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Technical difficulties when posting.

Sorry, technical difficulties when posting.

I'd be inclined to just go with Viking 50 and then just halve or quarter the skil (or up the difficulty) for secondary and "other" skills. So basically 50/25/13 but only tracking one number. I think the specialized/jack of all trades thing isn't noticed by players unless the NPC is around for a long time, and the players have a chance to notice it, and their ability in other categories. In that case a full character sheet is probably warranted. For me, in game play, I'll sometimes add a skill to a reoccurring minor NPC if it comes up in play. For instance, in one sci-fi campaign we had a minor NPC who ended up always being the one on duty when they had to fix a shuttlecraft. So after a few such encounters I added a Shuttlecraft specialty to his sheet. By then end of the campaign he was one of their "go to" guys when it came to shuttlecraft. I find it's actually a good way to flesh out minor characters. A minor trait or hobby can help to develop an NPC's personality or backstory.

The hard part was trying to keep from laughing while running the adventure. A key thing here is that RPGs take plac ein our heads. So if you can put an idea into the heads of your players it is real to them. It's the same with NPCs. How tough the appear to the players has less to do with their actual stats and more to do with how you present them to the players, dice rolls included. In one game the GM got on a hot streak with a minor NPC ( a street urchin) and rolled double crticals with two pistols. We didn't know that and just assumed he was a great shot. By the time the GM told us about the double criticals, the NPC was an officer in the musketeers and actually had become a great shot Good luck, and have fun.

You welcome. It's actually from Fate: Spirit of the Century. What they did was give locations aspects that could be tagged for bonuses, like with characters. So if you were fighting a bad guy in a burning building you could tag the "burning" aspect for a bonus to your combat roll (or escape roll). BRP game mechanics are different, but the concept ports over. You could even use one of those "things you find in a..." tables to help you round out a location. The idea works outside of combat too. I once stressed out a PC who was doing a little B&E to check out a warehouse just by having him step into a water dish as he climbed in through the window. Amazing what a water dish with "GOLIATH" written on it can do. The guard took the dog home with him, but the PC didn't know that, and spent the next half hour on edge expecting the guard dog to appear. Next time I do something like that, I think I'll make Goliath a Toy Poodle.

I usually scribble out some sort of rough map just so the players know where everyone and everything is. It usually not to to character scale either. One of the drawbacks to a battle mat is that it forces GMs to put everything close together. No one is every really out of range with 5-10 foot squares. If you want to make things more interesting, make the setting more interactive. Come up with a few details about the area where you are staging the fight, and think of how the the characters could incorporate them into the battle. For instance, if they are in an old warehouse, there could be a forklift someone could hope into a use to push , racks with various products that could be toppled onto cultists or maybe a power line that could be used to electrocute something. An alleyway could have a dumpster, a fire escape, some broken bottles, an open door to the busy kitchen of a restaurant Just think up a few features for the scene. Then have a NPC use one of those features in a fight to help get the players thinking of such things.

Careful, that might make your world go round. 😉

Nice! It has a satellite image look to it that must have taken some work to pull off.

I hope it's nothing serious. Best wishes towards him.

Don't blame yourself, I suspect they were already mixed up. 😉 I'm surprised I got that right before coffee. ☕

I believe Classic fantasy was by Rod Leary AKA @threedeesix. He hasn't visited the boards in quite some time.

Sad, but probably true. Not a good thing for the hobby though. When the day comes where the majority of tabletop RPG players are getting the senior discount, then the hobby will probably be like rotary telephones. Definitely. This might be a case of new tech and capabilities working against us. Old RPGs were done in basic, legible fonts on a while high contrast background. Today most games are full color with lots of artwork, and can use highly stylized fonts designed to invoke a sense of the setting/genre being emulated. But generally at the expense of legibility. And to be fair, BRP isn't bad as far as size and legibility goes, it's just our eyes aren't what they used to be.

LOL! Me too. I used to be able to read that small font in the RQ2 APPENDICES, and old C&S was entirely written in something like a 4 point font, which I went through with no problem. Now, I'm lucky if I can read the chapter headings without glasses. I wonder, as the average age of table top RPGers increases will we wind up with LARGE PRINT editions of all the old RPGs?

Oops.😳

Now there I might be able to help you. In the US, most photos of military gear, and vehicles taken by government agencies are considered to be in the public domain. Apparently years ago it was decided that as all this stuff was paid for with taxpayer money, the taxpayers owned the gear, and so if was considered wrong to charge people for photos of stuff that they owned. It doesn't apply to all photos, but generally speaking you can usually find a PD image of US military gear without much trouble. For instance, the USMC have released this photo of the ULCV https://www.marcorsyscom.marines.mil/Photos/igphoto/2003237282/ into the public domain, although they do ask that you credit the photographer.

