KPhan2121

I have a few questions about Weapon Length and the Closing Rules. To get this straight, when a short weapon user charges at a long weapon user, the long weapon user gets to strike first regardless of the actual DEX rank. That counts as their Action for the combat round right? So what happens if the long weapon user already attacked (against another target) earlier in the combat round, I'm assuming that the long weapon user doesn't get to make that attack and the short weapon user doesn't need to make a dodge check before attacking. That makes sense to me like if this is a situation where a duo of short weapon users could overwhelm a lone long weapon user.

If the long weapon user doesn't actively keep a short weapon user at bay, does that mean the short weapon user can just waltz into the close distance of long weapon user after he successfully dodges the long weapon user's first strike? Or is closing a separate action and the short weapon user just moves close enough to attack and retreats back to his original position?

Lastly, is the dodge roll for closing an opposed skill check if the long weapon user is actively keeping him at bay? 

4 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

I was trying to come up with a power concept that I could use liberally to give 1 or 2 power to most NPC in a shameless non op fashion....
So that I don't end up with the players having 6 casters against either powerless mob, or esoteric powerful one.. but instead common soldiers with a surprise...

Initially I like the concept .. but then I realize it's a bit like sorcery, except less flexible (less spell choice) yet more powerful (the equivalent MP they cast is higher). So I am wondering whether the concept is sound or not!? 😮 

Enough with the introductions, here is the power mechanic for you to comment on!

--

 

Adepts are a new kind of magical practitioner. Each adept follows a way, or magical discipline. A discipline is a list of up to 6 magic spells and a skill named after it.

An adept, or practitioner, has a “Way of the Discipline Name” skill that define how far his mastery of the way goes.

For every 20% In the skill he can learn one power of the discipline that cost less that skill/20% magic point to cast. For every 10% in the skill and adept get one cast slot. And he can cast any of the power he or she know using a cast slot in the power phase of the round (INT+D10 initiative).

Adept can recover each slot with 1-hour meditation.

Magician can create new discipline by teaching their way to a group of students. They can choose up to 4 spell they know at 80%+ or 5 spell they know at 100%+ or 6 spell they know at 120%+ and teach them to new recruit as part of a new way. Spell level / MP cost is decided when creating the discipline.

You know, this has some similarity to the Psychic Powers rules I've made for the Fading Suns to BRP document. The psychic can choose a bunch of psychic paths which are skills that unlock more powerful abilities as you increase your skill rating. Check it out, it might give you some inspiration for some of the disciplines.

4 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Or port over the Summoning rules from Strombringer. If you have that you kinda have what you want/need.

Originally, Sorcery in Stormbringer was just summoning, and the spells were added later. The Sorcery system is a reskinning of the RuneQuest Battle Magic system.

THE BGB is just a collection of rules from previous BRP games, with a few tweaks. So anything you like from another BRP game can be ported over if you like. So if you like the Demon rules from Strombringer (of which there were several versions) then feel free to use them rather than worrying about using something that is expressly Gold Book

 

BTW, I think the mainreason why the summoning rules were not included in the BGB is that they don't really work well with the other power systems. Demon items in Strombringer are often game changers, being much more powerful than other magic of the same POW cost. For instance a sword that does an extra couple of dice damage, all the time, is better than most other, if not all other, damage boosting powers.  And once you got one, it's permanent. 

. 

 

Hmm, this makes me think that you could use the Super Powers rules to make the demonic abilities. Like every power point spent towards creation would have the equivalent to the same amount of character points for items. Like if I wanted a demonic sword that had a fire ability, I would use 10 power points to give a sword Heat Projection giving it +1d6 heat damage. It wouldn't be so over powered like in Stormbringer 5e where the equivalent power points would give you a +2d10 bonus to damage and a +100% to hit. And there would be much greater variety in the powers. Imagine a greatsword that could give you HP drain and superspeed on top of the extra damage.

4 hours ago, Mugen said:

My opinion is that the intent of the designer was to provide a simplest system, but in the end he removed half the rules and didn't replace them...

We had a conversation on a related subject some times ago :

 

Thanks! I guess I'll just have to get Advance Sorcery then. 

