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it's not so much amazing as it is me being lazy and methodical. I don't like "eye-balling" stats for a lot of things. It tends to take longer, and inconsistencies tend to crop up. But a foruma method means that I can just plug data into a spreadsheet and it can spit out game data. I started doing that with vehicle stats awhile back and (once I did my homework) started to get good results. With animals it's mostly a case of using existing RQ3/BRP animals as the default archetype stats for that type of animal, using the average body mass of a similar animal to get it's average SIZ, and then using the difference in SIZ and the cube-square law to determine the adjustment to STR and CON. It works out that you should alter STR and CON by 2 points for every for every 3 points you alter SIZ. Since most animal stats (hit points, damage bonus, and even armor points) in BRP/RQ3 were derived from it's attributes, most of the work can be automated with a spreadsheet. In the long run it's actually easier and faster to use a method such as this rather than "eye-balling" it, as once you have the formula you cna just plug in body mass for lots and lots of animals. I think Erasmus current database has stats for over 1200 animals. Since we used existing animal writeups as defaults, our stats are mostly consistent with what's already out there. And with a formulaic method the STR, CON and SIZ scores are all rated consistently relative to each other. Once I can work out a reasonably good formula for MOV things should speed along again. In theory movement speed for animals can be worked out from body mass (SIZ), muscle mass (STR, but can be approximated from SIZ), and a factor based on body shape, but I haven't been able to reverse engineer a formula that holds up, yet. Yup. Some sort of start, using some sort of method gets the ball rolling. Lots of examples makes it easier for the GM to find what he is looking for, or at least something close enough. With multiple examples of similar animals he might not have to change the numbers but instead just pick a similar animal that is larger or smaller. Plus, since we did use some sort of method to get stats, our results can be reproduced by anyone else who uses the same methods, giving us all a common baseline to work from. And knowing the method used makes it easier for a GM to adjust the method used. So if a GM doesn't like our stats he can see how we cam up with them and see for himself how and where we went wrong!

That is closer to what I was expecting. I figure a cat probably patrols it's territory at, say 5kph, so patrolling a 300 km sqaure territory (about eh size of a 20km radius) would take quite awhile. Looking on-line I been seeing that there is a distinction between a cat's territory and the area that it visits frequently the large territory claims, and why most cats seem to be gone for only a few hours at a time. Unfortunately it also puts the whole issue of high stamina for small animals back into doubt.

If we are only going to use CON for HP, and toxin resistance, and Stamina for everything else (or vice versa) wouldn't it just be better to adjust the hit point formula? For example if Hit Points equaled SIZ with a slight modifier for CON, say HP = SIZ-2+CON/4 I think it would solve most of our problems. For instance, if a cat had CON 10, SIZ 2, the revised formula would give it 3 hit points.

Okay. I'm surprised. Figured it would take too long to cover that much territory.

Yup. What we did was classify most critters alone the lines of a generic body type (canine, bovine, feline, pachyderm, theropod, etc.) and linked the attacks available to the body type. While it does require a bit of GM fine tuning here and there, it holds up fairly well. And since the damage class scale is a ladder, it's easy to customize a critter's damage by moving it up or down a rung on the ladder. Depends on when Erasmus and I can get out acts together and finish it. We're working on putting together a sampler of critter stats. Some of the "behind the scenes" mechanics that we've been using to generate stats are available for anyone who is interested. We used a mathematical approach to generating stats, based on a creature's body type and mass, which we use to extrapolate stats for similar creatures.

Some possible options: 1) Use the bump mechanic from HeroQuest. Basically, if the skill is over 100% the character subtracts 100 from his skill and rolls against the remainder, but "bumps" up his success by one level. You can subtract another 100% for another bump at 200% skill and so on. That will let you handle skills over 100%. 2) If you want a simple way to keep special successes without doing math, on any roll that is successful, if the character rolls either a five or a zero on the "one" die, it is a special success. 3) If you want a simple way to keep critical successes without doing math, on any roll that is successful, if the character rolls an odd doubles (11, 33, 55, 77, 99), it is a critical success.

I doubt that. I might believe it that a housecat might walk 20 or 30 km a day, might, but I do not believe that they walk in a 20-30 km radius. Where did you get that from?

Well, you're doing pretty good so far! In the last few days you've hit some of the issues that we've been discussing and dealing with. LOL! That's pretty much what we came up with. What we did was note the various ways db was implemented (full half, in d3s, etc.) as well as the various types of attack and their corresponding damages. Eventually we came up with a damage class/weapon class psedostat, based mostly on critter SIZ and diet that we use the scale the damage, and determine how much of the db (if any) should apply. In some cases, such as very small critters we even ignored the damage penalty. Frankly, I'd love to tweak some of the damages a bit more, but we are also striving for our final stats to be pretty close to official BRP/RQ3 stats.

