Used in that fashion the player never needs to see it. The tinkerer however can well, tinker to his heart's content. The results will fit in logically somewhere along the line of extant weapons. Would you really be all that put out if the only thing that changed to accomodate such was which dice you threw? Joseph Paul

Let me state this again: It is not just a problem that with one or two firearms being modeled poorly. The problem is that there is no basis, no system, no math for that modeling. That means that every new firearm’s stats are based on the subjective conjecture and anecdotes that the designer believes at the moment. With that as a design philosophy it will be hard to keep any continuity between future setings. Two different authors may very well give very different stats for the same weapon or give poorer stats for a weapon that should, and in the RW does, outperform others. Why do those weapons have those values and not other values? Enpeze, would you please show how the damage values are “perfectly integrated into the rest of the hit points system”? Just because it fits the designers need to limit the power available to the players doesn’t mean that it is actually is integrated i.e. the values for damage flowing from the game’s design principles. I like the melee damage values for instance. I have no idea if they were set by any sort of rigorous (in the math sense) modeling but I have noted the odd change here and there especially with javelins. They seemed to have started with 1D12, went to 1D10, and finally to 1d8 or so. Somebody in the process decided that javelin damage was wrong and changed it. My only concern is- what was the basis for that change? RW information that proved javelins were less effective or the desire to manipulate how combat takes place to create the mood that the designer wanted? Yep. That has been brought up before too. The compilation of the BRP rules was a stirling opportunity to deal with some of the things that proved to be persistent nags in the system. I am sure that Jason did deal with quite a number of them. I don't understand why the inconsistent treatment of firearms has been left unaddressed but perhaps that is something that can go into a companion book. In an effort to make this relvant to the topic thread again I will note that shooting BRP characters with GURPS damage values doesn't make them any deader but it is satisfying to know that I can 'recon by fire' through a block wall! Joseph Paul

Hmmm. 1) I suspect that if the sole rationale was effect based then what we have is a system of firearm damage based on anecdote. Which is what seems to have actually happened. The designer wanted a certain amount of lethality (too much for pistols according to Badcat's friend and not enough for rifles and larger weapons according to others) What happens is that different rounds and different guns end up with the same damages when they shouldn't. The .458 and the .50 have very different muzzle energies mainly because the .50 is twice the size of the .458 and can pack significantly more powder into the case. Yet this is not modeled. In CoC guns don't work well against the Mythos so after a certain point it doesn't matter if the modeling breaks down. We now have a different paradigm with BRP. Mostly this is a designer gripe- if the expectation is to use the new edition of BRP to create new games then it behooves us to have systems that model well for many aspects of firearm use and not just for the vision of one horror game that needed to downplay the effectiveness of guns. 2) Stopping power seems to be intimately linked with shot placement, the surest stop being one that disables the central nervous system. Delivered energy has quite a bit to do with it but there is still quite a bit of controversy over what -exactly- stops people but more E does seem to be better. 3) Basing gunstats on the reported effectiveness of shooting people gives us a very one dimensional view of the guns. It tells us nothing of the effectiveness against materiel for instance. And that boogers up any future development of firearms for other genres that await development. If we don't have a way to model energy/penetration and the effect on the target now what is a more milataristic (modeling WWI, special ops, future conflict with aliens/superdudes/mostali etc) game supposed to do? I would certainly like for there to be scalability built into this so that substantially the same system can be used to resolve pistols and tank shells. 4) The "elephant problem" is not that you can't drop an elephant it is that two guns with very different RW stats do the same damage. I find it unrealistic to have the .458 at ~5000 ft/lbs ME be the equal of the .50 at ~13000ft/lbs ME. 5) I really don't understand objections to making firearms, especialy long arms, model RW behavior better. If you like that they are deadly how does making the big ones deadlier hurt that? 6) I tried the 3G3 conversion last night and while not exhaustive I did find evidence of what the HyperBear blog spoke of. Compared to 3G3 stats CoC pistols are overpowered and the .50 cal is under powered while the elephant gun (taken as a .458 Mag) is overpowered. The numbers are all over the place and, in this small sample, defy finding a formula to base further expansion of firearms or any other projectile damage on. Will this sort of stuff bother people? Well, yes it does bother many that have some idea of what guns do. The arguments about the effectiveness and modeling of firearms I have heard from the first time I played CoC. If BRP is the new baseline then it should have looked to improving the modeling of things that have been known to be a problem. Joseph Paul

Well I am not all that concerned with the minutia. What I am concerned with, and if that blog is correct it supports this, is that there is no rational system for the firearm damage figures in CoC. Which is a concern for me because I would like to see firearms expanded in scope in future supplements. I don't want to see future supplements making changes that contradict the core rules for something as ubiquitous as firearms. Or worse more than one supplement giving different views on it. In 3G3 Greg Porter lays out a method for creating a conversion rule for any system. You need three data points, preferably of firearms that have large differences in their damage. You compare them to the same weapons in 3G3 or its big sister More 3G3. Do some math and you should start seeing some glimmering of a formula such as every doubling of 3G3 damage value equates to another D6 of damage in your system. Well it looks like CoC doesn't do that. Damage is all over the place and CoC may be one of those systems where the designers assigned values on a 'looks good' basis. Badcat's example is a good one in that it shows that guns in CoC are lethal enough for humans. But there are things that don't make sense in CoC- the elephant rifle and the Barret .50 do the same avg damage. Other systems have the Barret at nearly double the damage of the elephant gun. In Superworld an M2 .50 cal machine gun does 5d6. In CoC a 75mm shell does 10d6. Is a 75 really only twice as powerful as a machine gun round? If, as has been asserted, there is no rationale for the damages assigned to firearms in CoC then now would have been a good time to make a change, pick a base line, and bite the bullet on this. Joseph Paul