Enpeze

Whats makes Mongoose Traveller that great that its for you on par with BRP? Given, I browsed only through it, but found nothing exciting in this book. -rules - well...rather lame compared to BRP -background -nice and ok, but nothing I had not seen in other supplements -artwork - from medium to outright bad So whats so special about MonTrav IYO?

BRP is a intended as an easy to play ruleset for minimalists. We should not make the mistake to Gurpsificate it. For such minor questions like learning new skills every good GM should be ready to come up with his own ruling.

Except for Nephilim I own all those books. (I am mad I know) So I would not need the new BRP book. But I really like it. I have some minor issues with the values of some futuristic weapons and futuristic armor and the skill martial art, but the rest is great. Concentrated BRP.

Sadly this is true. There are plenty of discussion if a weapon do x or x+1 damage but AFAIK this is first discussion here about the parry capabilities of weapons in BRP no? We have a good share of dagger fighting. Mostly because other weapons break, you fight in bars, easily concealable etc. So it depends on story. Eg. our assassin campaign in a renaissance fantasy environment we had dagger fights every evening.

Interplanetary interceptors looking like a P38? I dont know. It looks a little bit over the top to me.

I always find it interesting that we micromanage fanatically effects like 1d8 or 1d6+1 for weapon damage or having a at least 2 seperate rules for the min. attributes for weapon use, but we dont have a problem to house rule (or not rule at all) the obvious fact that daggers are doing hard to impossible to parry axes/hellebardes and vice versa. (not counting other parrying improbabilities) Yes in this case we are given the advice to "find it important" and house rule it by ourselves. No support from the system in this question. Additionally we have dozens of spot rules for this or that nonsense which seldom or never arises in the game but parrying with daggers which occurs in nearly every game regularly is not considered. Maybe it would blow up the BRP rules too much? From 380p to 380 and half page BTW: my house rule for this parrying problem is even much simpler than a half page (BRP like). I give situational parry modifiers of -20% or -40% and this works perfect.

2 magnitudes? Try to parry a 1H battleaxe with a dagger at full skill. Or try to parry a dagger with a 1H battleaxe at full skill I think its not that simple than reducing the problem to just the size of a weapon. The downside of all this is to clutter the rules with "parrying" houserules. Which is better?

Not that I am a big fan of Woo, but I think BRP should be able to simulate it. Browsing through the powers section of the rulebook, doubling HPs with extra blood reservoirs, giving insane skills (150%+) and assigning no or only small penalties to impossible PC stunts should do the trick. Maybe you could also use MPs as stunt points and modifiers (eg. +20% skill augmentation per MP) or sacrificing 1 MP per extra attack. Additionally there is a ki rule in one Land of the Ninja RQ which says that as long you are able to roll under the ki skill you can attack each single strike rank. (as far as I remember correctly) Of course your players should be top-notch and well versed in Woos movies to be capable to invent wooish stunts on the fly. On your part I think a simple "every stunt is possible as long as the player can describe it" philosophy would help alot. IMO the focus should not mainly on what detailed BRP rules can do for those stunts. The focus should more be the imagination of your players and a liberal "everything goes" from your side.

Additionally if you like that your PCs have a better survivability you should introduce smaller monsters. Eg. having such extreme monsters like in D&D in the higher levels seems too dangerous for BRP. Look alone the damage bonus for such the BRP conversion of such monsters. ("ok, little rurik search for your head and re-attach your arms and lets fight against those 1d6 hill giant chieftains :)")

Excellent idea. I love 5th edition SB too. Its the highlight of all BRP versions IMO. But I hope there is no problem with using artwork from the book on your site.

Your formula is a little bit disturbing. I prefer the following definition: -5% per lacking point STR or DEX. Halving or doubling devalues the skill. Using this mechanique is not easy to evaluate and thus unintuitive and arbitrary. Eg halve a 80% to 40% means that this poor chap loose suddenly all the skill training he got the last 10y, while another one who has the same problem and who is at a basic 20% looses only 10%. Halving and doubling is maybe a easy calculation for some GMs but its not a clever rule design. I understand that in there are alot of BRP/RQ-GMs out there which take skills rather easy. (even inventing new ones on the fly for specific game situations) For them maybe its ok and fun to give vast boni that skills go easily over 150% or cut a skill in half without thinking twice. But not me.

