MatteoN
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Posts posted by MatteoN
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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.
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An obvious but overlooked setting would be Renaissance Italy. The political and papal intrigue. The lntercity-state wars. The arts and learning. I think it's highly underused setting.
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).
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Incas would be even more difficult to get "right" than Aztecs.
No more so than sun-powered mechanical condors and mysterious cities of gold!
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Aztecs and Conquistadores..
Or Incas and conquistadores, sun-powered mechanical condors and mysterious cities of gold...
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Grazie, Paolo!
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Thanks!
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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.
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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.
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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...
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this less known super robot
Are you kiddin'? Balatack or Diapolon are less known robots, not Ga-keen!
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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:
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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.
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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.
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Except that "intelligence" isn't a single number in real life, as social scientists belatedly discovered.
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.).
Book-learning is just as easily represented as a set of skills ... as are animal-handling, social influence, artistic ability, and any other arena in which some people excel and others fumble around.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.
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Removing INT and (except for 4th edition magicians) POW, on the premise that skills and a player's own intelligence replace mental stats.
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).
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4. People who hate rolling percentage dice, for whatever reason.
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!
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But the bad ones are spicier.
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...
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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:
Sun(太陽編 taiyō-hen) Published in The Wild Age, 1986-1988. This is the longest story, and was the final volume completed before Tezuka's death.[5] It centres around Harima, a young Korean soldier from the Baekje Kingdom whose head is replaced with that of a wolf by Tang Dynasty soldiers following the defeat of the joint Baekje-Yamato force at the Battle of Baekgang. He then escapes to Japan where he becomes the feudal lord Inugami and becomes caught in the middle of the Jinshin War, as well as joining a greater battle between supernatural forces and time-travelling to a bleak future world ruled by a theocracy that claim to have captured the Phoenix. This chapter stands in stark contrast to the earlier historical Phoenix stories, which tended to de-mythologize the mythical characters therein, for instance in Dawn, many Shinto gods are portrayed as mere humans. In this chapter, however, various Youkai, Oni, Tengu and other mythical creatures are shown fighting against Bodhisattva.
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There also are the cowboys & aliens and the alien vs. t-rex options!
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I've got them all! The little Italian BASIC booklets that were published by Stratelibri in the 1990s
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.
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I will start adding a small shipping fee in a matter of hours. Go grab it while the discount lasts!
You greedy fellow!
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Yesterday I had a Q&A about BRP Mecha and other games on the rpg.net irc channel. Here is the transcript:
The Hardboiled GMshoe's Office: [Q&A] Paolo Guccione (BRP Mecha, et al)
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.
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Didn't know of the Shogun Warriors.
Has anyone tried something like this houserule?
in Basic Roleplaying
Posted
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.)