MatteoN

And, while I'm at it, what if in case of a major wound (5+ HP for normal characters, 10+ for heroic characters) the attacker freely selected a location and the defender tried to make a Luck (?) roll in order to avoid the location being incapacitated/destroyed? (I'm not fond of MW's major wound table.)

I decided to recycle this thread, which I'd opened to illustrate a houserule I realized was broken, using it to ask for opinions on another idea I'm pondering, related to hit points and damage. I like how Stormbringer/Elric!/Magic World randomizes the damage absorption provided by armour, mirroring the randomized damage inflicted by weapons. How do you think gameplay would be affected by this major change: give each PC, NPC and creature the same fixed amount of hit points (let's say 10; 20 for "heroic" PCs and NPCs); and use the damage bonus table (substituting Constitution instead of Strength) to determine the damage soak bonus (or penalty) to be added to the armor die roll.

Absolutely. The Italian Wars were fought by many of the European powers of the time, the two main antagonists being France and Spain/the Holy Roman Empire. From an rpg point of view, the flowering of Christian neoplatic Hermeticism might make of it a magic rich setting, in which magicians seek the intercession of demons, angels or lesser "spirits" to influence reality (real world magic never was anything like D&D magic or "sufficiently advanced technology"; renaissance "learned" magic is also to be distinguished sharply from witchcraft, that was very uncommon in Italy).

No more so than sun-powered mechanical condors and mysterious cities of gold!

Or Incas and conquistadores, sun-powered mechanical condors and mysterious cities of gold...

Grazie, Paolo!

Thanks!

I seem to understand that the very popular Savage Worlds (which I never read nor played) occupies a similar niche to that BRP, although it tends more to the emulation of pulp fiction than to that of "realistic" fiction.

Il pubblico cinese ha comunque gradito molto, al contrario di qualche autorità locale: L'Esercito cinese contro i film Pacific Rim «È solo propaganda americana» - Corriere.it (English version: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/27/chinas-military-calls-pacific-rim-american-propaganda)

I have BRP Mecha but haven't read it yet. However, since it's meant to allow transformable mechas, and these often have one or more non-humanoid shapes, I think you shouldn't have any problem, besides having to come up with the hit locations peculiar to each shape.

Penso che Del Toro si concentri soprattutto sulla qualità visiva delle immagini e sulla "tonalità emotiva" delle scene; è chiaramente un regista di genere, che però cerca di fare dei film di genere meno ... generici, cercando di dare una maggior profondità, quasi sinestetica, alle immagini (perciò la moderazione nell'uso della computer grafica - non mi riferisco a PR - e il felice impiego di tecniche tradizionali) e di trasmettere allo spettatore la meraviglia e l'orrore che provano i personaggi, piuttosto che semplicemente divertirlo per due ore con uno spettacolo che segue gli scorrevoli binari dell'intrattenimento di genere. Del Toro è secondo me un "monomaiaco", interessato solo a fare del cinema il più "meliesiano" possibile. Ho difficoltà a ricordare personaggi nei suoi film - compreso Il labirinto del fauno - dotati di un autentico spessore psicologico, come probabilmente si avrebbe difficoltà a trovarne nella favole e nella letteratura fantastica di tutti i tempi e luoghi. E' vero che PR risulta particolarmente "concentrato", e che l'intera struttura narrativa del film è costituita da cliché e luoghi comuni - sia hollywoodiani che, fortunatamente, come tu rilevavi, giapponesi - che lo puntellano quanto basta perché non crolli come una montagna di macerie addosso a robottoni e mostri giganti intenti a dare spettacolo. Certo, tolti mostri e robot non rimane probabilmente nulla che valga il prezzo del biglietto, a parte le belle facce di Rinko Kikuchi e Idris Elba, e le scarpe di Ron Perlman. Devo dire tuttavia che a me è venuto spontaneo confrontarlo con quei film di montaggio che i giapponesi traggono (traevano?) dalle serie animate, nei quali in 90' veniva riassunto tutto l'arco narrativo di una serie di decine di episodi col risultato che, in genere, solo chi l'ha vista ci capisce qualcosa e non si annoia a morte. Beh, magari quei film (quelli che ho visto almeno - mi sovviene proprio quello tratto da Baldios che tu hai ricordato) avessero il ritmo e l'intelligibilità di Pacific Rim! Pare comunque che cinquanta minuti di girato siano stati tagliati; mi chiedo cosa potesse esserci in quei cinquanta minuti: davvero, dubito che Del Toro potesse averli spesi ad approfondire la storia e la psicologia dei personaggi (forse con qualche altro flashback?), e non ci sono durante il film stravolgimenti dei loro (molto lineari) rapporti, che lascino pensare che qualcosa che non abbiamo visto li abbia alterati. Mi chiedo se non avesse dato più spazio agli altri Jaeger. In particolare, forse dare più screen time a Crimson Typhoon e ai suoi piloti (dei quali mi pare non sentiamo neanche una battuta) avrebbe reso il film più eccitante per la vasta platea cinese a cui nei prossimi giorni il film verrà sottoposto? Comunque, su imdb Pacific Rim 2 risulta in pre-produzione.

