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Depending on the era, the reverse might be more difficult! Parrying with the sword was generally frowned upon in cultures that used shields. For one thing, it risked damaging the blade (and not all blades were made of the same quality; for another thing, using the shield gavea better chance of drawing the attacker's blade out of line, and making an opeing that you could exploit with your own sword.

Some do appreciate the benefits of the delcaration phase. One big benefit to mee is that it reflects the effects of being caught off guard and having to change your actions during a round in respose to something that happens after the declaration phase. At least is does in RQ2-3 with the 5/3 SR delay. In generate th old SR system handles things fairly nicely. It isn"t perfect. As has been pointed out earlier, the "reach" rules leave something to be desired, and the "go early, wait rest of round" thing is a bit off, but SRs do a good job of intergrating the "Four Ms" of FRPGs (Melee, Missile, Movment, Magic). It certainly beats the "I won initiative so I can draw my weapon and attack four times before anyone else can do anything" method. I think the "fix" for most of the SR problems would be to have SR carry over from round to round (the way spellcasting does), but with some sort of add on the way missles have. The major obstacle would be dirrentiating between reach and speed.

I'm another fan of Strike Ranks. I've been converting a D&D DM over to RQ/BRP and one of the things that has intrigued him was the way SR worked. In D&D (or BRP without SR) someone with a higher intitative can draw a weapon, move across a room, and attack a guy standing 10m away, even if they other guy is weilding a bow with an arrow at the ready. With SR they guy with the bow is almost certain to loose the readied arrow first. And might even get a second shot off before getting attacked.

That is very interesting. As I posted eariler, I ould have expect the .50 cal to just punch right rough, and not dump enough energy to rip off limbs. Maybe this is a case of the human body's elasticity working against itself. If you had made this claim with a hand held firearm, I wouldn't have believed you, but a .50 cal is another story.

I can see them tearing flesh open, but I would think that tearing limbs off would be unlikely. I would expect them to just punch right though something like a body. Maybe if it hit a major bone at just the right angle, that might @rpvode enough resistance.

Most of what I7ve seen agress with Niteshade's post. In a nutshell, unless someone gets hit with a massive amount of damage, then chances are they won't die outright, and how they deal with the injury is as much a matter of their personality and psychology as anything else. Yeah, the bullet might kill the guy, eventually, but he might do a lot of damage before then.

Which IQ scale are you using? And what is the standard deviation? The values look off to me. So do your probabilities.

If it helps, I did write up a corrected and exnpaned SIZ table awhile back. From about 5-88 the SIZ table uses a x2mass - +8 SIZ progression. If it were up to me, I7d have stuck with the doubling progression thoughout. It actually would have made a few things easier. I agree with the "common sense" idea for lthings, except... People usually don't know enough to work it out. For instance, how many people know what an "average" man can lift? Even going with "common sense" I suspect that each of us would come up with a different answer. I am leaning towards something along the lines of half your mass without a STR roll.

I think there probably should be a default lifting ability. At one time Iused tohave to lift boxes of tile for a living, and going strictly by the Resistance Table, I'd have been hard pressed to get through the day without "failing" to lift the tiles a few ties. Technically, there is a 5% chance that a average man (STR 10) can't pick up a pencil.

You got me doing it too. I haven't play TS for decades, so I needed to brush up on a few things to make sure I had the comparisons right. Not that it is that strange. Ikeep most of my espionage related stuff together. Even RPGs I don't run can be useful sorcebooks for the gameI do run. I remember incorporating Lady in Distress into a Bond Mission. As for the RS Companion. It was a mixed bag. I thing the rules were archaic for 1984, but some of the soruce material was good. By the time the companion was written most RPGs had progressed beyond TS, and there were several espionage RPgs out there, inclduing Bond and Espion/Danger International. I suspect that was one reason why S.I. was written a couple years later. TS did cover the genrefirst, but some of it's mechanics were poor. The way it handled death traps in particular was rather disappointing. In other RPGs players could try to talk thier way out, fight thier way out, tech thier way out, or even think thier way out. in Top Secret, it was all down to your Survival Value.

One suggestion. You could simplify the skills a little by using skill categories. Just make the Skill Category the base % for all skills under that category. For example, you could have a Mental Skill Category at Mind x3%, and it could incude Education, Perception and so on. You could even add Medicine and other skills with alower base %, if you want, just assume that they are difficult/hard skills. I suspect you could combine most of your skills into a half dozen categories (physical, Mental, Social, Technical, etc.), and reduce stat blocks. Just an idea.

I'm curious. What are the changes from the core rules? I commented a while back that there were some difficulties with BRP regarding weapon damages and armor penetration. For one thing the damages are random (reflecting the variation lethality when striking a body) maing ithard for them to consistently penetrate a given thickness of armor. For another, the range is condensed so much that rounds end up being able to penetrate armor that they never could, again due to the variables for damage. What's different in the supplement?

The amount of retreating, or the amount of shooting. What teneded to happen with us was that PCs who weere good shoulds would pull an Indian Jones and just shoot people rather than risk a HTH encounter. Esepcially if the PC wasn't that good at HTH. About the "arcade" stuff. What I was reffering to was that the Streetfighter RPG was based off of the Streetfighter series of arcade fighting games, and had some special maneuvers to duplicate the abilties of the game. Throwing fireballs and such. That is the kind of thing we'd need to eliminate if we wanted to adapt the mechanic to BRP. Unless you want spies throwing fireballs. But the mthod is one of the few that would capture that "comapring maneuvers" feel of the TS tables.

