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Oh, sorry. I was referring to the OP's proposal and disputing the claims that the chances of crits and specials were the same as in the RAW, and what the possible permutations of that rule would be in play. I'll have to go read your earlier post to see how your idea works mechanically.

Sorry, I couldn't think of a better example off the top of my head. Yup, that's part of it. When you spend more time generating the character than you do playing the character, you wonder "What's the point?". A second reason though is that the extra abilities gained won't matter much in play. Higher skills often don't matter all that much compared o ther BRP games. It's like with the excellent Investigator Weapons supplements. When you are facing any of the Big Mythos Nasties ©, It doesn't matter if you are toting a .25 Beretta pocket pistol or a .50 Browning heavy machinegun. Either way you are outclassed. IMO, Such supplements become much more useful and appreciated outside of CoC. But that's probably why you don't hear much about the supplement.

It's a bit more BRP adjacent but FASA's Star Trek game had such a lifepath system (probably the second one after Traveller). During chargen you would get some early life skills followed by branch skills corresponding to the characters duties (helm, communications, engineering, sciences, etc.). After that they would go though one or more tours of duty, each of which gave them a few more skill points. They had similar rules for generating non-starfleet PCs, and game was percentage based too. Other than the differences in skills (you need to add in a lot of new Skills like Starship Engineering and Communcations), it is pretty much swipable for BRP.

Probably because a more in depth and detailed chargen for CoC is like adding a more colorful and detailed paint scheme for a MXY-7 Ohka.

The OP was crtits on odd doubles,

Why could it restore the first 4 and not the second? I mean he didn't have the arm for them either. Also, if the PC took 8 points od damage, then But it's not general damage, is an obious injury to a specic location. There is a bloody bit of shoulder or pelvis right there to target with a healing spell. Imagine if a PC had his and chopped off. By the rules that would be the same situation as you are describing. The character would be perfectly alright right down to the spot where thier arm ends. The bloody stump of their forearm could certainly be cauterized, bandaged and such, so why couldn't it be targeted with a heal spell. Plus remember a location at 0 HP isn't destroyed, just disabled. About the only way your player's argument makes sense to me if if he is talking about bloodloss. BTW, I don't think there is any healing that restores general hit point specially, because that is not how RQ/BRP has ever treated injury, or healing spells. I think it is something very important, and something that will need to sort out for you game before you end up in some oddball situation where one or morea PCs die because the other PCs were not allowed to heal them due to this rule. Yeah ruleset here is critical. While the various battle/sprirt magic spells between BRP games are similar there are some differences between them that chance how this works out and what spells are required. No necessarily. If there is healing magic that can reattach the limb (Healing 6 in RQ2, and possibly and Healing spell in RQ3 depending on what page you are looking at) then the maximum would still be the same. And even if the limb can't be reattached then you have to ask where are the other 4 point of damage located that need to be healed. It's definitely not general body damage, but a bloody stump at the shoulder or pelvis, and I can't see why such an oviparous injury couldn't be targeted with a spell.

The problem is that by the new method the numbers do not overlap but increase independently of each other, leading to a lot more specials, making implaing weapons more powerful. For example, someone at 90% would then have a 5% (01,11,33,55,77) of a crtical, plus a 18% (05,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55,60,65,70,75,80,80,90) chance of a special, which is a 5% higher special chance than normal. Except it might alter the game in other ways that you didn't intend or desire, such as increasing the effectiveness of impaling weapons. Do the math, it's not worth it. If someone had a 100% skill and halved thier skill to double thier crit and special chance they would pretty much be right back where they started, but with a lower success chance. For example: 100% skill RAW, Crit: 5%, Special: 20% (with 01-05 being crticals) Alternate, Crit: 6%(01,11,33,55,77,99), Special: 20% Halved 50% RAW, Crit: 03% doubled to 6%, Special: 10% doubled to 20% Altenrnate: Crit 3%(01,11,33) doubled to 6%, Special: 10% doubled to 20% So basically a zero sum game. No it doesn't. Since crit and special chances are a pecenratage of the success chance that any change to the success chance will affect them proportionally. It's like it I gave you a choice between having 50% of $20 or 100% of $10.