At long last I'll able to have in my hands (and read, because I don't read rpgs in pdf format) the outcome of your and Francesco D.'s precious work. By the way, Francesco was my game master when I played Mekton (and Mage)! I haven't seen him in ages...

Are you kiddin'? Balatack or Diapolon are less known robots, not Ga-keen!

There has been a short exchange between RosenMcStern, the rpg.net member komradebob and me at rpg.net, on a topic on which people here might have something to say: 1) http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?695774-Sell-me-on-roll-under-mechanics-vs-roll-over-mechanics&p=16992899#post16992899 2) http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?695774-Sell-me-on-roll-under-mechanics-vs-roll-over-mechanics&p=16992948#post16992948 3) http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?695774-Sell-me-on-roll-under-mechanics-vs-roll-over-mechanics&p=16992986#post16992986 4) http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?695774-Sell-me-on-roll-under-mechanics-vs-roll-over-mechanics&p=16993019#post16993019

Paolo, have you already seen Pacific Rim? I saw it yesterday, and I think it's a quite fun mix of conventions from both Hollywood movies and animes! It absolutely isn't "too Hollywood", and the mechas and the kaijus (I loved them) are stunning.

fmitchell, it seems that we're totally on the same page as far as our preferences are concerned: I too think that the stat/skill distinction generally is arbitrary and unconvincing. If I wanted to modify BRP, I probably would do without the characteristics and use just skill categories and skills; damage bonus, hit points and magic points would have to be determined directly, not derived from other characteristics. However, I like the INT and EDU characteristics, because I see them respectively as: - a trait describing a character's capacity to acquire new knowledge either directly through sense perception or indirectly through reasoning. While it's obviously true that one can have keen senses and be slow-witted, or viceversa, I think with the INT characteristic and the sense related skills it's possible to represent a large variety of characters. - a trait describing how much general knowledge the character has already acquired. I conceive it differently from how it's (unconsideredly imho) presented in BRP games: I don't interpret its rating with reference to today's state of the natural sciences, seen as a fixed, eternal standard! Rather I interpret it in reference to the body of beliefs and knowledge accepted by the historical culture to which the character belongs. So a shaman might be a learned member of a tribe of nomadic herders, just like a MIT professor is a learned member of the population of Boston. The fact that the latter holds a larger number of true beliefs than the former in my experience is often irrelevant in rpgs, where most of the times the question is whether a character knows (or believes) something that other characters know (or believe), and not whether he knows the truth about a given matter. When it's dubious if a character is aware of something, the player makes a Know roll whose multiplier depends on how likely it is that that a member of their culture is aware of that thing. That is, I don't consider Edu as an optional characteristic.

Of course, but that is true of other stats, too (if you're resistant to fatigue you also don't suffer from allergies and are immune to poisons etc.). Perhaps the main point of getting higher education (in scientific faculties a large part of the information you receive during college is out-of-date by the time you get a degree) is training to wrap your head around new things and be an efficient self-learner. Now, you could have an "Understanding/Learning" meta-skill, but I think the Intellingence stat (with the Idea roll) works just fine for that purpose. And if what bothers you is that stats are typically (and lazily) described as mere "inborn traits", simply reinterpret them as dependent in part on your genetic pool and in part on your environment/upbringing, as I expect a biologist/geneticist that is not a supporter of genetic determinism would do.

I see this as a major mistake in rpg design. Sometimes I might want to play Stephen Hawking, and other times Mister Bean (or their 5th century counterparts).

A sub-category that cognitive psychologists might find interesting is that made up of the people that think that the d% is more random than other dice. Welcome, StanTheMan!

It's not that the bad guys' taste is more pungent per se, it's just that, when the dinosaurs eat them, the safeties of their Mauser C96 pistols are often disengaged...

Since SoL's setting is Japan during the Heian period, I think Osamu Tezuka's very cool Book of the Sun (last narrative arch in the Phoenix series) may be inspirational:

There also are the cowboys & aliens and the alien vs. t-rex options!

Here a mention is made to a couple other (licensed?) mini-settings that were published on the same rpg magazine on which BASIC- Giocare Alien was originally published.

You greedy fellow!

Cool! Sadly, I'll have to wait the end of June to order my copy. Paolo, if you're comfortable with the superhero rules of the BGB, I suggest you put together in a little pdf some guidelines for fast and easy creation of some common japanese superheroes ("the cybernetic martial-artist", "the power-armored samurai", "the giant hero"...), as a free bonus for people who want some more anime/tokusatsu funkiness in their BRP Mecha games.