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Another option would be to use skill cateogires and (optionally) subskills. For example, Melee could be a skill and covers all fighting with melee weapons, but 1H Sword, 1H Axe, 2H Spear etc. are all subskills/Perks. I'm not sure exactly how you are working the weapon perks, but it's possible that you could carry it a level further with specialties such as: Melee: 1H Sword (Xiphos) 2H Spear (Pike) Non-combat skill would have a similar approach with something like Athletics (Swim, Run, Climb, Ride) and Perception (See, Hear). Everything would default back to a skill cateogry, so you can cover all skills with just a half dozen or so scores. The nice thing about this approach is that you only need to detail a NPC as much as you want. You could have Palace Guards with Melee 50% -Polearms (Halbards), or if you are in a rush or he isn't all that important just put down Melee or Halbard with a skill rating and be done it it, makingmost NPC stat blocks quick, short and easy.

I started with AD&D, was disappointed by some aspects of it, and also switched to Stormbringer, back in 1981-82. From there I expanded out into RuneQuest and other RPGs. But I haved played any D&D in twenty years, even though it's about the only game people around here run.

Or because in the original "White Book" D&D thieves and clerics both used the same table. The extra tables for thieves in AD&D was to address the aforementioned problem of thieves passing fighters on the combat tables in White Book D&D. Be fair to yourself here, your trying to remember three plus version of D&D that are all over 35 years old and and I doubt you've played original D&D or AD&D since D&D 3E came out over 20 years back. And I suspect D&D isn't you Primary RPG either. So you're trying to sift through your memories and figure out what bit when to which game from back when a low armor class was better.

Actually they had thier own table in AD&D. Yeah, basic D&D with elf, dwarf etc. Yes, but that is D&D's fixed armor class, and increasing hit point system. If you were to translate character from that over to BRP, they'd lose hit points but gain some parry and dodge skill. Yes, but in BRP weapon skills start lower than in D&D. The idea with conversion is to capture the essence of the character and what they can do, but not the idiosyncrasies of the game system that originated from. For instance, in Basic D&D, it's pretty much impossible to take down a fighter who has 80 hit points with one attack from a sword. But if said fighter were converted to BRP then things change. Now something like classic fantasy straddles the line as far as D&D goes. It really comes down to why someone wants to convert something rather than play for the game it was written for. If someone want's it to play like Basic D&D well nothing is more like Basic D&D than actual Basic D&D. So if someone wants to use BRP, Magic World, Traveller, RoleMaster, etc. instead, then they must be aspects to those other game system that they want, and will nessitate changes from Basic D&D.

So Basic D&D. Okay then +2 for every 3 levels is +10% oer 3 levels of 3.33% per level. Clerics 2.5% per level Mages 2% per level So a 10th level Figter would have a 83% skill with his weapon plus and modifiers for STR and Magic BTW, where are thieves on this. Same as clerics? There was a bug in old D&D that had Thieves passing fighters the combat tables and hit dice, due to the lower amounts of XP needed to level. What makes you say that? Go with 50% +3.33% per level for weapon skills. Add for STR and DEX. Yes, I know, that's D&D. It uses hit points instead of active defense. But if you are converting it to BRP Just add DEX bonus to Dodge and Parry. The idea is that by converting to BRP someone wants to have parries. If converting from BRP to D&D then I'd do the reverse to get a level and related abilities. For instance a warrior in BRP with a 70% Sword skill would work out to (70-50=20%/3.33=6) about 6th level, and get the hit points and saving throws of a 6th level fighter. Boy does this take me back. I remember when debating about clerics wielding edged weapons and the XP awards for monsters were things. Basic D&D used the3-5, 6-8 9-12, 13-15, 16-18 brackets If convert to BRP you'd probably either drop category modfiers or use the 1% per point over 10 from the BGB.

Well the way we did it back in the days of D&D/AD&D was to use THAC0. Basically (20-THACO)x5%+50%. I think I might have a conversion book around somewhere. There were a few published ones back in the 80s and 90s. Haven't reallly needed them since a direct conversion doesn't really work between increasing hit point and fixed hit point game systems. If I wanted to covert something I mostly looked at characteristics,character level, special abilities and then gear. It really came down to porting over what the character could do and presenting it in a manner consistent with the RQ/Stormbringer/MAgic World rules we were using. So no fighters with 100 hit points, but certainly very skilled ones with a high CON. Oh, another way to do it would be to use the hit point die. Thus: Fighters (d10) = 5% per die Clerics, Rangers Monsters (d8) = 4% per die Thieves (d6) = 3% per die Magic USers (D4) + 2% per die Or you could just add the character hit point to a base chance (50% or 25% if you want to be more BRPish) to get weapon skills. You'll get fairly similar results. Maybe take out the CON bonus first? And the easiest thing to port over, if I remember my AD&D correctly.

