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Yeah -- Weed entered into R&R when I lived in Alabama. People who have not experienced kudzu often have trouble "getting it" but if you have been there, you know exactly what a weed patch would be like. I will PM you about the PDF.

Hello draven and Welcome to R&R. Regarding Farm and the lack of mechanics – it’s true; I didn’t put in any mechanics. The thought process went something like this; I had run Aftermath for decades and it is a game that has at least two farming skills and some mechanics for each, but I could not recall ever asking anyone to make a Basic Farming roll. It just never came up in play. BUT, farming skill is a quintessential near-future post-apocalyptic skill. The farm boy goes out into the big ugly world, or the small community is lacking the farming skill it needs, or the like – I had to include the skill. If your play style is such that you are actually making farming rolls, I think there is enough description to help the GM wing the mechanics. I could imagine running a game in the “Pendragon style” where each adventure is separated by a boring year of tending to the small homestead on the edge of a ruined city or the like, and this time is handled with a few die rolls. In such a case, it would be easy to improvise. Regarding the missing Avalon text; the bottom third of page 11 should be all about Avalon. If the text is missing, then you have a bad PDF. If it is there, and you just didn’t recognize that the section was meant to be an aside about a pair of related groups then that is just bad layout on my part. If I were better at page layout when I put the book together, that would have been a side bar or a text box, but it was my first stab at laying out a full book. I looked at it again this morning, and I would have done that differently. Regarding more R&R stuff. I have about a quarter of a full length adventure put together – it is called Rubble Lane and is a tribute to a certain classic Runequest adventure. The play-testers seemed to enjoy it – but unfortunately that project has been stalled by Real Life ™. On the other hand, I have 90% of a short R&R adventure completed that I am hoping to finish for the Science Fiction adventure contest (which ends this week – so I need to get on it). Glad to hear you like R&R – let me know if you run it.

For the record, R&R started life in the 1980's as a series of Aftermath games... BDG was certainly on my mind when I developed the Risk system (as was e-values from Morrow Project). The all or none property of ballistic armor comes from gel studies. I'll see if I can find an original source -- the idea is to use a fixed round and energy and then fire it into increasing thickness of Kevlar, while measuring penitration depth. The response is sigmodial with a very step rise from near-zero to near-final penitration. I modelled this as square response...

Sorry for my tardy reply. For number 1, if Risk of attack is greater than Risk "protected by armor" then attack risk is droped by one. I hit you with Risk 11 weapon, and you have Risk 10 or less of protection then you take damage from a Risk 11-1 attack. (Of course other modifiers may apply.) For question number 2, I used a totally geek-aligned system (explained in the Firearms download, but not in the R&R monograph). What I did was to use a non-linear regression on "typical" muzzle energy versus the average damage listed in the Big BRP book. I then used that relationship to calculate Risk for other rounds (with a few asides listed in the download document -- particularly I am giving each calibur a "typical" energy and then individual firearms can raise or lower the Risk of the calibur -- it is just a gaming expedient). For the record, in play the system goes very quickly and give a first-blush approximation of modern firearms damage. The reason I used the muzzle energy instead of other metrics is because I can get those values easily from gun magizines and the Shooter's Bible. This gives me a system that will accept a large number of modern firearms without a lot of work.

The risk system from Rubble and Ruin is, as said above, basically the same idea as penetration. AND... you can download the system for free in the download section: Modern_Firearms - Downloads - Basic Roleplaying Central. With firearms, in our "real" world armor is generally all or none -- not additive as represented with the Armor Point concept. Risk is my answer to this issue.

I like the new banner!

Dustin says top people are working on this!

I have e-mailed Dustin about this.

