cjbowser

Thanks for posting those. It's funny, I was just re-reading the Micronauts today...

The ETA is September 09.

Thanks for putting that up there.

Are you looking to run the game via a play-by-post site like Role Play Online dot net? If so, I'd love to be a player.

If you're looking for folks to run playtest games in their local area, then I can't. I've got a brand new son, so all of my playing is currently play-by-post.

I'm looking for people who have a group they can either play a game with or at least peruse the rules and look for issues. If you don't have a group, but still want to contribute, you can read the material and offer feedback on rules implementation and such.

Nice!

I'll get the playtest forum up and running by tomorrow.

Got a blurp for the frontpage now?

SGL.

I'll get you one shortly. Thanks!

It might be a good moment to put BRP on DriveThru then (even if this is against my personal interests).

It will certainly benefit RuneQuest, though. Mongoose is still there. You can buy all of their D&D products, but not D&D. Or you can buy all of their RQ products - and RuneQuest!

I do wonder why you can buy CoC material there, but not BRP material. I also wonder why there is CoC material on OBS that is not on Chaosium's site. I had to get Curse of the Cthonians from OBS instead of sending the money straight to Chaosium.

If there is good, quality product out there that fills the void created by WoTC pulling of material, especially the old-school content, BRP might gain some customers.

Also, advertising...

For example a roll of 50 on a 80% skill is a larger degree of success(30 under). than a roll of 20 on a 40% skill.(20 under).

The 80% skill can roll any thing from 1-60 to beat the 40% skill on its 20 roll.

The 40% skill would need to roll from 1-10 to beat an 80% skill who rolled a 50.

Who has the easier roll to make? how does that not give the higher skill an advantage?

Why not just use the degrees of success rules in the core book? That's essentially what you're knocking around here.

It allows for lower skill levels to beat higher skill levels on occasion, particularly if the lower skill level rolls a crit or special and the higher skill level only rolls a normal success, even if the difference between the die roll and the skill level is greater for the higher skill character than it is for the lower skill level character.

Plus then you can use the handy chart in the back of the book to completely eliminate the need for messy subtraction.

Thanks for the offers to help, everybody. It looks like Triff is out until the 18th, so that'll give me some time to get the scenario typed in as well.

I'm looking for a few diehard souls to read through/comment on the setting material and BRP rules changes I have come up.

It will be published by Chaosium as a regular distribution book, not a monograph.

The introductory scenario is not done yet. It's written out longhand, but has not been typed in yet. When it's typed it, it'll be about 10k-15k words and need serious playtesting.

What's it about you ask? It's a modern day espionage setting. Think more Bourne and Burn Notice and less Bond...

Post here or PM if interested. I'll see if Triff wouldn't mind setting up a dedicated forum.

OK. I'm ready to buy the book now. Where do I send my money, or first born child?

It'll dovetail nicely with Cthulhu Invictus (which is Julio-Claudian).

I would start EDU at 10 (unless you are trying for a specific setting such as an academic setting, in which case GM Fiat would rule), but set the maximum for a starting character at age-5, otherwise you'll end up with quite a few over educated characters walking around.

Then, EDU will feed into profession skills. EDUx20 for normal level games, EDUx25 for heroic, EDUx30 for epic, and EDUx40 for superhuman.

I would make EDU cost 3 points during character creation and bump the number of points to either 34 or 36 for a normal level campaign. Note: I haven't actually tested this, but it seems to be a good medium for getting characters that are reasonably educated without nerfing the characters too badly or creating ubermensches. If you're shooting for a higher than normal level campaign, increase the build points by 12 per campaign level as mentioned in the book.

I'm pretty sure other forum members will have much better suggestions.

This is excellent news. Any word on page/word count?

Which brings up a good opportunity I think, rleduc. How nice would it be to see some of the monographs get some extra support through the BRP Adventures mongraphs? Might not work in every case of course, as some would no doubt require the full monograph to really understand the adventure setting, but still....

To use a videogame analogy, we often see a demo for a game to build interest for the full game. Why not a sample adventure with some setting notes to promote a BRP monograph?

See how easy it is to volunteer others to do work?

If the timing works, I plan on doing this for the setting I'm writing for Chaosium. The setting'll be released as a book, not a monograph, but hopefully you guys are ok with that.

