rust

... so hopefully they should be a bit more responsive / communicative now...

This would be most welcome. A while ago I recommended some monographs to

someone, and meanwhile he has attempted to contact Chaosium about the ship-

ment charges four times without any reply.

Yep, I agree - if it otherwise makes sense for the character in question (= he has a reason

to have that skill and enough other opportunities to use it during the game), Knowledge (Mi-

litary Hardware) would be a good choice.

I think to throw the grenade where one wants it to land is purely a matter

of physical skill, and therefore of the Throw skill.

The other questions, what the grenade does, the kind of fuse and timer or

the best placement, are matters of general or specialized knowledge, for

which I would use either a Know roll for the more common knowledge (e.g.

to distinguish a fragmentation grenade from a tear gas grenade) or the De-

molition skill for specialized knowledge (e.g. to decide where to place the

grenade for maximum effect).

I would suggest assigning a familiarity penalty based on the complexity of the new item, reduce the penalty for training and have the rest of the penalty go away with practice/use time. Example; Mk.X Hardsuit, -60 familiarity penalty, reduced by 20 for training course, and reduced by 1 per hour of use/practice. Take the class and four 10 hour days of work/practice and the penalty for the Mk.X would be gone.

Thank you very much, I like the idea. :thumb:

You would not treat a turtle badly, I hope ... >:->

Thank you all very much for your ideas.

I agree that most comparatively simple consumer goods do not require much

familiarity to use them. However, I was thinking of the more "professional"

stuff, in the case of my setting for example something like a new type of

artificial gill or diving hardsuit, or a new kind of weapon ( a gauss harpoon

is under development ...).

A time factor or, in the case of weapons, an "ammunition used" factor could

be a possibility. On the other hand, I have seen people attempt to get some-

thing to work, or to fire guns on the shooting range, for hours on end with-

out any kind of success, or hit.

As for training, this is a good idea. At least I could give the characters a num-

ber of opportunities to use the device and score a success in non-dangerous

situations.

Thank you again.

Thank you very much.

During our next campaign I intend to introduce a number of new technologies

and pieces of equipment into the setting, in order to give it a little more colour

and the "feel" of a continually changing and developing world.

The player characters will of course be unfamiliar with the newly available gad-

gets, and I am looking for a simple rule to make this unfamiliarity felt during the

game.

Since I did not find anything in the BRP core rules, I think I will make the use of

an unfamiliar device one step more difficult than usual (e.g. from Automatic to

Easy or from Average to Difficult) until the characters has used the device suc-

cessfully at least once.

Does this make sense, or do you see a problem with this ?

Thank you.

Since Varun's culture is based on the Indian culture, which is rumoured to be a very

status conscious culture, status and the influence it gives will be important elements

of the setting.

A player character will start with an average Status of 40 %, but this value can get

higher for someone with an advanced education (engineer, scientist) or a position

of authority (security officer). The maximum beginning value will probably be 65 %.

Status gives influence. Within the Varun colony, the normal Status value will be

used for this purpose, but outside of the colony the value will be reduced, depen-

ding both on the distance from Varun and the kind of people the character tries to

influence.

Within the Demidov Cluster, the value will be reduced by 20 %, and in the Far Ava-

lon Region by 50 %. If the character attempts to influence someone from a diffe-

rent field (e.g. a scientist attempting to influence a politician), the value will be redu-

ced by another 20 %.

So, a Varunian marine biologist with a Status of 65 % who attempts to influence a

CDA bureaucrat on Lubeck Station in the Far Avalon region has his Status value re-

duced by 50 % because of the distance and by another 20 % because the bureau-

crat is a non-scientist.

With the resulting Status of -5 %, the bureaucrat will obviously not be impressed

by that strange egghead from some unknown remote colony ...

Status can be gained and lost during play. Since the Varunians respect their elders,

increasing age gives a Status bonus. The actions and successes or failures of the

player characters can increase or reduce their Status value, depending on the im-

portance and consequences of their activities for the colony's community.