Here is Megarat from R&R: Megarats Three foot long megarats live in small colonies within the rubble. Individually they are not too dangerous, but they are often encountered in large ravenous hoards. They are primarily nocturnal, and return to their communal nest during the day. These nests usually house 2-20 adult rats and are always located in dark underground places. A prospector can frequently identify a nest by its strong and unpleasant odor. Megarats will chew on anything and the prospecting near their nest sites is often diminished due to the chewing of these giant rodents. Characteristic Roll Average STR 1D6+1 4-5 CON 3D6 10-11 SIZ 2D3 4 INT 5 5 POW 2D6+1 8 DEX 2D6+6 13 APP 1D6 3-4 HP: 7-8 Move: 12 DB: -1D6 Attacks: Bite 40%, 1D6+1/2DB (Bleed). Skills: Hide 40%, Dodge 40%, Listen 75%, Stealth 50. Powers: Dark Vision, Super Smell. Armor: 1 point fur.

Can I play? Rubble and Ruin has (by my count) 13 sets of human attributes: Str: 10.46153846 Con: 11.53846154 Siz: 10.53846154 Dex: 13.61538462 Int: 13.07692308 Pow: 10.46153846 App: 11 Not bad... Dex is high, but there is some "self-selection" there, NPCs that are not somewhat above average will be less likely to bother the PCs and will then not need to be stat'ed.

It is a good week for Engadget and R&R... I saw this today: boeing-and-bae-partner-to-put-a-laser-on-a-machine-gun-make-the.

In this morning stroll through Engadget I came across two stories that related to the science of Rubble and Ruin. When I wrote R&R I was trying to take modern science as seen from my perspective as a professional scientist and project to a near future where everything was cranked up to 11. For AI brains being used to “man” automated weapons systems I give you http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/13/darpas-msee-to-develop-new-mathematical-language-race-of-senti/. Of more interest to me, R&R has a “fantasy” element of nano-psionics. This was intended to represent some new discoveries coming out of the Second Global War that could not be predicted from our current vantage point – the idea being something like asking someone in 1910 to predict the atomic bomb. There were probably people thinking in terms of both big bombs and unlocking the power of the atoms, but I don’t think anyone had a clear idea of how it would be done. Likewise I don’t believe anything like nano-psionics will appear in our future, but I do believe there will be things we have yet to think of. Still, it was interesting to see that people are using tattoos of subdermal nano-particles to create biomonitors. See this link: http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/21/fluorescent-nanosensor-tattoo-monitors-glucose-under-the-iphone/

Yes, Page 109 has "Buying Psionics" under Miscellaneous services, and Page 112 has a section on buying nanites. I just treat them the same as the other bioengineered races. (So, yes I do use the Age-20 rule for them.) I let one of the current player have a 35+ year old rat with cyberware, and have had no problems.

Do let me know if I can help in any way -- and let us know how it goes!

This is a great project!!!!! (IMHO)

Dummm, deee dumm dum... T minus 3 hours.

Rubble and Ruin also has a section about hot days requiring extra stamina rolls. The ruins are unpleasant that way!

I love complex game mechanics -- but I know that love is not universally held -- so what I was trying to do with the Risk/Fire Arms system is to create an alternative to "ablative hit points" that creates dramatic tension, doesn't break the "suspension of disbelief" of people with some familiarity with fire arms, and is fast and fun to play. To me the original RuneQuest (1) rules were designed to simulate SCA fighting -- there was a huge overlap in those two communities in the late 1970's (myself included). What I wanted with the fire arms system is something like the original RQ combat (that is, fast and easy to play, and gives a "first order" approximation of reality) but not centered on SCA-style melee combat, but rather small fire fights. Someone on RPG.net once complained about my system reduces risk for darkness -- but I would argue this makes perfect sense in light of the above. If you think about the "accepted" two step process for modeling injury in RPGs you first determine if your attack caused any injury (the roll to hit and possibly defensive rolls) and then a roll for damage. This is just a model! It is not set in stone. Morrow Project realized that most modern fire arms deliver a very consistent amount of force, so in that system a fire arm did a fixed amount of damage, and the hit location roll was a surrogate for the damage roll. In my system, you use standard BRP rules for determining if there is a hit, and then the "risk" is a (hopefully easy to compute) intermediate before the damage roll -- the risk gets modified up or down depending on the conditions of the firefight (for example skilled shooters get a small increase, and novices a small decrease) -- and then a damage roll is made.

