andresni

Ran some tests, and using the formulae: (dX + dY) * 10 -20 with X being wound level (4 is healthy), and Y as difficulty (4=easy, 6=normal, 8+ = hard and harder), one gets quite sensible distributions against various skill levels. Skills above 100 should fit, can be made player facing, and relatively fast math. Alternatively, dX+dY, subtract 2, multiply by 10. Snake-eyes is a natural crit, degrees of success works as normal (1/5th, 1/20th, for example). Can even use doubles as crit with the benefit that the more difficult and the more wounded you are, the less likely you are to crit, somewhat counteracted by skill level. And, it's only "easy" to crit when the task is easy and/or you are healthy. EDIT: skill % are indicative of how often you can expect to succeed (under stress) at a normal task when you are healthy, or an easy task when you are a bit wounded.

Yeah I've been thinking about using this kinda like adrenaline shot, though it'd work more like luck in CoC to adjust rolls. Take a stim-pack (if space setting) or get adrenaline from injury, which can then be used to boost rolls for a short period or until it runs out. To even out the death spiral a bit. Though, I think using con rolls and stamina rolls and track all that might be too crunchy for my taste, but perhaps it's good idea. Sounds similar in a way to usage dice in e.g. Savage Worlds. Roll "hurt" or "fatigue" to do an action. Fail (assuming hurt/fatigue maxes out at 0%), lose x hurt/fatigue as you push yourself, roll with disadvantage. Extreme success, gain hurt/fatigue, roll with advantage. Adds more rolls though, but quite light otherwise. Perhaps it could be combined to one roll? Brawns 90%, climb 50% - roll 10/30/70/91/99 = extreme success (second wind/confidence boost), success, failure, failure and you hurt yourself, fumble (hurt yourself + something bad happens). Brawns 50%, climb 90% - roll 10/30/70/91/99 = same, same, success but you over exert yourself, same, same. While injury doesn't make you weaker per se, you have to overcompensate more and more to achieve the same success. Though it doesn't immediately make sense how you can overexert yourself doing psychology or tactics skill. Or perhaps player can choose to not push it, e.g. "you climb up the tree, get half way and notice your fingers are starting to hurt, you can do the rest but your fingertips will be sore, press on?", "the recoil jostles your arm silly, holding the gun steady will zap your strength", "concentrating on Bob's words are difficult, it'll tire you". Checked out a bit on James Bond now. I like the "ease" factor. Add skill and characteristic together, multiply by X, roll d100. Injury could then hit the characteristic. Until they drop there's always some chance to do a task. Though seems like the game went overboard with tables 😛 Very true. Though, in my case, I want it a tad more complicated while they want less complicated (though I don't know exactly yet as I haven't played with some of them before, looking to start it up in perhaps a month or so). Will ofc. go through the rules and any weird stuff that comes out of this thread in the end to see if they grok it or not. We played savage worlds a while back and the dice mechanics confused them, so that's where we're at and why I want to use BRP or a derivative. It just flows in my experience, while keeping that granularity I enjoy. Yeah this seems like a simple solution, just adding one roll and letting context and players/GM do the rest. Could prompt some roleplay moments, better roleplay narrows down the effect of failing the "healthy" stat. This is interesting. While I'm afraid of using multiple dice types as I know some in the group gets confused then, slowing down flow, but one could use say d10 as dice (00 is 0), or d20 (20 is 0), and you roll x of those depending on difficulty. Each injury adds one more die. Not very granular maybe. Bonus: making everything player facing is super easy!! It should also be easy to see when you roll a good roll, though adding it all together might be a slog when difficulty gets high. However, with xdX mechanics, there are natural break points to be aware of/min-max around. For example, with 7d20, there's around 6.6% chance of succeeding with skill 50, but around 20% chance with 6d20. Using d10 or lower helps but need 12d10 to get 6% chance for a skill of 50. Though there's definitely some variants here I haven't seen before. Multiply two dice together, roll under. The varying dice for 10s as you noted. Something like this would be my inclination, but I think a table is needed. But I'll take a look at the resistance table again in BRP. EDIT: Probably getting a bit tired, but going on with Mugen's idea. Could one replace characteristics (or have derived characteristics, e.g. brawns) with dice types, and then do the same with difficulty? So, every wound increases die type by one, and same with difficulty. Multiply the two and beat your skill. Though, even with 2d20 (max difficulty, max wounds), a 90% skill will succeed about half the time, and 50% skill about 1/3 of the time. Perhaps scratch this idea 😛 Also it's math heavy without a table.

Facepalm. My brain didn't think of this. You are right. That's no good. Agreed. This seems to be better on the face of it. But it punishes low skills a lot (while the above option punishes high skills). 20% skill -> 10% vs 90% -> 80%. Or a 50% malus cutting away most skills. I like this, but it's not very granular (perhaps it doesn't have to be), and if a PC attempts a difficult task, with 50% hurt, is that 75% malus? or 1/5th difficulty? Beyond these two easy options (and excluding a more complicated wounds system that increases book keeping a lot), there are only two more I can think of: 1) Multiplication of skill and characteristic. This would be fair. Brawl = 90% = 0.9, so a 10% wound would be 81% skill. Or 18% for a 20% skill. This seems fair, and can work if players can work out the math fast enough. Or perhaps print out a good old fashioned multiplication table. Would work fine with some automation rules. 2) Characterstic + skill addition like in Mothership. Though, this would lead to skills between 0-200% (brawns 0-100, brawl 0-100), or adjusted to 0-50% but this gets iffy for many reasons. Perhaps a third option: roll under both with rolling under characteristic means you get the intended effect, rolling under your skill means you manage to do it. For example, brawns: 80%, climbing: 50%, roll of 90 means you can't climb it, get stuck, fall, etc. Roll of 70% means you hang on, dig in, or reposition, roll of 40% means you scale the wall. If you reverse the %, you get, respectively: failure, climb but it goes slowly or you make a lot of noise, and scale the wall. This option will rely a lot on context interpretation. So, fail both rolls = failure, fail characteristic but not skill = partial success, fail skill but not characteristic = partial failure.

