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That's why I liked skill categories. It's nice to have some sort of generic rating to see if an NPCs can do something if the PCs do something unexpected. Chances are, we won't need to know the Orc Guard's storytelling or seduce skills, but it's nice to have some sort of generic "social" skill on the writeup to fall back on, just in case.

The goal was to use the broad skills to help simplify the amount of bookkeeping- especially for NPCs that won't be showing up again. Athletics isn't all that unreasonable. Those people who are gifted at running tend to be above average at jumping, climbing and swimming.

Yes, the fumble table predates the current BRP rules. Back in the days of old RuneQuest, the rule was that a defender had to declare his parry (or dodge) when he was attacked, regardless of what the attacker's result was. The logic behind it was that in order to parry an attack you had to start acting when you spot the attack coming. If you waited to see if the attacked "hit" it was too late to parry it.

Much of the orginal Superman is different from what has become the norm for the man of steel. For instance his powers weren't originally due to effects of Earth's yellow sun, but instead entirely genetic. Kryptonians were highly developed mentally and physically. The radio show is also responsible for the stupidest power attributed to Superman : "Superman's friends don't drown!" I agree that it makes sense to depower Superman for several reasons. For one thing it's almost impossible to really challenge Silver Age Superman. He has all sorts of incredible powers and is so intelligent that he should be able to figure out a way to use those powers to solve the problem. Take a loot at how many of the dilimeas posed to him should be easily solvable if he were to actually use all his powers intelligently and not just bull his way through it. In recent years the trend has been to humanize him. Clark Kent has become more than just his secret identity. In fact, it's far to say that now that Superman is Clark Kent. That's one of the things from crisis that hasn't been retconned. It adds depth to the character and opens up a lot more story possibilities.

Yeah, it also feeds into the whole familiarity breeds contempt thing. The really powerful villains in a series start off very tough and menacing, but become less impressive each time they get defeated by the heroes. What I did in my campaigns is use them as a backdrop for the PC heroes. Kinda like how a Gm uses the Arthurian character in a Pendragon campaign. I ran a campaign set in the Marvel Universe, but with the PCs playing their own heroes. One in awhile an actual Marvel character would show up, but not that often. The limited contact helped to reduce problems with interpretation. Plus the PCs got to see the heroes from the viewpoint of their own PCs- not as a reader. Quite a few RPGs have rules for stuff like that now. It's just not quite established yet. And even so, such revelations don't usually result in an improvement to the character or the story. Unless it's pulled off really well, or the revelation is something that seems very logical and believable once it comes out, it usually ends up eliciting a groan from disappointed readers and get's forgotten a few issues latter.So it's probably not going to enhance the gaming session.

I think that in the case of Superman the escalation is due less to the fact that it is an ongoing series and more a case of one-ups-manship. When Superman first appeared his was much less powerful and couldn't fly. But as other heroes appeared with more and more incredible powers, Superman keep getting more powerful so that he could top the other heroes with similar powers. But what writers (and higher ups) decide to do to a character is definitely a point to consider. It holds true with all works of fiction to some extent, but that nature of the comics makes it more pronounced. In a story, the writer can always have a character display some new talent or ability. It may or may not past muster with the readers, but it can be done. In a RPG, it's not really possible for a character to suddenly develop some new skill or other ability out of the blue. I think RPGs can handle Superheors, but the GM and players need to have some sort of common ground regarding expectations of existing characters.

And it stopped Duracell from doing those head to head battery comparisons that they were noted for. The EB made that whole campaign backfire. Not only did Energizer get a mascot out of the deal, but the whole campaign ended up putting what was an unknown brand solidly into competition with what was supposed to be the premium brand. Eveready has got to be pretty happy with the way that worked out.

Yeah, It's like when you see some sports figure on TV saying that the team won because they gave 110%. "Skills are rated as a skill chance, or the percentage chance a character attempting the skill has of succeeding, a value somewhere between 0% (no chance whatsoever) to 100+%, meaning it will always succeed." - Pg. 9. Yes, the qualitative aspects are factored in there too. There is another RPG that I like which allows for success chances up to 300%. Values above 100%in that RPG don't represent increased probabilities of success, but increased probability of achieving a superior result. BRP is similar. Someone with a 100% skill rating and someone with a 200% rating are both virtually assured of a success, but the one with a 200% rating is more likely to achieve the better result, and win some sort of skill contest between the two characters.

