Mugen

On 5/4/2024 at 12:36 AM, DreadDomain said:

This topic made me track down a copy of Land of Ninja or La Voie du Sabre (my LoN disintegrated years ago). I found LVDS at a reasonable price and it arrived yesterday. The book is pristine as if new. Very impressed.

I remember seeing a shop in Paris that had a shelf of unshrinked RQ3 books, sold 5 euros apiece. RQ3 was definitely not a huge success here...

Beware that Ki powers seem to have been altered in the translation. A good number of them have a cost in "points de POU" instead of "Magic Points". Although it may sound familiar to players of RQ 2 accustomed to "Power points", it's very disturbing to those that only knew RQ3...

I see no reason why it wouldn't work.

Obviously, you'd need to change the SIZ and STR scale, unless you want all PCs to have STR and SIZ 1 😆.

There's even room for having differences in Character Creation depending on your mice's starting region, even though I don't think the comic gives much information about this.

Note also that despite being primarily a simplified Burning Wheel, MouseGuard also drew inspiration from Pendragon. The way it treats weapons, and its combat system with 4 "stances" are clearly coming from it.

The last draft of Mongoose's RuneQuest rules had an interesting idea concerning parries.

When both opponents rolled the same success level, damage was reduced by the parrying weapon's Armour (a number between 4 to 6, IIRC), or twice that number if the defender's roll was superior to the attacker's.

I loved that idea.

It was written by Kenneth Hyte, IIRC, then edited by Mongoose team to become the carastrophic 2 rolls system that was in the published version...

I don't remember how dodge worked, but it was certainly more binary. It seems to me the defender avoided the blow if his roll was superior, but lost some actions.

@sladethesnipernote I mentionned Mage:the Awakening and not Mage:the Ascension as my favorite. Awakening is a mix between Ascension and Ars Magica. It has 10 Arcana (Entropy was split into Fate and Death) and no Verb+Noun, but makes a mechanical distinction between "rotes" spells that a Mage learned and improvisational magic, whereas in Ascension rotes were just examples of how Spheres can be used.

Improvisational magic is still possible, but it costs Mana and requires a Gnosis (=Arete) roll, whereas spells require a standard Attribute+Skill roll.

I also mentioned the 13 practices, which are not very different from the difficulty chart from @rsanford's post above.

https://philgamer.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/mage-the-awakening-101-arcana-basics-the-13-practices/

56 minutes ago, NickMiddleton said:

Completely off the cuff: I think a limited set of skills, or even a single skill with a list of specialisms / sub-domains, and then a set of spell lists as a set of guidelines is a good starting point. Ars Magica's distinction between formulaic spells and spontaneous spells. A set of lists of specific formulae in specific disciplines / categories to get people started (and provide a baselines for adjudication) and then skill rolls to allow variation. Sticking to the formula of a "known" spell is easy; push the formulae modestly (+/- 3 points in effect from a baseline) is routine ;  radically pushing the formulae (+/- 4 points in effect or mroe ), or coming up with an entirely novel spell is hard...

That's why I favor Mage the Awakening over AM and Mage the Ascension.

It has improvised magic and learned spells and a fixed list of 10 magic skills named Arcana (Life, Space, Forces, Matter, Mind, etc.) 

Contrarily to AM, you don't have a list of verbs to add to your Arcana. Instead, your Arcana level tells which kind of effects you can do. At 1 dot (out of 5(, you essentially have access to informations relative to the Arcana, at 2 dots you have limited control over it, and at 5 dots you can literrally Make or Unmake anything within the Arcana's realm.

There are 13 different "practices", 2 or 3 of those per dot. It would be possible to map these on a Magic skill %.

I like having some freedom in magic, like in Ars Magica or the 2 Mage games, especially Mage:the Awakening.

But I also think having no clear boundaries on what magic can do is a source of imbalance between players. Playing a mage or a non-mage is a completely different experience in the games I mentionned.

That's also the reason why a game like Star Wars D6 started with only 3 Force skills and eventually gave Force users a list of powers they could use in 2nd edition, because once they had a certain skill level they were too powerful.

And even in Mage, Magic comes with different skills that clearly define what the Mage can do. Spirit, Magic, Life, etc. Though even with this limitation, there's still hundreds of ways to achieve your goal with magic...

21 minutes ago, Nokaion said:

How would you solve this?

I wouldn't use an advantage/disadvantage system for difficulties. But if I understand you correctly, I think it's not an option. 🙂

In Mythras, I think I would make Witchers powers a specific kind of Mysticism, in which Attributes enhancement is the consequence of drugs, and Sigils are lesser versions or Sorcery spells, either instant or lasting until the Witcher stops concentration.

2 hours ago, conajofa said:

@Mugen I get what you mean!

The real utility is it as a resource for Techniques, like Dojis being better diplomats the higher their honor and Scorpion being able to use Honor as a currency.

I suppose one can translate this with personality traits, my real question would be what would be the opposite, Shourido precepts aren't directly opposed.

