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Yeah, but the problem with most of the WoW boxed set is that while it is enough to start playing, it really needs more to sustain a campaign. Future world more so than the others. Every time I started a game with a WoW book I ended up moving the characters over to a more developed RPG (RQ, Stormbringer, Superworld boxed set). What is that?

Except a cuirass shouldn't be flexible. At least not that type of curiass. It's still a nice cover though.

Superworld had the basic framework for them, and a buch. While it was geared toward Superhero characters, it could be adapted to other settings.

That's what most RPGs do. It has it's good and bad points. I'd rather tie hit points to SIZ than CON though. I'd love to use CON for healing though. Something that's been kinda off in just about every BRP based RPG. Namely the fact that the guy with the high CON takes longer to heal.

Do you want me to give you the bird? Um, I mean the octopus-dragon-manlike thing?

LOL! I've done the Yoda voice to D&Ders trying out other RPGs telling them they "must unlearn what they have learned." It's surprising how difficult it is for most hardocre D&Ders to do that, though. They usually trust to their previous experiences and fight me every step of the way, sticking to their standard tactics until the bitter end. The first time I really got one of them to change was when running the old Jame Bond RPG. Things went horribly wrong (D&D thinking again) leading to one character be separated (i.e. he was leftamong the living) from the rest of the group . Surrounded, outnumbered and outgunned, the player figured he was dead no matter what he did and decided to try a new approach and listen to the advice the about how to play the game that the GM had been given him for months. He threw down his (empty) pistol, and surrendered. To his surprise (the player still tells the story to this day, noting is was his most successful outing in said RPG). the PC was taken captive; brought inside the Major Villain's headquarters; was congratulated by the Major Villain for being a worth opponent; had the Major Villain explain his plan to him in detail; and then found himself standing right next to the Major Villain's master computer while he still had his Q-Branch issued Pen-Grenade in his shirt pocket. He found it remarkably easy to thwart the Major Villain, blow up his HQ, and escape in the confusion. It was much easy their the "shoot through the front door" and fight to the death approach that the group had adhered to for the previous month. True newbies tend to do things like use common sense, and try to play the adventure and setting and find things much easy to understand.

Yeah, for example he might be trying to shoot back, and if he got shot in his gun arm or not could really matter to whoever he is shooting at.

"We hold these truths to be SELF evident." A likely story. Since when do sharks know how to use an Elder Sign to seal something? More worrisome is that while reading this thread I had some sort of epiphany and came up with the idea of retelling the Maltese Falcon but replacing the stature with that little bas-relief sculpture of Cthulhu from the original short story.

Yeah, there is nothing like Challenge Rating to use as a guide. I'd advise going with very weak opponents early on. Low skill scores (25-30%), low damage, and low armor. Ome of the differences between game systems is that in D&D the players are expecting to get hit and take damage. A fight where they don't is considered too easy. I once mauled a group in RQ because they didn't know how to react to getting inured properly, and just shrugged off the hits they were taking until it was too late.

I think most of the BRP related RPGs are fairly newbie friendly. BRP itself (that is the Big Gold Book) is less so than most of the others, mostly because it collects various systems, options and variants that have appeared over the decades in the RPGs that Chaosium has produced. IMO, you are probably better off starting with something like RuneQuest, Strombringer or Magic World as your core system to get clearer, and more consistent rules. You can always port over stuff from the BGB or elsewhere that you want or need. If you have it, the original Magic World (from the Worlds of Wonder boxed set) is an excellent intro. I think the biggest obstacle you are going to with newbies isn't so much how hard it is for them to pick up the game mechanics, but how hard it will be for them to grasp the differences in play style, tone and setting. D&D is much more forgiving to players who are reckless or make bad decisions. Healing, limb regeneration, and raising characters from the dead is common, maiming and permanent player character death are uncommon occurrences. I've seen groups of D&Ders get shell shocked and/or angry when trying out RuneQuest when someone got killed rather quickly or (even worse reaction)maimed . Taking off a limb in combat without high level magic is kinda considered "out of bounds" to D&Ders. Also, experienced D&Ders tend to have worked up some ideas on how to do things that don't always work out in other RPGs. When things don't go as the players expects they look to assign blame and usually decide the fault is with the GM and/or game system rather than with their tried and true methods. Foir example I've slaughtered A LOT of D&D players in other RPGS simply because they tend to try a frontal charge against archers. In AD&D the tactic was sound. Fighters did a lot more damage in melee, and the arrow or two they took in damage didn't have much of an impact on their hit points. But in RQ those arrows hurt, and can easily incapacitate or kill a PC. So you really have to explain that to them ("What the heck is an impale? Whaddya mean my sword arm is broken, it was just a 4 point hit?"), several times ( "Yeah, yeah, the game is deadly, blah, blah. We get it already. We're not new to gaming ya know.") , and probably even run a mock fight or three ( "If that bandit didn't get so lucky and roll that critical, He;d never would have killed me with just one arrow.") to get the point across. That will tend to make the players somewhat gun-shy of combat in the new system, and might even discourage them from wanting to play it. But that's a lot better than the instant hatred the game will get if the players find out the hard way.

In my experience with CoC madness typically occurs before chargen.

Yes, it works on plants, if they have a body and POW score. Just ask an Aldyrami. No, it doesn't work on furniture, Depends on the Undead. Corporeal undead have a body, and a POW/Magic Point score, so they can be targeted.