I'm preparing to run a fantasy game using the Sorcery rules from the BGB. One of the things that caught my attention are the rules for Summoning Demons and Elementals and binding them to the flesh or specific objects to gain powers, are there any guidelines to the sort of power they would gain? I looked at the Stormbringer 5e rules and found that they have a system for creating the abilities based on how much PP you spend. But the BGB's version of sorcery doesn't have any of that, is it just meant to be completely freeform? 

I'm not familiar with MERP, but there is already a Lord of the Rings for BRP document. I never used it myself, but it seems pretty extensive with 172 pages. It says that it's using another LOTR game as a basis for the rules, but it could be helpful for your game.

There's also an entire page dedicated to LOTR documents.

https://basicroleplaying.org/files/category/47-middle-earth/

11 hours ago, Rhialto the Marvellous said:

Okay, the leaking seems fine, but I'm not sure of the "slip past": the concept behind the latter was that only slow attacks could slip through, which original FS modelled with a damage ceiling before the shield triggered. Why not stick with that idea?

In earlier drafts of the game, I had considered using a minimum damage threshold based similar to the original game (and the d20 adaptation). The values were derived from the Fading Suns d20 game. In that game, you would roll damage then make a d20+damage rolled against a DC, it was 17 for melee attacks and 15 for ranged attack. I wanted to avoid too much needless dice rolling so I subtracted 12 from the shield activation DC from the d20 games and came to the minimum damage threshold values of 5 for melee and 3 for ranged.

The first problem I ran into was Martial Arts, getting better at dealing damage would increase the chance that the shield would activate and stop the attack. I tried to solve this by making it so that any extra damage would not be counted towards the damage threshold, after all good technique and craftsmanship should not activate the shield. In the end I did not like the solution as it slowed the game down. The attacker would either have to declare which dice is the weapon's damage dice or roll the dices separately.

One solution I've considered doing was making it so that Martial Arts lets you bypass the shields, but I thought that it made shields useless. I tried to make the benefit weaker, like every 20% of martial arts raises the minimum damage threshold by 1. Another was allowing the characters to decrease the accuracy of their attack to raise the minimum damage threshold. There were many more that were tried and dropped in favor of the current rules.

Another problem was that the original game rolled for it's armor and the d20 adaptation had no damage reduction based off of armor, the BRP rules default to static armor values. However, there is the option to roll for AV, but I think it would slow down the game too much. Imagine having to roll to attack, then rolling defense, then rolling damage, if it exceeds damage threshold, roll shield AV. If the attack goes through the shield, then roll armor. The problem is further compounded if you have to do that for like 15 hits from an assault rifle.

In the end, I think that the original Fading Suns system was created for that setting in mind. There are so many rules that only exist because of some facet of the lore. I've tried to introduce many houserules for BRP to accommodate for how it works in Fading Suns, but it was taking too long and the document was over 30 pages at one point. I haven't even touched the occult and space combat rules yet, the end result could easily reached 50 pages. I decided that it was better to have a simple system where characters take a penalty to attack based on the SIZ of their weapon. I think the increasing accuracy penalty captured the spirit of the Fading Suns rules without the complications involved in trying to replicate it. However, if you still prefer to do it like it was in the original Fading Suns game, I've posted a topic where I discussed how to  make Fading Suns shields for BRP. It should be enough for you to use for your own game.

5 hours ago, Rhialto the Marvellous said:

Sorry, just sat down to look over the revised (1.0.1) version and noticed some more items: this is incredibly useful, as I have a friend who really wants to run FS, but is not keen on the original system. I showed him this and now he's all set, so thanks very much. 👍

