rust

While this is true, a planet with a high enough surface gravity to retain a size- able amount of free hydrogen long enough that it is still there when the planet has cooled down enough that humans could theoretically want to terraform it and live there would have a too high surface gravity for humans anyway - if it is cold enough to live there and still has lots of free hydrogen in its atmosphere, you would not really want to go there.

I normally use both DEX x 5 and Dodge, with DEX x 5 as the innate ability to re- act and Dodge as a trained skill. Agility is used in everyday situations, for exam- ple getting out of the way of a chariot coming down the road, Dodge in the more complex situations which require some judgement to understand that one should get out of the way and which way one should take.

Thank you very much. After a few quick calculations a damage of 1d8 per round seems a bit much for the situation. I would expect that most characters would fail one of the first ten CON rolls. If they make it to the first CON x 1 roll, they have held their breath for 10 rounds or 2 minutes. With a damage of 1d4 they would then take an average damage of 2.5 per round, so a normal person with 12 hit points would fall unconscious and die after about another 5 rounds = 1 minute, after holding the breath for a total of about 3 minutes, which seems to fit well with real world data. With a damage of 1d8 after the first failed CON roll the person would suffer an average damage of 4.5 per round, so a normal person with 12 hit points would fall unconscious and begin to die after 3 rounds = 36 seconds, after holding the breath for a total of about 2 1/2 minutes, which seems a bit too short.

Yep, I will be all over the place in this setting ...

Only in theory, no one ever contemplates the other option. In my campaigns I always have a spaceship full of cows in a low orbit. Whenever someone shows the slightest sign of disrespect, the spaceship launches a cow, which unerringly hits the character in question - RIP. As Roosevelt said, always talk softly, but have a cow in orbit.

Three tiers, two tiers ...? - I am the referee, there is only one option, to obey my every word, with swiftness and kindness, or else !

True, and I would not rule out that the colonists could one day decide to build an arship, it would indeed have many advantages - but exactly these advanta- ges convinced me to keep an airship out of the characters' hands, at least du- ring the early phase of the campaign. I want them to move on the ground and to experience all the various natural hazards of the planet before I allow them to get airborne and avoid the majority of these problems. The colony therefore does have two shuttles for transports between the orbit and the planet's surface, and it will have a few aircraft in the not so far future, but these are not suitable for the kind of exploration missions the characters will have to go on early in the campaign (not much ability to hover, and no ability to land "in the wilds", etc.). So, if the characters are clever and fast learners and ask for an airship, they will almost certainly get one sooner or later - but they have to come up with that idea. Yep, I basically used the early Earth as the model for the planet, and just remo- ved almost all of the water, otherwise it has almost exactly the same properties as our planet did before life developed. I wanted to have reliable, "hard" data, and the best source seemed to be the very distant past of our own planet.

Blame it on the planet Mars, he was the first one to use that idea ... Thank you very much for the offer, but they would not fit well into this setting. It is one of my usual "colony settings", this time in a background universe with reaction drive spaceships for interplanetary travel (which makes a voyage of a year or so quite normal) and wormholes for interstellar travel. The planet at the core of the setting is a somewhat Mars like desert world (yep, once more), only a lot bigger, with a much more dense atmosphere and an acceptable surface gravity. The initial colony will be very small, only 250 people, and their equipment will be not very futuristic, the most advanced technologies will be robotics (but robots are still extremely dumb) and genetics (to create the lifeforms required for the terraforming of the planet). From the "feel" of the setting this more "tilt rotor aircraft territory" than "airship territory" - think 2300AD, perhaps.

Well, we could take the average of those numbers, arriving at about 15,500 ... Reminds me of "statistical death". If you fire your gun at someone and first miss 1 meter to the left and then 1 meter to the right, he is statistically dead.

Not much, your whale is only a little bigger than a battleship.

No oxygen at all, the planet has the same kind of nitrogen - carbon dioxide atmo- sphere which Earth had before oxygen producing algae developed. Theoretically the carbon dioxide would be somewhat toxic, but someone attempting to breath the atmosphere would suffocate because of the lack of oxygen long before the carbon dioxide could do any significant harm.

The same damage as for inhaling smoke ? Well, why not - bought. As long as I can tell the players that this was discussed on the forum and is not my arbitrary decision ...

My new science fiction setting needs a rule for suffocation, because the air on the planet at the center of the setting is not breathable. The house rule I used for previous settings is a bit too complex, and so I tried to find the relevant ru- le in the BGB. Looking at the spot rule for Choking, Drowning and Asphyxation on page 218, a character takes damage to his hit points each round after he failed the last roll of the series of CON rolls described there. The text then lists the damage for in- haling water, smoke or poison gas, but I seem unable to find the amount of da- mage caused by the lack of breathable atmosphere. Any help with the rules or, if such a rule really does not exist, any idea for the amount of damage taken in such a situation would be welcome.

