rust

But the standard system doesn't reward people who contribute more. It rewards those who make more rolls in different skills.

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" ...

Hmm, but if the players veto the GM's preferred setting (due to not enough mindless violence for their 'taste') then his fun is already ruined. The GM should say what's what - that's fair because he does the work. GMs should not have to run systems, settings or situations they dislike.

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.

So, again, a social contract is needed. The GM and the players need to sit down beforehand and discuss play style and expectations. If everyone is not on the same page, and some just cannot accept how others like to play, or some create a situation in which others are no longer enjoying the game, then either people have to adjust to the situation, or leave the game.

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.

If a GM thinks his game is suffering due to poor RP, surely it's his duty to encourage a better RP style?

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.

Strangely, reports of this con are very rare to find!

Just in case you have not yet discovered the website:

http://www.the-kraken.de/

So Gencon has come and gone, and still no sign of Chronicles...

Not yet, Chaosium has announced it for the fall.

THe downside would be that the shield should get beat up a bit faster than a weapon, say an extra point or two off HP.

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.

I don't really like the rule about shields being harder to damage - in real life, shields get tatty pretty quickly.

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.

And I hope everyone here will agree it's not 'playing the tactical combat role expected of your character class'

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

I keep seeing that everyone says mrq1 had horrible errors and was not a good system. I have the players handbook but that's the only mrq1 book I have. What is it about the system that people didn't like?

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.

On the same page is similar generator for Traveller (Mongoose edition) that is more hard SF in feel.

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.

Frankly, from my experience when fighting in the round, even with a point only sword, if you're not confined heavily by the environment, closing up enough to be within reach of a point sword without getting skewered isn't that trivial an exercise anway.

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.

Poor sporting technique.....but a perfectly valid combat technique. if he'd of been a knifeman who'd be talking to us today ?

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 ...

What I meant by "win", is more of the D&D 4e, balls and chunk, conquer and kill approach ...

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.

Perhaps, it should be noted, that playing to win, and getting into character and engrossed in the setting, are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

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.

That's the key, of course; if you're trained in only the specific sports techniques, they effectively train you away from a number of effective combat techniques.

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.

Can you use thumbs in fencing?

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:

Do you have a source for those claims? In my experience, the high physical conditioning and excellent reflexes of an elite athete usually win against "more maneuvers". Also, they get a lot of experience in competition (something that "combat oriented folks" do not). Usually a few mastered techniques used and proven time over time, under competition stress and full resisting oposition work better than the other stuff.

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.

Police or military training won't make you an expert knife-disarmer.

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 ...

We actually try that with friends when we meet for martial arts training, we got people from all martial arts, (karate, sanshou, kickboxing, judo, ju-jitsu, taekwondo, box, muay thai), and the guy with the plastic knife and no weapon-specific training (whomever picks it up) has about a 85-90% kill rate (unless you run away or manage to grapple him, you are preety much dead).

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.

Would you prefer to face someone with a fireaxe or a knife?

As long as I can move unhindered by heavy armour or anything else, I will take the guy with

the fireaxe - if I can avoid his first attempt to hit me, he is out of the game, because I can

do a lot of nasty things to him before he can get his weapon ready for a second attempt. The

knife fighter would be a far more dangerous enemy, he can move as fast as I can, and his

attacks are far more unpredictable.

In a society that values personal virtues more than wealth, Status = Fame.

I am not certain. To give a real world example, Einstein was probably far more famous than

most of the heads of state of his time, but he did not have the same Status as, for example,

a president of the United States.