MatteoN

I've actually been considering looking into Fantasy Hero as a system for use in Urban Fantasy games, based on other people's praise. I have not played the HERO system before, however. Aside from time-consuming but flexible character creation, how is HERO?

I liked playing it very much! I'm not very knowledgeable about HERO, but except for the bit I found annoying (variable bonuses for stats) I'd say it's a great system. It has the best damage location system imho.

Of course I was just ironizing on GURPS' balance-through-disadvantages, but forgot to include a smile in my post! 

These things are much easier to handle in GURPS. For example, a non-violent, wheelchair-bound giant would be a perfectly viable character.

Cool!

Not anymore! 

Was that "Wow" or "WoW"?  

 

And is "WOW" "World of Wonder" or "World of Warcraft"?

I don't think different advancement rates are a good idea

So it's become a bad idea in a couple of pages. May I ask why?

Just what is a "General d100" topic?

"How many times does d6 go into d100?"

Enjoying CoC is just a matter of having read and loved Lovecraft's tales before becoming able to realize how bad they are.    

In CoC PCs are straight men of the real stars: the monsters. So you want to put your character in the ultimate danger, because that's the only way to make the star appear in the spotlight and scare the imaginary audience. If your character manages to do that, you've done a good job; and if they're still be able to tell their story, that's a triumph!

Barbarians of Lemuria (terrifically simple, wonderfully Conanesque) [...] is the one I'll play again in a heartbeat. Thoroughly enjoy playing it.

If you'll ever try it, let me know what you think of Honor+Intrigue, that is a BoL hack with rules for swashbuckling.

I'm also in an on-line playtest for a Trail of Cthulhu campaign that'l take about 12 months to play through.

Interesting! Right now I'm playing in an excellent Trail of Cthulhu campaign, Eternal Lies, that has official conversions of NPCs etc. for CoC.

Is the campaign you're playing going to be of a breadth comparable to that of EL, Masks of Nyarlathotep or Beyond the Mountains of Madness? Do you know if it will be dual statted for CoC? Any idea when it's due out?

What about renaming the current BRP forum "d100 - Forum for general d100 discussions" and lumping BRP and all Chaosium games (MW, Stormbringer, CoC) together in a single forum with subfora (like the "More Games" forum) dedicated to the single games?

I think character balance is an illusion. 

 

Also, BRP skill checks and rolls tend to even characters on the long run.

You mean that you're under the illusion that characters tend to even out on the long run? 

You're right that balance doesn't depend on just what is written on a character's sheet, and that even abstract mechanical elements cannot possibly be made to even out perfectly. Still, I don't see where the problem is. BRP  is full of optional, sometimes incompatible, rules and subsystems. In fact, a mantra that gets repeated again and again about BRP says that the game's system is so transparent and modular that you can tinker with it, adding and subtracting rules and subsystems, without the the risk of breaking it. And what we're doing here is just speculating about an optional subsystem, based on BRP (RQ etc.) as it is, for those who'd like the illusion of balance to be less remote from their actual experience of the game. I generally don't like meta-game resources like fate points, but I have no problem with the game allowing that kind of option to players that like it. Having the largest number of options isn't necessarily an undesirable thing, right? 

You do have a point about higher skills already being harder to improve! Aren't there other resources on which you'd base the "learning bonus", besides number of actions, damage bonus, and hit points? What about power points?

Don't get me started with 'Malum Umbra'

 

"Malum Umbra" reminds me of a setting for True20 that was called "Lux Aeternum".    

Once per round, a critically successful parry allows a character fighting with two weapons or a weapon and a shield to make a riposte. Perhaps one might be entitled to a riposte by a normal success if fighting with two weapons or a weapon and a shield, and by a critical if differently armed? 

Else/also, as an additional houserule the defender who successfully performs a a defensive action against a failed attack might be exempted from the -30% modifier to their next defensive action in the same turn?

auyl, I think your friend gave you excellent advice. It's true that players in a game can all be happy if, and only if, the GM makes sure that each character is able to contribute to the group's collective success or failure. However I don't think that means that trying to balance a bit PCs that have widely different abilities is an exercise in futility, especially if this can grant GMs more leeway to design settings and adventures that don't necessarily have to compensate for power imbalances between the PCs, or to restrict the range of playable characters for a purely mechanical reason.

This is not what you're talkig about, but you might still find it useful:http://www.colinabrett.me.uk/htdocs/brp40k.html

How many degrees of success does DH2E have? How do you determine what your DoS is?

Another way to slow advancement would be to increase the number of checks/picks required to get a skill improvement. That will slow down the advancement of the more powerful characters.

If you find some merit in the idea of figuring the percentage by which a starting character is superior or inferior to the standard starting human character, and using that percentage to modify (respectively, disadvantageously or advantageously) the amount of skill points the character gains on a sucessful experience roll (or, perhaps even better, the experience roll itself!), I'd be very interested in knowing how you would develop it.