A vehicle system with stats for mass and volume/dimensions would indeed be most welcome, SIZ may work well for creatures, but SIZ for vehicles is one of my personal BRP bugbears, and the rules do not help at all. For example, there is this „Space Vehicle, Transport" on page 271 of the BGB. According to the stat block it can transport a cargo of SIZ 48. On page 272 under „Cargo" it mentions that 1 SIZ is the equivalent of 1 ENC, and on page 180 it mentions that 1 ENC is the equivalent of 1 kg. As a spaceship should be able to transport a little more than 48 kg, this is unconvincing. On page 27, „Object SIZ Examples", an automobile has a SIZ of 50, so we have at least an approximate dimension of the spaceship's cargo hold. However, we still do not have a mass, and for remotely realistic spaceships with reaction drives the mass is important, because the performance of an empty ship is different from that of a loaded ship, and there is a mass limit to the ability of the drive to lift the ship from a planet's surface and out of the planet's gravity well. With „SIZ 48" all one can do is guess, since that volume of grain has a very much different mass from the same volume of machine parts. Ah, well ...

I just looked up how Ringworld treated vehicles, their stat block there includes: Mass Volume / Dimensions Speed Maximum Acceleration Energy Used Power Supply Applicable Skill Cost Armor Hit Points Hit Locations plus a short text which describes those things like passenger and cargo capacity, special features and equipment, and thelike.

Since Atgxtg quoted me with the remark that "BRP is showing its age": No, what I mean is that BRP obviously consists of an old core with layers upon layers of bits and pieces added over time, taken from all the various BRP based games de- veloped since the original Runequest core was published. For example, there are the Sanity rules from Call of Cthulhu, the Personality rules from Pendragon, and so on and on. Not all of these pieces fit together well, and so BRP is quite different from a consistent generic system designed "in one go".

With the Point-Based Character Creation (BGB, page 19) a player could easily create a character with an initial STR of 30+ once the restrictions of a "normal" power level are lifted, with an "epic" power level he could even have a charac- ter with an initial STR of 48 - who could probably throw Conan over a house.

Of course it does.

In my view BRP is a kind of mixed bag in this regard - sometimes the decision is left to the referee, sometimes there is a detailed (and not always convincing) ru- le. I think the system is showing its age this way, what started as a simulationist old school system added bits of a more detailed system here and there, and the result is a not always consistent mix of approaches, more rules heavy than a true old school system, but not as elaborate as one of the "modern" generic systems.

Looks very good, thank you for this.

I very much doubt it. For example, probably the most important stat for a "real physics" starship with a reaction drive would be its delta-V, which is completely irrelevant for a "fantastic physics" vehicle with a reactionless drive. Any system written to enable the design of both types of starships, realistic and fantastic, would need different formulas or at least different pre-calculated modules for both types, it is not really possible to turn one into the other with a simple modi- fication. A "fantastic" starship is not just a beefed-up version of a "realistic" star- ship, it is a completely different animal, one could just as well try to modify a bal- loon into a supersonic jet.

Thank you all very much for your answers. If I did not miss anything, we may have different opinions whether the rule reflects learning in a high technology society well, but there is no problem with the game mechanics, so I will use it for my setting.

The way I usually handle this, the "general knowledge" is represented by the Knowledge roll based on the Education characteristic, while the relevant skill represents the "ability to do something" with that knowledge. Right, and in my campaigns I usually break down the "general" sciences into a number of more narrow fields. For example a biologist character can have a skill in "Ecology" or "Genetics" or "Marine Biology", which includes the basic knowledge of all the biology fields, but he cannot have "Biology" as a skill which covers all the fields equally well.

In the science fiction setting I am currently working on the characters will often have to learn a new skill, one where their base chance is only 0 % or 1 %. According to the BGB, page 184, "To learn ... your character must train for hours equal to his current percentage ability with the skill." This makes little sense in the cases mentioned above, because learning 1D6-2 % of, for example, a science skill in 0 - 1 hours would be highly implausible. Since I did not find any other rule for learning a new skill, I tried to come up with a house rule. The learning time in such cases would be 40 (maximum hours of learning possible in one week in my setting, instead of the 50 hours used in the BGB) minus the Intelligence characteristic of the character: (40 - INT) hours. This way an average character would need 27 hours of learning to understand the basics of the new skill, which seems plausible to me. If you see any problem with this house rule, please let me know.

The vehicle stats I actually use during a campaign are the vehicle's dimensions, the passenger and cargo capacity, the type and range of sensors and weapons, the presence of any special equipment ("the ATV has a winch", etc.), the fuel requirements, the performance (range and speed), and the cost. Any system which enables me to determine these stats, preferably in a simple, "low math" and modular way (so I can design and add my own modules for the setting specific stuff), and which provides me with some example vehicles to compare my own designs to, would be most welcome.