My suggestion would be don't covert D&D to BRP until you familiar with both game systems. As other have pointed out, it's not exactly a straight forward process. Spells are different and D&D adventures are written for characters of a particular level, with even based on the relative strength of the PCs. whereas BRP adventures aren't as rigidly tied to the PC's capabilities.. If you want to try BRP with a D&D feel then, again, as other have pointed out Classic Fantasy is the way to start. Now once you have some familiarity with both systems you will get a feel for how to covert something over and when to just replace it with a BRP analogue. For instance, I wouldn't covert over a standard animal such as a horse or bear but instead use the BRP stats, perhaps modified to account for any special abilities. Also, as a rough guide each +1 in D&D is a 5% increase to skill in BRP, but D&D tends to give character a higher base chance of success (about 55%) than BRP does (typically between 5-30%). But ultimately converting is more of an art than a science. A direct conversion won't work as well as just getting the right feel for the character, trap or whatever from the adventure.

As others have mentioned, said creator was almost certainly referring to the original Basic Role Playing booklet that Chaosium released ages ago, and bundled with many of their boxed sets. It was a stripped down, streamlined version of the RuneQuest rules, and has been the basis for all the succeeding Chasoium RPGs, and several non-Chaosium RPGs. As far as the first D100 game, that depends on just how you want to define it. As has been pointed out Bunnies & Borrows came out in 1976 and used percentile dice for skill rolls, and Chivalry & Sorcery came out in 1977 and it used percentile rolls for combat, but both were "class & level" games. Traveller might have been the first "skill based" rpg, but didn't use percentile dice. A lot of games used percentile dice in limited ways, especially for tables, once the idea of rolling two ten sided dice that way came about as it gave m ore room for different options. Traveller even invented a D66 to get the same sort of flexibilty. I believe RuneQuest was the first RPG to be skill based that used D100 for most of the game mechanics. Previous game might have had bits and pieces of what we think of as a D100 game, but RQ is probably the game that put it all together. I also think Steve Perrin was probably the one most responsible for that, too, as earlier drafts of RQ were more like D&D., RIP Steve Perrin.

Nice cover too, although the digest format didn't do it justice. The game was somewhat math heavy but have a few novel ideas, such as the one second combat rounds and being able to roll attacks on warriors based on their level (i.e. you rolled to hit a 3rd level warrior every 3 seconds, a 4th level warrior every 4 seconds and so on.) with spells taking multiple seconds (rounds) to cast. I still remember a tense battle where the warriors had to hold off something long enough for the wizard to get a spell off. If I recall correctly the fact that the PCs had just reached second level and that slowed down the damage (attacked every other second) just enough for the wizard to be able to get off the spell.

Quelle Domage. There are a lot of old, unsuccessful games in English, of various complexity to join it. Kabal for instance. I had to run that with a calculator. Yeah, sounds a lot like RollRoleMaster. Lots of rolls on tables to determine anything in combat. It also reminds me of the MARS system. It was basically a D100 type of system that used rather extensive hit location tables that detailed the injury right down to which organs were damaged. I was not a bit fan of instant kills on hit location tables, but the one in MARS involved damaged every major organ in the chest (heart, lungs, kidneys,etc.) and a severed aorta so it was one I had a hard time arguing against. I mean you probably hope you die instantly from that.

Sounds interesting. I'm not familiar with it- probably because it is French. So when you say ."you have to "dynamically" determine what malus you use" do you mean that the GM picked something like a broken arm or sprained wrist to reflect the malus, or that the player did, or that it was determined by a roll on a table?

Okay, for one round, that's what I wasn't sure about. In some systems the character remains stunned until they make the roll. Hmm, that doesn't sound right mathematically. 14/28/56 (9/23/51 after armor) vs 34(39) shouldn't be worse that 14 (9) vs 9/17/34. Doing the math I get 0%/0%/110% vs. 0%/10%/50% It's not an issue for characters, unless they are giants. It is an issue for high hit point creatures. Basically the resistance table's automatic success was designed for situations such as a tug of war when one side so clearly outmatched the other that the really inst a contest. Like say a contest of strength between a grown man and a field mouse, or a half dozen adventures against a dragon. But injury is something different. It's not as much about how much damage one takes, but how imporant the bits that got damaged are. Getting your throat cut might only be a 2 point injury. So I think the minimum success should probably apply for damage. In real life you can kill an elephant with a .22 pistol. Oh, and another thing you might want is the eventually fatal idea. Naemy it's possibly to inflict a wound that will eventually kill theopponent, but might not take them out of the fight. This happens a lot with hunting. THe animal takes a mortal wound, but runs off for a half an hour before dropping. Sharing ideas is what that's what forums like this are for. Yeah, test it. Then post it. The testing tends to find most of the bugs, but posting it means more sets of eyes, and a better chance to spot something that you overlooked.