• p.8, Weapons Table: should be Garrotte or Garrote, but I haven't seen garote before (though both variants I mention are accepted)
• p.9, Vibrating Blades: I'd change to read "A vibrating blade does no extra damage but it will cut through energy shields easier, which only provide 7 AV instead of the full 15 AV." to distinguish from regular (non-energy) shields.
• p.13, Note for Energy Shields should probably read "The first AV value is the shield’s normal AV. The second AV is the shield’s AV against weapons or attacks that slip past or leak through energy shields." You might want to consider italicizing or otherwise highlighting terms you define in this document, as I did in this example...but then you're taking another step towards a more formal document. 😉
• p.14, MedPac: "Standardized" or "Standard" in place of "Standardize"
• p.15, VS Perimeter Guards: should read "A small floating orb that sets a perimeter around a camp and monitors the area."
• p.15, Wet Jackets: delete "A jacket" and start with "Silvery sheets..."
• p.15, Facial Scanner: should read "Recognizes human and alien faces and can store pertinent information on them."
• p.15, Arm Harpoon: should read "Holds up to 5 short spears that can be launched up to 10 meters."
• p.15, Jonah: should read "A slightly more expensive version of the Arm Harpoon; involves a cable attachment and an internal pulley mechanism."
• p.16, Stimusim: should read "Stimusim replicates the sensitivity of flesh..."
• p.17, Pilot: should read "...can double as the navigator."
• p.17, Gunner: should read "They man..."
• p.25, Soma/Hardening: should read "...providing an AV of 3 plus 2 for any extra power points..." (matches phrasing of other abilities under Soma).
• p.28, Vis/Note: should read "Instead, at 61+%..."
• p.29, Urge: should read "When a psychic fumbles a psychic powers check, commits a heinous deed or breaks a strong personal conviction, they must roll against their Sanity."
• p.36, Hubris: should read "When a theurge fumbles a Theurgic Casting check, commits a heinous deed or breaks a religious taboo, they immediately roll against their Sanity check."

Right, made the changes.

5 hours ago, Rhialto the Marvellous said:

p.13, Note for Energy Shields should probably read "The first AV value is the shield’s normal AV. The second AV is the shield’s AV against weapons or attacks that slip past or leak through energy shields." You might want to consider italicizing or otherwise highlighting terms you define in this document, as I did in this example...but then you're taking another step towards a more formal document. 😉

This is more of confusing rules on my part. The Slip Past Shields would go through an energy shield's AV instead of reducing it to 7. I added a sentence on page 13 "Success on the attack completely bypasses an energy shield's AV." As for the note under the energy shield's stats I changed the sentence to "... weapons or attacks that leak through energy shields." I hope that clears up the confusion.

I also italicized all instances of "Leaks through energy shields" as well as all instances of "Energy Weapon(s)" to differentiate them as terms.

Finally got down and fixed up the typos Rhialto pointed out and some others that I found.

16 hours ago, Rhialto the Marvellous said:

Really well done! As someone who ran a FS campaign for a few years but grew tired of the system and endless expansions this is incredibly useful...A few things:

 

Thanks, glad to hear that you liked it!

16 hours ago, Rhialto the Marvellous said:

 Ur-Obun text on p.4 is reproduced for the Ur-Ukar, and presumably they'd have some different skills?

 

Ah, I spotted the mistake. Luckily its only a minor one, other then forgetting to change the name, the rules are as stated. The two races start with similar skills, but one of the languages is different.

16 hours ago, Rhialto the Marvellous said:

Energy Shields on p.13 says "...the shield may burn out. It can also be caused by being by multiple hits..." when it should read "...the shield may burn out. It can also be caused by being hit by multiple hits..."

P.15: I think it should be "Magna-Lock", not "Lick".

P.24: Should be "Subtle Sight", not "Suble".

Ah, thank you for pointing those out. I'll rewrite those parts as soon as I can. Is it alright if I credit you for some of the changes on the next update?

16 hours ago, Rhialto the Marvellous said:

For those of us without M-Space: does the "Hd" for the ships represent "Handling"?

Yes.

I have a request to ask you. Since you've played Fading Suns for a long time, can you take a look at the Urge and Hubris rules. Those were the rules where I had the most difficulty in translating Fading Suns to BRP and I ended up using Sanity to represent them. I'd like to hear your opinions on how they function.

I finally finished my document and just uploaded it. 
If you guys find any issues with the rules or wording of the text, please tell me so I can fix them.

I'm writing up a Fading Suns for BRP document very slowly. I can give you what I have, but its mostly a gear list at this point and the rules havent been solidified yet.

49 minutes ago, Questbird said:

I like simpler systems. How about these principles:

1. Shield Fighting skill is added to weapon skill when attacking a shielded opponent
2. An activated shield blocks all fast-moving ranged weapons
3.  An activated shield makes parrying or dodging melee attacks Easy for the defender
4. Medium and Long melee weapons are Difficult to use against a shield

I have an even simplier system. Your energy shield provides two armor values, one high and one low. Most attacks target the high armor value, some attacks target the low armor value.

On 7/22/2018 at 4:25 AM, simonh said:

I wouldn’t call that a long discussion, it’s just a few posts and doesn’t cover a lot of the concerns I have on this.