LOL! The most amazing thing about the EB to me is that it originally came from a DURACELL commercial.

Uh, yeah, assuming you can find a stat range for the kaiju and mecha that you are comfortable with. You;d have to work out your "benchmarks" for SIZ, STR, POW, MOV etc, from the ways things are depicted in the film. No matter what values you pick for stats, Mecha's game mechanics look like they can handle it. You just might end up a bit over or under powered depending on what default values you pick. But you can always fine tune your designs.

Another way to look at the skill ratings is instead of treating it as an absolute scale (i.e. 100% being the best there is/can be) you can view the ratings as relative to some typical resistance or sampling of the population. So the character with a 100% rating might not be the best, but is virtually assured of beating an average person in a contest of that skill. His 100% rating isn't an assured win against other experts. The tricky part with % based skills is that the upper limits of performance are usually unknown, so the max skill scores are left open ended. It's quite likely that ten or twenty years down the road we might end up with a someone who can out perform someone who is "the best" in their field today, and an open ended scale allows us to account for that without retroactively downgrading the ratings of all the preceding characters, or even to help account for advances in our understanding.

It's out! Okay, I just bought the PDF! Oh, and it looks more compatible with some of my wacky vehicle rules than I had expected.

Nah, it just means that reality is not suitable for SuperHeroes. BRP just needs a little tweaking. Back when Chaosium did the Superworld RPG (Boxed Set) they tweaked some of the RQ/BRP rules to better fit the genre. We just need to customize the BRP rules a bit so they can handle the high powered heroes. For instance, the variant doubling progression I'd been championing (sorry, couldn't resist the pun) is very similar to the one used for SIZ in Superworld and latter adapted for RQ3. I think it could help us handle the really strong heroes. If we go with Superman being able to lift 200,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons, then the doubling progression reduces his BRP STR score from about STR 20,000,000,000,000,000,000 to a much more game-able STR 582. It also lowers his damage bonus down from around +1,250,000,000,000,000,000D6 to a more BRP friendly+36D6 or so.

becuase it makes for a better, more dramatic story. If he shrugged off over 95% of the attacks think of how boring it would be to watch and/or read. Yup. In fact, since he has super-speed, he should be able to kick butt and take names before most of his foes are even aware that the fight has started. But again, seeing that happen over and over would be boring. It's the same reason why Lex Luthor can put together a powersuit that lets him challenge Superman physically. Now if Luthor really were a genius, he'd throw together a couple dozen of those powersuits, coat them in Krytonite and take care of Superman once and for all.

Cam you give me some of the issues where he did that? The stuff I've seen from Marvel has kept the top rate heroes at around the 100 ton mark. I've never seen Thor moving planet sized masses. It would have to be some really incredible stuff. It's not so much the total force that is the problem, but the distribution. Like when a superhero grabs onto an airplane and tries to help it fly, by supporting a wing or the fuselage. Doing that would probably break the plane apart, tear off a wing, or at best, punch a couple of fist sized holes into the aircraft. Awhile back, I was looking at the Hulk's stats in BRP terms (about STR 100, SIZ 32) and that in BRP terms he probably could do more damage to a tank by picking it up and dropping it than by punching it. Yes, but often the side effects of some powers ends up being far nastier and powerful that the alleged main power. And again, I was referring to applying the powers realistically. The comics generally don't apply the powers realistically, and for some good reasons. Gwen Stacy was about the only time the comics played things realistically. That seems assumed. The same goes for the Hulk: he can exert millions of tons of force because he's nearly indestructible.