First off it's been mentioned before. The Fives and 10s rule is used in HARN. Not to say that either of these ideas are bad per say. So Odds Above, so Odds Below I believe this alters the critical/fumble chances slightly in some cases, and the specials chances significantly . Example #1: Someone with a 33% skill would have a 2% chance (01,02) of a critical by RAW, but a 3% chance by the doubles method (01,11,33). Examples #2: Someone with a 5% skill would have a 0% chance of a special by RAW, as their only possible special roll, 01, is not only a special success but also a critical success. Buy using the alternate method the character could get a critical with a 01, AND a special with a 05. At 50% by RAW it would be Critical: 3% (01-03), Special: 7%(04-10) but with the alternate method it would be Critical: 3% (01,11,33), Special: 10% (05,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50). Mechanically, the biggest issue I see with this rule would be with impales and similar effects. By RAW any critical is also a special success and thus an impale, but with the alternate method criticals and specials are independent of each other (except for when you roll a 55). This will reduce the effect of critical its with impaling weapons but is somewhat offset by the increased chance of a special success. BTW, If you don't like the new percentage then you can get something closer to RAW by replacing doubles with even results than end in 5. That way the crits and specials will overlap again.

g33k has it right. You don't re-figure hit points for several very good reasons: First off general hit points are hit points per location are not the same. Character will have over twice as many location hit points than general hit points. So if you reduced general hit points permanently you'd inflict a disproportionate loss to general hit points and possible even a forced permanent unconsciousness or death. In fact,due to the rate at which hit points progress and the effects of rounding, if you permanently reducing hit points with limb loss would exacerbate a known bug of the game system by penalize characters with a higher CON, becuse the higher your CON the harder is is to survive the loss of two limbs. For example: let's say you have an unfortunate PC with 10 General Hit Points who looses a leg to a shark. Now the leg had 4 hit points so the severed leg resulted in 8 points of damage. If the PC lost those points permanently he'd permanently be below the unconsciousness threshold. BTW, if you add up the hit points per location then 10 General Hit Points would mean 3 HP in each arm, and 4 in the head, chest, abdomen and each leg, for a total of 26 hit points. Secondly, the body does heal, so the PC must be getting back hit points, and the body must be adapting to function without those parts. For example: THe shark victim above lost a lot of blood along with the leg, some of which his body won't replace, but it will be blood that he no longer needs due to having one less leg to circulate blood through. Thirdly, as g33K has pointed out, just because one part of the body has been damage, the other parts aren't necessarily any weaker. In fact the opposite tends to happen. If someone loses the use of their primary arm, their secondary arm tends to become more muscular, and so forth.

There was an official rule for RQ3, and it was similar to option 2, and was part of the Regrow Limb spell. The reason why I remember it was that we had a PC lose a limb and then roll 01 to see how much was severed, so I rules that he only lost a finger, and I took 1% off of his Manipulation category modifier. It's not the current BRP, but I can get the old spell description if desired. Oh, and the old rules used to make a distinction between severed (taken off in one hit) and maimed (disabled through multiple hits). The difference being that maimed limbs were still attached but non-functional. This meant that maimed and partial severed limbs skill had hit points and such. This would be unchanged from before as it should not be any easier to chop off whatever was remaining in future fights. If you get your hand chopped off your shouldler doesn't become and narrower. When a limb was compositely gone, sometimes hits to it might simply become misses with weapons passing through the space where the limb shoyuld have been (again the % roll could be used here), but that was never formalized into a rule.

Yeah, basically like hero points/character points/etc. but geared towards particular skill sets. The idea could even be expanded to use the eight Characteristic x 5% scores as the pools. The pools could get refreshed periodically (per session, or adventure) or via skill rolls (get a skill check get points back on the corresponding pool). Anyway, it's a bit late now.

SAVE tends to get extreme reactions. People either love the idea of hate it. Personally I think it's a decent way to explain how and why PCs repeatedly confront creature of the unknown, avoiding the "Kolchak problem". I think you're right. EXACT conversions aren't necessary. It's more about capturing the capabilities of the characters, especially relative to each other and to the monsters. You want things to play out about the same regardless of the game system. But exact conversions are much easier to automate with a program or spreadsheet, making it much faster and easier to get a scenario converted into a acceptable set of stats that are usable with little to no adjustment.

I don't know if that sort of thing work work well in BRP due to the lethality of the game system, where big monsters can usually one-hit drop a PC. Something that might be an epic battle in Frostgrave would probably be very anti-climatic in BRP.Either the PCs drop the big baddie in the first round, or it wipes out the PCs. Yeah, something like a BRP to D20 conversion. THere were some old RQ to AD&D conversions back in the day, but supplements that could work for either system could help to promote the game. Backin the 80s magazines such as as White Dwarf, and Different Worlds would cover games from different companies, and would sometimes print adventures with stats for more than one game system. I think that sort of thing could help to expose new players to BRP the way the magazines did in the old days. If BRP had a standardized conversion to d20 or, better yet, Pathfinder, like many other games now do, it could generate sales to the d20 market and maybe bring some of those d20 players into the fold. Especialy since WoTC seems so intent on driving away their customers.

