rleduc

I got my copies yesterday. I haven't read it yet, but it looks like everyone did a great job!

I'll PM you as I get close. Thanks!

Thalaba, Thanks for the review. It has become clear to me since the publication that you are absolutely correct with regards certain of the mechanics sections being unclear. I have tried to clarify things on this thread as best I can -- and if there were ever a reprint I would certainly want to work on those areas. (I wonder if Dustin would let us resubmit an improved manuscript as version 1.1?) I again want to thank Puck for the cool art work. I think it added a lot to the final manuscript. Lastly, I am currently play testing a full length R&R adventure (we had a great session last night –- or at least, I enjoyed it). I have not approached Dustin with the idea yet, but once it is complete I want to submit it as a second R&R monograph –- we’ll have to see if they take it.

For the benefit of others who might read this, Spikemo is a somewhat recurrent example character. He shows up whenever I want to explain something with a concrete example but don’t need to make a big deal of the specific characters. I pronounce the name “spike” “mo”, as in “want me to spike you mo?”

I sent him a copy when I was writing it -- I need some material from the second book (which we are all waiting for Rod).

Yeah! My Classic Fantasy adventure was accepted. Good luck to everyone else!

I think the system seems a little complex at first brush because of the number of different types of points -- but once you get it, it is fast and easy to play and there is a fair amount of subtlety in the characters that can be created.

Hello Redstone, Each PSI discipline has its own strength stat that is used very similarly to POW – you spend points to fuel your psionic effects, and you can keep doing things until you run out of the appropriate points. You also get POW/2 points to buy your “super powers” as normal (from the big yellow book) and these POW/2 points are what are spent in order to buy both psionic effects (“spells” if you would) and the strength points to fuel them. Now imagine you have a guy with POW=16 with the “wizard” profession. This character has POW/2 or 16/2=8 points to buy “super powers” – and since he is a wizard we are going to drop them all into nanopsionics. Let’s make this guy an ESPer. First we need some effects. Each effect is a separate skill, but before we can start to buy the skill, we need to have the power – in the game context the power comes from funky tattoos that are embedded with nanites under the characters skin – before the character can learn the skill of how to use these nanites to cause physical effects, he first must have the tattoos – and that costs “super power” points. The Wizard profession lets us count up to four of these powers as professional skills, but there are only three ESP powers – we will take them all. It costs one “super power” point to buy clairvoyance, another for clairaudience and another for sense mind. Points so far: POW=16 -> 8 “super power” points. -1 for clairvoyance, -1 for clairaudience, -1 for sense mind; So we now have 8-1-1-1=5 points remaining. But, we do not have any ESP strength to power the above effects. For each “super power” point we spend on ESP Strength we gain +5 ESP Strength, so for four of our “super power” points we will have an ESP Strength of 4x5=20 (the maximum allowed under normal circumstances). Let’s do that. So now our running total is: POW=16 -> 8 “super power” points. -1 for clairvoyance, -1 for clairaudience, -1 for sense mind, -4 for ESP Strength = 20. At this point we have 1 “super power” point left that we could spend on something else, or we could take up to 3 points in Failings and buy another PSI category. Let’s do that. Three points of Failings are taken giving us +3 “super power” points. Plus we are going to take Kinetics power of Telekinesis. Our new running total is: 8 “super power” points +3 for Failings -3 for clairvoyance, clairaudience, and sense mind, -4 for ESP Strength -1 for TK; Leaving three points. But we do not have any Kinetics Strength to power our TK, so the three remaining points are put into Kinetics Strength at +5 Strength per point or 15 Kinetics Str. So after spending all of our “super power” points the wizard has: ESP Strength = 20, Powers of: clairvoyance, clairaudience, and sense mind Kinetics Strength=15 Power of: TK Now clairvoyance, clairaudience, sense mind, and TK are each separate skills that start with a basic of 10%, but all four of them can be counted as professional skills for the wizard, so points from the professional skill point pool can be used to increase them. Let’s say we put +40% in clairvoyance skill bringing it to 50%, and +65 in TK making it 75%. The wizard would have a 50% chance on a given turn of entering a trance and projecting his vision anywhere up to 20 meters away. Each time he does this, it would temporarily cost one of the 20 ESP Strength points per minute the power is maintained – but his maximum range will stay constant at 20 meters no matter how long he keeps the power up. He might use this power to look through a wall, and see into the next room. Because of the cross power with Kinetics, he could also move things in the next room using TK. He has a 75% chance of activating a TK power – once activated the power acts as if the character were standing there with a physical strength of 15/2 or 8, and a physical dexterity of 15/4 or 4. So the effect is very clumsy, and not too strong, but it can none-the-less be useful. I hope this helps, Rich

I'm a big fan of gusto myself -- welcome back.

I wonder what ever happened to that adventure...(Anyone ever hear about the adventure contest?)

