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Don't forget the GM's book, Methods of Madness. Just be careful though that you don't get sucked into buying a Condo of Madness timeshare.

1) Put into a table so you can give the player/GM one final % number 2) Skill should probably be worth more than luck. So a successful Navigate should probably be worth more than a successful Luck roll. 3) Factor in something for prevailing winds and currents. From what I recall the easy way to cross the ocean is to sail north or south until you catch one of these and then ride it out to a fairly predicable destination. At least if the sailors know about them. But overall I get what your trying for. My concern was mostly with the probabilities and die mechanics. A somewhat different take would be to limit the error to each day/week/or months sailing. Then one failure wont hurt as much. SO if you were handling it per day, and a ship could travel, say 100 miles in a day, then the worse result (double fumble) would only be a 100 mile error, and not 4000 miles! I was thinking of Bart Roberts ability to land near just about wherever he wanted to as far as the accuracy goes, hence the Luck roll. . Of course that was latter and with better equipment, but even so, he once ended up only 2 miles from where he was aiming at.

Sure, but with the quartering of skill and multiple rolls you end up making the skill worthless. I'd suggest, halving skill when out of site of land. Just once. Then add in a luck roll and the results of both rolls determine how far off course they are. If the player critical both then, surprise they are pretty close to where they wanted to be (say within 1% of the distance) go from there. Say within 5% for success, 25% for a failure and 50% for a fumble. SO double fumble means anywhere with 100% of the travel distance!

The problem with that, is that you don't get ships with 22 seaworthiness until later. Columbus' Nao's didn't have it, and Erickson's Longships certainly didn't. What are you trying to accomplish here? Let's go over what you are accomplishing in terms of game mechanics and tell me if it's what you are trying to do: Assume you have a navigator at 100% skill. He's out of sight of land so his navigation skill get's halved, twice. So now he's down to 25%. If it takes him at least two weeks to get to where he's going he would need to make two rolls, so he'd have a 6.25% chance of success. This is probably your best case scenario. Most people will be much lower, and or the trips will be longer. It would be much simpler, and nicer just to make one roll per trip at 5%. Is that what you wanted?

Interesting statement.Which cult? Orlanth? Group consensuses?

Speed, and Performance are derived from those stats. You don't have a airplane or a flying mech traving at supersonic speeds without the power to do so. Armor effectivness has a lot ot do with thickness. Accleration and top speed actually translate into game terms. If somebody knows something about the math they can figure out a lot about mecha that list real world data. Sure, a wheeled mech is in a tug of war with another mech. Horsepower/KIloWatts are POW, not STR. Likewise with a tank. So having a way to use POW or at least to covert POW to STR in some fashion (STR=2/3 POW is probably the simplest real world rule of thumb that almost works. Probably works better with a +24 after it). Compare how effective the GU-11 55mm round is in Macross to how any 55mm round is against any modern tank or anime tank. Outside of Macross 55mm is a too weak forfrontal armor. That's cool. As long as it's still in the works. Timing could just about be right for when when my Pendragon campaign ends, too. For the most part, you don't need POW points. You just need what mecha can do and how many times before it runs out f ammo, needs a new barrel, overheats, or needs to refuel.

There are humans here? Ewww. Larry, we have our share of arguments, debates, flame wars and death threats, - and that's just on Tuesdays! But most of the disagreements are on somewhat esoteric stuff, and differences between editions, and usually between people who have plane some incarnation of this game or other for decades. We behave better with new players.

Yeah, the advice here is pretty good. Start small, go at your own pace, and play as humans from the same area/culture so everyone had common goals. Have then get into some sort of fight with either throwaway character s(per g33K) or some sort of healing (like the right of passage fight in from of a healing in the old Apple Lane adventure) sp that the players can learn about combat without really suffering for it. You will probably have to remind people more than once that armor absorbs damage. MOst long term D&Ders tend to forget that at first. Run a lot of minor skill rolls in your first adventure, to give the players a feel for the skill system, degrees of success and all that. The idea is to get them familiar and comfortable enough with the way things work so they can start to make judgment calls about their abilities and know what skills they can rely on. You can tone down the number of rolls as you go along, and they pick things up.

