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An Opposed Skill Roll of your Threadkiller skill versus the forum's Uphold Tradition skill should do, but keep in mind that the forum's Uphold Tradition skill is above 100%.

Yep, Spotter's 2 successes minus Hider's 1 success leaves 1 success for the Spotter, which is why he wins and spots the Hider. However, there are at least a dozen different ways to handle Opposed Skill Rolls, and I have little doubt that you will have all of them mentioned in this thread, because Op- posed Skill Rolls are a favourite subject of this forum's discussions.

As a GM I have occasionally been accused of having a sadistic streak, but this is of course completely wrong. I only have the habit to refuse to help player characters which got themselves into serious trouble through stupid decisions, and the internal logic of the setting then sometimes leads to the sudden death of such characters ...

I have no idea what the reason is, but I still get only the garbage file mentioned above. I will have to try again tomorrow or later.

Well, at least the game mechanics enable GMs to kill player characters. Unfortunately I did not yet find a good way to take their stuff and advance.

^^ reported.

A roleplaying game setting and system very similar to feudal Japan: Legend of the Five Rings - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I did order the Magic World PDF from the Chaosium website, payment through Paypal went without problems, but now I seem unable to download the PDF from my account, all I get after about 15 minutes of downloading is a file "fdm_download_file-php?fileid=344" I can neither store nor open. Do others experience the same problem ?

This one needs a little language lesson. In German "ivory" is called "Elfenbein", which means "elf's bone". In a fantasy campaign a player character had the mission to establish contact with a somewhat hostile tribe of elves and to win them as allies for the fight against inva- ding orcs. At first it went quite well, he was captured by an elven patrol and taken to their tribe's leader for questioning, and thanks to the elves's traditional dislike of orcs the idea of an alliance was considered favourably. Then the elven chieftain at- tempted some friendly small talk and asked the player character for his profession, and in a temporary mental blackout he answered "Elfenbeinschnitzer" - "carver of ivory / elven bones". This ended the negotiation, and minutes later also his life ...

There tends to be a significant difference between a culture's virtues and its reality. In high medieval Europe the knights were expected to be chival- rous, but the majority were just arrogant brutes. In Japan loyalty was the warrior's primary virtue, but treason was quite common - one only has to take a look at the Battle of Sekigahara mentioned above and count the ma- ny forces which were bribed to stay out of the fight or even switched si- des during the battle to see that loyalty was not really at the top of the combattants' list of priorities.

To add a famous historical example for Japanese lords' ability to bend the seemingly inflexible rules of their culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu's son Hidetada ****** up really big before the Battle of Sekigahara, he managed to get his army of 16,000 men bogged down in a meaningless siege of an irrelevant castle and therefore arrived too late for the battle despite his father's or- ders, thereby almost causing the defeat of his father's army. Although his father was quite angry at him, he did not order him to commit suicide, and later made him his successor.

In one of my campaigns it would depend on what exactly happened, but as the domain lord's player I would consider that a samurai is a very valuable and difficult to replace asset, and that having my war- riors killed is detrimental to my ability to wage war. Unless the cus- toms or laws would make the death of the samurai in question inevi- table, I would look for another way to calm down the guest.

A minor non-player character, usually a member of a hostile group, with low combat skills and therefore easy to defeat. Think of the extras who accompany a major enemy non-player character, the members of a hor- de of weak enemies, and such. "Mook rules" are simplified combat rules designed to deal with lots of such weak enemies without wasting time.

A science fiction campaign. The team of explorers is stranded in the wilderness because their all terrain vehicle (ATV) has an engine problem. While the team's robot (an NPC) repairs the ATV, the player characters establish a temporary camp for the night. Player character: "Hey, robot, forget about that ATV and help me to carry this stuff." Robot NPC: "Task One completed, file ATV deleted. Task Two, transport of ma- terial initiated." Without the robot's data about the ATV a repair was impossible, and the team had to walk back to civilisation ...

Unless the setting is based upon a rather unusually chaotic situation where a society broke down almost completely (e.g. a post-apocalyptic setting), the setting's internal logic and consistency will enforce consequences of the player characters' actions whenever these actions collide with the ru- les and laws of the setting's society. Many published settings are rather generous concerning these rules and laws and how they are enforced by their societies, they tolerate player character actions which every remo- tely plausible society would punish very harshly, allowing player charac- ters to get away with acting like antisocial criminal outlaws. Some other settings, including those of Bushido and Pendragon, aim for more verisimi- litude and attempt to simulate the rules, laws and reactions of a plausible society, often using a specific historical culture as their model. While such a setting may feel more restrictive for the players, because it limits their characters' options, it has the advantage that it "feels" a lot more real and supports the long term identification with their characters as mem- bers of the setting's society.