Possibly, but what makes you think housecats have a high stamina? I wouldn't expect small animals to have the energy reserves, or the capacity to sdraw in enough oxygen to last as long as a fit human.

Gollum, maybe Erasmus and I should get you to join our bestiary project? The problem with the bite here is that while horses are stronger than wolves, the muscles horse use to bite are not at strong as those wolves use to bite. Plus, horses are herbivores and their teeth and designed to grind and mush vegetable matter, while wolves are carnivores and their teeth are designed to tear flesh and kill prey. IMO, the solution is to reduce the horse's bite damage. Something like just using db in d3's might fix this. I just don't see a horse bite doing much more damage than a light mace, tops.

I figured as much. The real world numbers and relationships are, IMO, mostly for series that take place in the "real world". But a fantasy series that takes place in it own setting only needs to be internally consistent. Yeah. I figured that. This way we can just write up stuff that fits the setting we are using. With a point buy method, we could run into problems if a series uses tech that is more powerful or less than the default in BRP Mecha. If some series gives a man-sized battlesuit a full powered undulation cannon or some such, the whole point buy thing would implode on us. I got a vehicle system in the works for the Doctor Who RPG and ran into that problem. If the Dalek mothership has "X" on the show, then it should be able to have "X" in the game.

Except that it means adding another stat, and one that would be highly similar to hit points, anyway.

Then it actually easier to writeup. All you need is is make sure the mecha stats are "correct" for the setting. In other words, they just need stats that let them do what they can do in the series. It doesn't matter is theier POW score is low or high compared to other series. If you are in doubt, just go with POW scores similar to the POW given to the sample mecha in the BRP core book.

Not really. That's what SIZ is for. What some of us have been suggesting is using hit points instead of CON for resistance against toxins. That way you factor it for greater mass (SIZ).

Not very much so, at least for the SIZ stat. As I said, I got a table that extends the doubling progression, so it was mostly a case of looking up the mass score (20,000 tons, 50,000 tons, or 70,000 tons depending on which Goji I was statting up), on the modfied SIZ table, or, to be more accurate, plugging the mass into a spreadsheet that does the math for me. The interesting bit was in tweaking the damages and armor stats to reflect how much punishment the kaiju can soak in the movies. I think I ended up with an average of about 4 AP per D of damage bonus, and often higher. That way a couple of kaiju can take some hits from each other without getting torn to shreds. Another interesting thing is although BRP Mecha uses some different values and methods, I think most of my Kaiju stuff could convert over to BRP Mecca fairly easily. Since Mecha bases AP on SIZ class and I based AP on db the relative AP scores of Kaiju should convert over reasonably well.

Yeah Gollum, you're onto something. In old RQ, most creatures had a CON of 3D6. THat is they could range the gamut of health the way humans do. But with RQ3/BRP the SIZ scale was expanded a bit, and CON was adjusted to help reflect the greater hit points and resistance of larger creatures, and, conversely the lower hit points and resistance of smaller creatures. I did a bit on math on this but the simply answer is that CON (and STR) vary at 3/rd the rate of SIZ. Or, basically, an average animal's CON score should be about 3/rds it SIZ. Give or take a few points. So if you cat is SIZ 3, a CON and STR of 2 are about right. Truthfully, small critters shouldn't be this unhealthy, but that's the quick fix. IMO the correct fix would be to replace the BRP formula for hit points with something that is sort of reverse the RQ 1-2 hit point formula. THat is Hit Points = SIZ plus a modifier for CON (1-3 = -3 4-6=-2 7-9= -1 13-15= +1, 16-18= +2, etc.

Ooh, thanks for the link. I've been wanting stats for MOSPEDIA for some time.

All that fiddling around I've done with vehicle rules has paid off! A lot of the time I can guess why Mecha does things the way it does, as I' know what some of the hurdles are. BTW, I wish I had seen your bit about applying maneuver modifiers according to multiples of MOV, it would have saved me a lot of time. I did something similar, but after a year or so. Yeah, but then most mecha wouldn't work in real life. So we make allowances for the genre. I've been working with the idea of just keeping the +8 per doubling scale used in BRP at the character SIZ range. It helps to keep the SIZes down, the numbers playable, and keeps the relationship between SIZ values and STR values consistent. It really helps to keep stuff form a particular setting workable with other things from the same setting. For example, King Ghidorah is usually listed as being about 50% heavier than Gojira. That's a huge difference with a linear SIZ scale, but only +4 with the doubling method. To help with the hit points I've been thinking of adding a "soak" or "intrinsic armor" stat. The idea being that very large craft gain some immunity to small arms just from the virtual of their size. For instance, during WWI British warplanes would fire machineguns at German Zeppelins with little effect- even when using incendiary rounds! While the machineguns left a lot of bullet holes in the Zepplins, and caused some gas leakage, the Zeps were so big that the damage was usually not serious. Yes, lots of stuff is "negated" on those crossover movies. The various robots are not supposed to be at the same power level, either. According to Go Nagai, Grendizer is supposed to completely outclass the others, which is one of the reasons why Koji Kabuto is sidekick and support character in UFO Gendizer. If the robots were about equal then Mazinger Z could have been or help against the Vegans.

