rust

Any ideas?

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.

I do too, but lost my copy of Ringworld years ago. If I remember correcclty, Ringworld did it differently, but I can7t remeber exactly how.

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 ...

A character can have a subskill aat a rating up to 1/2 the main skill. THe subskill adds to the main skill.

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

Well, some time ago in the "How can BRP become more popular" thread IIRC I suggested New Age Commune: The Sixties Countercultural 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.

So if we wanted to write up a monograph, we'd just reference BRP to the appropriate rules, not repeat them wholesale in it.

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.

Just an observation, but Rome doesn't appear on DriveThru's '2010 ENnie Nominees' list ...

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

Provide a world and background that catches and holds the imagination and desires of the majority of the role-playing public.

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.

That meaning that people are now aware that the system is alive and kicking. Two years ago BRP was only "the old, old system for Cthulhu" in people's minds. You may not realize it, but it counts. It counts a lot.

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.

Does it make it a popular system? No. With large volume sales? No.

From what I see and hear, Diaspora is a popular system with above average sales.

Mongoose with what is a revised (for better or for worst) version of BRP is managing to establish several product lines on it.

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.

Remember, though, that monographs are only available on the chaosium website and are not in general distributiuon.

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.

Using height/length just seems too complicated.

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 ...

I was just curious what everyone on here thinks about the number of skills a game should have.

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.

The "Death Touch", "Quivering Palm" and "Finger of Death" skills are now obsolete. Watch out for the "Proctological Thumb".

So this is why Expendables has Proctology as an Advanced Medical Field, I always wondered

when and how that skill could come into play ...

Eye gouge. Are we fighting for our life, or just doing a sport?

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

I don't know which one Rust has sent you ...

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.

Besides, in my view such a houserule would tend to complicate the game and slow it down, in

the worst case even to turn role-playing into roll-playing, when combat involving several highly

skilled opponents would require dozens of die rolls for the multiple and split attacks and parries

of a single combat round.

While this may be fun for a game that has its focus on combat, for my preferred style of role-

playing it would only put the game mechanics in front of the story and thereby interrupt the sto-

ry, damage the suspension of disbelief and waste a lot of time - I am far more interested in the

final outcome of the combat and how the story develops from there than in any details of the

combat.

You'd probably be better off just using the ship rules from White Wolf or RQ3 (similar but not identical, White Wolf seems to be an updated version of the RQ3 ship rules).

Thank you very much for the information.