It is not yet available, I think it will become available in March or April.

I think so. As I see it, mythologies are at their core mostly attempts to create an explanation for otherwise difficult to explain events by inventing a system of mythological entities and their powers and motives which create a more or less plausible "pattern of events" to fit the events into. The main difference between the real world mythologies and fantasy mythologies is probab- ly that in a fantasy world the mythological entities really exist and the "pattern of events" crea- ted by their actions is therefore a lot more consistent and plausible - the events happen far mo- re often at the right time and place and hit far more often the most plausible targets, there is much less randomness.

Not often, but for example my Black Eyrie Clan campaign in Sartar in Runequest's world Glorantha has lots of such entities which now and then - well, actually quite often - in- fluence the events of the campaign as a result of their own ongoing conflicts. Most of them do so indirectly through their cults' priestesses and priests, but occasionally one of them uses her or his powers to take a more direct approach. Overall they stay in the background, and it is difficult for the player characters to distinguish between strange natural phenomena or purely incidental events and their handywork, especially since all unusual events are attributed to the actions of mythological entities anyways- an earth- quake which destroys a town is never "just an earthquake", it is always seen as some kind of divine wrath or other powerful magic.

There is nothing wrong with using deities, immortals or otherwise extremely powerful beings as villains and antagonists or in any other roles in a fantasy campaign, it is ac- tually quite common in Sword & Sorcery stories. In my view such beings work best when kept in the background, without direct interaction with the player characters. They can influence the events through their worshippers or other helpers, they can send messages or threats, and so on, but they should only very rarely (if at all) ap- pear in person, they should only very rarely (if at all) fight the characters personal- ly, and they should never (really, never) hop into a situation to solve the characters' problems in a deus ex machina style. Otherwise, as long as they stay remote and preferably at least somewhat mysterious, they are just fine.

The best way to deal with this would be to do a little Internet research concerning the toxicity of various real world poisons in order to get a feel what plausible toxici- ties / potencies would be like. A short cut is the fact that a poison's toxicity can be expressed as the percentage of persons who are killed by the poison, or suffer the poison's maximum effect if the poison is not a lethal one. So if you define the poten- cy of your poison as the number of people of an average Constitution which are da- maged or killed by the poison, you can compare that desired strength of your poison with the Resistance Table on page 171 of the BRP book. For example, a poison that is intended to damage or kill 75 % of all persons with an average Constitution of 11 needs a Potency of 16, a poison that is designed to hurt 40 % of all heroes with a Constitution of 15 needs a Potency of 13, and so on.

It depends on your national law, the laws in the various continental European states differ considerably, and the relevant laws in England and the USA are completely dif- ferent from those in most continental European states (e.g. their laws have the con- cept of "copyright", which does not exist in most European laws, where a quite diffe- rent concept of "intellectual property" is used). For example, in Germany a Privatkopie ("private copy") for the personal use only is al- most always allowed, to compensate the owner of the intellectual property we pay a small fee with every empty CD, printer and other device used to produce copies we buy, and that money is distributed to the organization of the intellectual property ow- ners. So, to be sure what is legal, you have to take a look at the Swedish law.

Welcome to the forum.

My settings usually begin with the creatures required for the economy of the setting (horses, livestock, etc.) plus up to a dozen important examples of the setting's wildlife and perhaps one or two "monsters". These are the creatures the characters are likely to encounter in the region where they begin their careers in the setting, all other creatures are only introduced as needed, depending on the activities and plans of the characters. Since my settings are "sandboxes" I rarely know in advance what the characters are likely to do in the future, so preparing creatures "just in case" would almost always be a waste of time and effort. As for races, I very much prefer humans and only rarely use other races. Unless I spend a lot of time and effort to design a truly "alien" species, the result is the same as in most fantasy novels anyway, a species consisting of "humans by another name", so I can just as well use humans and give them some unusual abilities or disabilities and a plausible culture.

The current version of Open Quest will be replaced by Open Quest 2 in the very near future, and I doubt that the upcoming (and probably minor) changes have already been integrated into the SRD of the older version.

1) More flexible and more intuitive and easy to learn, use and modify than Hero, more granularity and detail than Savage Worlds. 2) Yes, it does, although there is the minor problem that the many options make it easy to fit the system to a specific setting or type of character, but the choi- ce of the right options can be somewhat confusing for a newcomer. The only genre where BRP is not really suited for is science fiction, because it lacks the rules for the design of high technology equipment (starships, etc.). 3) I do not have the hardcover, so I have to pass on this one. 4) As far as I know there is currently only one version of BRP available (but there are of course many, many closely related d100 games out there), and I am not aware that there have been any changes between the printings. 5) Many of the forum regulars have played BRP and its predecessors (the various versions of Runequest) for decades, so I see no longevity problem.