rust

For me the abbreviation "BGB" for BRP's core rules is bad enough, because here it is the abbreviation for "Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch", our code of civil law. There ha- ve already been some occasions where a text mentioned some paragraph or quo- te from our civil law and I tried hard to remember from which part of the BRP ru- les that could have come, or why Jason Durall had written a chapter about inhe- ritance or beekeeping into the BGB ...

I think the best place to find an answer would be the Dragon Lines supplement with its focus on the martial arts, the BGB itself does not cover this very well.

"Sprechenhaltestelle" ... =O=O Well, this will keep my mind busy for a while with futile attempts to find an expla- nation for this incredible term. My first helpless guesses would be something like "phone booth", or perhaps even "switchboard" ... And I thought the German in 2300 AD was weird ... Edit.: My favourite bad online translation program offers "speech stop" as the trans- lation - and now I wonder what that could be ...

Yep, cotton, linen and silk have all been used for body armour, and they provided a surprisingly good protection until the development of the metallurgy made im- proved types of metal weapons with better edges possible.

1) There was a rather elaborate experimental archaeology project about the lino- thorax. Unfortunately I have only a German description of the project and its re- sults, but an online translation program should make it possible to understand the basics of the content: http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/0,1518,675814,00.html 2) The correct name of the shield was "Aspis", because "Hoplon" is a general term for military equipment (and almost the same in modern Greek). Edit.: Found an English website about the linothorax project: http://www.uwgb.edu/aldreteg/Linothorax.html

The basic stats of BRP and D&D are indeed quite compatible, the conversion only becomes a bit more difficult when it comes to skills and feats. However, if you go more for the "feel" of a character than for the precise mathematics of the con- version, there should be no major problem.

I know, but as Homer wrote in The Odyssey, "So it is that the gods do not give all men gifts of grace - neither good looks nor intelligence nor eloquence."

You are right, and he also mentioned it just a few days ago here on this forum. However, as I understood it he has a lot of projects in his new job, and so the book about Ancient Greece had to go to limbo for now.

A way to avoid this would be a system with maximum levels of skills, based upon the characters attributes, similar to the way many systems calculate a beginning level of skill from the attributes. The Ringworld RPG went a step in this direction with the maximum root skills for general knowledge or skill in a field and the necessity to specialize in one of the branch skills once the maximum of the root skill was reached.

I think it would depend a lot on whether the specific skill is a static or a dynamic one. Someone learning a static skill, like for example to read and write Latin, has less difficulties than someone who is learning a dynamic skill, like one of the sci- ences, where much of what he learned early on has to be replaced and there is a steady stream of new, additional knowledge to learn. So one can doubtless be- come a master at a static skill with ten years of experience, but not necessarily a master of a dynamic skill.

It seems I really should finish my "Mysteries of Pavis" supplement for Call of Cthulhu, the one about Griselda and her trained schoggoth (with frikkin' laser, of course), before someone else writes something of that kind ...

Do you have any more nightmares to offer to ruin my day ?

Ah, I see, my bad. I looked at the example at the beginning of the book, where Critical Success is explained, and there it is rounded up. However, on page 175 it reads "Round fractions using normal rounding.", which most probably means to "round to the nearest".

In the BGB a critical success is based upon 5 % of skill rounded up.

You can always become the inventor of the protro-clone ...

Ah, I see - another serious case. It is not very infectious, so your familiy mem- bers and others are probably safe, but the medication is somewhat expensive, the standard treatment is 1 book / month ...

For most of us, but there are surprisingly many people who have serious problems with numbers, at least as many as those who have problems with spelling. I had some of them as players, and I soon realized that I was really torturing them by asking them to do calculations, even simple ones. Since games should be fun, not difficult (for them) work, we others also switched to tables.

Many of the earlier roleplaying games used the Runequest system or a very close relative that was obviously inspired by Runequest, some with official permission like the first version of The Morrow Project, some without such a direct connec- tion like The Expendables. In fact, there are some roleplaying "sages" who claim that Runequest, all in all, was the most influential system ever published. Edit.: To give an example, this is what Ron Edwards, the author who came up with the GNS Model of roleplaying, wrote about BRP/Runequest in his essay on simulatio- nism: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/

There are two such rules in CoC, the standard 1/5 for a critical hit and the optio- nal 01-05 critical success / 96-00 fumble, if both rules are used and they collide during the same action, only the critical success takes place.

I just talked to the owner of my FLGS, and he is definitely not amused. Right now he has no idea how to get rid of his stock of MRQ II books without making a se- rious loss, especially as Mongoose is now selling those books as cheap PDF bun- dles on DTRPG. He has already decided that he will not keep Wayfarer in stock, because he does not expect that it will sell over here, and he has ceased to ac- cept preorders of Mongoose books a while ago, after several announced books failed to materialize. I very much doubt that I will see any new Mongoose books on his shelves in the near future ...

This sounds suspiciously like the game template in this forum's download section: http://basicroleplaying.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=123

While I have a certain "brand loyalty" for Mongoose, more because of Traveller than because of Runequest, this is rapidly eroding. Yesterday I wrote a rant si- milar to yours on another forum, but I will not repeat it here, because it had the developments around Traveller instead of Runequest at its centre.

RQII Empires has a lot of interesting and useful ideas for organizations of almost every kind, the material that once was the RQI supplement Guilds, Factions and Cults. It is really not at all difficult to replace the Gloranthan cults with other organizations, and in my view it even enriches the game and gives it more co- lour and depth to have more different kinds of organizations.

Judging from what I know about the roleplaying games market over here, the chances really are slim. There is hardly a niche for yet another fantasy sys- tem, this part of the market is saturated, and Wayfarer would need a true "killer setting" to make people even look at it. Well, perhaps things are diffe- rent in Britain and the USA, and make Mongoose's decision look a bit more reasonable.

With Pete gone, Mongoose also has lost another excellent author of its Traveller line, and the turnover of the authors there is becoming a bit annoying - every time I am beginning to look forward to something new from one of my favourite Traveller authors, the next news I read is that he has left Mongoose.