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One thing I always wondered about it just how an artist can copywrite something that is based on another work. For instance if an artist creates a painting that is obviously a scene based on LOTR or Star Trek, how can that artists holdnrights to the image? I can understand how some thing would be generic and not (i.e.elves), but how could someone copywrite an image of the Enterprise as "original" work?

Thanks soltakss, You gave me much more that I asked for, too. :thumb: THe stats do help to see how easy it is (or isn't) to port something over from one system to another. With the noticeable difference of putting structure points on character scale, the stats are very similar, if not identical, to those in RQ3 and Sailor on the Seas of Fate. BTW, I take it Hull works as armor?

I7m not surprised. We tend to think alike on a lot of topics around here. For me doing "divide by 10" is easy. THen I just mutiply that by two or divde by twoto get the percentages. Or just rember the 230%/50%/70%/90% breakpoints for crticals. But as MRQ has illustrated, a lot of people can't do that sort of math in thier heads easy, or even work out the resistance table.

RQ3 had much of the same stuyff as Sailor on THe seas Of Fate, but slightly modified, and with ships that were not specific to theYoung Kingdoms. Neither are quite the same as BRP though.

Hey Simon, Could you give us a sample ship writeup from RQ Pirates so we can see what it is like and how it compares to/adapts to BRP?

Normal rounding has been the standard in every BRP game. vI find it fairly easy, thanks to the "3/5/7/9 rule". The critical breakpoints are 20% apart, going up at 30%, 50%, 70% etc. Some people prefer a straight 1/10% percentage (ala Stormbringer),. I think it all kind of boils down to how well a particular group can handle the math. Some people can calculate critical chances in their had on the fly, others find the 5% critical chance to bog their game down. Personally, I think that practically everybody should be able to calculate the special and critical chances in their heads, but apparently that is not the case.

Deja Vous?:eek:

Hi Triff, Scans on the way. Sorrythat I took so long, but I think my scanner is dying.

Triff, I've got them, and will try to scan them tonight.

Like others have said, it depends on the GM, game, genre, players, and how focused everyone is. The more the group focuses on characters, and roleplaying the smaller the group should be. Overall, I think 3-4 PCs is probably the optimum amount for an RPG, if the players are actually roleplaying. If they are just rolling dice and killing things, 6 is better. A GM can kind of cheat on this a little if the PCs pair off somewhat. THen the GM can kinda treat each team as a PC to interact with. THe main difficulties are keeping everyone occupied while still giving special attrention to characters when needed, and dealing with the effects of "crosstalk" as those who have nothing to due usually socialize with each other. Crosstalk can be fine in, say, a generic fantasy setting, but can really kill the mood if the GM is running a horror adventure. But then, large groups just don't work well in that genre.

soltakss raises a good point here. Game rules generally should reflect the "reality" that why are trying to mimic. I recall a Superheroperheroish campaign I ran a few years back w. here a character fell out (well crashed though) the window of a skyscaper. Realsistically, the PC should have been dead.or at least badly messed up from the 100 meter fall. In the game the PC was just stunned for a round, and trashed the sidewalk and a water main. Since BRP is a generic systerm, I think the way to go would be to try to make the explisive rules fairly realistic with options to "dail down" the effects as desired to reflect certain settings or styles of play. That way everyone could get what they want.

I done a litle work on this with my vehicle design stuff, so here are some of my observations: 1) THe explsoion values are a bit high.In game termsonly takes about 1 lb of C-4 to give explssion damage equvalent to a 120mm HE tank round. That just isn't right. 2) Assuming the car could set off the anti-tank mine (doubtful), the damage would really go into the wheel, which would prtotect the occupants of the vehcile, but not that much. BRP armor values kind of assume that the occupants are only protected by the skin of the vehicle, as when the vehicle is shot at. In this case, I7d probably give the passengers the benefit of the higher AP rating, but it probably won't make much of a difference, since the remaining damage is probably still going to be high enough to waste everyone. 3) One thing not considered in the rules is that the vehicle is in direct constact with the charge, and that the charge is probably shapred to maximize it's effect in the exact direction the vehcile is at, in realtion to the charge. This would make the charge much more effective against the vehcile, and less effective than, say, a grenade on those not directly over the blast. 4) Part of the explosive's effectiveness on vehicles in the real world is because vehicles as so large. A vehicle that is, say 8 times the size of a man, probably get hit with 4 times the shrapnel and blast due to increased surface area. Also, the explion can trigger secondary explsoions, fires, and other damage. So a vechile that sruvives and explosion probably wouldn't survive it for long.

