cleombrotus

What the hell, have my two sided RQ character sheet as well. MSWord so easily editable to suit your needs. Unfortunately contains lots of houserules like MRQ fatigue and in-house personality factors, but easy for anyone to change...

Funnily enough, although not die-laughing funny, I'm the opposite. I'll try and run almost anything that inspires me at any particular time. As a player I'm much more demanding from my gaming. I get the hump with any GM who can't create an environment which doesn't make me care about my character. I'm pretty open-minded and motivated going into games, but I do lose my enthusiasm quite quickly if a game doesn't match my expectations...Actually, I lose my enthusiasm as a GM quite quickly if the players don't match my expectations...I guess I have to face up to the fact that I'm a grumpy bastard...

It only goes truly wrong when we take ourselves a bit too seriously and perhaps start to believe our own hype. Personally I love the whole shebang. Rpgs are the nuts, and though we may be geeks, I always love meeting other roleplayers, because whatever the game there's always a kindred spirit and a decent conversation to be had. Except for the Vampire/Werewolf crowd, who seem to forget that they're only playing a game - you're all muppets...

Sometimes it just doesn't work out. I have a good friend who, we have decided, just can't play in my games any more than I can play in his. What we want out of a game is just too different, and even the way we imagine our game worlds is completely incompatible. In terms of Glorantha, he sees it as a world of elves and dwarves and dragonewts in, I guess, a Talislanta style of fantasy, whereas I see it as a dark, materially humanist ancient world where the magic and mythology just happens to be real. He never enjoyed my style and I never enjoyed his, but we get on fine. As long as he unconsciously knows that my way is better, it's cool...

I think that another pertenant point is that the group dynamic will more often than not thwart any pre-planned story arc, anyway. I have never managed to use a printed adventure in its original format except by complete chance. Player input scuppers the best laid plans. I think I ran The Belly of the Eel from Strangers in Prax with little change, but that had more to do with a particular players absence on one evening that prompted them to stay in Corflu 'for one more night' so the player didn't miss anything. Phew. I even think I managed to maintain my blase "You can do anything you want" face. Mostly I end up with unused maps which get filed away for future use in an alternative session. I once ran The Battle of Five Armies for Rolemaster, and that was a linear story with loads of combat. I went through The Hobbit and took every line and deed by an unnamed human character (there are a surprising amount) and worked out how that could be delivered by a pc. This created some hugely linear storytelling as you can imagine, right down to handing them scripts for their characters to read out. But it worked, and despite everyone knowing what was going to happen next the moment they were stood alongside Bard looking across the Long Lake and saw the distant flicker of fire from the Lonely Mountain, the scenario gathered an atmosphere of tension about it that just built and built. It was pretty cool, if I say so myself, but it was totally dependent on my players being up for what they could see I had planned. I know that if I had tried that in Glorantha, they would have bugged out like the callous mercenary bastards they are...

I stand chastised...just stirring the pot a little bit>:->

Linear/Nonlinear is an illusion. The only difference between players running amok in a citadel, running amok in a cave complex and running amok in the Elder Wilds is one of scale. I would point out at this point that we clearly run our games in exactly the same way, at least as far as this goes. I will just never claim to myself or others that this is 'nonlinear'. I am certainly not against this 'nonlinear' gaming, but to use the term 'nonlinear' as a thinly veiled justification of one's self-perceived rpg superiority is delusion. Perhaps not quite as pretentious as "I'm a roleplayer, not a rollplayer", but getting there... I should also point out that this is not aimed at you in particular, although you did kind of imply that I was a lazy GM with a bunch of drones for players, but then if we can't say these things on forums, then where can we say them?:thumb: I don't know what pixel bitching is, either...

Yeah, it's funny how the little things make the difference. I got turned onto Runequest through the most trivial things - armour tables and artwork. I also remember my mate (we were 11) who picked up the boxed set and went mental because it was the first time either of us had seen gem dice. We had the D&D character class mentality and of course the blurb on the back of the box said you could even play a unicorn! I wonder what sort of games we would have run if we had bought it there and then? And of course what Simon said about Giants in Middle Earth is perfectly true. At least with Glorantha there's room for debate and interpretation...

I guess it's the kind of egos (and the level of intelligence) that get attracted to rpg that creates a degree of friction, as well as the ability to express it verbally. I'm as bad as anyone else, I guess. I remember a one off game in a club I was attending for the first time where the GM used the Genertela book by Avalon Hill as if it was a D&D type module. We got to Wintertop like it was a room in a dungeon, and the description was "There's an army there." Emotive stuff. We approached this army who were apparently stood around in a giant mob like it was a sunday barbeque. Genius disguised as crap, surely? I confess I had feelings of superiority toward the GM. I guess that makes me a roleplaying snob, too. As you can imagine, I didn't re-attend. Anyone else have any pitiful roleplaying memories? Probably another thread...