Yeah that's the thing about using art or owned IPs. I'd suggest either not using art, or use art that is in the public domain. As for something that touches on an IP, such as Aliens, you best approach is to remove any IP specific stuff and replace it with homemade or generic substitutes. Yes, it's not ideal, but unless you can get a license, it's the only way you'll be able to put stuff up here without problems. Keep in mind that the folk at Chaosium and Triff need to protect themselves from any claims of wrongdoing. BTW, once you get the posting bugs worked out, you might want to send a message to TrippyHippy about these, as it would appear to fit right into his "mini-settings" idea.

No, it isn't. THe only real difference is that with each player rolling it turns into a 2d20 bell curve. Yup, there too.

Yup. I remember that from RQ2, I think. There was an article in Different Worlds which did just that. You could have different success levels, you'd just need to extend the specials for the passive side. But, ultimately Pendragon does the same thing in a more elegant fashion. Oh, and on a related note, I was working on a solo RPG that used the resistance table, but in a hidden way. I made 50%-NPC skill a modifier to the PC's ability. So if the PC with Sword 70% and was facing a bandit with ax 60%, the PC would subtract 10% when fighting that bandit. If he later ran into a goblin with scimitar 30%, he'd add 20% to his skill. It was the resistance table. Since I used the ones die to determine success level, I could determine who wins and the success level with one roll, which was very nice for a solo game. You also got a choice of specials to make solo combat more interesting. But could be scaled further on if needed.

I agree, I just pointed it out as an option. Yup. I Ultimately this all comes down to RQ not being designed with opposed rolls in mind. It had Attack vs. Parry and the resistance table. It predated that by a few years.

One thing you could do is to have something that breaks ties. For instance higher skill wins on ties or lower tens die, or some such. I was working on a method of using the ones die to determine success level rather than math/table. For instance all crticals ended with a "1", all specials ended with a "2" and so forth. That way one a tie a 46 will beat any success than ended in a 7 or higher. That way ties only happened when both the success levels and the die rolls matched (1% of the time).

Sorry, typo, Stormbringer. I believe the story goes that Chaosium had been working on a new edition of Stormbringer, but that was when Michael Moorcock wanted to end the arrangement, and licence out Elric to another company. So, not wanting to just throw the new edtion away, TPB decided to remove all the Young Kingdoms specific stuff, and release it as Magic World. At least that's what people said in the Stormbringer forum. That's why Magic World is so similar to Stormbringer and Elric!

Well, it was supposed to be called Stormbringer but things happened. Your comment does highlight one of the weaknesses of generic RPGs, namely that they are generic. No one gets excited over generic coffee, generic soft drinks, or generic anything.

Not really. The "mark" as it were was to handle encumbrance. THe fatquie system was made as a replacement to the encumbrance rules of RQ2. True, but wouldn't probably shouldn't have impacted fatigue. In combat you get an adrenaline dump and don't usually feel fatigue until later, when it all wears off and you crash. Of course that should apply to all fatigue though, not just encumbrance. I think most people's objects to the fatigue system were three fold: You can to mark off a point every round. You had to subtract 1% per point into negative from everything. It made high stats much more important in terms of what armor you could fight in while still having some skill, and for what length of time.

Oh, that's like tossing a grenade into the room. I doubt you'll get a consensus. MRQ1 maybe? And that mostly for how they bungled the Gloranthan cults. Orlanth with the Chaos rune because TPB didn't understand that Gloranthan Chaos wasn't the same as D&D Chaotic. Well most people didn't like the fatigue rules from RQ3. Ticking off a fatigue point every round and appling an increasing peanlty to roll, in 1% increments. Probably the winner for " un-fun or overly clunky" Yeah, that was probably fatigue points. Not that there aren't other things here and there that people don't like, but Fatigue Points probably topped most peole lists. Oh, it's not that bad. It's just pesky micro-managing bookeeping. Good Luck! From the ground up can be a bit tricky. Be sure to playtest stuff. It's surprising just how consistently another pair of eyes can spot something in ten seconds that the designers somehow could miss repeatedly for months.

LOL! One of the engineers I worked for once told a doctor that at least he can fix his mistakes, not bury them. Argh, cold solder joints, solder bridges, more rework. But that's just in. In game terms you have the skill, sorta. You just don't have it at the same level, and vice versa. What I can see, in game terms, as that as someone gets further away from their field of expertise, the difficulty goes up. The task is still within their general field, just not something that they actually do. BTW, on the software side of things, I gamed with one of those engineers and routinely went to his house and did tech support for him. Mostly undoing the stuff he did. He once deleted a bunch of Windows system files that "he didn't install". Now the guy could program machines. It's just that he was used to a very different operating system (G Code) and the memory constraints of CNC machines. Things like hidden system files to support the GUI were not something he was aware of. At least not until I had to reinstall Windows.