It was actually a very different type of plate, too. Greek Plate was a breastplate (and back plate) with graves, braces, re braces, and a partial helmet. Pet's quite right about the physical coverage bit of his statement (he's right about the rest, too). Mail, on the other hand, could provide much better coverage., and some of the Greeks neighbors used it. So mail was probably a superior defense at the time. Latter medieval plate gave much better coverage and protection. Some of the other reasons are climate, shields, and weapons. Full, heavy armor is more practical in a Temperate climate than in a tropical one. Also, the Ancients got a lot of their protection from their shields. Pete even had an optional rule to account for it in his Roman supplement. A nice hoplite or figure-8 shield was decent protection against most of the weapons of the day. But by the latter medieval period, weapons were becoming more effective, so there was a need for better armor. And, as the armor improved, it created a need for more effective weapons. So it was a sort of spiraling arms race between armor and weapons.

I disagree. The thing with handling this stuff realistically is that most of what the heroes do in the comics wouldn't work. For example, how many times does a hero catch a falling character, and the falling character is unharmed? Realistically. Lois Lane should have broke her back on Superman's arms. Or when one of those super strong characters throws a punch, they don't move. If they handled their strength realistically then quite a few of these supers would either be send flying or punch right through their opponents. And most of the great lifting feats we see in the comics wouldn't work. The characters would be more likely to break off pieces rather than actually lift a 747, tank, or even a pickup truck in their hands. Mythic Thor's feats surpasses those of Marvel Thor, even during the 60-70s. For instance, nearly lifting the Midgard Serpent out of the ocean. Marvel's Thor lifting ability is somewhere around the 100 ton mark. Now Silver Age Superman is another story. But DC's characters tend to be more powerful than Marvel's. Be careful. If you really fulfill the hyperbole then Magneto and the Hulk probably wouldn't survive using their powers. It's so easy for Magneto to accidentally give himself a lethal dose of radiation that it's not funny. Plus a very high power levels it gets boring. Most of these guys can easily kill another super if they can strike from surprise.

Not necessarily. One thing about legendary beings is that their powers are not entirely physical. So there is a lot more to them and their power than just good game stats. Also, many mythical and legendary beings attributes are greater than their comic book counterparts. Some of Thor's feats in the old Norse legends require a much stronger character than what the Marvel version of Thor. The thing is, most mythical and legendary beings were not presented in a manner that holds up with a understanding of the laws of physics, so it's kinda hard to make a fair comparison. There is a bit of Wylie Coyote-ism going on here too. The more we understand about how things work, the more likely we are to ignore or eliminate the more silly examples of great power. For instance, if a super strong character tried to lift up something really big, like a batttleship or mountain, we know that the object being listed couldn't withstand the force being extended over such a small area as one person's hands, and would break apart. Nor could the ground beneath the character support all the weight. So when dealing with super strong character we must either tone down their abilities, or ignore the laws of psychics for a bit. If you are not aware of the violations, then the extreme feats are not a problem.

Yes, not and not exactly. You see the way it works, realistically (and that's not necessarily the way it works in the comics -especially for superman), is that strength increases at a rate equal to the mass raised to the (2/3) power. What that means in that STR doesn't change as fast as mass. So if Superman's mass (and weight) were multiplied by a factor or about 900 (30x30x30), his Strength would only be increased by a factor of around 900 (30x30). A superman who is 900 times Stronger than the present one wouldn't be able to move that many planets, let alone the Sun. And post-crisis Superman isn't strong enough to push the Earth around anymore. As far a CON goes, it shouldn't be increased at all, but since BRP doesn't factor SIZ into things like poison resistance, a lot of big creatures get an increase in CON to keep them from being to easy to kill. POW also gets a modest increase from SIZ for similar reasons. Most GMs don't want to have the big nasties get taken out with befuddles and such due to low POW scores. Heck, even original SIZ Superman should be able to protect mankind from most of the Mythos nasties. His STR score is so high, relatively speaking, that any mythos creature that can be harmed by physical means could be defeated by one punch. Not that it would play out that way in the comics. Despite how tough and strong superman is supposed to be, in practice he usually ends up being just weak enough so that outer superstrong beings can give him a fight. But Superman is one of the most extreme examples of a super powered character, and he pushes the BRP game mechanics quite a bit. The game wasn't designed to handle characters with 15+ digit STR scores (and that's for relatively wimpy post-crisis Supes, who can't push the Earth around), qand things like the damage bonus is just unbelievable in BRP terms. Sticking with the doubling progression for STR and SIZ would probablyy result in a somewhat more playable set of stats, but even so STR is going to be incredibly impressive.