That sounds pretty good to me. POW is willpower after all, and thus the most pertinent Stat for this purpose. I still like the idea of calling the skill Firefight, and enabling it to encompass all of the stress related cock-ups that getting shot at seems to bring. It can then encompass your combat admin like re-loading, stowing mags, because by and large the awareness of your ammunition lies in a slightly fuzzy area between full load out and running low/out. Ammo awareness is an important skill and gets overlooked by the convenient record keeping of rpgs. Within a finite and reasonable framework, you are as apt to run out of ammo due to a fumble in your "Firefight" skill as any other mechanic I can think of, and keeping a bullet by bullet record is a pain in the arse and unrealistic to boot...by making ammo use more of a general mechanic, you probably get a more realistic ratio of ammo expended to actual hits on a target, at least as far as a modern military firefight is concerned...

All these debates about linear and nonlinear roleplaying are quite good fun though. I know it's all a matter of personal taste, but it seems that the claim to be a nonlinear roleplayer is tantamount to implying that you are more intelligent, more demanding of your roleplaying, more mature, better in bed, etc. Personally I gave up on nonlinear roleplaying when I was about fifteen. If I've made the necessary sacrifices required by modern life to give up a day for roleplaying, I'm going to get the right hump with any GM who tries to dress up a total lack of preparation as "nonlinear roleplaying". Whilst we all know that no players ever do what you expect them to do, and you've got to be prepared to think on your feet as a GM, I think that the art is to make something that is ultimately linear appear otherwise.

It is good to read through a thread where it all kicks off - I love it when someone is so wound up that their typing goes to pieces. I have to say that I never saw much rpg bitching until I got in with runequesters. Glorantha has always suffered horrendously from, how to best describe them..., errr, wankers. In all my years of roleplaying, the only people I've had look down their noses at me are Gloranthan runequesters, the only person I've ever wanted to kill for a really smug look/comment was a Gloranthan runequester (to be fair that sort of thing did manifest itself in his general personality, but that such a **** was attracted to Gloranthan runequest in the first place tells a story). As much as I love RQ and Glorantha, and I really do, there is an identifiable level of pompousity that seems to go hand in hand with it. Glorantha has always seemed to be its own worst enemy... However, the bitching is a part of the attraction. I remember the out of game conversations about how so and so was joining this cult and how everyone else was going to do that character in. After one such conversation I remember coming away with the distinct impression that Chalana Arroy was some kind of violent war god...(I had only read the RQ2 rulebook at this point I would stress). I guess any game, or world that can provoke such extremes of response has got to have something really good going for it.

Given that this is BRP it would be nice if we could use the resistance table for this mechanic. Make Coolness under fire a Stat similar to POW and variable in the same way. Maybe a derived ability. Then you can assign each firefight a 'pucker factor' varied by automatic fire, artillery, etc, etc, and make rolls in order to function effectively. There could be a fumble table associated with failure, mainly creating a degree of inactivity or ineffective activity. failures could represent something as minor as losing track of your ammo and having to change mags, flapping in various degrees - I've seen people frantically trying to fire dry weapons and seeming completely unable to make the link between lack of ammo and their inability to fire. It sounds a bit crap, but adrenalin can do some strange things to your head, and we're talking about 'elite' forces here (I won't say which to protect the guilty)... This stat can vary by general experience, specific experience, circumstance...

This is a great example of the differences between systems and reality. IMHO Coolness under fire is definitely an acquired skill. Some have an aptitude for it (high relevant stat/high starting skill), others don't but can be taught, or, if they live long enough can learn themselves. However in terms of an rpg you run into the same issues that MRQ did with Resilience/Persistance, that meant that once you had acquired the skill it was no longer a challenge. This is inconvenient for gaming but is quite realistic in terms of firefights. The more you do it, the better you get at it. I think it is best expressed in Band of Brothers, "As soon as you come to terms with the fact that you're already dead you can start doing your job" or somesuch... There is the counter argument that as soldiers become more veteran they actually lose degree of recklessness required for certain activities - I read somewhere that the general thinking was that only a unit that hadn't seen combat could have taken Omaha beach because of the level of naivety required to charge machine guns... I'd probably go with your ideas as far as a game's concerned, since it is, after all, a game...

Another few thoughts that have occurred... Coolness under fire or whatever substitutes for it should perhaps work as a cap to weapon skills in much the same way as ride skill creates a limit to mounted combat. The problem with this is that it makes for an indispensible skill in terms of rpg's, like MRQ did with resilience. Only raised by experience, obviously. An alternative to "Coolness Under Fire" might be a skill such as "Firefight". Thus a sniper, in position and braced would use his/her weapon skill, but the moment he/she comes under fire the skill is capped by an experienced based skill that dictates actual ability to think and function in combat... There is a distinct difference to what you can achieve with a zeroed weapon on a firing range compared to a firefight. When you get weapons tables in an rpg they always reflect, to me, the physical performance of the weapon when fired from a vice, in a lab. Weapons tables are from "Jane's" textbooks. How a character translates those characteristics into results should be more individual... Base skills like rifle, handgun, submachinegun seem about right. You only need familiarisation with a particular weapon to be able to use it as well as any other in a broad category. This would make a nice section on a character sheet for all the gun nuts... This is all bearing in mind that I've not seen BRP in its current form and thus in terms of system don't actually have a scooby what I'm talking about. Cthulhu Now is about my limit, but I always thought that in terms of a game it was perfectly adequate...