Sorry for the dealy, I got "shanghaied" to do some apartment renovating, and since I have to move into the aforementioned apartment by the end of the month, I haven't had much time to work on this. But, here is a quick heads up on where I stand: I got a copy of an army filed manual (FM5-250) for demolotions, and the cube root thing is about right for brecching charges (making holes through walls), but probably doens't quite hold up for cutting charges and other types of demolotions. I7m working on converting the formulas into easy to use BRP terms, but CoC's increasing the damage and range increment by 50% per doubling causes some whacky results. What seems to work out best is to use a standardized blast radius for all explosives, since increasing damage dice increases the blast radius anyway. Sothing like -1d6 for each 50% increase in distance might do it. That way I can use the Reletive Effectivness values to allow the system to work with just about any explosive. What is looking good to me at the moment is to use something like x2 explosive=+1d6 damage. It is easy, and seems to hold up well in game terms. It also keeps a 10 kg satchel charge from doing 50d6 to everything within 20m, and killing everybody within a 1km radius, making demoliions skill kind of pointless. I'm also seeing if I can make it all compatible with my old armor and vehcile rules. What I've got for a working model is giving the object a resistance value based on the SIZ of the hole, with a modifer based on material and thickness. I need to compare it to the sample protection values in the BRP rules to see how well it will work in game play. BTW, it it helps FM 5-250 has all sorts of formulas and tables that explain how much explsoivieve you need to do just about anything. I found it online, and could put some of the more pertinent stuff up here if desired. My only worry is that the FM is real world info, and not the kind of thing that we might want to spread around. While we find it useful for gaming, there are probably some poeple out there who might want to know how to blow up bridges for less friendly reasons.

We think a lot alike here. I also think that increasing the blast radius at the same time is part of the problem since increasing the damage automatically increases the area of effect anyway. I got out an Army Field Manual (5\2590) and seeing how the math looks.

In RQ3 secondary stats capped out the bonus at +10%. I think this was becuase Dinosaurs and other big creatures in RQ2 and Stormbringer ended up with insame base attack pecentages due to Strength. Flipping through the attack chances for dinosaurs in Gateway Bestiary reveals the problem. As for the two problems, yeah, your right, IMO anyway. The combined effect of the two problems is that all heroes are very vulnerable to one or more types of attack, and will probably be killed outright when running into a foe with that power. For instance, a laser could burn holes right through the Hulk, not something you'd ever seen in the comics. What might work would be to allow character some sort of default protection from other forms of armor. For instance, while a tank might have armor designed to stop kinetic attacks,just the general thickness/mass would provide some protection against lasers. Maybe 1/4th value?

Boy, you aren't kidding! Especially in the Appendix. For the benefit of those who haven't seen RQ2, I'll note that the back of the book had an appendix of a dozen pages or so, written in small (6 point?) type with all sorts of optional and alternative rules. It'S probably the best (if not the only) appendix even provided with a RPG. Lots of good stuff was tucked away in there. Of coruse it'S the fiddle factor that ruins the application. It's hard to reflect things like stoning or 20d6 fireball attacks accurately in such terms. You traded your "mark of the beast" for a Monstermark? :D

rust, Since I won't be getting my copy of BRP until after Christmas, I was wondering if you could check the BRP spot rules for explosives and see if doubling the amount of explosive increases both damage and burst radius by 50% (as in CoC). The CoC spot rule is causing a lot of problems with demolitions and the effect explosices have during game play. I suspect that whoever thought up the doubling/+50% rule failed to consider that increasing the damage also increasesthe area of effect, and that doubling the number of dice every time you quadruple the amount of explosives ends up giving small to moderate sized conventional weapons bombs damage capability and area of effect that exceeds thermonuclear devices. Even rounding the numbers down, a conventional bomb packed with 500 lbs. ton of TNT (something that could be dropped from a plane) does over 500d6 damage with a range increment over 250 yards/meters. This pretty much ensures that it will obliterate (inflict at least 100d6 damage) to any target within 60miles/100km. To be fair, I believe that the doubling rule was never intended to be used for anything larger than, say, a sachel charge, or maybe two dozen sticks of dynamite. As far a demolitions goes, this makes it hard for a character to survive his attempt, and makes it pretty easy to trash anything short of a battleship with a 20 lb. satchel charge. So I guess I'll need to tweak things.