Having shield fighting skill act as a limiter on weapon skill is one way, but I don’t think it’s a complete solution. Here is a summary of the issues as I see them:

• Attacks on shielded opponents by necessity have to be slower, so shouldn’t they be easier to parry?
• Shouldn’t shield fighting attacks do less damage, since they are slower and the shield limits available lines of attack?
•  Fast contacts with a shield are repelled by it, so shouldn’t it be possible to parry with a shield, by using fast movements to knock aside an opponent’s weapon?
• It should also be possible to do a knock back or bludgeon attack using a shield, I think this was shown in the movie when a character wearing a shield charges into a group of opponents like a human bowling ball and sends them all flying.

I had a lot of problems with the movie, but I thought they did a decent job with a difficult topic in addressing shield fighting.

Here are a few ideas for resolving these issues.

• Attacks against shielded opponents do half damage. That means a normal hit does half normal rolled weapon damage, while a critical success does normal rolled weapon damage (instead of double damage or maximum rollable).
• if shield fighting skill is not known (base is 0%), simply make all attacks at half chance.
• If Shield fighting skill is known as a separate skill, it is usable in combination with any other weapon skill but acts as a limit when fighting shielded opponents, so the attack roll must be less than both shield fighting and normal attack skill. If the roll is a special success against shield fighting skill, then ignore the normal halving of damage against shielded opponents. E.g. Knife skill is 80% and shield fighting is 50%. On 1-10 do double normal rolled damage. On 11-16 do normal rolled damage. On 17-50 do half normal rolled damage. On 51-80 the attack is blocked by the shield.
• Characters parrying or dodging an attack while wearing a shield get a +20% bonus.
• Shield fighting skill can be used with the unarmed combat attack and parry skills, and to make knockback attacks.

The example merits further discussion. A roll of 1-10 is both a critical on attack skill and on Shield Fighting, so both effects apply. The shield fighting Crit cancels the half damage rule for shields and the attack Crit causes double normal damage. On a roll of 11-16 the half damage rule for the shield applies and drops down damage from double on a Crit attack to normal rolled.

I think shields should grant a bigger bonus for parrying longer weapons such as swords and spears. Maybe +40%. This is because the tips of longer weapons are harder to control and attack slowly with for the attacker. The extra leverage and speed that is an advantage in normal combat actually works agaisn’t them. Also they are easier for a shield wearer to bash aside and close past. This is why fighters in the novel always use shorter knives, maybe up to short sword length. Chopping and slashing weapons should also be at a disadvantage.

EDIT: shield skill base of 0% doesn’t work very well with the half skill rule for characters that don’t know shield fighting. What happens when they learn it at 1%?

One problem with the above system is that if I know shield fighting at a low level and I’m at say 50% skill with my weapon, there is very little difference between my ability against a shielded opponent, compared to another character with 80% weapon skill. That extra 30% skill gives them hardly any advantage. That doesn’t seem right. So while I think I’ve identified all my concerns, I still don’t have a fully satisfactory solution yet.

I've been working on the rules and came up with alot of ways to do shields in Dune.

The Fading Suns Method

The first way was based on how Fading Suns does the shields, with a minimum damage to activate. In this case it was 5 damage. One of the issues I've found was alot ranged weapons were less likely to activate the shields compared to most melee weapons. One of the solution I did was reduced the ranged damage minimum to 3 and had it so that only the weapon's original damage dice was counted. Any extra damage from specials, martial arts, damage bonus, etc. was not counted towards the damage minimum and added after the shield gets bypassed. This accounts for smaller weapons being more likely to bypass the shield, but it doesn't account for the skill element of shield fighting. My solution for this was be to have a Shield Fighting Martial Art Skill, basically every 10-20 points in the martial art raises the damage minimum of melee and thrown ranged weapons by 1. This is probably one of the more accurate ways to handle shields in Dune (and Fading Suns), but its kinda finicky. When my friends playtested it, they complained that it slowed down the combat a bit.

The Attack Sinister Method

Another method I though about was using Dex. You can take a -5 to your Initiative to make an "Attack Sinister" that bypasses the shield. But I ran into the problem where the everyone was doing that and it negated the the initiative penalty and made it pointless. It also did not have a skill element and it made it a neccesity to have a high dex character.