TS did. It even had an assassination table. In fact, that is one of TS weaknesses. Like AD&D, pretty much every aspect of the game required some specific rule and an accompanying table, and host of modifiers. Most of those rules are very detailed, but sometimes to the point of comic relief. I flipped through the TS book the other day, thanks to this thread, and ntoiced that, according to the bullet modifiers table, .32ACP rounds do more damage than 5.56 NATO rounds, and that a .45 ACP bullet,does more damage than a .30-06! For some odd reason, TS failed to differentiate between pistol and rifle ammunition! So I think we might all be guilty of letting our nostaligia tint our view of some of these older RPGs. Not that TS was bad, just that it really needed to be streamlined. For instance, the assassination table could have been discarded and replaced with a modfier to the standard damage roll. There was a TS Companion book, but while it added some new stuff, it meant even more tables. As for the WIL rolls in Bond. Yeah they made a big difference in how Bond played compared to other RPGs. We had one campaign where one PC opted for a Detonics Combat Master (a >45) and discovered just how much extra stopping power the weapon hand in the RPG. That extra - EF to Pain Resistance rolls made quite a difference. Thing thing about the Bond RPG was that it could handle the Bond of the novels as well as the Bond of the films, so you could do a lot more with the rules than one might think.

I finally managed to dig out my RQ2 book, and the training/experience see-saw is speficailly listed as applying to combat skills.

I still doesn't really adress the basic issue, that anybody can master any skill. Again it isn't a complaint, just an observation about RPGs in general.

More like we thought the guys with the straight jacket would have gotten you, by now.

I see it a bit closer to Harn. That is, smaller (1-2%) improvements. But the 1D6-2 roll ins't too bad.

Don7t let the tables fool you. Despite the huge number of possible targets zones to strike, the combat system was basically a form of "rock-paper-scissors". Skill didn't play much of a factor. If you wanted to do that, you would ned to expand on things. There is amartila arts supplement mentoid eailer thad adds those types of maneuver to the game. Now, if you want to add in the tactical elemt of matching maneuvers and counter maneuvers, I7d suggest typing to adapt the system used in the Streetfighter RPG. it gave each maneuver a speed rating (determiend by the maneuver, your Dex, and your skill). Higher Speed would go off first, and some maneuvers could be "aborted to". For instance you cold "abort" a slow, powerful, attack for a faster block. it had rules for combinations, too. While many of "arcade game" aspects would need to be dropped, the underlying idea could be used in BRP.

Comapred toTS? Quite a few. Here is a partial list: 1) Shot placement and skill play a major factor in weapon effectiveness. In TS (as with most RPGs) it is mostly random. 2) Stopping power. The WIL roll that people have to make when it means that someone who gets shot can just ingore the wound and shoot back (until his hit points/Life Levels run out). 3) Much easier way to handle modfiers. In TS, there are a lot of modfiers, and most are not very user friendly. For instance some weapon range modfiers are things like -147. Figuring out the chance to hit can get tedious when you have to work out several modfiers,, and several shots. For instance, the automatic weapons fire modifier is something like -11% per shot fired. -10% per shot woudl have been a lot more player friendly. Ease Factors are much, much easier. 4) No hit points. THat are just a few things. Now, to be fair to Top Secret, it was written in 1980, and pioneered a new genre for roleplaying. Soit deserves credit for doing many things first, even if they way it did somethings left a lot to be desired.

Depends on what youwant. The basic martial arts system from RQ/BRP (roll under skill, double damae) is simple and fast. Not very interesting, but simple and fast. You could also add in the Unarmed Combat Power from the powers section to reflect expert martila artists. Or you could try adapting something like the martial arts system for HERO.

Don't let the babes and the tuxedo fool you. That system handles modern combat as well as anything else I've seen. Yes, there are a few tweaks in the PCs favor (in a Bond adventure they need 'em). But you can do ANYTHING you can do in TS with JB. I sed to do commando raids, and training excercises with it, even converteing some stuff for Delta Force.

Ah, the 89+ was a typo. That explains it. As for the difference between my results and the chart, well apparently they changed the table in BRP. It used to be the way I mentioned in RQ3, and is apparently supposed to be that way by the text. The difference lies in how they did the rounding. By the rules, rounding is to the nearest (that is one of thie standards for the system) v, but the table rounded up. Bu, like Thalaba says, you can certainly follow the table if you want and round up. The differnce will only be 1%. As long as that 89-00 was a typo , you are doing fine.

Orginal as in the first edtion boxed set that came with the "Sourcebook for the 1920s" in it.

The dungeon claw was a sign of the system, not the times. Other, espioe RPGs of the era were not as bad. Well, I spent a few buck more and bought the James Bond 007 RPG, which IMO is probably the best system for the genre. I know what you mean. I only mentioned S.I. because it's game mechanics would adapt more readily to BRP than the original. Some of the orgnial's game mechancis, like HTH and Surprise Values and "class" and "levels" would be more problematic when converting to BRP. BRP to me is the ideal system to capture "update" of old Top Secret. Presently I have everything from old TS save modules TS005 - Operation: Orient Express & TS006 - Operation: Ace of Clubs. I am hoping to have a complete collection soon.