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Since it is D&D, can't the input be in the form of radio and check boxes? Just select race, gender, classes, and preferred gear. Invincibility and the desire to kill things and take their stuff should be the DEFAULT (and only) setting.

You mean the rumours of 5E being a classless, skill based system, using percentile dice isn't true?

Fair enough. I thought that was what you meant, but with the various editions and name changes it can sometimes get confusing. Not as confusing as RQ2, but then Issaries wasn't trying to confuse things. I haven't seen HQ2. From what I've read the major difference seems to be that the game has dropped any sort of benchmarking or absolute scale, and instead all tasks are rated on a scale realtive to the characters. Not necesariliy a bad thing, at least for a game that aims for the mythic/cinematic style of play that Robin Laws shoots for, but not ideal for ALL sorts of gaming.

Point taken. The comic lines aren't what they once were. There was a time when Marve's super hero titles worked under a certain "common reality". DC's too. Now there is a lot more variation between titles or even in one title, depending on who is wrting it. While I do like more flexibility and variation, I think that the lack of a any consitency is one of the things that is hurting the comics industry in recent years. And as I have noted, I disagree. I don7t think it handles the "lower end" fine, but needs tweaking there. The middle end requires massive tweaking, and it cannot handle the high end at all without a massive rewrite. Now we might be disagreeing on just where the middle and high end are. But even at the low end, BRP BAtman and BRP Daredevil need a LOT of help to avoid becoming a statistic. One "bat-fumble" and it's over. Hey, we see pretty much eye to eye here. I prefer the SAGA edition to either of the two other Marvel games. The first one is the most popular, buy really doesn't play that well (I think the fans of the old MSHRPG are probably looking at it through rose colored glasses, forgetting things like AMAZING Strength vs. AMAZING body armor). I thought the MARVEL UNIVERSE RPG was interesting, but the "allocated stones" mechanic was flawed. Too much was tied to the refresh rate, and characters with fixed bonuses looked like they could rule the game. But I never tried the system out to see how it actually ran. IMO the SAGA system, both in MArvel and Dragonlance was a very good game that never got the attention it deserved.The "player active"mechanic used, where all tasks were treated as something for the players do do, was an inspiration. I still think that Marvel SAGA would make a great system for an anime RPG.

Yes,it does. And on more that one level. Packages for the various types of heroes (call the "Origin Packages" and spring them at the next Convention) would be a nice boon for such a game. All things that would help with running such a game, but still a sign that BRP really needs tweaking to handle Supers. At least Supers in the mold o the comics. If you wanted to run a more gritty/realistic type of Supers campaign, without the "four color" trappings, BRP works nicely, "out of the box." I could see using it for a "modern day" version of Cybergeneration. With teenagers in 2011 getting super powers in a world devoid of superheroes and villains (Hmm, that could really be interesting...) Yes. BRP is, at it's heart, a toolkit to create and RPG system tailored to a concept. No debate there. I'm not saying that BRP can't be adapted to handle something. I'm saying that it isn't well suited for some things "out of the box". For instance, I think Superheroes would require some tweaking with the STR, SIZ Table, and damage relationships to get them to beeter match up with the genre. I don't see that as a flaw, just a sign that "super reality" is substantially different from most other RPG "realities". It just ins't possible for one system to hanbdle all things equally well without some "modding". Pius some RPGs are better suited for this sort of thing. Any one of the three Marvel Super Hero RPGs handles the X-Men better than BRP does, in no small part because those games were specifically designed to do just that. But running a typical Supers campaign in BRP is going to require more work on the GMs part than running a typical fantasy or modern day campaign.

Yes,it does. And on more that one level. Packages for the various types of heroes (call the "Origin Packages" and spring them at the next Convention) would be a nice boon for such a game.

She7s right. The cannon tends to stain everything, and it7s impossible to keep the mashed potatoes on the plate. The cannon just isn't that practical. THe enemy always target the corn starch storage depots. A biscuit cannon with a gravy feed device, yes, but not the actual gravy cannon. Now a gravy bomber on the other hand, is a very logical and reasonable means of applying technology to meet (meat?) the need for aerial gravy distribution.

It's not that easy. For example, in the Comics, heroes get sent flying, then get up and continue the fight. With BRP a strong character is probably going to take a weaker one out (0HP) with one it. Whatever option used, would need to be applied to the NPC mooks, too, or else the PCs are going to be warned for murder fairly soon. And then some attacks simply should be treated as lethal. A burst from a SMG isn't going to just knock Batman out. Game Mechanics have a lot to do with that. For instance, if someone has an attack that no one bought armor against, then the PCs are toast. Those "X-Men" would have a hard time in BRP if they were up against the Radioactive Man. True, to some extent, but most of the major heroes and villians in the comics have had thier abilties defined to some extent. For instance the Hulk, Thor and the rest of MArvel7s "A list" strongmen can lift 100+ tons, and giving us a decent benchmark for working up a BRP STR score. Where I see problems is in what they can do with that score in the game.