Combining the two

I took the damage minimum fron the Fading Suns Method and made it so every -1 or -2 penalty to initiative increases the damage minimum of melee attacks by 1. This method turned initiative tracking into a nightmare since everyone was taking a different penalty to their initiatives.

The Activation Rating Method

In this method, the Energy Shields still provided Armor Value, but it had an adjustable activation rating as well. So a shield on low power mode had an activation rating of 50%, you can increase this in 10% increments up to 100% with increased power consumption as well as tiring out your character. The problem was the lack of skill element, constantly remembering to apply a penalty to all actions when increasing the activation rating, etc.

The Two AV Method

This method is probably the simpliest method to use. The energy shield provides two Armor Values, one high and one low. All attacks are resisted with the high AV. You can target the low AV by using a one-handed melee weapon in conjunction to a Shield Fighting Skill that works like Martial Arts.

There are a bunch more ways to handle energy shields that I've come up with but these are the ones that I remember. So far the Fading Suns and Two AV method seem to be the best.

Having shield fighting skill act as a limiter on weapon skill is one way, but I don’t think it’s a complete solution. Here is a summary of the issues as I see them:

• Attacks on shielded opponents by necessity have to be slower, so shouldn’t they be easier to parry?
• Shouldn’t shield fighting attacks do less damage, since they are slower and the shield limits available lines of attack?
•  Fast contacts with a shield are repelled by it, so shouldn’t it be possible to parry with a shield, by using fast movements to knock aside an opponent’s weapon?
• It should also be possible to do a knock back or bludgeon attack using a shield, I think this was shown in the movie when a character wearing a shield charges into a group of opponents like a human bowling ball and sends them all flying.

The problem is that BRP is a generic system and shouldn't try too hard to emulate every little nuance. It just adds in a lot of fiddly rules like in The Fading Suns method I described. It will lead to madness.

You could just shield fighting act as a limiter and the first three points don't need to have rules for them. The penalty on the attack roll is enough to represent them. The fourth point doesn't really need a houserule, it could be treated like a shield bash attack. Give it 1d4+db with Knockback.

On 7/22/2018 at 4:25 AM, simonh said:

• Attacks against shielded opponents do half damage. That means a normal hit does half normal rolled weapon damage, while a critical success does normal rolled weapon damage (instead of double damage or maximum rollable).
•  if shield fighting skill is not known (base is 0%), simply make all attacks at half chance.
•  If Shield fighting skill is known as a separate skill, it is usable in combination with any other weapon skill but acts as a limit when fighting shielded opponents, so the attack roll must be less than both shield fighting and normal attack skill. If the roll is a special success against shield fighting skill, then ignore the normal halving of damage against shielded opponents. E.g. Knife skill is 80% and shield fighting is 50%. On 1-10 do double normal rolled damage. On 11-16 do normal rolled damage. On 17-50 do half normal rolled damage. On 51-80 the attack is blocked by the shield.
•  Characters parrying or dodging an attack while wearing a shield get a +20% bonus.
• Shield fighting skill can be used with the unarmed combat attack and parry skills, and to make knockback attacks.

 The example merits further discussion. A roll of 1-10 is both a critical on attack skill and on Shield Fighting, so both effects apply. The shield fighting Crit cancels the half damage rule for shields and the attack Crit causes double normal damage. On a roll of 11-16 the half damage rule for the shield applies and drops down damage from double on a Crit attack to normal rolled.

 I think shields should grant a bigger bonus for parrying longer weapons such as swords and spears. Maybe +40%. This is because the tips of longer weapons are harder to control and attack slowly with for the attacker. The extra leverage and speed that is an advantage in normal combat actually works agaisn’t them. Also they are easier for a shield wearer to bash aside and close past. This is why fighters in the novel always use shorter knives, maybe up to short sword length. Chopping and slashing weapons should also be at a disadvantage.

 EDIT: shield skill base of 0% doesn’t work very well with the half skill rule for characters that don’t know shield fighting. What happens when they learn it at 1%?

 One problem with the above system is that if I know shield fighting at a low level and I’m at say 50% skill with my weapon, there is very little difference between my ability against a shielded opponent, compared to another character with 80% weapon skill. That extra 30% skill gives them hardly any advantage. That doesn’t seem right. So while I think I’ve identified all my concerns, I still don’t have a fully satisfactory solution yet.