Okay, right up my alley, my degree's in electronics! Energy is measured in a unit called the watt. Now the watt is a fairly small unit of energy (about the amount it takes to heat up one cubic centimeter of water by 1 degree C, each second). So generators, and powerplants usually put out many, many watts. Since the watt is a metric term, one thousand watts is referred to as a kilowatt (kW), and a million watts is called a megatwatt (MW). So that is what BRP Mecha is asking for. In the Imperial system, generators have their power rated in units of horsepower (hp). 1 horsepower is approximately equal to 750 watts (the exact conversion varies depending on the type of energy, but most are close enough to 750 watts that we can get away with 750 as a conversion factor. That also means that 1 kilowatt is approximately equal to 1.33 horsepower. They don't, but they can design the in BRP Mecha. BAsically what you do is have a lootk at the POW ans STR scores listed in the book and come up with POW values in about the same range as the STR and SIZ you want for your mecha. If it will help, here are some benchmarks for the power requirements/ maximum outputs of some real world devices. Microwave Oven: 1 kW Space Heater: 1.5 kW Typical Car: 100kW Supercar ( high speed performance car): 500kW P-51 Mustang Fighter: 1.3 MW Eurostar train: 12.2 MW Los Angeles-class Nuclear Submarine: 26MW Nimiitz-class Aircraft Carrier: 190 MW In terms of converting actual mecha from some series or other, it is actually quite common for Japanese companies to provide data for mecha with power ratings (in units of kW, MW, or hp) that you can use to get a POW score. Now, the reason why BRP Mecha uses two different conversion factors is because different shows work on different power scales (literally), so in order to keep the POW scores playable Rosen provided two different ways to convert. At least I assume that's why he did it that way. As far as STR goes, technically STR is a measure of force, rather than power, but the two are related. With gears and such, it is possible to get virtually whatever STR you want out of a power source. But it might not be practical. For instance, you could, theoretically power a STR 100 crane from a POW 1 battery, but not for long enough to do you much good. In the rules, but it depends on how big you expect the kaiju to be. Basically whatever SIZ you pick for the Kaiju, use for the Mecha. But be careful. I did up some BRP stats for Gojira and some of the other Toho Kaiju (something that for legal reason Rosen couldn't do in BRP Mecha), that used their "real" SIZ scores, but I used a modified SIZ scale to do it. Otherwise a 20,000 ton Goji would be around SIZ 2000!

Yeah. Hopefully, I won't annoy Rosen too much. I got a few ideas for tweaks, although I will have to look through the book to make sure I didn't miss some stuff first. But one of the nice things about BRP Mecha is that because it works the way it does, it is easy to modify. That makes it much easier to adapt it to suit a particular setting. Oh, and to do something other that suggest a rule tweak, I'm really liking the way Mecha handles air vehicles. Since the ground battleboard is treated as one MOV for air vehicles, I finally have an RPG where My plane doesn't suddenly slow down when somebody takes a shot at it.

What if you are emulating something like Shin Seki Evangelion, where the "mecha" are alive?

Sorry, I haven't gotten the chance to go over everything yet. I missed the addenda. There is a difference though between better armor and more toughness/hit points. But I was thinking of simplifying the rule tweak I cam eup with and bumping the HP row up a step or two for advanced materials.

Well even though BRP mecha doesn't have CON, you could still add it in and average it with SIZ to get the value you look up for hit points. if you wanted too. In most cases it probably won't change much. I was thinking of doing something similar (a CONstruction stat) to allow for advanced/tougher materials in mecha and vehicles.

Maybe. I'll have to check. One of the difficulties with BRP is that there have been so many sets of the rules with minor variations and many of us have played it for so long that we often don't play according to the latest version of the RAW. And at time the RAW contradicts itself - usually when somebody changes something and then fails to change the other things that get altered by the first change. I'll get back to you..

Sounds good to me. It really would depend on the intensity and frequency of the exposure. Even greater than 30 days might not be unreasonable under the right conditions. People who work in limestone quarries are get exposed to minute doses of radiation all day long. It probably won't affect them right away, but who knows what it does to them over years?