Also, I used this system for Rubble and Ruin.

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I’ll see what I can add, but first some caveats. The system in Rubble and Ruin is (with a few minor variations) the same as what I have available in the download section. Also, my goal was not to create the world’s most realistic fire arms system, but rather to create a framework in which a reasonably realistic RPG could be run – while keeping things simple and fast. Basically I wanted to address some deficiencies like 1) incremental armor (armor absorbs a portion of the damage), 2) the lack of variation in lethality (people survive being hit by high powered rifles all the time – they just don’t survive being hit well), and 3) I wanted to be able to take modern fire arms and “spec them out” to game stats, and I wanted the game stats to be meaningfully different. I will address each of these points in turn. 1) For armor, I used the ATF guidelines for which rounds that can be stopped by a given armor level, then I put a small “wiggle” factor on, and said that was how much risk was reduced. But anything over the stopped risk was basically unaffected (-1 Risk which yields approximately -1 HP damage, but see below). 2) The lack of variation in damage was addressed with the risk system. The problem is that 4D6 to the chest is invariably fetal unless you use an unrealistic “incremental” armor model. (4D6 averages 14 HP damage with only ~3% of the possible rolls being less than 8 – fetal for most people). Ideally, I would have liked the damage of a round to be uniformly distributed from 1 to Risk (Risk 6 => 1 to 6, or 1D6; Risk 12 => 1D12 etc). But I moved away from that for simplicity – the current system only uses easy to roll combinations (e.g. 1D10+1 for Risk 11, not 1D11). Remember that I use this with damage by hit location. So, without ballistic armor, 1D10+1 to the chest has a good chance of dropping someone in one shot – but there is still a 10% chance they will walk away with just a scratch! 3) Within the community of fire arms users there are differing opinions on the efficacy of variables such as round speed versus bullet diameter. My experience is limited primarily to my reading and spending a few years hanging with a fire arms examiner for the Illinois State Police (who every day saw different people who had been shot to death). I adopted his opinions (to the best of my limited ability) in the rules I presented, but I tried to create a system that others could easily modify to match their own opinions. For example, the risk values associated with different rounds can easily be changed – I even post the document in a word processor file (not a PDF) so you can edit it to match your own views. I need to run now, but I will follow this thread and respond if anyone cares to ask questions. (Also, constructive comments are always welcome.)

FYI I have the modern firearms system that I used in Rubble and Ruin available in the download sections. There are Modern and WWII. Many people tell me they like these rules.

Cool! Looking forward to this!

Remember the good old days™ when you would get together with your buddies and game for eight to twelve hours a couple of times a week? Back then the BRP experience system worked great; you would get a bunch of checks and some of them would improve each adventure. Over the course of a few real months characters would be getting better at the skills they used often, and not so much for the rarely used ones. But now days, for a lot of us, family, work, and Real Life™ get in the way, we might be lucky to get three to four hours of game time a week. But, we would still like a character to improve in commonly used skills faster than rarely used ones, and faster if the character has a low percentage, slower for higher skill levels. And, we would like to see noticeable improvement in the characters over the course of a few months of play. To this end, the group I game with has been testing the following system for the last few weeks. Characters accumulate check in skills as usual, but when it is time for skills to improve, there is no roll to see if the skill goes up, instead all skills with checks improve, but the amount is determined by the skills current percent chance of success. If the current skill level is: 1-30%, the skill improves by 1D8, 31-60%, the skill improves by 1D6, 61-90%, the skill improves by 1D4, 91% + , the skill improves by 1 Thus, after ten game sessions a PC who started with 90% in his or her main weapon will have likely improved to 100%, while a skill that is used (successfully) every other game and started at 25% will be around 46% or 47%. This gives noticeable improvement over the course of a ten week story arc, but not earth-shattering skill gains.

I use Google image search from time to time -- sometimes I find great things, others not. Oh, and use the word "floorplans" in the search.