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Thinking about it, could it be that there are any reasons that could make this "check-hunting" more common in fantasy campaigns than in science fiction campaigns ? I doubt that "my" players really are in any way exceptional, so the fact that they do not try to go "check hunting" should have another reason, and the only one I can think of at the moment is the genre - although this is also where my Latin ends. Perhaps combat with futuristic weapons is so deadly that a character is encouraged to always use the weapon he is most skilled with, because another weapon with a lower skill would sig- nificantly reduce his chances to survive the combat ? Perhaps the "skill set" of a science fiction profession, like starship pilot or scientist, makes it in some way reasonable to concentrate on the commonly used skills instead of trying to improve only rarely used skills ? Just wild guesses, I am afraid ...

I seem to be a lucky guy, because I have never had a player whose character knowingly took a higher risk than he considered necessary to solve a problem. I suspect this is because our general style is rather simulationist, and someone actively looking for unnecessary risks to ta- ke just is not a very plausible character - at least not one any party would tolerate as a mem- ber.

This is not necessarily a problem, I think. As the BRP rules say, the gamemaster should allow experience checks whenever skills are suc- cessfully used in stressful situations. In my view this means that the character has to take a si- gnificant risk to gain any experience from a successful skill use, he cannot just use this skill he- re and that skill there to get an experience check - unless he is willing to accept a significant risk of a rather harmful failure each time. For example, if a character intends to get a chance to improve his climbing skill by climbing each and every wall in sight, I will allow it - if he accepts that each and every failure will mean that he will fall and take more or less severe damage each time, up to and including the risk that a fumble will break his neck. If treated this way, characters tend to think before using skills just to beg for some more ex- perience checks, and if someone decides to use more skills and to take the relevant risk each time, the experience checks seem a fair reward - "more pain, more gain" ...

Since I do occasionally suffer from a bad case of worldbuilding fever, I usually have the frame- works of several different settings ready that I can propose to the players. However, if they ve- to all of them, for example because none of them is bloodthirsty enough for their taste, it is ti- me for new players for me or a new referee for them - in my experience it is usually a rather bad idea to try a foul compromise that makes no one happy.

This is how we do it. We discuss the setting and the "flavour" the campaign will have, especially how the setting will react to the characters' actions, because for us this is what determines the roleplaying style of a campaign. For example, in the setting I am working on weapons will be rare and the law enforcement will be highly efficient and professional. A reckless "combat monster" character will most probably soon have to face an angry SWAT team, and if he survives that a judge and a couple of years in prison, effectively removing him from the campaign for good. When talking about this setting, we do not discuss roleplaying styles, we talk about what the op- tions of the characters in this campaign will be like - this time it will be much Mc Gyver, but no Rambo. What is "good roleplaying" in this setting is determined by the inner logic of the setting and the consequences it has for the characters, depending on their actions. If the players agree to play this campaign, the setting itself will reward what is "good roleplay- ing" in this campaign, and "punish" what is "bad roleplaying" under these specific conditions. Not because I, the referee, decide to do so in order to "educate" the players, but because the setting treats the characters according to the assumptions it is built upon. Well, and if the players decide that this setting would be "too lame" for their taste, then that's it. I will not attempt to convince them to play something they are not really interested in, as I really hate to referee for unhappy or frustrated players - it ruins my fun, too.

I would like to add "provided that his players agree to try a different style of roleplaying", be- cause an attempt to "educate" the players against their will is both questionable and very li- kely to fail, even if it is a very subtle attempt - and awarding points is not subtle at all.

Just in case you have not yet discovered the website: http://www.the-kraken.de/

Not yet, Chaosium has announced it for the fall.

I suspect that an attempt to block an attack by something like a greataxe, a halberd or a maul with a wooden shield should have more serious consequences for the shield, probably even for the shield arm of the combattant holding the shield - there seem to be more than a few reports about shield arms broken because of the impact of a heavy weapon on the shield.

Yep, quite a few medieval duelling rules mention the number of shields the combattants may use during a duel, implying that many types of shields we- re of the disposable kind.

Agreed, this is a definition I would only accept if my character were a combat robot.

It was as Atgxtg explained. The system was a bit like my Windows Vista operating system, it constantly required updates to eliminate the bugs from the previous updates, spreading more confusion with each additional update - a permanent work in (little) progress, with only a few very nice exceptions like the first versions of Empires and Guilds, Factions and Cults.