 

There's a problem with this method as it makes the shield too weak. A shield should be able to withstand firearms and artillery strikes, 6d6 halved is still too lethal for a shielded character.

Having a bonus to Parry is similar to one of the ideas I came up for energy shields. However, I ultimately decided not to use them since you'd have to have this constant modifier in place for all of the characters that use shields. Its an unnecessary complication to the game that doesn't add much to the game or narrative. Having energy shields provide a substantial armor value should be enough to show how powerful they are.

The ways for someone to escape a grapple.

1. If the grappler  fails his grapple check at the start of his turn
2. The grappler making a maneuver that forces a resistance check and failing it
3. If the grappler isn't grappling the arms and allows the grappled person to grapple back.

I personally just have the characters make opposed grapple checks with whoever rolls lowest or the best level of success 

It's actually harder to initiate a grapple then you think. Even if the guy initiating succeeds on his grapple check, the defender still has the ability to parry his own grapple skill or dodge. If the defender wins over the attacker, then the grapple fails. If the attacker wins over the defender, then two things can happen: if the defender dodges then the attacker can roll (or choose in my case) where he grapples or if the defender parries then the attacker can only grapple the arms.

If the defender is wielding a gun I would grant them the point blank bonus, but I would also allow the attacker to parry using his grapple skill. Remember that they can't use their gun if the arm that's holding the gun is being grappled.

32 minutes ago, Sean_RDP said:

Although I understand trying to be true to the original, the most logical and easiest might be to just have the shield activate at 4, 6, or 8 damage depending on what the player wishes. I personally never found that variable reaction very logical as the shield would need to activate in literal nanoseconds between detecting how much force (damage) and how much it may or may do to the character. So set intervals give the allusion of a variable shield without the mechanical gymnastics.  It makes for one less die roll and calculation. 

However, if using a variable model, I would say a 20% chance of activation for damage over 4 : 20% at 5 damage, 40% at 6, etc... until at 9 or greater there is a 100% chance of activation

Well that is my original idea that I posted. I had the shield's activation threshold be set at 5, but it only counts the weapon's damage dice without any modifiers to it. So the extra damage from martial arts and the damage bonus as well as specials doesn't count towards the shield's activation. So lets say a dagger rolls 4 for damage,  and the character also deals an extra 3 damage from martial arts and another 2 from his damage bonus. The weapon's damage dice are only counted in a shield's activation threshold and it doesn't activate due to the dagger only rolling a 4 for damage, but once he bypass the shield he uses his full damage, 9. 

3 hours ago, g33k said:

I tend not to like trying to emulate one game's mechanics in another game, personally.  I like a "native to the new game" sort of rule that gives some of the flavor or the old game...  So, off the top of my head:

Give the Shield a %Skill -- roll-under means the shield "activates" and provides armor-points.  Note that a shield thus has TWO ratings -- armor pts, and "activation".

I wouldn't try to do the "damage threshold," just make it less-effective (lower Armor and/or worse Activation) against non-ranged weapons.

YMMV

This sounds a lot like the shields and missile fire spot rule, just that it applies to melee attacks too. It could work, but it would require an extra dice roll. Maybe have something like a reverse martial arts skill? Like the attack roll must roll underneath the activation threshold to bypass the shield.

The reason why the damage threshold was used was due to a inherent property of the energy shields in the setting. Basically, a dagger could slip pass the shield more easily than a great sword would. The great sword has to overcome the shield through brute force. There would have to be some sort of modifier to the shield's activation check based on how damaging the weapon is. One of the things I can do would have the activation check be how much damage was dealt times 5.

1 hour ago, muminalver said:

Use the reistance table

Damage vs. Shield strength

You Can do it like the classical parry each time Damage goes through, the strength of the Shield decreases.

 

I prefer to stay away from the resistance table if I can, it would be very sluggish to have to use the resistance table after every hit.

I trying to make some rules for a Fading Suns game and I'm a bit stumped on the energy shields. I'm thinking of using a modified version of the rule from Fading Suns D20 since it's easier to translate mechanics. In the d20 game, the damage dealt to the shield is used as a modifier to roll against an activation check. The DC for ranged weapons is 15 and 17 for melee weapons. So a guy fires a gun and deals 5 damage. He rolls a d20 and adds the damage, if he rolls 15 and above, the shield activates and grants 15 damage resistance. Weapons that "leak through shields"  basically reduce the DR by half.

