Michael Hopcroft

And no base is ever truly abandoned when one of your hobbies is time travel....

In an earlier thread in another part of the board (which I can't quite look up) I posited the question of superheroes as a way of exploring how to turn characters from other games into BRP characters. The example involved the d20 version of Guardians of Order's Silver Age Sentinels, although their d20 version of Big Eyes, Small Mouth has roughly equivalent possibilities and problems. I still think GOO's flirtation with d20 was a major mistake for them, at least creatively. In terms of power or point level, the Guard (the premier superteam of the Empire City Universe) was hardly balanced. It was, however, rather on the high end. Their lead character was the Sentinel, a thematic cross between Superman and Captain America. With Sentinel's d20 character sheet in front of me, I see that he had STR 96 and CON 30 but only (?) DEX 19. My question was whether porting those numbers directly into BRP would give nonsense results. According to the chart in BRP that much would give a damage bonus of +6D6 assuming a reasonable size for a Superman/Cap type. Is that enough to do all the things that Sentinel is reputed to be able to do? That's TWO -- TWO obscure historical RPG references for the price of one! I'm not nearly ready mentally to tackle converting superpowers; in fact, I'm barely familiar with how they work in chargen. But it's an interesting question. I've had a hard time imagining anyone having the poiints to get a 96 STR in Superworld -- what would that do?

Daleks might be able to survive outside their shells, but probably only for a day or two at most. That shell isn't just an armor and weapon system -- it's a very sophisticated piece of life support technology that takes care of the digestive, respiratory, circulatory and other needs of the Dalek and enables it to survive and function almost anywhere -- including hard vacuum. The question I would like to see answered is how Daleks reproduce. With their individuality trained out of them almost at the embryonic stage there would not be Dalek "families". I imagine that on Skaro, and on any other world the Daleks have established a permanent presence on, there would be some sort of system where Daleks come in at specified time to provide genetic material (perhaps from the vestiges of their reproductive systems) and then medical specialist Daleks make Dalek embryos which are grown in utero and then raised and educated in large groups until they develop enough phsycially and intellectually to get their casings and enlist in the glorious Dalek cause. Daleks are probably miserable their entire lives. Especially when they don't have someone to bully.

I still haven't heard anything from Guardian. Do you think telling them which distributor carries RQ6 would help them find it?

Well, I have the BRP ruleset and also Mutants & Masterminds/DC Adventures (same game, but the second has the pre-52 lineups from DC Comics) plus a few fan-created packages I picked up online. The big thing in the new edition appears to be the do-anything-with-a-little-work Core set that comes with FG3 and is intended to be the basis for many extensions for other games. Thanks to wbcreighton I know that BRP works. I don't have the skill to do any modifications (I mentioned in FG that I wish sometimes I were ten years younger and that better programming coursework had been available to me when I was in high school and college -- the Apple II was the hot new thing when I graduated from high school....). As it is, I'm just hoping I can be a skilled enough end user to make play happen.

I would love to take part in FG Con. The last virtual convention I went to was a blast. We were mainly playing and socializing on Hangouts, so I'm wondering how FG handles the socializing aspects. And whether it supports voice at all. I downloaded the demo just now. It'll probably be at least a couple of days before I can purchase my license (probably the Full license so I can GM -- the Ultimate sounds nice but is a bit spendy for me at the moment). There are several games I am interested in, the majority opf which do not show up on the list of games FG supports. And I'm wondering how many of the rulesets that are listed on the site, either from fans or officially, work with the newest edition (apparently the program just completed a major upgrade cycle). I have ideas on what I would like to see but no ideas whatsoever on how to make them real. I regret my age -- if I were younger I would probably have been taught enough programming in high school and college that I could have a go at building a ruleset. As it is I'll probably be as completely lost at sea as I would be adapting a template set for Hero Lab (which supports CoC but not really the full scope of BRP).

In reading through the Powers section in BRP, it seems to really discourage bricks. If you want to be super strong you must add one point to the characteristic for one Power Point. Since you only start on average with about 105-110 and need attacks and defenses, you can't just pour everything you've got into STR. I don't think I've seen a published Superworld character with a STR above 65 (in the core set the most I've seen is 63, but Superworld seems to use a different scale for Damage Bonus).

I wonder if the Shark God can pluck dragons out of the air and eat them. (And what happens when another creature eats a dragon? Does the magic of the beast do something to the beast consuming it?) What I would really benefit from is a BRP-centered Excel sheet that enables me to add new campaign-related skills, use all the power systems in the core book (including psychic abilities and superpowers) including adding original spells, and alter the number of dice rolled in attributes to make way for a greater variety of creatures and beings. I'd also like it to calculate the core things that need to be calculated, from hit points and damage bonuses to base skill levels, and enable me to improvement skill checks to build more experienced characters if I want a degree of randomness.

If I used that link straight it would put the Sentinel's strength in the range of several thousand. I don't think anything can survive being hit with a 100d6 damage bonus. Even the lowest conceivable roll of 100 would vaporize almost anything. But since its pasis is AD&D2 rather than d20 I suspect that might not be the best approach.