Superman's official height is listed at 6' 3", and his official weight is listed as 225 pounds. 225 pounds is about SIZ 16. To get his weight at 186 feet we can use the cube-square law. 186 feet is 29.76 times 6'3", and according to the cube-square law, Superman's new weight would be his original weight (225 pounds) multiplied by the cube of height ratio (because he is not only 29.76 times taller, but also 29.76 times as wide, and 27.76 times as deep). 225x29.76x29.76x29.76 = 5.930,363 pounds and a few ounces. So a 186 foot tall Superman would weigh roughly 6 million pounds! Or 3000 tons! I can give you a couple of SIZ scores for that, depending on which conversion method your prefer- the official one or my doubling one. The doubling one is the onyl one which can give you a usable STR score for Superman. Much tricker to answer. It depends on the reason why the effects Red Kryptonite usually takes 24 hours to wear off on Superman in the first place. If we go for a technical solution, and assume that it has to do with his super health (i.e. CON) and how much Red Krytonite radiation his SIZ can soak the duration could be reduced considerably. Then again, it might not be reduced that much at all. As a rule of thumb, we've been using 2/3rd the change in SIZ as the change to STR and CON. Since Superman has such a large STR for his SIZ (he can lift so many tons his STR score is effectively infinite in standard BRP terms- so the increase due to increased mass might not mean much at his CON level.)

That would be an interesting setting. Like seneschal said, it covers a lot of ground (and time). We've got two continents and a fair number of islands to cover, plus at least a thousand year time period of history to cover to be comprehensive.

One unsual approach to writing up a mystery adventure that can be fun, and fast is to have the PCs find something (a dead body for example), and then ask yourself some questions about the discovery. Pick (basically make up) answers that seem fun and interesting. Then, after you've done that for a bit, look at the assorted details you have and see if you can work up a sotry that fits the details. Once you got that much working, you can usually get a good idea of what is going on, and can fill in the other details in a common sense, cause & effect fashion. This way, you don't really need a good mystery to start with; you can make up the mystery along the way. One of the nice things about this approach is that the players will generally be taking the same approach to solve the mystery as you used to fill in the details. So you should have a pretty good idea of what questions they will be asking, and what direction(s) the answers will point them towards. For instance, if the PCs find a dead body in one of the PC's home, you not only have the description of the victim, his possessions, and method of death to provide clues, but also you can work up a reason why he was found in the PC's home.

Uh, the Maximillian PLate isn't all that great a choice for fighter magi. It's not all that light and has two chestplates (a breastplate and a plackard) and a backplate. A well fitted mail shirt or a coat of plates would probably be a better choice.. It was better for what it covered. Part of the problem with plate armor was that because it was rigid, it couldn't be used to cover joints. At least not until the high middle ages, and even then suits of plate were augmented with mail. Horse archers. That helps a lot when it comes to weight and fatigue. Protection wise, mail was about as good as any other armor until the high-late middle ages, when the smiths were skilled enough to make the Gothic armors. Oh Gary is the source, as far as RPG circles go, but my point is that the term is still widely used,m even though many of us know better. Just like with the plate vs. mail thing. Honestly, I think the real reason why plate is better, heavier, and more expensive in most RPGs is that most game designers are setting up for all the various armors to be available at the same time and place, and so they need to tweak values to make it logical for all those armors to appear in the same shops. Realistically, and historically, newer armors phased out older ones. It's even worse with weapons. Hmm, there was some stuff I was working on for armor in Pendragon that might be portable over to BRP. It's not that tough to convert. Just divide the AP in half. I'll have to dig it up and see if it could help here.

I think you picked the right targets. They were also responsible for adding the word "mail" to every sort of armor, i.e. scale mail, ring mail (a whole other can o' worms), banded mail, plate mail, etc. Gygax wouldn't have to use "field plate" to refer to actual plate armor if he hadn't clouded the issue up with plate mail.