My own take for BRP is to have the Energy Shield give an armor of 15. The shield has a damage threshold of 5 and it only counts the weapon's unmodified damage. So it excludes the damage bonus, extra damage from martial arts, special successes, etc. The extra damage can be added after the hit lands. So a character with a dagger rolls 4 for damage, this goes underneath the shield's damage dice. Once the shield has been bypassed, he can add his damage bonus (d4) as well as the martial arts damage (d4+2). You wouldn't be able to do this with ranged weapons, so a bow's full damage is used to see if it exceeds the damage threshold.

Otherwise I'm thinking about a Shield Fighting Martial Art similar to Dune but I think that would be making energy shields too weak since having a high enough shield fighting skill will effectively render them useless, but it'll be simpler to do. They both have their pros and cons so I'm not sure which to use. What do you guys think?

I do a stat block and don't have a detailed skill list. I just have Primary skills that they are expected to have in their profession and secondary for anything else. If they have really high skills, then I add a Tertiary Skills.

Here's an example from a game I was running.

Imperial Templar

STR 15 CON 14 SIZ 15 INT 13 POW 11
DEX 13 APP 13 EDU 14
Move: 10
Hit Points: 15
Damage Bonus: +1d4
Armor: 10-Point Templar Armor 
Attacks: 
E-11 Rifle 45%, 2D8+3 (Impaling)
Vibro-Dagger 45%, 2D4+2+1D4 (Impaling)
Grenade (Explosive) 45%, 3D8 (Knockback) 
Skills: Primary Skills 45%, Secondary Skills 30%
Powers: None

In this case, it would only allow you to carry more while flying. Like if you're flying while lifting a car to drop or throw. The Sprint power can double your ground speed or be applied to your Super Movement, Flying etc.

As for the Core Rulebook, I can't find anything about it. It just says that the Flight can be conbined with Superspeed which is not what you're looking for.

Yeah... I think you'd like Unified Powers. It seems to be closer to what you're looking her.

Which "travel" powers are you talking about? You can always take many levels of a power in order to increase it's effects.

As for porting something else. I recommend looking at the Unified Powers homebrew, I personally think it makes super powers more interesting while simplifying them.

Now, if you are going to port M&M. I'm not too familiar with the system, but I understand that it doesn't have an HP system and it makes it harder for characters to one shot eachother. You'd have to tweak with the dmg and hp model of the game in order to lessen the lethality of the game since you characters could be throwing 10d6 worth of dmg per attack. Or you could just play it straight and have the setting place restrictions on supers killing eachother. Thats what I did and it worked alright for my game. I just tweaked the rules a little.

The BRP system is not designed for overly powerful characters and works better for lower powered games.

6 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

LOL, you might want to take a peek at that old Bond RPG. It did stuff like that.

One thing you might consider doing with the half % would be to let it adjust damage. One idea I was toying with was to set the number of damage dice by the SL. So something like a broadsword might only do 1D4 on a marginal success, maybe 2D4 on a normal success, 8D4 on a impale, and so on.  

 

That sounds like an interesting idea. I think the adjusted damage should be based on the difference of quality rating between the attacking roll and the defending roll. 

1 hour ago, Mankcam said:

Yep this is how CoC 7E does it. I think it will be a shame if it isn't how RQ or other Chaosium BRP systems run things. I know I certainly will be playing them all like this, just for consistency, and the fact that such a minimal addition to the original rules can really make things run so much better at the gaming table.

Awesome! I'll take a look at the quick-start rules as soon as I can.

1 hour ago, RosenMcStern said:

I have some difficulties following your point.

- Effect-based combat does not increase book-keeping needs. You generate an effect and spend it on the fly. What book-keeping are you talking about?

- Pre-announcing the manoeuvre you want to use does not speed up things at all. Because it requires that you make a tactical choice every time you are about to roll. Post announcement, on the contrary, limits tactical decisions to when you win the exchange. You only pick one option when the dice have already said "yes", not when the dice might say "no".