Hmm... You don't really need opposite traits. Given they're always equal to 100-trait, failing a roll under a Trait is basically the same as succeeding a roll under the opposite one.

The list of virtues is, according to this wiki :

Compassion

Courage

Courtesy

Justice

Loyalty

Honor

Sincerity

I think most exist in Pendragon's personality traits, perhaps under different names.

14 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

I'll add a third BRP-ish game for consideration: King Arthur Pendragon.  This leads me to a Nephilim thread that I started a couple of years back, which in turn refers to yet another thread.  The ring of interdependent elements resonates through a lot of gaming concepts.

There's some discussion in there that refers back to Wyrm's Footnotes No.14.  The concept of dragonewts mastering emotional dichotomies, which might work well with the Rings of Lot5R, though instead of ranking up from 1 to 10, they trend toward mastery-in-the-middle by controlling the extremes.  Have a look at the attached snippets.

!i!

WF14 Dragonewt Personality Traits.pdf 1.04 MB · 1 download

Of course, Pendragon is a great inspiration for L5R !

But I will rather use it to model "Honor" and Bushido virtues rather than rings.

L5R gives one monolithic "Honor" stat to every character. But it's a rather useless stat, as its meaning is supposed to change depending on what you think of Bushido virtues. Scorpions usually have a very low Honor and Lions and Cranes have very high Honor because it was a balancing factor in the Card Game between factions. But he RPG tells us he Scorpions may actually be the most honorable faction because they stick to Loyalty with passion.

Using Pendragon as a model and splitting Honor into 7 personality traits makes much more sense than one single and, IMHO, meaningless Honor value.

Just like in Pendragon, acting accordingly to a virtue will make it rise, and acting against it will make it decrease. High virtues could be exalted, but might also lead you to stress, angst and ultimately seppuku.

There are many ways to implement rings in BRP.

As for myself, I think I'd implement rings as pools of points, which can be used to fuel magical and mystical powers, or to gain bonus to chances of success.

If you look at existing BRP games, there are 2 with similar concepts :

-RuneQuest : Adventures in Glorantha gives every character "rune affinities" in %, among which 6 are Elemental runes. Those can be used to Augment a skill, or o perform Runic magic.

-Nephilim is a game about elemental spirits which possess human beings. Each Nephilim has 5 Elemental abilities scores named Ka-element, which are used to cast spells and boost a characteristic. Each Nephilim is tied to an element, and the value of each Ka-element is determined by his Ka (= POWer). For instance, a Fire Nephilim with Ka 16 will have a Ka-Fire of 16, but a Ka-Water of 4.

You could also use them as replacements for characteristics, like in L5R 5th edition, or Qin:the Warring States.

3 hours ago, svensson said:

Let me also mention Mongoose RQ 'Samurai of Legend'. You can d/i that on the Mongoose website.

It was already mentioned in the "Runeblog post" mentioned in the OP. 🙂 

1 hour ago, conajofa said:

Also because Schools on Rokugan are School of thought, IIRC there isn't an inherent solidarity between members of the same school.

I disagree.

19 hours ago, conajofa said:

So, for example, if a player is in School A and then later also learn about School B but School B has similar skills to School A, then he automatically increase in Rank in the school.

Then, don't automatically increase ranks in schools, and consider those skill minimums as a guideline to consider when a master from a school will consider you're good enough to receive appropriate teachings.

If you've seen the manga/Anime Rurou ni Kenshin, that's exactly what happens between Kenshin and his master.

It also explains why Mirumoto Hitomi was able to be rank 5 in the Mirumoto school despite having Insight just slightly above rank 2. Well, that and poor proof-reading in 1e, too.

6 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Casting if done by combining their skill in a technique (Create, Destroy, Control, Change, Perceive) with one of the Forms I mentioned above and rolling that against a spells difficulty. In BRP terms, this would be similar to RQ3 Sorcery/BRP Wizardry and rolling against the lower of the two skills.

That's more or less what I was expecting for RQG Sorcery when Techniques and Runes were first teased during the game development.

Oh, and I missed the elephant in the room, Land of Ninja for RQ3, which is currently discussed in another thread.

L5R schools have a lot in common with the cults you see in games such as RuneQuest or Mythras (which is the current name of RQ6). That is, a group of people that provide esoteric knowledge and powers to their members as they progress with the skills valued by the cult.

Reaching rank X in a school would require you to have at least X in every skill associated with the skill. In turn, being rank X would allow you to learn various powers taught by the school.

You could also take inspiration from Mythras Mysticism, Animism, and Combat Styles.

Note that @Runeblogger, who created the blog you mentioned, is a member of this forum. 

I just remembered I also tried to make my own adaptation of M:tG magic colors in BRP back in 1999. It's available here, only in french.

It was an extension of a magic system close to the first Magic World system, where each spell is a skill.

