Enpeze

I am quite pleased that BRP is not among the 2008 nominees, because I

would have found it very difficult to vote for either BRP or Traveller.

Besides, if BRP should be a nominee in 2009, there is a chance that it has

become somewhat more well-known, and that there are some settings and

supplements making playing BRP even more attractive.

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.

I suspect there are two things at work:

1. Most people don't think about it;

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?

2. In most games it _won't_ come up that often; you can go a lot of sessions before hitting a situation where you're parrying a poleaxe with a dagger, because its relatively rare the situation where you get attacked with a poleaxe and all you have is the dagger. If anything, the "I'm trying to parry the Giant Maul with my broadsword" situation is more likely, and even that one won't come up all that often.

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.

Like most rules, depends entirely on how important you find it.

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.

I think the passage about shields was just a leftover or referred to slung shields (although it could apply also to the way I currently houserule MRQ). We have debated (read: flamed) this point a lot on the MRQ forum, and the point is that using armor points for parries as in RQ3 is unrealistic (a steel sword is not better at parrying than a normal one), except for the fact that parrying huge blows with small weapons should be more difficult (but not impossible, except in case of area attacks).

I am happy with the BRP rules as they are, simple and realistic. The only option that need be added is to make parries vs. weapons two orders of magnitude bigger Difficult, i.e. do not parry a halberd with a dagger unless you are 200% proficient with it. But this is best left to the GM.

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.

BRP is more lethal than D&D though nowhere near as lethal as CoC. When playing in a fantasy setting characters usually have access to some combination of armour, parrying, avoidance and magic to either minimise the damage taken from any given attack or recover from it. The BIG difference to D&D games though (when played out of the box) is that in BRP *any* attack from almost any enemy could kill a PC whereas in D&D you normally have to be weakened by several blows before your character might die.

Consequently, in BRP, the most dangerous thing to do to a group of PCs is to outnumber them. In D&D if you outnumber the PCs 2 to 1 with a group of critters a few levels lower than the PCs, the worst that is likely to happen is that they lose a few HPs. Do the same to BRP PCs and there's a real chance you might accidentally kill one of the PCs. For most BRP/RQ fans, this is a *good* thing.

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.

SB/RQ formula: Skill - (Required STR - Actual STR) *5% - (Required DEX - Actual DEX) * 5%

BRP formula: Skill / 2

Which one is simpler?

Plus make one SAN roll for endorsing Ken St.André, you Tunneling Troll

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?

This would be brutal:

          General Hit Points   14


d100                 Location HP                

1 - 5       5%     SKULL       1  (Head)

6 - 10      5%     FACE†       1  (Head)

11 - 15     5%     NECK        1  (Head)

16 - 27     12%    •SHOULDER   2  (Arm)

28 - 33     6%     •UPPER      1  (Arm)

34 - 35     2%     •ELBOW      1  (Arm)

36 - 39     4%     •FOREARM    1  (Arm)

40 - 43     4%     •HAND       1  (Arm)

44 - 60     17%    THORAX      3  (Chest)

61 - 70     10%    ABDOMEN     2  (Abdomen)

71 - 74     4%     GROIN       1  (Abdomen)

75 - 80     6%     •HIP        1  (Leg)

81 - 88     8%     •THIGH      2  (Leg)

89 - 90     2%     •KNEE       1  (Leg)

91 - 96     6%     •CALF       1  (Leg)

97 - 100    4%     •FOOT       1  (Leg)

Stolen from HarnMaster

Much too complicated. Is not basic anymore IMO.

In another game I own, the player says which location the character is aiming for. After the player rolls his attack die, he then rolls for the hit location twice (more if the rolls are on the same spot). The roll that comes nearest or on the location is the one that's kept. I plan on using this rule.

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.

I'm a fan of WFRP so the idea of hitting an arm and crippling it appeals to me. >:->

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.

I picked the last option because I like both...and I really am a gorp (with lots of extra chaos features)! >:->

I think a hard scifi would greatly benefit from hit locations. The old Ringworld supplement had them and it works very well since any of the scifi weapons in it do damage beyond a humans max hit points. The only way to survive those is to take the hit in a limb (that's immediately missing, but can be regrown of course...or replaced in a different take on scifi), but any hit to abs, chest, or head are instant death. Without hit locations, any hit would be instant death.

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

Well I like this new version better - i.e. the under-statted have to roll at half skill.

(But this is a debate for the Difficulty Modifiers thread... )

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.

If you did not notice, there is a table for specials, criticals and fumbles, too

Seriously, if I caugth my daughter ever asking for a calculator or a table for doing the maths in a RPG (it will not take long before she gets interested in the matter) I would bash her on the head and send her studying her maths again.

But if someone has little fun doing calculatios, there is no reason to not waste a sheet with some tables. The resistance table alone will not kill a tree.

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

It probably depends how much you can internalize that sort of thing; the special results are 20% of a value, so as long as you're dealing with 5% or bigger modifiers its easy to remember, and the occurance of fumbles or crits is low enough that the marginal cases are easy to check when they come up.

The real issue is whether you see adders/subtractors or multipliers/dividers as representing the process better; even though both do some of the same work, the results differ enormously when you get to one end of the skill rating or the other.

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.

There is always someone who hates maths.

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.

As the person who created it for RQ decades ago, I can tell you that it was created because several of the play-testers had trouble doing math on the fly from Steve's original formula of 50% + 5% of the difference. I did nothing more than chart it up in pencil on some large square graph paper that I used in the Navy for charting. It was cut & pasted into the playtest rules - I believe I still have my copy of them from 30+ years ago. So it is merely a convenience tool. I like it for being vs inanimate object or force but use the Stat vs Stat on a D20 or Stat*5 vs Stat*5 on a D100 when two sentient beings are involved and actively competing.

Skaal,

Sven

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.

Not sure about the opposed rolls route. Seems kind of strange for a door to make a roll to resist being opened...I think in my set of rules I might just go for a written explanation of the formula rather than the big table. It's pretty simple after all when you get it - to my mind the table is not necessary.

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)

One less book to carry around.

I just say pdf.