A few other games do similar things. The James Bond game has a series of would levels, namely Light Wound, Medium Wound, Heavy Wound, Incapacitated, and Killed. But they do not add up entirely linearly. You can't be killed by a series of light wounds, for instace. EABA is another example. Basically for every die you lose from wounds you get a die of "armor" to reflect the fact that it will take progressively more serious injuries to actually make a difference. It's a stand against the ridiculousness of killing someone who is heavily battered with a 1 point foot injury.

Is this a one time thing or do you keep rolling until you shrug off the pain? How about you just increase the difficulty of the resilience roll instead? Otherwise I can see a plethora of double attack weapons (twin barreled stun guns). I think it is easier/more intuitive to double the damage rather than halve the resilience. For example Joe's assault rifle would do 14/28/56 damage, adjusted to 9/23/51 for neglible/neglible/automatic success for Joe. Oh, and I suggest using the 5% minimum chance of success for something like this because we've all been stunned for a bit by a minor injury, bee sting or some such. I once hurt my back while rising out a pair of socks in the sink (I don't know how) and spent a few rounds on the floor checking out the dust bunnies under the tub. I was messed up for a good week, until a friend brought me to the Emergency Room and they gave me Valium. Then I spent 6 hours rolling around the hospital in a wheelchair with the brakes on.

I'll look to see if I can find the orginal version of the tables that used x1/2 and x2 multipliers instead of the modifiers. Ironically, it was a case of changing things to be more compatible with BRP, as it didn't use multipliers at the time. Then the BGB came out and introduced difficulty and aI kicked myself. I beleive I've seen it, I'm just haven't looked at it in awhile. Yeah. I think they have a few bugs with them. If I were redoing them from the ground up, I'd probably do something like Pendragon where weapons get a bonus against certain types of armor. Yes, but it works out becuase the damage value is the number used in the opposed resistance roll, and not the actual damage inflicted or the effect suffered. That mostly came from games like Timelords, CORPS and the James Bond RPG. I was frustrated that in most games, if an attack doesn't kill or disable someone, they can just continue on as if nothing happened. RQ is a bit better about that, thanks to hit locations, but people still shrug off gunshot wounds. In Bond, however, there is a Pain Resistance roll that a character must make whenever they get injured, and they can't act until they recover. There is a similar mechanic for stuns too, which allows people to beat each other up in fistfights without necessarily suffering serious injuries. Well, BRP didn't really have anthing to cover that sort of thing. It the reason why fistfights don't work out well in BRP. By the time somone is taken out of a fight, they have broken bones or some such. Yeah, because anthing ten points lower than the critter's hit points can be shrugged off. That's why a ratio of damage vs. total hit points probably works better. Timelords did that. Damage taken was compared total hit points to get the severity of the wound. CORPS did something similar, and in a simpler, tidy way. Basically the damage taken determined the difficulty to remain conscious, the degree of impairment, and the leathery of the injury. Basically you'd roll a d10 against the damage, modified by hit location, and if you rolled equal to or under the damage taken the wound was eventually fatal- meaning that the character would die from the wound over time, unless they received medical treatment, magical healing or some such. Head hits that made the roll by 3 points, and torso hits that make the roll by 5 were instantly fatal. CORPS handled larger creatures by giving them a multiplier to the damage taken. So, say a .44 magnum bullet that did 9 damage to an elephant would be multiplied by 0.2 and get round down to an eventually fatal chance of 1, or 2 for a head hit. Of coruse, in real life it's less about how much damage a wound inflicts, and more about what exactly got damaged. A two point hit through the eye is probably going to be more of a threat than a ten point hit to the pinky. What you could try in your system could be to just double the damage for each success level. That way a 13 point bullet wound that gets a critical would be doubled to 26 and then again to 52, making it capable of dropping an elephant. Of course such a hit will take out any normal humanoid opponent, but that's to be expected, and really isn't all that different from what a critical hit would do in BRP. Yeah, as long as the values stayed under 25 or so everything would be fine. Most games are designed with a certain "sweet spot" in mind and the rules are optimized for that. RQ/BRP was really designed around humanoid characters with under 30 hit points, and works well for that, but gets a little wonky at higher values as everything doesn't scale proportionally. Anyway good luck.. If you want any help or feedback, just let me know.