Hm??? Whats wrong with Ken? Am I missing something?

Much too complicated. Is not basic anymore IMO.

Years ago we had also a house rule for hitlocations. For every 10% you have been under your skill roll you could modify the hitlocation table with 1. (eg. you have 60% and roll 30 for to hit. This is 30% under you max skill. So you can modify the d20 roll on the hit location table by 3) An additional rule in this little subsystem is that if you reach 21 (by modifying the table) you can choose to hit any hand-sized spot you want on the enemies body. (hitting the eye-slits in a helm is not possible) But today we dont use this rule anymore. I found it nice several years ago, because it made combat easier to control. But now we like games without hitlocations more.

Did you ever play BRP with hitlocations? If yes then you surely know that loosing a limb or head happens in BRP much more often than in WFRP. In our low powered fantasy games every second fight or so. I cannot recall that this was the same while I GMed WFRP. Ok in this game there was always the theoretical option to loose a limb but it happened only a few times in more than one year of campaigning. I think WFRP is in this respect much overrated. Its reputation as "gritty" system is IMO mainly coming from D&D players which compare it with their rule system.

This is an extremely interesting view. For over-the-top damage settings hitpoints enable creatures to survive much longer than in "standard" settings.

Yes. I am not convinced about all this "halving" and "doubling". It gets a little bit out of hand when high skills are involved and thus is not very intuitive. I would have prefererred plain simple modifiers like the SB1 5% per point or so. I like also the "strike last" and "half damage" option alot. I assume Ken St. Andre did it right in those days.

Really a table for specials? wow I didnt know this. In which book?

Yes this I see similar. Eg if your style prohibits high skills and see it as unrealistic, you should avoid multipliers at all. Eg. a 65% fighter would suddenly have 130% when shooting at point blank range (DEX/3) which is plain silly in a gritty environment. OTOH if you like heroic gaming % and skills with 150% or more are not a horror for you (see SB5 were the PCs reach regularly skills of 100% or higher) then multiplying is nothing special. There are no standards in BRP how GMs should evaluate skills in their games so it all comes down to the personal gaming style if you like multipliers or fixed values. I know for my personal style which I like. I know WHAT +-20% to any skill means in my games but I dont know what a x2 means. Linearity counts in my games, not arbitrarity.

Consequently such guys cannot calculate criticals and specials too. And they cannot add up damage dice. Maybe we should intregrate some additional tables for them.

Well, nobody questions about the necessity of the resistance systems. Its an amazing useful and elegant BRP tool. I just dont get that in a world were 90% of all rpger are D&D nerds which seem to have no problem with dozens of math heavy tables and myriards of senseless rules its necessary to have a 1/2p table for a simple 5% per point formula. I mean even a 10y old could calculate this on the fly. In 20y of playing I know nobody who ever consulted the table when using the resistance mechanics. So my conclusio is that its wasted book space. But maybe I and my friends are math genius

SAN rules for extremely chaotic sightings are ok. But only because WFRP has this means nothing. One of the goals of these rules is to shock the players and contribute to the apocalyptic feeling of the setting. Its for style only and dont drive you permanently mad like CoC SAN does. So if you have a dark and apocalyptic crossover between horror and fantasy then SAN rules are maybe a good choice. But for normal or high fantasy games it does not contribute to anything and I would not consider it if I were you.

this ist true. I am not sure why chaosium does always display this table in every incarnation of BRP. Maybe its an insider joke for them? It takes away 1/2 page space in the book. Its so easy to calculate the odds on the fly. (5% per point difference - so for what is this table?)

We only subtract and add the following modifiers: +-20/40/60%. Multiplier we consider as not very intuitive. IMO its more linear and intuitive to calculate a certain chance of success in adding a simple +-20% to say 77 than to double or to halve it. (doubling or halving additionally to beeing not intuitive produce sometimes odd results with high numbers)

I just say pdf.