Becuase how give machines perfomr in battle is often best repsented by those values, and putting them on the same scale helps to do that. Because it can simplfy bookkeeping and mecha might be in situation where they do pit POW against POW or even STR or SIZ. It depends on how you go with it. And a POW stat threshold allows for that without having to go into tracking POW points. Think of it like getting rid of fatigue in RQ3. YOu don't have to worry about small POW expenditures interferring with the big guns, just the reverse. Which then could be handled more elegantly without POW point then,. Just make it single (later double) use. Which again gos to show why POW points are needed for most designs. Just give the weapons a clip with anumber of shots. Or, hollywood clips in some anime. Okay, I will comment on it. For starters how faithful BRP Mocha is at reproudcing a given series, depends on the anime. Some weapons, often the same weapon, can be more effective against a given armor one series than in another. That's just the effect of multiple people doing anime series and having multiple takes on things. One of BPR Mecha's strengths though it that a GM can easily fine tune or shift the damages up or down a little to better reflect a given series. That makes it very adaptable and customizable. So if A GM thinks a weapon is underpowered ot too powerful in BRP they can adjust the damage die pretty easily enough. BRP Mecha is a good game. One of the better anime RPGs too. Coomperable to later versions of Mekton, but with BRP's treasure trove og addtions and options to back it up. I think it's biggest "fault" such as is, is that, well, gone. Is Revolution Mecha still in the pipeline?

The granularity problem is not due to linear scaling, but simply how big the increments are. It you use smaller increments you get more granularity, but possibly at the loss of playability, and even of realism. A weapon with ten times the energy isn't necessarily ten times as effective, not is a 105 kW engine much more powerful than a 102kW engine. I just put energy (POW), thrust (STR) and other things on the "doubles every 8 points" scale that SIZ uses. It keeps things constient and makes it easier to put everything on the same scale. As far as a Heat track goes, well it's very Battledroids/Mechwarrior, but has even one mecha anime series ever made heat dissipation a major limitation on what the mecha could do? Personally, I think that for the most part POW isn't a problem and most machines are designed with enough POW to handle their normal needs. That's how the egnineers do it in real life. Those shows that do put a POW limit typically give the machines a limited fuel/battery supply or a time limit (like the 60 seconds limit once the umbilical cable is cut in Evagellion), or have a weapon so powerful that it can't be used with most other systems (the main weapons in Yamato and Macross). So I don't think we really need to track POW points or Heat Points to make the mecha from most shows playable.

I did something similar It could with a few tweaks. {art of the problem is the linear scale for some of the stats. It's great for ease of conversion, but restricts the playable range. I've experimented with using a doubling progression for the stats, like how BRP./RQ/Superworld does for SIZ and it opens thing up a bit. I've also played around with ditching POW point pools and instead giving the mecha generators that can spend up to a certain amount of POW per turn.

Yes, mostly except for: 1)In real life people react to being damaged. In most RPGs they just mark down the points are carry on, unless the damage is enough to hinder hem in some way. In real life a 1 point punch could stun someone, cause them to fall down, or even give up. 2) In ral life people heal constantly, not weekly. So a punch that does "damage", but not a lot of damage (less than a point in game terms) mightheal up in a few days or even a few hours. Not necessarily. For example the old James Bond RPG had it so that most punches and kicks didn't do enough damage to inflcit woulds but instead caused Stun results that forced a roll to avoid being stunned for a bit. Serious wounds had a Pain resistance roll that was similar. In RQ, you could easy modify fight fights to require something similar. Any head hits could be treated as Knockout attempts pitting damage against head HP. Not all the complex. I'd probably rule that fists roll 1D10+10 for hit location too. The only time some get's punched in the foot is when he is trying to kick somebody. Yeah. Mostly ture. Yes, both in the sense that there is no reason to avoid it, and that it doesn't impair the character in any way. It's why I never liked "Rumble at the Tin Inn" adventure. I though it just doesn't work. Instead of a barroom brawl you have multiple homicides. There are a few RPGs that address it, but a lot of players don't like dealing with wound penalties. Realistically it's a aggregate effect. Eventually the pain and disorientation become so great that the person can't fight effectively for a few seconds (or longer) and that's when their opponent takes advantage of of the situation and really lays them out. I think oder RPGs, such as RQ suffer the most at this sort of thing because they came out before the idea of fight fights and similar situations had caught on. Back then PCs wanted to to kill whatever they were fighting, so treating fists and kicks as lower damage weapons worked just fine.