Why do I get the feeling we are going to end up with a blank piece of paper? P.S. "Species" would probably be more accurate than "Race", unless all the sentient beings are all part of the same species, as race is a subset of a given species.

I that that would depend on the way magic worked. If like D&D where it lets you bypass most defenses then yeah, it don't make much sense. But a lower powered/higher cost magic system might not invalidate fortification. For example in Pendragon 4th edition magicians have to pay for their spells with lots of prep time, weeks of magical sleep, or multiple rolls on the aging table, so a spell that bypasses the fortifications is usually prohibitively expensive- at least at a scale large enough to be useful in battle. Oh, btw, they still built city walls and other fortifications long after the advent of cannon, they just changed the fortification to reflect the new technology. Actually taking a wall down with a cannon requires that they have a cannon, cannonballs, powder, etc. and can transport it to the site and man it long enough for it to actually take down that wall.

I depends on what you are going for. if you want something feudal then Pendragon (or Harn) is worth a look. On the other hand, if you just want to add soem fortications to your BRP game, then the download covers most of it. But it really does depend on just what you want. For instance, Pendragon (and Harn) has a farily sound ecomonic model compared to most FRPGs, which gives players a fell for how expensive some of these things are. Depending on which edition of PEndragon you pay, a knight might have an annual income of £2, £6 or £10, most of which goes to maintaining the knight, his family, and so on. So a a stone tower that cost £30 is a significant expense that ususally requires the knight to hold multiple manors or have acqyuired a lot of treasure in war or adventures. Also, it's probably worth mentioning that quite a few of us already own these games (and others) and so we have every reason to use them as references and guidelines for other games when doing what you want to do now. If we didn't have all of them already, we'd probably only use what we already have or just one source. Harn is a feudal fantasy world that goes into a lot more detail than most other medieval style RPGs. Pendragon, by contrast, focuses more on Arthurian legend, and doesn't go into the same level of detail as Harn, but it still has enough of the feudal economics in it so that player knights will feel the probllems that go with maintaining a knight and holding land. I'm not familiar with Pillars, but Pendragon does give player characters bonuses from buildings, just not for fortifications. For instance if you build a Jousting Area you get a yearly check to lance. There was a cheat sheet for all this on the Pendragon forums. Maybe I can dig it up. But Pendragon focuses on character traits and glory, with most benefits impacting one or both.

No , the link is busted, which is strange, since the pdf still pops up when I googled "Pendragon Fortifcations". Maybe I should try to upload the PDF to the downloads section of this board? Like so: https://basicroleplaying.org/files/file/884-pendragon-fortication-castle-pieces/

Lordly Domains is pretty much the same Fortification rules from the Pendragon Noble's Book combined with some hunting stuff an adventure or two and all updated for 4th edition.. There is also the Book of the Manor for Pendragon 5th edtion which is nice but requires a lot of bookkeeping and has some major flaws, as you can pretty much build infinite improvements and break the game. The Book of the Estate addresses most of that, but it is geared towards major landholders, and land rules and confrontations are only a small part of it, and it doesn't go into the same detail as the eariler books. There was supposed to be a new book of castles for KAP5,but it hasn't been released yet, and it is still DV based. Oh, and come to think of it, Greg Stafford had https://gspendragon.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/pendragon_fortifications.pdf on his website.