Upon reflecting a bit further, I think I'll start with the following base, and see what added complexity is desired or needed: Each skill is associated with a characteristic starting at 100%. For example, brawling is associated with brawns/physique/body. Then you have to roll under the lowest of brawling and brawns. Taking physical damage results in lowering "brawns". This gives also a little buffer before damage takes effect. Damage can be modified by HP (or con/size) as outlined earlier. It's also less punishing as -10 to all skills can be too rough, but as the general characteristic (e.g. brawns) gets lower and lower, the more punishing damage becomes. Characteristics reflect then your peak capacity (how hard you punch, how fast you learn, etc.). These derived characteristics represent how close you are to your peak. And skills represent your knowledge/experience/practice with whatever. One can use this either with more abstract characteristics such as brains, brawns, mug, guts, etc. Or, one can use it with hit locations. Each location starts with 100%, such as hands, head, torso, legs, etc. Any skill using one or more of these locations use the lower % between skill and location(s). This simulates nicely what happens if an arm reaches 0%, or eyes, or one leg, though, most skills use most parts of the body if it's to be used to full effect. Armor can then soak some damage, or serve as additional % (i.e. a meat shield). Creatures with superhuman stats basically have higher HP thresholds for lowering % (though I suspect this will be too much to track for GM) and higher damage bonus, as per usual.

I like this. In this way, someone with a large HP pool would need more damage to give a wound. If we assume for example 3 tracks if we want to model physical injury, sanity, and resolution/grit/willpower, and a person is out of commision if one track reaches 100%, or perhaps if the combined total is >100%. So, to get a minor wound (10% on the physical track), you need to take say 1/4th damage. 20% is 1/2, 50% is 4/5th. Maybe. The bigger and stronger you are, the more it takes. Damage below 1/4th could be just 1% to get that slow grind John McClain goes through in Die Hard. Do a similar thing for sanity (sanity points) and grit (power points). These percentages are then subtracted from any relevant rolls. Seems like a happy medium between book keeping/crunch and ease of play. Permanent damage can be included easily by increasing the minimum starting point on one of these tracks.

Ah yes, I knew about the RQ method. Should have gotten a little bit deeper into why I asked the question to begin with, being that I find wound mechanics like RQ, like temporary insanity in CoC, or indeed major wound mechanics in Mothership (any many others), too crunchy or too taxing to keep up with. It depends obviously on the table, but my experience is that players are better at remembering their bonuses but not their negatives. I enjoy the RQ variant in principle, but in practice I find such mechanics hard to keep up with except in one on one fights or similar. I'm usually the one in the group that reminds the others that they can't see or something during combat (or being an unofficial DM assistant). Some automated sheets on Roll20 or Foundry can handle some of this crunch, but I much prefer removing as many temporary buffs/debuffs that needs to be remembered as possible. One could ask then, why have a death spiral 😛 Thus the question, how could one do it in BRP with as little crunch as possible, given that I'm one of those who enjoy death spirals (or love to hate them). That was an interesting read! Thank you! Not a death spiral as I'm thinking of it, but an interesting way to deal with stressors. I've read briefly on this, but it didn't grok it for me. Do you happen to have any tips for a quick read/example of this in action? This would be the easiest solution to implement, agreed. Though would require subtraction which is always harder than addition. But, I think this would be the way to go unless one ties characteristics to stats and hits the characteristics (harder to implement, easier to play). One possibility with the 'easy' solution is one can have different damages which subtract from different kinds of skills. Then total negative modifier reaches 100%, you die or go insane or some such. Then damage has to be modified by characteristic. Hmm. It's an interesting idea 😛 I find it more realistic and to me that's part of the fun. Though it's a difficult balance, between realistic, fun, and minimum crunch.

New here and partially to BRP (only played in a few BRP derived games). Since I love tinkering, and want to run some BRP in the near future, I've been hacking together some different variants of BRP and Mothership (which isn't really BRP I guess). One thing both of them miss is a death spiral, or at least the kind where you get weaker as you take on the weight of pain/chaos/depression, what have you. For Mothership it's easy to add such a mechanic. Just let damage hit your strength, sanity hits your intellect, and fear/trauma hits... a new stat. For BRP though, it's not so easy. Three ideas: 1) a negative attribute that is subtracted from every roll. Increases math as one has to subtract something and calculate levels of success. 2) do like mothership where each skill adds to a core characteristic/skill, e.g. to punch someone roll strength + brawl, or General fighting skill (e.g. Str+dex/2) + brawl. Taking physical damage lowers strength or the general fighting skill. This gets crunchy as in option 1, and/or requires redoing some skills and characteristics 3) use wound levels like in Savage worlds, and add a disadvantage for each wound. Increases number of rolls. Unclear how to do damage. Other thoughts? Any BRP game that has a 'proper' death spiral?