Guns get very complicated in rpg's, especially if you're really after realism rather than an adequate game simulation. I always thought that if skill means skill, as opposed to a simple probability of a hit, then firearm capabilities like recoil, range and rate of fire and human capabilities like coolness under fire should be considered part of the skill for the purposes of BRP. Even ammunition management in a firefight is a matter of experience rather than mathematics. The chance of any numpty picking up a modern rifle and hitting something in the head is covered by criticals. Coolness under fire is probably a skill, based on an aptitude for combat (POW stat? Maybe High INT as a negative since it goes against reason!) but learned through experience. You learn that if you don't keep your head over the parapet so that you can lay fire on the enemy then he will close with and kill you. This of course means that you might cop it either from an aimed round or a wild one, but the alternative is a certain death, whilst sticking your head up only offers a chance of it. Whilst Str helps with the recoil of a rapidly firing submachinegun, the skillful use of bursts is a much more effective means of controlling it. Adherence to marksmanship principles (a learned skill) makes the recoil of even .50 cal weapons more of a painful nuisance than an impediment to hitting a target. I always felt that you should give a weapon an optimum/maximum performance and downgrade its abilities through skill range bands. Over the top in my own opinion, but people do seem to want reality above all else. As an observation, most of the serious soldiers I've met cared about two things - the size of the round and the reliability of the weapon. Everything else was just window dressing. As long as the weapon didn't get a stoppage, the only other question was whether the guy they hit was going to stay down or fire back. Weapons are often referred to only by their calibre - as a roleplayer I was horrified and found it incomprehensible to think that they didn't know they were using colt commando/M203, but they didn't really seem to care...

Games I've often thought of running using BRP/RQ/Cthulhu Now include: Ancient Greece: Persian/Pelopponnesian War 550BC - 400-ish. Maybe on a Pendragon year by year basis. Dawn of the Dead: It would take a lot of effort to make this more than a one trick pony - perhaps using elements from Resident Evil. Cyberpunk - I love the Talsorian world but the system is a bit pants. BRP would be perfect for it. Disney's Incredible Journey - with an obvious player-led variation on the basic "two dogs and a cat" formula.

Okay, hey all, my name's Stuart, and I've been roleplaying since 1980 when I got Basic D&D for christmas... Like lots of people I went system berserk in the eighties when roleplaying exploded, and used to buy every system that came on the market. Now, after many years with several breaks in playing, but never in reading or planning, I am back to several core systems: Rolemaster/MERP. Luckily I purchased everything that ICE ever printed on Middle Earth before they lost the license. That stuff is awesome. Harnmaster. Such an awesome system and world. Can you imagine how much headscratching and kinstrife would have been avoided if certain other worlds had the idea of publishing no event based material after a specific world date, leaving it to individual GMs? What a cool idea. I know that Glorantha never had its origins as a roleplaying world, but still... Runequest. I can never escape it. Every time I get inspired by another game, I still get drawn back to Gloranthan Runequest. It's the ancient world thing, really. The original inspiration for me was the ancient Greek style Luise Perenne artwork, combined with thinking that the armour in Conan the Barbarian looked awesome, and RQ let me customise my character's appearence by different armour for different locations. Shallow, of course, but I WAS twelve. Of course I say that, but it's these things that still lie at the heart of my ideas about RQ and Glorantha. I saw "The 300 Spartans" when I was seven, got into the hoplite look, went outside and turned a baby mattress into a shield and started hitting everything with a stick. When I saw RQ a few years later it clicked, got me into mythology and ancient history and ancient warfare, interest in which led me down a winding route but ultimately into the military because like every other idiot I wanted to see war, because like many roleplayers on certain other forums I thought that I knew something about it having continued to hit other like-minded people with pretend swords and shields. Having seen war and found out just how daft it really is I returned to roleplaying and I now work in policing thus mixing my love of fantasy and ancient history with my now well developed ability to hit people with sticks...hmmm... Our runequest game is ongoing and more fun than ever because we went back to basics. The mercenary adventurer trying to thrive in Pavis and everything developing from that. My character Cleombrotus is the best I've ever played because he is based on everything I have ever liked about RQ and since I am so aversed to him dying I get genuine adrenaline rushes when we run combats. Which is nice... For the record, MRQ as a system was a huge disappointment...and that's being polite...now roll on BRP:Roleplaying in Glorantha...

Bloody hell, Acrobatic Flea! that's a name i remember from the mid-eighties!!! Is Heropress still going? I think I was the original player of "Hellfire" for an afternoon session in Pembury...I'm sure I still have Heropress issues 1-9 or something floating around somewhere...