Perhaps those ducks who do head for space do not have the curse quite that bad (they can't fly unaided, but an airplane or spaceship will work just fine with a Duck aboard) or, if the curse is persistent even in the low-magic area of the typical SF campaign, they could have access to artifacts that let them do so safely. Or perhaps the ducks have worked out a means to teleport between planets or have built a series of gate networks (walk -- er, waddle -- through the gate and you're in another world). Which puts Ducks in possession of probably the most advanced technologies in the campaign -- which traditional Duck paranoia will prevent them from willingly sharing.

It just occurred to me that I don't really remember how D20 characteristics scale to d100 characteristics. That could serve to alter things as the numbers get bigger. And I wonder whether the SAS conversion to d20 was deliberately nerfed for ease of play. The CoC conversion system doesn't provide any formula for that purpose, but somehow I don't think straight-on substitution would be the answer. Anyone have a BRP spreadsheet that includes super-powers?

Calling them that to their faces would probably not be wise. I can see them in space, and as a different race for the PCs to encounter. Not necessarily elementally evil, but different. Different enough to make first contact difficult -- IIRC they cannot speak in the same way humans do, to the point that they might not even recognize the sounds we continually emit as language. Depending on what sorts of technology they use, the inevitable misunderstandings might have dangerous consequences. Then again, even Mythos aliens might do well to heed the advice of the Doctor: Run. As fast and far as you can. Run and hide, because the monsters are coming. Imagine the Ducks with a space empire of their own, with dozens of worlds under their big webbed heel....

What did they call that race of cylindrical aliens they found in the Antarctic -- the ones responsible for the shuggoths? I'd be expecting to see them in a Cthulhu Space campaign.

I managed to take out one of my older games: Silver Age Sentinels the late Guardians of Order's attempt at a superhero game. It was done in two flavors, tri-Stat and d20. The d20 port isn't that great. I had it on PDF, so I printed out the Sentinel's d20 character sheet (the Sentinel is sort of a cross between Captain America and Superman -- the experiment did a lot more than augment his physique, also giving him Flight, Invulnerability, and "Atomic" attack powers. He has a STR of 96in d20 and a BAB equivalent of +13. He would definitely pose some of the handwavium issues we see in most supers campaigns. His Damage Bonus, if we take the straight score, would be +5D6. It could be worse.... The Tri-Stat version is a much better game, but probably an even more difficult conversion. Tri-Stat gives a single stat -- Body -- for all physical elements of a character. Superior strength and endurance are represented by Attributes that further define a character. IF you look at the Sentinel in Tri-Stat, you see that his Body stat is high but that he still has multiple levels in Super-Strength. This makes pure mathematical conversion a pipe dream.

Even The Many Fantastic Adventures of Elmer Fudd?

Just be glad you're not trying to translate the original DC Heroes. Superman with a STR 25 was 33,554,432 times as strong as a normal human with STR 2. Hard to imaging him being lower than a STR in three or even four figures. You would definitely have to buy out the store's entire stock of handwavium to avoid problems with some of the most powerful characters. A character who runs up and down the city streets at Mach 5 would require lots of the stuff. But one way to deal with the fragility of humans is to use the PCs' reputations to advantage. I'm amazed that anyone short of Darkseid would even bother trying to punch or shoot Superman. Surely they would know that all it does in annoy him (if even that -- he always had a surprisingly even keel). Superman would not really need to do anything to foil a bank robbery except show up -- you're a bank robber. He's Superman. One guess who's going to win this one.

How would you buys build a race template for a species of sapient pigs? I don't have culture details yet, but I'm curious about writing them up. The one question I have is the SIZ, STR and DEX scores. Pigs are bigger and stronger than suburbanites raised on cartoons give them credit for. These "pigmen" would have human mental characteristics,and presumably a few adaptations to life as tool-using bipeds (working hands, and feet big enough to keep them upright, in place of their hooves), but at least in part they'll still be pigs. The one cultural thing is that they would probably resent pork-eating cultures and people, even if the pigs they ate were just normal, non-sapient livestock. They probably don't particularly care about their "cousins" in the barnyard, but the symbolism is what gets to them.

Unfortunately I could not find references to any of the d100 games on the system when I last visited. Rolling dice the right way should work just fine, though. I'm just wondering what other things I will need to track down in the system to run BRP/RQ/D100 adequately.

Ducks vs Cthulhu IN SPAAACE.... I like it.

I've heard mentions of Call of Cthulhu IN SPAAACE!: a game where Man is exploring the stars but finding the Mythos every so often. Finding ways to terrify (and blast the sanity of) explorers who have already encountered many different kinds of alien life is a challenge. But there are ready-made space creatures in the CoC core books who could be just as easily encountered on alien worlds as they can on Earth (or in its solar system).

I was thinking for a long time about doing a somewhat-higher-fantasy version of Harn for some system. Harn is in commercial limbo, and has been seemingly for the last ten years. That doesn't make its following any less dedicated. Nonetheless, there are interesting things going on, and the lack of an overarcing meta-plot to the setting makes it a blank slate for players to write on. IIRC, magic in Harn is rare and frequently mistrusted. Playing a mage would be rough for that reason.

Pity I only had the option of voting for one system.

WHAT? RuneQuest would never quite be the same without the ducks.

I looked back up to the top of the thread and saw that the OP had issues converting DC Adventures. Now supers in BRP (via the old Superworld rules) might well pose issues regardless. But I'm curious what problems you had and how you addressed them.