Quite clarification. By HQ1 do you mean HQ1 or HeroWars (the name HQ was forced to go by when somebody else had the copy write on the HQ name)? I think I have HQ1, and haven't seen the latest version. But I think I agree with you on this. The new version relative scaling is good for the type of heroic fantasy gaming that the game was built for, but would be a nightmare for the superhero genre. Since Supers can routninly do impossible things we need an absolute scale just so we can wrap our head around what they are actually doing.

Yeah, but I don't think you could prove it. For one thing HQ rates everything in a relative fashion. Supoers would need some sort of benchmarks to show just how fast, strong, etc. they are. Strong 10W3 works okay in Glorantha, but isn't worth crap if you are trying to pick up a tank. Another problemis that in HQ all things are equal. A character can, overcome a foe's Nuclear Death Ray ability with lLepidoptery. Just how is a mystery (bore the bad guy with trivia until he surrenders?), but HQ allows it. I think that for HQ to be a really, really good superhero game the abilties would need to be defined, and that is the big no-no.

I agree. It didn't. But I also think the added complexity was needed to fit the genre. I don't think it could handle "X-Men" level very well. One thing about BRP is that it is simply to easy to kill a character with an attack at "X-Man" level. BRP is just not as forgiving as the X-Men comic. Attacks that would leave a character in the comics lying on the group unconscious would put thier BRP counterpart in a body bag. Not that this is a bad thing. It is just the difference between BRP lethality and the comics. There is a scense in one of the issues of Avengers where Hawkeye threatens to shoot a villain (Power Man or whatever he changed it to) with an arrow. The villian doesn't back down and Hawkeye actually does it. The bad guy is shocked as despite years of shooting people, Hawe\keye has never managed to penetrate someone with an arrow before. The effect is like running a group of D&Ders in BRP and having one of them get impaled by an arrow. At one point, long long ago (15 years?), I was in the process of licensing Superworld with another author and we were going to radically re-invent the system to accomodate the genre. Various complications made it fall through, but it would have been interesting.

What I would like to see is something where you could "dial the realism factor" to suit a campaign. Say with BRP core ruls at one end, and a 4-color comic variant at the other. A few alternate rules, some variant tables and the ability to cut & paste stuff.

Another thing is that modfiying dice rolls is a new addtion to BRP and an optional one at that, while the concet is central to Fate and SotC. Even when a character doesn't invoke an aspct, he can always spend a Fate Point to adjust a die roll. It is commonplace. In BRP is a a rarity. Heck, for years there was debate o just what a GM should allow with a Luck roll. No matter how ood a game systemis, no one system does everything well. Some games have featurs that make them better suited for certain tasks, and often those features don't port over easily to other RPGs. IMO Aspects are a bad fir for BRP. In factBRP is probably one of the worst choices for such a mechanicsnce the BRP rules are radically differernt from SotC.

Yes, but thse characters are not actually SUPERheroes. You don7t need the superpowers subsystem for those characters or thier foes. I7m not aying that BRP is "bad" because it doesn't handle superheroes well. I'm just saying that we probably could use a supplment for Supers and that it should bend a few of the BRP core ruls to fit the genre.

Exploing dice can be a pain. Especially when they get so hot as to obliterate a PC. THere isn't much a player can do when what was supposedly 1D6 gives a result of 52. I7m runnig a D6 Star Wars campaign, and that game uses a Wild Die D6, maning that 33% of the rolls are affected one way or another. I have to step in at times, especialy during the large battles, to keep a fluke roll from ending the campaign.

I think it was/is. Back before BRP was relased, Jason posted some warnings that the various "power" systems were not "balanced" of against each other, but more or less cribbed from thier original soruces. Some things did get some playability tweaks (Magic World magic was downgraded a little so that mages couldn't just be walking artillery). It's a start. There are quite a few other major differences. A key one is that in Superworld characters can soak damage with Power Points. Two characters (super powered or not) can get into a fist fight and beat each other to a pulp. In standard BRP, the characters would break bones, and kill each other. With Supers it gets gruesome. There is just no way tbeat someone up without leaving them in critical condition. BRP does have a knockout rule, but to make a supers campaign really work, you need to have a non-lethal damage system of some type. Now the tricky question: How many/much of those changes could/would/should apply to the start BRP core rules? IMO not many, if any. The Supers genere is very differernt from the "gritty realism" that is inherent to BRP and most of its spin offs. It doesn't really mix 'n match well the same way some o the other power systems could, at least in thoery, interact. Once you got guys able to punch through brick walls, suvive 100m falls without a scratch, and and pick up tanks by the gun barrel, you've warped the lthe lgame reality enough that "gritty realism" seems out of place. IMO the same is true for any genre or setting that has a signficant difference in feel from the BRP core rules.