While increases through age affect all uses of the Status, increases through success

are more specific, they can affect only the character's status in certain regions (the

merchant who is well known and respected on Poselok) or with a certain group of

people (the starship captain who rescued a CDA official from certain death and now

is the CDA's local hero).

In this case I would prefer MMMMM, the Miraculous Monstrous Marsh Mellows Man ...

How about intelligent Plankton?

I used something very much like this in an earlier setting, inspired by the book and

movie Solaris, an "intelligent primordial soup" with telepathic abilities.

But then, as Mr L is probably too polite to mention, he'd be trusting them not to pass on that link to others...

He has to trust them not to make and distribute copies anyway ...

Rod, you could use You Send It, the free trial version, and upload the file there.

Once people have confirmed that they have bought the print version or the PDF,

you could send them an e-mail with the download link, and they could download

it whenever it suits them (within 14 days after you uploaded it, that is), which

would take the burden away from your server.

Not really Aliens ...

Having used various kinds of more or less "furry" aliens in my previous settings,

I think I will design the Varun setting without any real aliens at all.

Instead of true aliens, the as yet undiscovered neighbours of the Varun colo-

nists could be humans, the descendants of a colonization attempt that went

wrong because of a hyperdrive failure and stranded the colonists far from their

planned destination - a "lost colony".

However, while "lost colonies" usually are described as "neo-barbarian", this one

could have developed in the opposite direction, "forewards" instead of "back-

wards", and could now have a technology far superior to that of the worlds of the

known space.

I am not yet sure whether I will really use this idea, but if I do so I will probably

use the Darrians of the Traveller universe and the Minbari of the Babylon 5 uni-

verse as the base of my design of the "human aliens" society and culture.

Hey Rust,

Since you've mentioned Traveler, have you seen this: http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=78452

Yep, I used it to design the various basic creature types of my setting, which I then

used to design and stat the different species of each type.

For example, the basic shape of all "Type A" creatures (warm blooded, radially sym-

metric, six limbs, and so on) was designed with Flynn's Guide to Alien Creation. Then

I worked out a "family tree" of these "Type A" species, assigned some special feature

to the members of each "branch" of that family tree, and finally used the design system

Frogspawner uploaded to the forum's download section to decide upon the BRP stats

of each species.

The result looks like this, with one "branch" still left "missing", just in case that I will have

a good idea I want to introduce later during the campaign as a new group of species to

be discovered by the characters:

One of my former patients, a historian, wrote a book about the "Umkaufbücher"

(= accounting books, I think) of merchants from Augsburg who traded with Italy

and the Netherlands.

It must have been a mindboggling task to handle all the various currencies invol-

ved in a simple purchase of goods in Florence, its transport across a landscape

of tiny semi-sovereign states with different currencies (= same names, but dif-

ferent values, depending on the silver or gold content on the coins they minted),

tolls and taxes, and finally its sale in Antwerp.

I once attempted to design a "realistic" trade system that simulated this kind of

trade, but gave it up very soon - even players very interested in playing a mer-

chant character and willing to do some accounting would have run away screa-

ming, probably never to return to our gaming table (and also not to sanity).

Where most fantasy RPGs blow it is that they tend to greatly devalue the money, equating a gold piece with a dollar, pound, make or other modern denomination, and go with a modern price scheme.

Yep, for example the Holy Roman Empire did not use gold coins for about the

first 500 years of its existence, the standard currency was the silver Pfennig.

There were simply too few goods with a value high enough to justify the use

of gold coins.

This changed only in the High Middle Ages, when the merchants of Florence

and others began to build their "trade empires" that handled a sufficient vo-

lume of goods to make payments with gold coins reasonable. But even then

the average citizen did rarely see a gold coin and would have found it a night-

mare to try to spend it, because hardly anyone in town would have been able

to change it.

Values changed a lot over time, but as a very rough estimate a tiny gold coin

with a weight of about 3.6 gram was the equivalent of two monthly incomes

of a normal labourer ...

My personal setting and campaign design nemesis are background events,

the unfolding history of the setting that influences the "feeling" of the cam-

paign and the options for the player characters' activities.