4 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

If a spell can be in or require multiple colors then you might want to make your colors White (Silver), Blue, Yellow (or Gold), Red and Black so that you can mix colors for spells that mix categories. So a spell that is both Yellow and Blue would be Green, and so forth. 

Does that mean White mixed with any other color makes a pale color ? Pale Blue, Pale Yellow, Pink, Grey ? Same with Black : Dark Blue, Dark Yellow, Dark Red ?

To be honest, this 5 colors system sounds a lot like Magic:the Gathering to me (and predates it by more than a decade), but I think it's easier to know where each spell goes in M:tG. In part because there's litterally thousands of examples in...

On 4/5/2024 at 1:04 AM, Jens said:

(...) I'd skip phase 2 and move straight into phase 3, SRs.

So, basically phase 2 would be a move to phase 3. 😉

20 hours ago, RosenMcStern said:

 The subtle differences between esoteric Buddhism, exoteric Buddhism and Shugendo is also somehow implemented, whereas it is lacking in LoN, where shugenja are treated as sorcerers (!). 

I did a short re-read of my copy of LoN (well, La Voie du Sabre, as I only have the french version) because I didn't remember any mention of Shugenja in it and I've not seen it. Sorcerers are described as adepts of the Tao, seeking immortality. Which is a bit out of context, IMHO.

However, defining Shugenja as "magicians" was an error present in Bushido, also from Bob Charette...

The name Yamabushi is used, though, but they are described as warrior monks from a buddhist sect.

There's no mention of Onmyōdō.

BR:UGE + The Book of Magic should be enough to play with Land of Ninja, with the caveat that the latter has a few RuneQuestisms that were not correctly removed. Also, keep in mind that this magic system is meant to be used with the POW experience checks.

I think OpenQuest is close enough to be used with LoN, and it's far more simple.

Note that if you want to play in Japan with a BRP-related system, you can try Legend + Samurai of Legend. But, despite being a RQ3 descendant, I think it's too far from the origin to use LoN without modifications. It might be a good inspiration source, though.

35 minutes ago, Ravenheart87 said:

I have a soft spot for RQ3e, especially the british Basic version. Nice, clean, short, and has a simple point distribution method instead of fiddling with professions.

The simple version (*) was also present in the original game. It's just easier to miss as it only takes a paragraph.

(*) You get 30% to spend each year after 15, with a maximum of 75+bonus for skills with an experience check box, and 100% for others. An average, 22 years old character has 210% total.

I think I'd try to define Disciplines as skills, and use either Psionics, Magic (from the BGB/BRUGE) or any variant of RuneQuest/Legend/OpenQuest Sorcery as an inspiration to make powers work.

Skill % could give access to different powers, like in the WoD original game. It would also limit the number of points one can spend when he activates a power.

I'd also take inspiration from Chronicle of Darkness rather than old WoD and use a unified "power" stat scale for all supernatural being. Vampires Blood Potency, Werewolves Rage, Mages Arete would all work the same.

Edit: note that attributes in Storyteller/ing system have much more impact on tasks related to skills than in BRP.

If you add 10 points to DEX, you'd have excellent initiative, but you'll rarely gain more than 10% in related skills, and only if you use a BRP variant were skills are affected by characteristics.

The equivalent in WoD would be a gain of 2 or 3 dots in Dexterity, which impacts a lot of actions, and gives much more than +10% chance of succes.

18 hours ago, NickMiddleton said:

I dislike adding additional rolls in to the flow of the game, which has always been my misgiving about augmenting skill, so I exclusively use the first method. I prefer the focus of the "drama and tension" to be on the primary roll, so a player makes a pitch to myself / the group of what skills / passions (or "passion like things" in the case of my usual house rules) and where I / we agree they make sense they get to add the special chance of the relevant skill / passion (maximum of one add from a skill and one add from a passion or passion like thing).

Given the success of RQG, it clearly works for many, but it'll do no harm changing the details.

As for myself, I think I'd use the random method for passions, and the static bonus method for skills.

In my view, passions are not reliable, while skills, and knowledge, are.

Sounds like an idea for Light Side/Dark Side in Star Wars... 🙂

4 minutes ago, PauliusTheMad said:

APP - 1d6

Note that if you use APP and not CHA, it is meant to be a measure of one's attractiveness inside its own species. If a troll's tusk disgust you, it may be attractive to members of its own species.

5 minutes ago, PauliusTheMad said:

So for sake of example, taking that first creature (as the lizard like critter can use mostly more random set of human stats) if I make em smaller for sake of trying to balance it? Or should I give em decent stats but give em some flaws of mental nature? 

STR - 3d6+6
Con - 3d6+4
SIZ - 3d4+14 

INT - 2d6+4
POW - 2d6+3
DEX - 1d6+3
APP - 1d6

You will never be able to balance these 3d4+14 in SIZ.

SIZ is used in HP and damage bonus calculations, which makes it twice as valuable as STR and CON for a melee fighter.

Its drawback is that you're clumsy and hard to hide.