It's not a change, it's a clarification. Disrupt was never intended to work on inanimate objects.

Probably because the designers start off trying to create some sort of ancient/medieval fantasy setting and fortress are part of the trappings. Historically thy worked fine, it's just that fantasy RPGs ususally introduce powerful , reliable, and plentiful magic to the setting that can often make the historically appropriate tech obsolete (or worse). Realistically a society that has such magic would eventually adapt to it, and become something different than an ancient/medieval setting with magic thrown in. For instance, the relatively low cost and effectiveness of the protection spell would probably shift the balance of power in warfare away from the heavily armored troops, much like how gunpowder eventually shifted the balance of power away from the armored knight. And considering how many people died from infection and poor medical skills historically, the effects of the Heal spell would be amazing.

By the rules the answer is no. I'll see if I can find the issue of Wryms footnotes that has it. But according to the text of the spell in RQ2: DISRUPTION 1 point 80 meters, focused, permanent A spell designed to speed up random molecular motion in the target’s body. If the caster’s POW overcomes the target’s POW, the target takes 1D3 points of damage in a random body area. This damage is not absorbed by armor. It is implied that the spell only works against living creatures (and/or undead or possessed dead) objects since the that the target must have a body and a POW/Magic Point score to overcome. That would disqualify most objects as valid targets.

You're missing the context. It's not that Disruption is a game changer, per say, or that it is over powered. it isn't. It's that allowing dirsupt to be used on objects rather than against living beings is.

Okay, that makes more sense. How to you handle SAN loss in such a system? Do you take it off MPs? I assume that the version that uses a d20 adjusts the SAN losses accordingly..

Sure. The problem here is with the "fall out" of someone letting disrupt work against objects. It makes the spell a cheap and easy way to destroy small objects, and allows a group to gang up on a bigger tough object with massed disrupts. Basically disrupts bypass armor and "stack" their damage against the object's hit points. Yeah. I'm not arguing that Disrupt is overpowering, it isn't. What I'm saying is that by allowing it to work against non-living objects it changes things in the game. It's already been clarified (back in the RQ2 days) that it works against the living. The POW vs. POW roll should help clear things up, too.

Sure it is, you can walk right up to a castle. it isn't going anywhere. A bunch of guys with disrupts are going to be able to take down the main gate much faster than they would with a battering ram. And they don't even have to get as close to do it. Game changer. And troops can get within striking distance of a tank or battleship fairly easily. Heck, just surrender and walk up. Game changer. Most inanimate object don't have a POW score, so the POW vs. POW thing isn't going to be an issue. So Game changer. Yes,it's supposed to be. It's a Rune Spell. I think you're wrong. A single disrupt can ruin most handheld items, if you allow the spell to be used on objects. A group could take out a guard's weapon before the guard gets an chance to use it. Game changer. And a group of characters using disrupts can take down bigger objects fairly quickly for only a minor cost in magic points. It's the ability to bypass armor that makes the spell so useful against objects. Big game changer. The thing is, allowing disrupt to work against objects gives the characters ways to quickly damage things that they otherwise wouldn't be able to damage, or would take a long time to do so.

Yeah, it would need some sort of restrictions, since it could be far to easy to exploit. I could see an army taking down a fortification with a bunch of disrupts (A thousand troops, each casting 1 disrupt is going to average 1900 points of damage. Through armor, that would take out three or four battleships, or a dozen modem tanks, certainly enough to knock a castle down to it's foundation, causinhg who knows what sort of carnage among the enemy. And the army could fire off a second round of disrupts later on in the round. Talk about a game changer.

It is only supposed to affect living things, or at least things that have Magic Points to resist with, since you have to overcome the target's MPs to get it to work. . I believe this was covered under an old issue of Wryms Footnotes. If you allow it to be used otherwise, then it's up to you to deal with the consequences, and there could be some beauts-especially if the group does mass disruptions. Blast down doors (or maybe just the hinges), sink ships. whatever. It's all pretty ease when you can bypass the armor points. I doubt there is much in the way of locks that have more than 3 hp. If I were to allow disrupt to work on objects I'd apply the object's innate armor points (or at the least add them to the resistant value against the spell).

Could you elaborate a bit on this? Since PC POW scores are generally in the 3-18 range, and magic points start off equal to POW, this would seem to indicate a very low SAN score.

It does seem that the Sword was Death's original and perhaps ultimate shape. At least that's the Humakti view, so it would make sense for Humakti to use swords. Even if they are trolls. Everyone else got a watered down version of Death. In RQ2 it fed into why only Humakti got Sever Spirit as a reusable spell. But RQ2 focused on the region around Dragon Pass.

LOL!. THinking back, I can just see you messing around with a boot disk and autoexec.bat file to try and get something to run. HI MEM, LOAD MOUSE HI, etc.etc. WE pretty much had to do that with every new piece of software back then. Things are so much more user friendly these days. Oops, maybe not. My antivirus program had some sort of glitch in the last update and detected hundred of false positives.

It wans't too bad in old RQ. A bit of an annoyance though. Pershaps POW should be taken out of the skill percentages and instead affect skill use in some other way? Say, something along the lines of spending Magic Points to adjust die rolls as a form of Luck. Kinda like Stormbringer's old Elan mechanic.