The only (few) cases I have seen where this kind of reward with points did work was when the players decided who among them would deserve a reward for good roleplay- ing, not the referee. However, in these cases the players define what "good roleplaying" is, and if their de- finition is not the same as the referee's definition, this can backfire badly.

Excellent, and most useful - thank you very much indeed.

Well, this Silver Medal for BRP Rome does improve my opinion of the Ennies, it seems they sometimes really identify the best products.

Indeed, and it would be unwise to ignore that one can also be hit by a blade from behind if one attempts to close in on an opponent without controlling his weapon. I remember a very painful hit to the back of my head when I once made that mistake - something as heavy as a sword would have put me out.

Yep, that's one reason why rapier fencers usually have a dagger in their left hand, once one gets past the long rapier it is time for dagger work ...

There would be at least two ways to handle this, I think. The first one would be to modify the campaign slightly in the direction of a "kill the monsters" horror game, allowing the characters to fight and succeed in a less dangerous setting. There are a couple of Lovecraftian stories of that kind written by other authors who contributed to the mythos, and some of the recent Cthulhu inspired roleplaying games also tend towards a background of this kind. However, my own response to the situation would be quite different. When it comes to Call of Cthulhu and the mythos, I am a firm believer in the "attack directly and you die" philosophy. A character who thinks that he can treat a mythos creature like a D&D monster rarely survives the encounter, and a player who attempts to play Call of Cthulhu like D&D has a significant cha- racter turnover.

Yes, of course. In the end, whenever a character has a motivation and something he wants to achieve because of this motivation, he attempts to "win" by achieving it - and so does his player when playing the character accordingly.

Players sometimes change their concept of fun over time, for example when a certain style of roleplaying is becoming boring and a new style is discovered, but "educating" players to like a specific style usually does not work and has a tendency to make them dislike the game, the re- feree or both. What you can do, is to subtly offer the options you would prefer them to take, and to subtly re- ward what you consider good roleplaying. However, the key word really is "subtly", without any kind of force and without any kind of railroading - and especially without any kind of "punish- ment" for those players who ignore or refuse the options you offer. In my experience the best kind of reward for something like this is an in game reward, not just a number of any kind of points. To give an example, players whose characters always kill their opponents and never accept their surrender could change their mind if the opponent they spa- red pays a considerable ransom or later on helps them out of a desperate situation. This way it is the setting that reacts to the characters' actions, not the referee who reacts to the players' decisions. But in the end even this way of influencing players is problematic, and there can always be play- ers whose ideas of fun are incompatible with those of the other members of the group. In such a case, there could be no other solution to the problem than to continue without such a player - for the referee, it is usually better to lose a player than to lose his own fun in the game.

Indeed. We had someone who was a truly excellent foil fencer and who wanted to try the ra- pier, too. His main problem was that in foil fencing a slash is not counted as a score, and that he therefore tended to ignore slashing attacks instead of defending against them. And while a rapier is primarily a thrusting weapon like the foil, it still has an edge, and a rapier slash to the face or the back of the hand is a most unpleasant experience.

In combat fencing you can. In fact, you can use the entire arsenal of dirty tricks a sport fencer would never think of, just take a look at this one:

The source I can offer is personal experience with rapier fencing. To give an example, a sport sabre fencer is not allowed by the rules of his sport to aim for the legs, and so he never learns or trains to defend his legs against attacks. His rules also do not allow him to move more than a step or two sideways, because he must not leave the fencing lane, so he also never learns or trains to defend against an opponent circling him. And so on and on - a long list of vulnerabili- ties that are easy to exploit.

As a relative of mine, who was an army unarmed combat trainer, once remarked in a similar discussion, one does not have to disarm the guy with the knife, only to kill him ...

There is a huge difference between martial arts sports and unarmed combat. Put the guy with the knife against people who learned unarmed combat with the police or the military, and his success rate will go down considerably - probably to zero if he faces an unarmed combat trainer of police or military. By the way, it is very similar with fencing weapons. Even an excellent sports fencer has hard- ly any chance against an opponent who trained combat oriented fencing, because the sport uses and allows only a very limited selection of all the possible maneuvers. An extreme exam- ple is sabre fencing, where the sports rules disallow more than half of the possible attacks.