I think that aspects could work in BRP, if it were used without and of the "power systems" to compete with it. Either don't use magic, powers, psionics with aspects, or make such powers limited to a few characters. BRP also "suffers" in this manner by having attributes. Adding aspects is like double dipping. A guy withan 18 STR is supposedly strong in BRP, but if a PC with a 10 STR takes a "strong as an ox" aspect, we have a problem. And BRps resolution system is very differernt from SotC. In SotC, most rolls are opposed, and tagging aspects is important for winning the conflict. In fact, Aspects can be more important than ability, since taking two or three aspects can throw a conflict in favor of a poorly skilled character. That is completly opposite to how BRP is designed to work. IN BRP if a character with 20% skill beats one with 100% skill, he got very, very lucky. Thus aspects are going to cause a radical change in the importance and operation of skills. In BRP skills are king. Aspects will "deposte" skills in BRP. Now I think that "it can be done", but to get things to work out well requires some radical adjustments to the BRP rules, and getting the players to accept those changes. A player who has spent months building his character7s sword skill to 117% isn't going to take kindly to a new rul that lets someone with 26% skill beat him by tagging "quick reactions, strong grip, steady hand, and light on hs feet". I think that to really get aspects to work, you wou have to rebuild a BRP varinat from the ground up. Ditch attributes, and make aspects a core mechanic.

I think I got your drift. What I am saying is that I don't believe that was the intention. The powers were cribbed from Worlds of Wonder/Superworld and modified slightly. Superworld was able to handle the Hulk and Superman (well, not Supers unless you had a lot more points, but it could do a good knockoff. I know, I did it). I think "goldbook" BRPs difficulties in handling high powered characters isn't intention, but merely a byproduct of adding Superpowers to the BRP core rules, without the necessary adjustments for supers that Superworld had. That the designer used Worlds of Wonder Superworld booklet rather than the Superowlrd box set also played a factor. But that is just my impression. Jason put "goldbook" BRP together, so he's the guy who would "know" what his intentions were. The point is probably moot anyway. The fact remains that BRP doesn't handle the supers genre well, and that there are those who would like to see something like the Superworld supplment for the new BRP, so there is at least some market for it. Personally I think there are lots o RPGs out there now that can handle Supers better, and that the idea of a "BRP Champions" was novel in the early 80s but rather uninspired now. But, all the other "generic" systems have a Supers supplment, so why not BRP?

I think youi might be misinterpreting earlier posts. Many of us have said that the BRP rules "work" for running the powered human concepts, but not for the more extreme types. The examples you give, were mentioned eariler, with BRP being a good fit for Batman, with Spiderman pushing the limits and Iron Man being a bit too much. BRPs "gritty realism" gets in the way of other types of supers. I don't think that was a intention, but rather the result of adding superpowers to the BRP core rules without the modifications that went with Superworld. Jason had to mix toghether several similar, but different sets of game mechanics to get BRP, and that meant deciding what to keep and what to throw out. I think that Supers did get shortchanged in BRP, but the nature of the book meant than something was going to get shortchanged, and Supers was the logical choice. I've seen it done, but there is always a trade off. That is one reason why Chaosium used to customize their core game system to accommodate whatever setting they were using it for. Overall, I agree with you on what it does and does not do well. But just because you don't want to use BRP for a Supers game doesn't means that Supers didn7t get shortchanged in BRP. If I wanted to run a Supers game I would use a different RPG, too, but just proves that BRP isn't as good at handling Supers as some other RPGs. Even the light Supers cause problems with BRP. A major concern is that on a Supers scale, BRP is not very forgiving. If something gets through the armor, it is usualy fatal. Spiderman punches Batman and does enough damage to turn him into the Bat-stain. With 6 different attack types, every PC hero is almost aurred to be a sitting duck against something.

The big golden book presents some difficulties for supers. For one thing the new BRP uses the size table from CoC, but with RQ style damage bonuses. This means that damage goes up much more slower in comparsion to Superworld (either edition). For example, someone like the Hulk, who can lit 100 tons + (STR 91ish ) and weightsover 800 pounds (SIZ 31 ish ) "only" had a db of something like 7d6. That is too low for the Hulk to smash tanks and such the way he does in the comics. On the other end of the scale, DC characters who can lit battleships are going to find the scaled down SIZ scores of such vehicles much too low. I think for a revamp Superworld to work, it would need to throw out quite a biit o BRP and replace it with things from or similar to those iin Superworld.

One option would be to oppose each culture reliion with that of the other cultures. To difiernt cultures could have widely or even slightly different beliefs that result in opposition.

Ah! I understand. I've had similar experiences with products from Europe.

There is more to it than intention. There is also awareness, and ability. Going after someone or something like this costs money. You have to pay for lawyers, and fees up ront, and often it isn't worth it, since the other party might not have the means to cover your expenses. In a case like this, companies tend to turn a blind eye: partially because it isn't costing them any profits (Worlds of Wonder has been out of print for decades), and partly becuase they would alienate their fan base. Case in point, Chaosium could go after the BRP site, and try to get Triff to remove the alternate rules, and homebrew stuff that is here, but it would be very stupid to do so. Triff hasn't histed any commercial supplements or such, and going after him to get him to remove something dumb like a BRP character sheet would simply aggravate a forum comprised mostly of Chaosium fans and customers.

Ouch. It is probably moot now, but just in case someone else wants to get FATE/SotC, they used to sell it as a hardcopy+PDF bundle for only a little more than buying the hardcopy. It would certainly be cheaper than printing the PDF.