Well, I've noticed with my players is that they don't think about the decision until after they make the roll. Which means they pause the game to look up what the different effects do and how to do them. For them, the tactical choice is made before their turn when the intent is announced first and they don't do that when the intent is announced after. They opt to wait for the results before making any tactical considerations, which slows the game down. They want a "Does this work? Yes or no." instead of a "You have a list of choices you can make after the roll." I think it comes down which person has the responsibility for the rules. The announce intent before approach has them thinking solely on the combat situation with me handling the rules of how it works while the choosing from a list after approach has them being responsible for the rules. I have a player whose pretty mechanically minded and likes dissecting the ruleset, so he's pretty much fine with anything. The other two aren't and don't like it when the rules intrude into the narrative.

9 hours ago, colinabrett said:

A Critical causes double damage; a Special causes the weapon's special effects; so what would be the effect of an "Under Half Success"? Roll damage twice and take the higher result might work but that just increases the number of dice rolls. Or, an Under Half Success could automatically allow a riposte.

When applied to other skills, I can see how this would be useful. Perhaps on an Under Half Success, a particular task gets completed more quickly (even a couple of combat rounds could make all the difference in some cases) or has some other minor advantage.

As for a different name, I quite like "Solid Hit" or "Solid Success".

Hope this helps a bit.

Colin

Well, it counts as a normal success in the attack-parry matrix. The whole point was that it beats a normal success. Also Critical Success does max damage and goes through armor. In other skills it will offer a minor benefit. I quite like the name "Solid Success".

7 hours ago, Mankcam said:

Isn't this a 'Hard Success' from CoC 7E?

 

I didn't know that was a thing if CoC 7E.

5 hours ago, RosenMcStern said:

You might also consider moving to one of the rulesets which use effect-based combat to make hand-to-hand action more interesting: Legend, Mythras or Revolution d100.

I tried that and some of my players didn't like it as much. Part of the idea of Half-under success was to speed up combat while keeping the book-keeping minimal. BRP has rules for some special maneuvers like disarming which requires the player to announce their intent and roll under 1/2 their skill already. I'll probably expand on that to include more effects. 

2 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

The old James Bond RPG used to do this. In that RPG your roll would generate a Quality Rating, similar to RQ/BRPs Success Level. QR1 was the best result (1/10th success chance), QR2 the next best (1/5th), QR3 (1/2 success chance) and QR4 was a marginal success.  Now in that RPG just how well you accomplished something, weapon damage, etc. was tied to that QR result. 

I'd suggest making the half result a normal success and call the other result a marginal or acceptable  success. 

The thing is, though, just what are the benefits going to be to rolling under half, compared to a normal roll?

I'm not sure what to do with the Under-Half success other than it beating the normal success. The main point was to add another quality rating that would reduce rounds of players trading blows with not much happening. I also might make a system revamp that requires the characters to generate a minimum quality rating to succeed in place of a modifiers. Like a difficult action requires a under 1/2 skill success or a special success. 

So I had a conversation with my friends about BRP a while back. They criticized that the combat could get bogged down easily with characters just trading blows for rounds. One of the solutions I used was adopting the riposte rules from an old discussion I've found on the matter. 

While glossing over the discussion, one post caught my attention.

On 8/24/2009 at 3:16 AM, deleriad said:

 

 

Why make it complicated? The proposed rule is really a generic rule for any sort of counter-attack with any sort of weapon. It's not specific to fencing.

 

Why not just say that a riposte/counter-attack is an attack using a defensive reaction. A riposte thus subtracts 30% from your next defense (just like any parry or dodge) and the attack can be any sort of attack. I see no need to bother with DEX ranks and so on. After all, a regular attack doesn't consist of mostly doing nothing except on your DEX rank, the DEX rank is just a handy method of ordering who does what when. It seems to me that the essence of BRP is about using fairly quick and simple ways of resolving issues with minimal book-keeping.

When I first introduced this houserule into the game, my players seemed to enjoy it, and sure enough the game's combat was faster. We've used it in a variety of different campaigns. My players have become less enamored with that houserule, the combat was ending in fewer turns but the time spent fighting and number dice rolls made to reach to the conclusion had only decreased a little.

I've thought of a houserule to include an "Under Half Success", basically if you roll a success that is under half the current skill rating it would count as a Under Half Success. It expands the type of successes a character can achieve. I haven't presented the idea to them yet, but what do you guys think of the houserule? Also do you guys have a better name for this? Like Good Success or something that sounds between Normal and Special?