rust

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.

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.

I used an extension of the Status skill. The Reputation starts at the same percentage as the Status skill and is then raised according to the character's activities within the setting - the more visible and successful or desastrous the character's activities are, the more famous he becomes. However, this is influenced both by the group he has to interact with (a famous scholar is better known to other scholars than to warriors) and by the distance from his home or base (a local hero may be quite unknown in a neighbouring country). If I remember it right, my usual modifier was something like -20 % for a different group and -10 % for each village or town beyond the home / base, but I am not certain - my current setting does not use Reputation.

Thinking about it, from what I remember Ringworld used "Root Skills" capped by the charac- ters attributes and "Branch Skills" which continued from the maximum value of the relevant Root Skill. For example, a character who wanted to learn Ecology first had to raise his Biology root skill to its maximum, and then could start to put additional points into the Ecology branch skill. If the Biology root skill was 30 %, and he invested 1 additional skill point in Ecology, his Ecology branch skill was activated at 31 %. The Biology root skill would always remain at its maximum of - in this case - 30 % and could not be improved any further, and each new Biology specialization would again be activated by investing at least one more skill point and starting it at 31 %, with an unlimited number of such branch skills. Well, at least this is what I think I remember ...

I seem to remember a similar approach from the Ringworld RPG.

With stats for Charles Manson ...

I just made one of my irregular visits to Chaosium's website and discovered this: http://www.chaosium.com/article.php?story_id=445 It almost seems that Chaosium is planning to use the Chronicles of Future Earth as the new BRP setting that has been asked for so often in this thread here, especially since the supple- ment is announced as Volume One of the Urth setting. Congratulations to Shaira (), in my view this setting has a good chance to become a real success, because it can use the entire "bandwidth" of the BRP system, from magic to tech- nology, in a genre that is not yet overcrowded with similar settings.

As always in such cases, if you intend to publish anything that might touch upon the rights of Chaosium, it would be prudent to ask them whether they would have any problems with it - this is much better, and usually easier, than having some misunderstanding causing real pro- blems later on. Besides, if you want to publish something connected with BRP, a good relationship with Cha- osium might well help later on during the distribution.

On my German "home forum" there was yesterday a post of someone who is searching for a used copy of the BRP main rules - the first ever post of this kind I have seen over here. It seems that things are still moving at glacier speed, but there can be no more doubt that they indeed have begun to move.

As far as I remember, I never went further than mixing elements of BRP, GURPS and Traveller, with an occasional idea from other roleplaying games added to the mix.

Rome is now on the list: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/rpg_ennies.php?manufacturers_id=2555

I am afraid this order is several magnitudes too tall. The majority of the roleplaying public does already have such games, and I would consider it unwise for Chaosium to try to compete directly with games like D&D or Pathfinder, because the chance of a success would be minimal at best. The roleplaying style supported by BRP is a minority style, and I would very much prefer Cha- osium (and others) to publish material aimed at that minority instead of adding just a few mo- re publications to the already mostly saturated majority market.

Indeed. Until recently people told me they were not interested in BRP because they did not play Call of Cthulhu and had played "all that other old stuff" already, decades ago. Nowadays I get PMs on my German "home forum" where people ask me whether I would recommend this or that new BRP supplement (with Rome and Crusaders leading), and people proudly present their new BRP stuff in the "Just Arrived" thread. True, this still does not happen very often, and definitely not as often as I would like, but the fact that it now happens at all shows that something is changing for the better, and I think the fact that the many good BRP monographs are now available on DTRPG will help a lot to reinforce that change.

From what I see and hear, Diaspora is a popular system with above average sales. True, but Mongoose is a much bigger company than Chaosium, with both more personnel and more money. To compare Mongoose with Chaosium is a bit like comparing Boeing with Cessna.

This is no longer the case, a few weeks ago Chaosium has begun to make more and more of the monographs available as PDFs through Drive Thru RPG.

And it tends to produce ridiculous results, just think of the SIZ a giant sea snake would have if the SIZ were based on length ...

In my view, as many as are necessary to play a specific campaign. When I write the framework of a setting and begin to note down ideas for a campaign using this setting, I also take my list of standard skills and think about which ones should be deleted for this campaign and which ones I might have to add to the list. For a science fiction campaign with the exploration of a water world as its focus I will certain- ly not need skills like camel riding or desert survival, so what is obviously unnecessary is de- leted from the list. Some skills which would obviously be useful for such a campaign are not a part of the list of standard skills and have to be designed and added, for example animal training (dolphin) or technical skill (diving hardsuit). And then there are skills that can be "rewritten" for a different purpose, for example crossbow skill for simple spearguns, and skills which will only appear later in the campaign, but should already be prepared, like knowledge (native culture) to deal with the native aliens which will probably be discovered after a few adventures. Once my campaign specific skill list is finished, it is playtested during the campaign's introducto- ry adventures and then becomes "semi-official" for this campaign, but still open for changes and additions that may come up during the campaign - often new skills are added, sometimes one of the skills on the list turn out to be a stupid idea and is deleted. So, how many skills are needed ... sorry, as many as are necessary.

So this is why Expendables has Proctology as an Advanced Medical Field, I always wondered when and how that skill could come into play ...

Yep, and some other maneuvers not covered by sports rules also come to my mind ...

The one from Witchcraft, hoping that you have no problem with me "pirating" it ...

You have a PM.

Well, sometimes one could really get the impression that Chaosium rarely misses the chance to miss a chance.

It is the charm of BRP that it can be used just for realistic historical settings just as well as for truly fantastic ones, and I have no problem with either - I just happen to prefer the more realistic ones.

The 137 longbows recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose had a draw strength between 445 N and 823 N (100 to 185 lbf) and an average draw length of 76 cm, and the skeletons of longbowmen show severe deformations to the left body side because of the strength required to draw the bow repeatedly over a short period of time. Player characters are of course superhuman beings (*cough*), but I think that a longbow ra- te of fire of one per round / 12 seconds would be realistic, someone able to draw a 500 N longbow more often per minute could probably have won a wrestling match against Heracles or Thor with his left arm alone ... such archers did exist, but in my view they are beyond the scope of a normal setting. So, no split bow attacks for me.

Looking at historical records, 1 arrow per 12 seconds seems right for a normal archer, although a master archer was expected to hit a human- sized target at a distance of 200 yards twelve times in one minute.