Oh,m that's really old. I think I posted it before the BGB came out., back when everyone around here was all enthusiastic about the announcement and hoping that it would actually come out and not turn into vapor. If I had seen the BGB first, I'd have used difficulty modfiers (easy x2 , hard x1/2, etc.) which were in my first draft, instead of the flat percentile modifiers.. Yeah, probably. If I recall correctly I was trying to introduce a hit pointless wounding system similar to what was used in BRTC's Timelords system which compares the ratio of damage taken to total hit points to determine how serious a wound is in a manner very similar to the resistance table. Since the resistance table relies upon the difference between damage and hit points rather than the ratio between the two, you might have a problem with light attacks having no effect as hit points increase. For instance a 13 point wound on a 52 HP elephant is in the 25% category (13/52=25%) where on the resistance table anything below 43 points of damage will get lumped together into the "automatic failure" range. If I were trying to offset that, I'd divide hit points into some sort of threshold, like 10% of hit points, or 25% of hit points and then compare damage taken to those threshold values. So an elephant might have a 5/10/15/25/30/35/40/45/50 thresholds, or 1/13/26/39/52 thresholds depending on how graduated you want it to be. If you want any help or insight into what my warped brain was thinking when I wrote that stuff, just let me know. Oh, and if it helps I have another method of handling opposed rolls and success levels that doesn't use the resistance table or the critical/special tables. While I was planning on using it for opposed skill rolls, it could also work as an opposed wounding system.

I'd say the point was to push lead and later plastic, which it did. Highly stylized art that brought in a following.

Ugh! I consider that to be the decline of Games Workshop.Before that they were a good little gaming company with soem games and an independent magazine that gave Dragon a run for it's money. ONce Warhammer came out GW just turned into pushing overprices lead (and later plastic) minis in a highly fantasy punk style that I never got into. Somehow draws with rainbow coloured mohawks hefting oversized weapons to big for them to wield, wearing inch think plate armour loaded with so many spikes that even a glancing blow would catch, just didn't fit the more realistic vibe I was going for. Oh yeah, I knew quite a few people who really got into the minis and painting. So much so that they spent way more time paining minis than they did gaming.

I saw the ads for them all the time in the various gaming magazines of the day (i.e. Dragon, Different Worlds, White Dwarf, Space Gamer) but didn't realize they were anything that I would have been interested in until I saw them up close. I didn't either until I saw them at a convention and notice the "Includes basic role-playing" bit on the boxes. That intrigued me enough to buy them, and once I got a look inside I was so pleased with the content. I mean, back in 1981 RQ content either came from Chaosium, Judges Guild, or an article in one of the gaming mags of the day, so this was a quite a pleasant surprise.

We used battlemats too. One cool thing though was that the scael used for the carboard was pretty close to the ones used on battlemats so we could (and did) place tower and wall sections over a battlemat. I wish these things got more of a in store presence though. I think they really could have been a good intro set.

Those bring back menories! Really great deal for the price.

I think that's a bit misleading, as you would need to be familiar with those other games in the first place to get something like hit locations to retrofit. If someone is already familiar with the ruleset then WoW gives them a nice springboard for a rules light system. But they probably need at last a passing familiarity with a more advanced BRP game to know what to port over, be it hit locations, piecemeal armor, new weapons, damage bonus, or whatnot. It's kinda like how the BGB is a great toolkit for those who are familar with the various Chaosium RPGs but all those options can be a bit daunting to a GM new to the system. Magic World can be great to grant other BRPish stuff onto, but you have to be aware of the stuff you want to add to it in the first place. BTW, anyone familar with the old Fantasy Paths boxed sets of map tiles? In a way they did what WoW/Magic World did but, in some ways, better. For those who aren't familiar with them they were sets of double sided cardboard tiles that could be assembled into various locations for gaming. Each box would come with a set of the BRP rules and a short adventure that made up of the map tiles. THe adventure would also have a rudimentary version of RuneQuest Battle Magic spells, and BRP stats for whatever new creatures were used in the adventure. THe set would even include some cardboard counters specific to the adventure. I think the old Fansty Path sets might be a better start up set that Magic World, as RQ's Battle Magic system was superior to the magic system used in Magic World.

Which Magic World? The original post was about the short booklet that came as part of the Worlds of Wonder boxed set back in the 80s, not the current 250+ page game.

Yeah, pretty much. The magic might be a bit overpowered as a wizard can pretty much fry anything with a 5-6 point spell, but it works.

That's pretty much RQ2 spirit combat, too. Strombringer had the one roll determines the outcome thing, and that is fast, but has it's own drawbacks. I dunno, I don't think it's much worse that two characters slugging it out with swords. Now considering the opposed nature of the roll they could streamline it by having only one roll and having the outcome decide who takes the damage. Stormbringer has a one roll wins all approach, but that also wasn't all that fun to roll or narrate. If PC fails his binding roll, there is an angry elemental or demon to fight. And that is wrong with that? I mean it is combat. If if were physical combat you'd end up with the same situation. SO basically the magician defeats the spirit and then binds it and it takes a day or so for it to recover it's magic points.