The dead tree version of the BRP Adventures monograph is now available.

Thanks for the pointers, Nick. It might be time to set aside publisher and go with Scribus.

Err, I think it can - you mean link text boxes so if there's too much text to display in the first box it flows through and displays in the second one? Scribus can certainly do that, there's a button that lets you link text frames (select a text frame, hit he link button, select the next text frame), plus you can get it to show which text frames are linked from one of the drop down menus. Additional buttons (like the link text frame one) may be hidden if the application window isn't big enough, there are >> you can click on to expand the button bar and show tools that are hidden.

Cheers,

Nick

That's what I meant. Thanks, Nick. Another question for you...

Does Scribus do Master Pages (so that certain items appear on every page, but with the option to turn off for individual pages as necessary)? And does it also allow for sectioning where you can have different headers and footers for different chapters instead of having to create a separate doc for each chapter and string them all together in Adobe or something later?

Several people have recommended using Scribus for layout. I have a question about that. Does it have text overflow? I've been looking through the man files and online and can't figure out how to get that to work.

Chad, I was somewhat remiss in not asking what you are working on?

Care to comment on any current project(s)?

Well, I was going to work on a dystopian future setting: a little Snowcrash here, a little Count Zero there. Some Equilibrium thrown in for good measure; with a dash of Dark Angel and a sprinkling of 1984. However, it seems as though that might be taken already... :thumb: I'll probably still do something along those lines for the Halloween contest.

I'm also working on a setting for BRP. I'm not quite ready to announce it yet. However, I'll everything should be set to paper in a couple weeks. At that point, I was going to advertise around here for playtesters/readers.

A couple things you could do, real quick.

Use total hit points (CON + SIZ) instead onf (CON + SIZ)/2. Perhaps even double the total, but that would be too much in my opinion.

Use of of the options to create Epic or higher games. This will give you more skill points, which players can put into Weapons, Dodge, etc...

Use Step 6 to generate more skill points.

All of the above (with the exception of doubling the total hit points) can be found in the BRP book.

Good to hear that my monograph is being put to good use.

Although I do have a passing interest in the Andes I currently have no plans on producing a monograph for that setting.

What are you next plans? A full fledged version of the world presented in the BRP adventures book? I'd like to see that.

Check out this site for one implementation of shapeshifting. Basically, it's 1PP for a 10% chance to successfully shapeshift.

Wow... thanks for the advice everyone. I'll give some of those options a try (the only app mentioned I don't have access to is InDesign). Heck, I'll even give excel another shot. :happy:

Hopefully I'll have quality results in the next week or two!

So, I want to design a custom character sheet for the setting I'm working on, but need some advice on what app to use.

I started with excel, and that resulted in nothing less than total, abject failure.

It doesn't need to be editable in electronic format. I'd be perfectly happy with something that people can print out, write on, and enjoy (that doesn't look like total crap -- see reference to excel above )

As we've had a recent spam-wave, there's been added a security question at the registration:

What is the three letter acronym for Basic Role Playing?

It should stop spambots pretty well, but is it too difficult for those who have no experience with BRP before?

SGL.

Well, you've capitalized the first letter of each word and explicitly asked for an acronym. Hopefully they'll pick up on that.

Pretty sure they haven't used all the art before. :cool:

SGL.

That's right. They did have an art contest to go along with this one. Cool.:thumb:

Some proof reading would be nice, BRP adventures is particularly bad.

While I'm not going to dispute that better proof reading would be nice, monographs are definitely a case of buyer beware:

MONOGRAPHS ARE LONGER WORKS by one or more authors on a subject of import to Chaosium roleplayers. On these products the author has also fulfilled the functions of editor and layout artist; we at Chaosium have done little in the way of editorial. We found these works compelling and thought that you would enjoy them. Through the publication of monographs we can offer our most loyal fans more information, and evaluate the potential of these works for eventual release to the wholesale market. More importantly, they’re a lot of fun.

That above quote is as equally important to someone submitting a monograph as someone preparing to buy it. One of the key things a monograph author, or really any author, can do is give the work to somebody else to proofread before submitting it. You can't even count on a professional editor to catch all the errors, so the more eyes you have looking at the text, the better off you'll be.