Hmm, I got a few answers for this, but the internet ate my original post. So I'll give it a second try: Something Innovative First and foremost what I want to see is something new and innovative. The thing about BRP-UGE is that it's all stuff we''ve seen before. Heck it's mostly the BRP-BGB under a new license. Now that was great back when the BGB came out, as it helped to reprint rules and game mechanics that had dropped out of circulation when Chaosium stopped producing RQ and Stormbringer supplements. But the UGE is pretty much stuff we've all seen before. What I love about 80s Chasoium was how innovative they were. They didn't just come out with RQ, but they adapted the RQ rules into BRP and Pendragon to cover diverse setting such as the Eternal Champion series, Lovecraftian Horror, Larry Niven's RingWorld, Superheroes, and Arthurian Britain. They did things like the Thieves' World boxed set, Questworlds to open up RQ, and Worlds of Wonder to open up BRP. You never knew what they would come out with next (especially if you read thier catalogs 😉 ) What I would love to see is a book that covers somewhere we haven't seen from Chasoium in the past, with the rules adapted again to reflect the new setting. Just what setting? I don't know. Maybe something swashbuckling, or 1950 s atomic horror, or a full of space opera type setting. Just exactly what it is isn't quite as important as the fact that it would do something that Chaosium hasn't done before. Campaign Packs I love the old boxed set campaign packs for RQ, such as Pavis, Borderlands, and Griffin Mountain. I think they really were the epitome of setting and adventure supplements for RPGs. In each pack a GM not only got a setting, fleshed out with locations, major NPCs, encounter tables, etc. They also got several adventures, as well as lots and lots of stuff that they could get ideas from for futher adventures. The packs were a much better value for the money than say a AD&D letter series of related adventures. Something along those lines, would be ideal supplements. Something Universal Yes, we all love BRP but we're the choir. But what I think BRP needs is something that could get the attention of all those gamers who are only familar with class & level RPGs. TO do that, I think there needs to be one or more supplements that work for more than just the BRP game system. Kind of like how the Thieves' World boxed set was mostly system independent and had NPC stats for multiple game systems. Now I don't know just how open the ORC liscene is and how practical is is to mix 'n match game stats these days, but something that could work for another game system as well as BRP, especially D20 with game stats for both, could really help with crossover sales and marketshare. FOr instance someone could be drawn to a particular setting or adventure, see game stats they understand and can use, so they buy it, and are intrigued by the stats for this "other" RPG, BRP and look into it. Nick brought up GURPs and it's setting books, but ICE also doid something similar with tier setting books, only their books had rules to work in Rolemester, HERO system, and sometimes even D&D. It made them very useful for people who wanted to game in any of those settings, but it also helped to cross pollenate Rolemaster and HERO system. Something Basic The BRP book is a great toolkit for experienced GMs but it's got a steeper learning curve than is needed. The thing is all those options and alternate rules are nice to have when setting up your game world, but they can be confusing for new players and GMs, and require a GM to basically learn multiple ways do doing things. A new GM has to choose between sequencing methods (DEX ranks, Strike Ranks), fixed or variable armor, general hit points or hit locations, various powers systems, etc, etc before they can do anything witht he game. We've seen several threads from GMs trying to piece all this out and the hurdles they have depending on what game mechanic these choose to mix 'n match. Now all the BRP games in the past made all those choices up front,.making all those games more accessible. Someone playing RQ didn't need to know about variable armor or summoning. Someone playing Stormbringer didn't need to know about strike ranks, rune magic or impales. Neither had to know anything about the Cthulhu Mythos, Ringworld, or King Arthur. Each game came with a set of mechanics that decided all the game mechanics ahead of time. So GMs and players only had to learn one way of doing things. What I'd like to see is a smaller book, no bigger than RQ2 or Stormbringer, that gives a basic or even semi-generic setting and set of rules, without the all the various options, that new players and GMs could start with. Something along the lines of the mechanics from Stormbringer/Magic World wouldn't be too far off the mark. Simple and easy to learn and use, but with enough to run a campaign with. 400 page books can be intimidating and off-putting to new GMs and players. There were reasons why the old Worlds of WOnder boxed set put each setting into it's own booklet instead of doing one big book. Now once a GM has his sea legs and feels comfortable with those rules they can opt to expand into the wilder world of BRP, grab new rules from the BRP-UGE and so on. But lets give them something easier to start with, like what we had. Something Free One thing that D20 type games have in abundance that BRP lacks is all the third party sutff. Especially short free (or low price) stuff. Now obviously Chaosium can't give everything away, but in the age of digital documents why can't we have something along the lines of "one-page dungeons" but for BRP. We ot a lot of GMs around here, so why could we all put together a short little adventure or setting or rule or something and then someone collect it into a PDF that could be put up on line for free. That would really help to draw in new players and GMs since it wouldn't cost them anything to downlad and read the PDF, and maybe get interested in BRP. This could be something that we could do that Chasoium wouldn't have to. Something like a semi--regular fanzine wouldn't be a bad idea.