I posted this some time ago -- I use it to outline settings from a character creation standpoint. It might help, http://basicroleplaying.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=123 Rich

There are two issues; layering and Ballistic protection. In the example a character is layering two different armors -- they have some cyberware armor and over it they are wearing synthaweave. As per the page cited in BRP you can only add the protection together if one of the armors are classified as "layering" and since, in this case, one is, then the melee protection is 2 from the cyberware and 5 from the synthaweave to a total of 7. But, if someone shot this character those 7 armor points will not help them; bullets ignore normal armor. Instead the characters ballistic protection is 6 from the cyberware (ballistic AV is always the second number) plus 0 from the synthaweave to a total of 6. Now, if the character is shot with a Risk 6 or less weapon it will be fully absorbed by the armor. Ignore the attack. If the attack is 7+ Risk then all the armor does is reduce the Risk by 1: 7-1=6, 12-1=11 and so on. In effect the armor takes about one point of damage off the attack -- in most cases the Risk value is the top of a uniform distribution between 1 and the value (except that is it tweaked for easy dice rolling). Does this help? Rich

This came up on another thread, but I put it here also -- for future reference. Hello Scarecrow, Below is a reposting from the Rubble and Ruin thread under BRP Publications. I am going to double post your question to that thread, and I have added a few "design notes" to see if that helps clarify what I was trying to do in R&R. So Rich (I hear you cry) why in the world did you do this? R&R presents a mid- to high-crunch interpretation of modern firearms. It is trying to capture the feel of movies where the hero fears for his/her life whenever someone points a gun at them. Since this is a reasonable response in the real world, what I did was to try and develop a system that modeled many details of firearm combat, while at the same time keeping it simple enough that it plays quickly*. What you get if you use all the R&R mechanics is the nicely balanced damage by hit location system of “old school” Runequest for melee combat and a separate system with only modest bookkeeping overhead for firearms. I do want to add that I am not claiming this is the best way to run all games in the world and everyone should make the distinction between melee and firearms. Instead, I view game mechanics as taking the same role as cinematography -- mechanics draw the audience (in this case the players) attention to certain details of the world, while ignoring others. In a R&R story, the lethality of firearms plays a critical role in defining the “feel” of the world -- in other stories it will not be so important and other rules can be used. Does this help any? If not, please feel free to ask additional questions, and I will try my best. Thanks for your interest, Rich * At this point I should confess that my “typical” gaming group has players evenly split between PhD scientists and undergraduate engineering students (with the occasional bachelor’s level computer scientist through in for variety) -- YMMV with how quickly the system plays, but it works great in my hands. -------------- There are two issues; layering and Ballistic protection. In the example a character is layering two different armors -- they have some cyberware armor and over it they are wearing synthaweave. As per the page cited in BRP you can only add the protection together if one of the armors are classified as "layering" and since, in this case, one is, then the melee protection is 2 from the cyberware and 5 from the synthaweave to a total of 7. But, if someone shot this character those 7 armor points will not help them; bullets ignore normal armor. Instead the characters ballistic protection is 6 from the cyberware (ballistic AV is always the second number) plus 0 from the synthaweave to a total of 6. Now, if the character is shot with a Risk 6 or less weapon it will be fully absorbed by the armor. Ignore the attack. If the attack is 7+ Risk then all the armor does is reduce the Risk by 1: 7-1=6, 12-1=11 and so on. In effect the armor takes about one point of damage off the attack -- in most cases the Risk value is the top of a uniform distribution between 1 and the value (except that is it tweaked for easy dice rolling). Does this help? Rich

Hello Scarecrow, Below is a reposting from the Rubble and Ruin thread under BRP Publications. I am going to double post your question to that thread, and I have added a few "design notes" to see if that helps clarify what I was trying to do in R&R. So Rich (I hear you cry) why in the world did you do this? R&R presents a mid- to high-crunch interpretation of modern firearms. It is trying to capture the feel of movies where the hero fears for his/her life whenever someone points a gun at them. Since this is a reasonable response in the real world, what I did was to try and develop a system that modeled many details of firearm combat, while at the same time keeping it simple enough that it plays quickly*. What you get if you use all the R&R mechanics is the nicely balanced damage by hit location system of “old school” Runequest for melee combat and a separate system with only modest bookkeeping overhead for firearms. I do want to add that I am not claiming this is the best way to run all games in the world and everyone should make the distinction between melee and firearms. Instead, I view game mechanics as taking the same role as cinematography -- mechanics draw the audience (in this case the players) attention to certain details of the world, while ignoring others. In a R&R story, the lethality of firearms plays a critical role in defining the “feel” of the world -- in other stories it will not be so important and other rules can be used. Does this help any? If not, please feel free to ask additional questions, and I will try my best. Thanks for your interest, Rich * At this point I should confess that my “typical” gaming group has players evenly split between PhD scientists and undergraduate engineering students (with the occasional bachelor’s level computer scientist through in for variety) -- YMMV with how quickly the system plays, but it works great in my hands.

