Peter Fitz

That's fine in principle, but it does mean a lot of work for both player and GM. Especially for the GM, who has to maintain consistency in the level of effect from session to session without any clear guidelines. The advantage of mechanistic magic systems is that it removes a great deal of ambiguity.

Once again I find that because our gaming group's collective schedule is so erratic, I end up spending far more of my time fiddling around the edges of my campaign milieu than actually devising exciting adventures to put them through. If I'm very lucky, we might — might, I say — manage to get a second session of our first adventure next week. Maybe. Current mood: Somewhat disgruntled. Adulthood sucks.

Here's a comparison of some 3d and 2d minis for gaming purposes. The 32mm mini on the left is from Reaper, while the 32mm paper mini to its right is from OkumArts. The little paper mini is another one from OkumArts that I've recoloured and resized to roughly 15mm, while the 15mm 3d mini on the right is an old Traveller figure from RAFM. The 3d minis are better, there's no doubt about it. But the paper minis are perfectly adequate for TTRPG purposes, and they're much, much less trouble to prepare and store. NOTE: OkumArts paper minis, unlike most that I've seen, have both front and back sides illustrated. That's important for games in which facing might be relevant.

Wow! This sort of thing appeals to my desire to play with little dollies, though realistically I suspect it would be of fairly limited utility within the game. Cool though.

Once you've got the size, shape, bulk etc. of the weapon determined, and you've decided if it's a melee weapon or a ranged attack, then in my view the most important things about it are the Special Effects of just how it does its damage. In pure game terms, damage is just pips on a die, but if your weapon is, say, a Flaming Sword then the SFX become the most important thing to differentiate your toy. Are the flames large, like a torch, or do they just lick along the edges of the blade? That may affect the ease and extent to which it will ignite flammable objects or creatures. Can the flames be directed like a short-range flamethrower, or does it just act like a burning brand? Is the blade itself hot? In which case it may cauterize the wounds it inflicts, so less bleeding. Is it always hot, or does it get hotter as you use it? In which case, how long can you hold on to it before you start scorching your own hand? Or does the handle somehow stay cool? Can the sword be used to intentionally cauterize a bleeding wound (i.e First Aid) or will it just do more damage to the victim without helping? All of these possibilities arise because your Flaming Sword has a bunch of SFX. Any weapon in a RPG, at its core, is just a mechanism to deliver X amount of damage points. That's not very interesting. The interesting thing is how it delivers that damage, and the consequences of how it delivers the damage.

I've given the party in my revived Space Opera campaign a Far Trader, since I like my players to have more or less unfettered access to a ship. It makes my own life as a GM much easier. There's so much that can go wrong with a spaceship. To that end, I found some deck plans for the Empress Marava class Far Trader (from Traveller) on the internet, and recreated them as a vector file in CorelDraw. I rescaled it so that it can be used with the old 15mm Traveller minis I have, and printed it out on tiled pages. I don't know how much use we'll get out of them — I may just have to arrange a hijacking or two, or maybe an invasion by some kind of inimical Space Baddies. In this photo it just shows the lower deck; there's another sheet for the upper deck as well. I'll probably get them laminated at some stage, when I have a little bit of spare cash.

I've started converting some of the equipment from my ancient Star Hero campaign. It's not difficult, but I think for many of the pieces a basic description of what it does as all that's needed; actual mechanical definitions will likely be largely superfluous. A gravitic flight pack, for example: I guess, if you're involved in a chase, then knowing exactly how fast or how high you can fly, and how maneuverable it is would be necessary. But most of the time, knowing that you can fly about as fast as a car can drive is sufficient. So precise definitions can probably wait until they're actually needed. Weapons are a different kettle of fish, but rather than converting Star Hero technobabble into BRP technobabble, I'll just replace the SH gear with the nearest equivalent from BRP and call it done.

I like the spinning black hole best.

I have a copy of M-Space to use as a guide, but I'm running the campaign in the Terran Empire milieu I started it in two decades ago when I was using the Hero System (5th ed.) These are the pages I set up for that campaign: https://mojobob.com/roleplay/hero/sci-fi/terranempire/campaign_notes/campaignindex.html and I'll just convert things as need be as I go along.

We had the very first session of our new BRP space opera campaign this evening, and overall it went pretty well. Most of the session was taken up with character creation, and with the blind leading the blind it was all a bit chaotic. However, the system is so easy and intuitive that once we actually got down to roleplaying it all went very smoothly. Except for the dice, of course. Those blasted dice. I'm allowing everyone to make pretty much whatever changes to their characters they like for the first few sessions, until things bed in and people get more of a grip on what skills and equipment and what-not they actually need. The initial adventure is a space-hulk salvage scenario, which should provide a bit of excitement once it gets properly under way.