One method, used in Harn, but easily adaptable to BRP is the "fives and zeroes" method. In Harn, any roll than ends in a 5 or a 0 (10, 15, 20, 80, 95, etc). is a critical. Either a cortical success or a critical failure depending of if the roll is under the skill % or not. Now with BRP we could do somthing like this for crticals and specials. We could even change to make crticals any rolls than end with a 1, and specials any roll that ends with a 2. We could even adapt it so that only ever other digit (01, 21, 41) counts as a crtical and the others (11, 31, 51) count as specials. This would eliminate the math but still give the same crit and special percentages as the standard system. If we split up the range from crits and specials a bit we could expand the result for skills over 100%. For opposed tests, I'd be more inclined to use a D20 and go with the Pendragon method. That or the old ICE method off adding the skill to the die roll and rolling high. D100 and rolling low is probably the worse set up for opposed resolution.

Yay! Whenever I see a "installing latest security upgrade" notice I tend to get paranoid and assume to worse. Glad it was just routine.

Sure, put the pressure on. Actually it'S fun to do stuff like this. I just hope it doesn't suck or doesn't make sense with the rest of the BRP rules. One problem I'm already noticing is that the "double amount +50% damage" rule from CoC might not work well with th AP/HP ratings for vehicles. A M183 satchel pack will probably do enough damage in BRP terms (about 30d6) to blow a tank to bits. I don't think it would be quite as easy in reality. But hey, a character actually has to get close enough to place the charge on the tank in the first place, so he can probably use a break.

I think the "BRP Combat can be deadly" comment bears repeating. Unlike a lot of RPGs, PCs can go from being up an active to dead and gone with one lucky hit at any time. Now add Raise Dead is uncommon or unavailable in most BRP settings and you can see that it is usually best to let the PCs outclass the NPCs by a fair margin most of the time. Also, Double teams and surprise attacks are murder in BRP Again, unlike what a lot of players are used to and expect, two or three wimpy fighters pose a very serrious threat to an experienced warrior. Without a bunch of hit points to fall back on, the fact that the foes are getting two or three attacks per combat round usually compensates for a difference in skill. Also, the realtive low number of hit points mean that any surprise attack/ambush has a very good chance of crippling or killing a PC rather than "softening" them up as in most level based RPGs.

ALsonote that "zero edition" is not the finished rulebook, but was printed and released early to appease fans who wanted to see it and didn't want to wait for the final relase, since it wan't known when the book would be ready to ship. There are a few things in the rules that were not in or corrected since "zero", so it is worth checking out to see the updates. Chaosium was going to make a file with the corrections, but I don't know if it is done yet.

I agree, I don't find it easier, or more intuitive, for skills over 100% just doable. I still prefer the old RQ method of 5%/20%. I f9ind that just give the plays a copy of the old RQ crticall/sepcial/fumble chart on an index card or somehere on the character or note sheet works out the fastest, and allows for adjustments due to modifers easily. IN fact, I think it is probably as fast and easy as any of the supposedly "faster" methods. But then, my core RQ players knew how to divide by 5 and could remember the 30/50/70/90 breakpoints fr the 5% critical chart. In most cases we could tell something wa a crit or special before doing the math.

Connecting the dots...:confused: The original post mentioned the surprise that PCs got 2d6+6 INT and SIZ whille everyone else rolled 3d6. In fact, Elric is about the only BRP deriative where PCs and NPCs roll differently for INT and SIZ. In most other BRP based games, all (human) characters roll the same for attributes. This lead to explaining that, plus some comments as to if/why this is better or worse than the way other BRP games handle character attributes. So the orginal post is kinda based on a flawed premise. Where or not this place is cheaper than therapy depends on what price you place on your SANity. There are other ways to "pay" besides money,and sometimes this place can make you pay, and pay, and pay :eek:

But it shouold have been cut in the anti-heroic mold. That is what made the Elric saga special.