Well Nick already mentioned Aftermath so I'll add that amny of Aftermath's hit locations were for LEft Side/Right side and were together on the hit location table. What side you got hit on was partially determined by how you were weeilding your weapons. For instance someone fight with a rapier would be in a presented stance and when hit 70% of the hits would his his weapon side (the side presented to the opponent). Conversely, someone fighting with sword and shield would be in a refused stance and only 30% of hit would hit their weapon side, with 70% hitting their shield side (and, hopefully be covered by the shield). Someone weilding two weapons would be in a frontal stance and hits would be 50/50 for either side. Characters with high skill got an aim ability allowing them to bump the hit location around the body a bit based on skill. So someone with aim4 who rolled a hit in the right shoulder (location 21) could shift the location all the way down the arm to the right hand, or over to the neck, face, skull, the left shoulder, or anywhere else on the chest or upper abdomen.heart, abdomen. The *ahem* vitals were location 12 and just out of reach in this particular case. I could scan/post the tables and body location image if you want. It is fairly easy to follow and could be adapted to BRP pretty easily, especially fi you port over the left side./right side roll. It's really only 17 different hit locations, with left/right side doubling 13 of them. As far as effects of hitting the new hit locations, I'd say for the most part you don't need to treat the new locations all that differerntly. Hand, lower arm, upper arm, and shoulder are all still an arm hit. What you might want to do is just add in a few "reaction rolls" for when specific spots get hit, such as a DEX roll to see if someone drops something for a hand hit, or a roll to keep standing if hit in a knee, or maybe a stun roll for hits to the head or "vitals". You might also want to adjust some of the rolls and threshold values for things like hits to the heart might be more leathal or lead to bleeding out a bit faster than to the lower chest. Armor would probably need to be a bit more precise though. Gantlets, Vambraces and rebraces would now cover three different hit locations. BTRC's Timelord's RPG used a 31 hit location table similar in many ways to Aftermath's. In Timelord's hitting a particular part of a location could adjust the wound's lethality, the ability to remain conscious, the rate of bloodloss/eventual death (which might be stopped with medical attention), or if a bone was broken (which slowed the healing time).

As SDLEarly already mentioned, Pendragon is really the only BRP related stuff that covers castles and fortifications in a way similar to what you are asking about. Pendragon, BTW, is not exactly BRP but a BRP realted game set in an Arthurian feudal setting. It isn't quite BRP compatible and the castle rules have changes somewhat between editions but you could pick up and adapt the rules to BRP. The Nobles Book from first edition is available on DriveThru RPG for about $5. The latter Book of the Estate is also available (for $20) but most of what in it probably wouldn't be of much use to you. In a nutshell fortifications cost money to create but provide a Defensive Value that affects battles in Pendragon, (and would need to be adapted somewhat to BRP, which as yet doesn't have a mass battle system, although the orginal rules for Pendragon are simple enough to adapt easily). Defesises are build in concetric layers with higher fortifications being able to add to lower ones in front and various bits of fortification also have other effects and benefits (for instance you need gates to get into and out of the fort) but the core idea is that they all increase DV. You could also look through the Pendragon section of this board to see what's been posted and what is there for download.

Yeah, one of the things about generic engines is that they are generic. Generic systems are nice in that they can be adapted to multiple settings and are easier to pull away from a specific setting, and players who know a generic system don't have to lean a different system, but often specific game systems are better at emulating specific settings that generic system are- at least out of the gate. They should be. Chill (at least first edition Chill) is better at emulating the stetting and style of the old Universal and Hammer films that BRP, so I prefer it to BRP or CoC for that sort of thing.

That's what Pendragon does. But then, Pendragon eschews attacks and parries and instead uses an opposed roll to determine who "wins" and does damage to the opponent, making splitting skill risky as it could lead to taking more damage. As far a BRP goes the biggest worries I'd have over slotting attacks below 100% would be with unexpected magical or situational skill boosts, or multiple attacks on the run. For instance a mounted PC with Sword 60% could do an attack on the run attacking a half dozen opponents at 5%+10% height advantage (15%) as he rode by. But then a person could do that in real life. EDIT Oh wait, what about missile weapons? Would you be okay with someone armed with a pistol (or anticipating what you might want this for, a laser pistol) firing off a half dozen shots in a round at some minimal percentage? Speaking of which, you probably want to have a minimal percentage, say 5% or even 10% for each attack to prevent someone from doing something cheap like taking an AR-15 and splitting 20% into twenty attacks at 1% each.

Let me guess, inaccurate in that they covert the relative value of money and purchasing power but fail to take into account the change in relative value of items over the years? For instance the price of silver in 1932 was 30¢/oz, and the price off eggs was 18¢/doz. so one could buy about 20 eggs for an ounce of silver. Now in 1923 the price of silver has risen to $23.44/oz. giving silver about 78 times it value, but you can't get 1560 eggs (130 dozen) for $23.44. You'd be lucky to get 10 dozen for that price. So an ounce of silver will only purchase about 6 times as many eggs as it would in 1932. Any pretty much every other item has a different increase as items get cheaper or more expensive to produce or transport over time.