Twelve seconds in combat is a looooong time.

I don't think the statement should be a straitjacket. Obviously the character would adapt to changing circumstances. Maybe you could require an Idea roll or something to be able to change targets on the fly, but as long as there's no obvious attempt to abuse the system I wouldn't even bother with that.

I guess the new cover is more representative of Imperative as a generic-ish rules system, but I think the old cover was much more atmospheric.

I bought it through DTRPG.

My copy of BR:UGE arrived today, simultaneously with three other books from all over the world. Booty! Masses of booty! Of course this means there will be no more little presents from Past Me in the mail for a while, but still. BOOTY! I've read many comments on the supposed illegibility of the text in the new edition of Basic Roleplaying, but frankly I'm not seeing it. Admittedly I need my reading glasses to read it, but then I need them these days to read anything much under 72pt. The printing is crisp and clean, and the paper stock is beautifully luxurious and matte. I love it. RPG books are getting pretty massive in these modern times — that Lyonesse volume is fully 40mm thick, and the others aren't very much more svelte.

Looking forward to seeing it.

There are two reasons not to do that. First, and most important, it would make the book a lot harder to read, especially if you're looking at a PDF on screen. And second, because rotating the tables in floating frames is a recipe for disaster in a word processing application, and wouldn't be much less trouble to lay out in any case.

Here's a screen-shot of the layout I've chosen to go with for my A5 version (that would be Digest for US people, I think). Even with all the text at 9pt, and no illustrations at all, it comes out at about 650 pages, and I haven't made a start on any table of contents or index yet. I've had to break most of the tables up and reformat them, because they mostly sprawl out horizontally too far otherwise, and to fit them in to an A5 page I'd have to drop the font size down to only 5 or 6 pt, which is basically illegible.

I do have DTP programs available: Serif PagePlus and Affinity Publisher. I've used InDesign in the past, but the cost of ownership of that is just too high. However, none of these are all that useful for laying out a publication that is light on illustrations and heavy on tables; none of them handle tables all that smoothly. The best DTP program I've ever used for technical publications was Ventura Publisher (later Corel Ventura), but they stopped making that, and the ancient versions stopped working with one of the versions of Windows — Win2k I think. It was a while ago. For my purposes, LibreOffice works just fine. It's just a pity that Microsoft doesn't work or play well with others.

I've more or less completed the players' section, and am as far as the bestiary in the gamemasters part. I'm going to have to go back though and completely reformat all the equipment tables though, as they just won't fit on an A5 page. [Edit] And now I've reached that stage where I wonder why I ever thought it would be a good idea to do this at all 🙂

I'm in the process of reformatting the US Letter RTF to A5 ODT in LibreOffice right now, which is a lot more work than I'd hoped because there seems to be some weird glitches with LibreOffice's import of the RTF's formatting. I'll get there eventually.

The large-format BRP cost me a lot, because I didn't realise at the time that my laser printer would print in just black & white, and I thought I had to replace a couple of colour toner cartridges to get the job finished. If I had taken it to a print bureau, I think it would have cost me about forty Kiwibucks, which would have been only a modest saving over just buying the PoD softcover (though that wasn't available at the time). As for the small format version — I don't really know. I don't know how much of my black toner I used up on it.

Some time ago I got a copy of Basic Roleplaying when the PDF was on sale at DriveThruRPG for 99c. I printed it full-size and bound it in a fan-glue binding (the green one). The BRP Quick-Start rules were free, so I did them too (the floral cover, on the left). Both of those bindings have been around for a year or so, and since then I've also bought a PoD paperback edition of the rules. Recently I thought I'd like a copy in a more compact form, so I printed the Big Yellow Book in A5 signatures, and stitched and bound it into a Little Big Crimson Yellow Book, on the right. Now Chaosium have released the shiny new edition of BRP, with the editable RTF text block available under the ORC. However, even without any illustrations, and with all the text at 10pt, an A5 production of that comes to somewhere around 700-800 pages, so it might be a while before I get up the gumption to lay that all out and print it in signatures.

I'm wondering why a reptilian species would have such massive boobs, or any boobs at all?

Having an editable .RTF is great, but what would be even greater (and would make life a lot easier) would be an OpenDocument .ODT (or even, heaven forfend, a .DOCX) file with paragraph styles included. That would make reformatting the document so much easier, and would allow the creation of a table of contents with ease.