Our campaigns usually consist of up to three adventures during each game

time year, with each adventure dealing with some important event in the

setting's ongoing history, and much off time to allow the player characters

to work on their jobs (e.g. research projects), found and raise families, im-

prove their skills, and all that.

This means that our campaigns tend to cover a lot of time, our record was

more than 120 game time years, and as the referee it is my job to come up

with the major background events during that time: Wars, epidemics, na-

tural desasters, inventions, megacorps takeovers ...

While designing all this tended to be a chore, I have now discovered that

it can also be fun, by using Runequest Empires and Runequest Guilds, Fac-

tions and Cults.

These books contain a rather generic system that treats states and orga-

nisations much like characters, with characteristics and skills, and provides

rules for their interactions - a system that creates a background history as

the result of a "background metagame".

Meanwhile I have created the stats for the Varun Colony and its most impor-

tant organisations (Jain Alliance, New Society, Aquafarmers' Cooperative,

Miners' Union ...), and the stats alone already provide a lot of ideas for fu-

ture conflicts, alliances and so on that may have consequences for the cha-

racters.

I generally treat failures as minor issues and fumbles as the big "sheep dip" but in high stress/risk situations the failure result becomes "treat as fumble". Fail a swim/diving roll while moving some equipment is not the same as failing a swim/dive roll on a panic ascent.

Thank you, another good idea.

One concern is just how good the economics of the game are to begin with. If the game's ecomony is shaky or doesn;t make sense to begin with, trading just makes it worse, putting a spotlight on the flaws.

Indeed. Unless one is willing to invest some time and effort to create a plausible

economy for the setting, the simple method proposed by Sdavies2720 is the best

approach, because a more complex trade system could well damage the setting.

For a medieval or fantasy setting, there are a number of supplements that help

to create a plausible economy, for example this one:

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=19294&it=1&filters=0_0_40050_0

(- but read the reviews, not everyone likes that style)

In my opinion a failed roll should be interpreted something like this: ...

Yes, I think I see your point, and I agree.

In my view the Mishap Tables should only include very general notes on possibilities

of what could happen, to serve as an inspiration that allows me to tailor the result

to the specific situation, for example the specific mission the character is on.

The only main difference is that I intend to make a fumble situation dependent on

the skill roll of the "buddy" diver, because I want to force the characters to avoid

their usual "I can go it alone" stunts and to encourage teamwork.

Perhaps a failed roll means the task takes longer. The more failures the higher the chance that the diver runs out of oxygen/power/whatever or might encounter some nasty critter.

Thank you, a good idea - it could become the main entry of the Diving Mishap Table.

If I use a bell curve like 2 D6 for the table and make it entry number 7, it would be

the "standard problem" caused by a failure, with other and more serious problems

somewhat less likely.

It just a question of mathematics.

Ah, you know, mathematics and me was never a love affair ...

But you are obviously right, so the sentence about having to end the dive

after a failed skill roll will be deleted.

Examples would be the purchase prices and the sales prices of various kinds

of goods, depending for example on the volume of goods traded, the distance

covered by the trade route, the transport costs, and supply and demand at

the origin and the destination of the trade goods, so that a merchant charac-

ter could decide which goods to buy, where to find a market for them, how to

transport them there, and how much profit to expect.

To give an example from my setting, the Varunians can sell surplus crystals

from their seafloor mines to buy foodstuffs on an agricultural world, but it

could be more prudent to sell them to an industrial world, ship the industrial

goods to the agricultural world, and trade them there for the foodstuffs. To

find out which approach gets the most foodstuffs, one needs the prices on

the various worlds, the transport costs, and so on.

Considering how often even experts fail a roll in BRP, maybe a simple failure shouldn't be so bad as to end the dive.

True, and I am not yet sure how to handle this.

The scuba divers in my setting all have rather high skill levels, because they get a 20 % cultural skill

bonus to their Swim skill, which makes 45 % the lowest possible Swim skill for a Varunian, and for the

professional hardsuit divers with their high tech equipment most routine tasks should be Easy, which

would also give them a very good skill value for normal operations. Both should make failures compa-

ratively rare.

I think I will have to playtest this and see how often failures really happen, and then modify the rule

if it seems appropriate.