Hello -- I just took a position at the Great Lakes Biofuel Research Center at UW-Madison. My wife and I are really excited about the move. Madison looks to be a great place to live (and raise our 4 year old)! I'll be up there in late January, maybe we can all meet up someplace. Rich

Any BRPers in Madison WI? It looks like I will be moving there soon, and was wondering if anyone on this forum is up there. Rich

Thanks everyone for the comments regarding R&R but I feel that I am thread-jacking the thread. What I was getting at was that for me writing a monograph was a personal thing that I did because I wanted to write what I felt was a cool thing – independent of any response from the gaming community as a whole (but certainly with the folks on this forum in mind), and even though I did step onto a PA third rail – it was still worth it. Not only would I do it again – but I am starting to outline my next idea. (But it is nice to hear people say they enjoyed the work )

Since the days when “old school” was simply “the school” I had been running post apocalyptic games that were a restaging of what has become “the cannon fantasy” setting. To me it was an obvious and fun thing to do, but none of the PA games that I could get ever had that as their focus – sure I could beat mechanics into allowing the game I wanted, but never out of the box. So then I got the crazy idea to write a monograph which would, I imagined, be shared amongst the friendly people here at BRPCentral – and a few friends and the occasional outsider who stumbled upon it. Well before I know it, R&R is being compared on RPGNet with all the current high profile PA games and getting trashed – I felt that in general the wider audience was buying it hoping for “Aftermath – the BRP version” and then being disappointed. In retrospect I should have spelled out exactly what I was trying to do -- the title was too subtle (come on people Rubble and Ruin – dang doesn’t that sound a lot like certain other old school games). Still, I am glad I wrote it – I am sorry that there is a swath of people who bought it expecting something else, and should I find time to write another monograph I will (though I will try to be more explicit with my back text).

Charlie grabbed that phrase from the first paragraph and made it the tag line for the book.

But at least it does have an index...

Happy to answer. It was my first try at putting together a complete book and I did not get the organization perfect. Yes. It gives a little protection against bullets.

Thanks! There is so much variation in post-apocalyptic literature and (IMHO) so little in PA gaming – I was trying to do something new. I have always imagined the chud taking steel belted tires and painstakingly crafting the rubber-steel mesh into some form of flexible melee armor. The main idea is that these guys are spending hundreds of hours lurking in their holes doing nothing but trying to perfect the craft of converting common material from the ruin into body armor. Alternatively, you could have them manufacturing the best slashing weapons, or some other useful item that takes some skill and a lot of time. R&R uses three kinds of armor; layering, non-layering and ballistic. Layering and non-layering refer to BRP p.261 and the special rule of layering armor. Basically (as I read it) you can have one layer of soft (or layering) armor and one of non-layering. As an aside, I have always allowed two layering armors if anyone wanted to that. Ballistic armor comes from R&R p.47. Basically melee armor provides negligible protection against modern firearms – true fact, try it someday – instead to stop bullets you need ballistic armor. Ballistic armor has the property that it either effectively stops a bullet, or it provides almost no protection. That is Type I ballistic armor will stop a .22 round but provides almost no reduction in penetration to a rifle bullet (this is measured using a ballistic gel and measuring how deep a given round will penetrate – then you put the armor over the gel and fire again). To simulate this in R&R ballistic armor will either remove all of the risk of a bullet or failing that, it will only reduce the risk by one point. So you are exactly correct. The “layering” property of cybernetic armor implies that cyber armor of 2/6 under, say, synthaweave (5/0 AV) will protect for 7 (2+5) points of melee damage and 6 (6+0) ballistic. Correct!

I use to use that system myself until one game where half the party was busy fighting the Saucer King of Ming-12 while the rest of the group was organizing petit fours for a meeting with the Queen – when one player wanted to use his “Make Sandwiches with soft cheese and cucumber slices” skill, but another pointed out that these were not actually petit fours, and then the Saucer King pointed the brie. Anyway, harsh words were spoken and it was decided that slightly more detail was needed for our group. It serves me well.

When I start a BRP campaign, one of the first things I decide is if I will have an open or closed skill list. In games with a closed list I write out all the skills that I will ever call for – if it is not on the list, the players can be assured that their characters will never be asked to roll it. In these types of games I usually include some “umbrella” skills with names like “science” – I will never ask for a “physics” roll or a “bioinformatics” roll – the players are guaranteed that I will only ask for “science” rolls. In games with open skill systems I allow the players to define the skills they need – for example, someone might take Science: Bioinformatics 50%, while someone else might take Science: Computer Science 50%. Closed skill lists are fast and easy for players – but they are also restrictive. I ran a zombie apocalypse game once with a closed list and it went very well. Having a closed list forced the players into simpler roles – we ended up with “scientists” and “tough guys” and “sneaky people” etc. This worked great for an open game played primarily at a university gaming club were players came in and out all the time – and there was a fairly high mortality rate. On the other hand, when I run more character driven games I do better with open skill systems that allow the players to describe their character with their choice in skills. To continue beating the science examples to death, if I want to play a scientist in an open skills game I would first pick his/her field – NMR protein structure determination, and then figure what skills would I need; maybe Science: Physics, Science: Bioinformatics and Science: Chemistry. By the time I do this I have a lot of my skill points stuck in obscure skills that might never come up in play, but I have a very accurate description of the PC’s abilities. In summary – in my hands the skill list is an important tool for setting the tone of the game. Whether you have large open lists or small closed lists depends on the “cinematic” feel you are trying for in a particular campaign.

Pardon the double posting but... It is done! The PDF is on-line!