I'm sure it should be possible to streamline the method I was experimenting with above to determine what type of die a given character rolls to increase their skills. For example, one might perhaps just take into account the sum of the character's characteristics multiplied by the number of game mechanics they affect.

So, try this:

1) check how many mechanics are affected by each characteristic;

2) multiply each of a typical human's characteristics by the number of mechanics it affects;

3) add together all the results and take note of the sum total.

When creating a character (even if it's a human!), multiply each of the character's characteristics by the number of mechanics it affects (as in 2)) and add together all the results (as in 3)). Then divide the number you got in 3) by the sum total. The quotient is the number by which you have to multiply the maximum number of points the typical human adds to a skill in case of a successful experience roll, to determine what is the maximum number of skill points the given character can gain per experience roll.

I understand how INT takes some extra consideration because of how it affects advancement, but I'm not clear on how you suggest measuring/dealing with the characteristic disparities.

I said it was a quick and very dirty method!  Since HPs and DB are derived from CON, SIZ, and STR, I just took the charactersistics into consideration. However, probably it wouldn't be hard to take all of a given creature's derived stats and bonuses into consideration and compare them to those of a average human to figure out by what percentage the range of the creature's experience die must be reduced or increased.

Hmm. Interesting.

 

I just ran a the totals on attributes on the non-gloranthan elves (Monsters of Legend/MRQII Monster Book) whose totals come out to 90 on average, with 3d6+6 int for an average of 3.5 higher than human int. The free starting skill points are a flat amount in Legend though, and improvement rolls work the MRQ way (you get a set number of rolls, which you can take for whatever skill you'd like, charisma/appearance increases the number of rolls you get, d100+int vs your current skill total to improve, and it goes up by 1d4+1), with a teacher you roll your skill, and on a success, you add int/5 + teacher's teaching skill/10.

 

The number of improvement rolls you get is irrelevant, what is important is the bonus a higher intelligence gives you per each improvement roll. If you like that kind of approach, tinkering with it to implement it in Legend should be quite easy. The bonus an elf gets from their high intelligence when learning from a teacher seems negligible (+3.5/5).

 

 

Yes. I've played a lot of point buy RPGs, but now I have more fun rolling up a character than engineering it (but I never was a min-maxer). A balanced random chargen is my holy grail. However playing a mediocre character heroically can be particularly rewarding.

 

 

Since HPs and DB don't affect a character's advancement, I thought it was sufficient taking into account the characteristics from which they are derived. INT is particularly important in BRP (a truly anthropocentric game) because it affects both character generation and advancement. The main problem is whether one should give APP/CHA the same weight as the other characteristics. 

Interesting. Why do you think you would prefer the multipliers?

I'm a heretic in that my preference is for modifying the die result instead of the skill rating. I prefer to only have to pay attention to a single variable (the modified die result) instead of two (the modified skill rating and the skill result). Adding flat modfiers to the die roll in case of hard tasks would make critical and special successes unachievable.

I think I'd prefer multiplying the die result (with botches occurring only because of "natural" rolls of 99 and/or 100), but haven't yet playtested this method.

to use Tolkien's races as an example,  perhaps if a Man of Bree has a standard skill gain roll of 1D6, then perhaps a Dwarf from Durins Folk rolls a 1D4 instead, whereas a Sindarin Elf from Mirkwood rolls a 1D3.

On average, the total of the characteristics of the (Gloranthan?) elves from BRP is 82, 4.5 points more than standard humans (created with 3d6 in all stats except INT and SIZ). That is a small increment of a mere +4.5%, that probably by itself wouldn't justify using a different die. On the other hand, on average BRP elves have 3.5 more points in INT than humans, that influence both their starting skills (as each point of INT gives 10 personal skill points) and their experience rolls (3.5/2 rounded up gives an increment of +2% to the chance of making a successful experience roll). Now, the weight of the extra 35 skill points elves get on average varies depending on the caracters' power level: 

                                  avg starting skill points

                                  humans       elves

normal game             355              390 (+10%)

heroic game              430              465 (  +8%)

epic game                 505              540 (  +7%)

superheroic game     605              640 (  +6%)

The average elf's higher intelligence gives them an average increment of +7.75% to their skill ratings. As a quick and very dirty method one might perhaps add these three percentages (+4.5% to characteristics, +2% to experience rolls, +7.75% to skills) and modifiy by the resulting percentage (14.25%) the range of the die rolled to increase skill ratings. Since the die normally is a d6, that has a chance of 16.7% of rolling a 6, reducing the range to that of a d5 should be a MORE than adequate compensation for being an elf. [EDIT: This was awkward; probably it makes more sense to reduce the average result (3.5) of the die rolled to increase skills by the cumulative percentage (14.25%), and find out what die/dice have the resulting value (3) as the average result (d5).]

I think the most simple quick fix to model this for me would be to decrease the skill gain rolls for non-humans.

Yes, that is perhaps both the best and the easiest solution.