I think you're the first. I have one friend who loves the Corum book, but then he never got into Stormbringer, so I'm not sure how much of his fondness is due to Stormbringer rules, and how much is due to the Corum books, or to the Corum RPG.

Yeah, Mymidorn conjures up images of hoplites, ants, and the Trojan War. Before Iron conjures up images of vitamin supplements.

Yeah, it looks fantastic. It really has a nice scholastic reference book quality to it that is rarely seen in an RPG related product.

And he is right, in a way. The thing is KAP once your scores hit 30 or so it become problematic. With height bonuses, inspiration etc, you can get into autocrit territory. The the GM's only option of giving you trouble is to in battle is to do the same thing you're doing, which greatly escalates the PK casualty rate. The game really wans't built for PKs to be in that range all the time. Some sort of scale down is probably needed. Or just sit back and wait as those traits and passions eventually drag the PK into a bad situation anyway. But even then, it's going to take a considerable amount of effort and resources to really hinder such a PC. I'm, starting to think that the biggest deterrent to high scores is the benefits of high scores. Last night, in the third week of my new campaign the PKs got into a battle and put the guy in charge who had been the guy with Sword 35 in the past. They almost got them killed. In one instance he had the choice of several opponents in the battle and he went for the biggest and toughest, and the group got banged up pretty good. Later on, the went for glory and did an "Attack vs. Two" when they had no reason to, and then spent the next couple of rounds fighting to get out of dodge. This was against a pathetically wimpy peasant army. What the Player is starting to figure out is that opponents that seemed easy when you have Sword 35, aren't such pushovers when you have Sword 15. In the last campaign that Player was puzzled about the phenomenally high casualty rates he was having with followers, but last night he got to see what it felt like to be an average knight instead of a master swordsman.

Plus to e social conseuqnces. Nortnally a bar fight isn't considered the same a tryintg to kill sombody. But here, it is the same, just with less effective weaponry. Yeah, hitting someone with your hand isn't all that good for your hand. Not all that great for what the hand hits either.

Which is patently silly. In the real world most punches don't do much damage, and few people end up with broken arms from blocking a punch. Just image how a boxing match would play out in BRP. I really think that that if it is going to be a brawl, then some sort of non-lethal rule should be used. Otherwise draw swords and get it over with quicker. In RQ swords and fists are both doing lethal damage and are lethal weapons.

It does strain credulity a bit though. In game terms, two punches to an unprotected head are more lethal than a whack with a mace! When it comes to fist fights, RQ's (SCA) roots are showing.

The difficulty is that RQ doesn't have any sort of non-lethal combat. So one punch to the head from an average guy usually leaves their opponent incapacitated or dead. What you might want to do is just use use hit points as a measure of what it takes to knock someone out. Maybe give everyone a point of free armor to reflect the fact that clothing can take some of the force out of a punch or kick. If someone wants to escalate things to lethal combat (say by drawing a knife) then switch to normal RQ combat. That way you can run a bar fight without having to deal with a body count.

Well since BoU refers to GPC second edition I think it was something Greg was thinking about too. I suspect he wanted to get Sires, Castles and Magicans out so he could keep everything consistent, get all the names right and so on.

That's what the Sidnell points out. Hi stoically calvary as effective as shock troops long before the introduction of the stirrup and raised saddle, so there must have been something to it.

I've run into the same. The prevailing theory used to be that no stirrups and raised saddle = no couched lances, but some recent reenactment (Warhorse: Calvary in Ancient Warfare, by Phil Sidnell), on the effectiveness of some historical calvary appears to disprove this. From what I've read it appears the spear was used more cross body, which would reduce the impact force on the rider, and spread it out more evenly across his body. It would also reduce the impact force on the target, but for him it was still concentrated in a small area.

You'll love this: a horse's height is measured at the withers. What the @#$% are the withers? It's a ridge between the shoulder blades. Why measure from there? Apparently because the horse will raise and lower it's head, but it's shoulders remain at a constant height.

Good point. My bad, I mean't 3D6+18 (28.5) not 3D6+12. However in RQ3 a SIZ 22.5 horse would only weight around 330 pounds ans probably wouldn't be of much use as a mount to anybody who weighed over 110 pounds.