rust

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.

Not necessarily. Remember that oxygen is a highly reactive gas, so if there are no indigenous lifeforms that are producing it, then it will combine with other elements such as iron, as it has done on Mars to form....rust!

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

That is a two tier system.

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.

PFFF!!! Rock paper scisors!!! HA!!! Real men flip coins, what do you need 3 tiers for?

Three tiers, two tiers ...? - I am the referee, there is only one option, to obey

my every word, with swiftness and kindness, or else !

One of the reasons why I used airships was that there are actually quite good for this sort of setting. In a Nitrogen-Co" atmosphere, air would be a lifting gas, so any enclosed structure would be viable as a flyer. Carbon fiber frames and skins and pumps that would fliter air out of the CO2 would have a lot of advantages as a colony vessel. It is almost the idea vessel for such a setting.

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.

BTW, Be careful how big you makeyou planet. Since you prefer a hard SF setting, you should be aware that as the size/gavitiy increases, the minimum molecular weight retained is lowered. So a big planet could hold oxygen or other lighter gases. A ntrogen-carbon atmosphere would suggest a low gravity.

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.

Hey! You thief!! Swiping my Adnex setting!!! .

I'm going to half to be moe careful with my emails!

Blame it on the planet Mars, he was the first one to use that idea ...

BTW, Will you be needing my notes for armored airships and carbon fiber pneumatic cannon?

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.

So, make your pick: 222, 333, 30000 or 31200 =)

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.

... and i probably got the last 3 wrong.

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

Why isn't it breathable ? Simply not enough oxygen ?

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.

1D4!

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.

Of course, HERO System has had complete vehicle rules since 3rd edition. I haven't always liked them, but they are consistent with the rest of the game.

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.

... what you really mean is it doesn't look like the 'hot new thing' over on RPGnet... that in a few months will show itself as having just as many (probably more) flaws than BRP.

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".

What if they want a 30 STR? To which, I correctly responded, that under the rules as written, they can't have a character with a 30 STR, at least not at initial creation or under the rules for increasing characteristics. (Barring super-powers of course, but that's not the same as a 30 STR.)

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.

Couldn't this idea be taken up with vehicle modifications?

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.

If a knowledge skill were measuring just "knows about it," I might have a 20% in physics, in that I have a good chance of knowing what something is, and at least having some idea what it's about, so, for example, I could read a book for non-specialists and get something out of it. If a knowledge skill measures "knows how to work with the underlying principles," my physics skill would be about 1%.

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.

But the super-specialization in modern science makes it difficult to use "general" categories like "physics." A professional physicist will have an enormous amount of knowledge about his or her own particular field, but be only generally competent in the minutia of some other field, although both are within the realm of "physics." So what would "physics" 85%, for example, represent? Presumably in the future this problem will get worse, not better.

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.

I think RPG fans, in their (generally laudable) brand loyalty can sometimes forget that competition is actually good for the consumer.

Competition is good, but those competitors are a real nuisance ...

The BGB does work, but I still think I would have preferred the former.

For my purposes the BGB was almost perfect. I have been using a modified Call

of Cthulhu system for a very long time, and for me the BGB was a huge collec-

tion of useful bits and pieces I could add to my system, more a box full of inter-

esting material for the improvement of my system than a system on its own.