Atgxtg

Interesting, but I7d say use POW or CHA to continue acting rather than CON. It really isn't so much a question of your health, but of you determination.

CON would be used to survive or heal from the injury.

What I7d like to use is a delayed fatality/bleed to death rule. Something like a injury will inflict another point of general HP damage every (CON-DMG) minutes. Or maybe use a DMG vs. CON of resistance chart.

DMG Result

CS=1hp/SR

SS=1hp/MR

Sucess=1hp/MIN

Fail=1hp/hour

Fumble= 1hp/day

Successful treatment will stabilize the wound and stop HP loss.

In the real world, pretty much no one drops dead when they get shot, but everyone dies if they don't treat the wound. Maybe we could apply a modfier to the roll to treat the wound making it harder to stabilize more serious injuries?

BTW, while we are discussing injury. How about we swipe the HEaling Rate rules from Pendragon, where character heal (STR+CON)/10 HP per week? That way healthy character would heal faster than small sickly ones? It always bugged me that the guy with an 18 CON took just as long to heal from a 3 point injury as the guy with a 6 CON.

The key factor for any sort of Hero Point system is that it has limits. THe key advantages are that they let you avoid some horrendous dice rolls and set up for more story based adventures.

FOr example, one time I rolled up a character and got killed from a critical hit in the first fight (first attack, GM rolls 01, game over).

With smaller groups this can seriously slow down or derail a campagin. With a group, someone else can cover for a dropped PC or heal them or whatever, but with small groups losing one PC can throw the fight.

Another nice thing about the points is that they allow a GM to better model many (actually most) genres and settings better. Most works of fiction place the heroes in tight spots with the odds stacked against them . They hero manages to succeed, relying on wits, perseverance, and a good deal of script immunity. But, try to mirror that with most RPG mechanics and you just get a dead hero. In fiction the fledgling hero (at 30%) manages to survive his encounter with the evil master swordsman (140%), so he can find the master swordsman and be trained. In BRP the hero is meat. Chances of surviving the encounter are fairly slim. What Hero Points do is give the PC some minor script immunity.

As for the fumble thing. What I think people fail to grasp is that fumbles are much much more common thanks to multiple rolls. Basically it is Russian roulette. Keep rolling a a fumble is a certainty. This stems from one of the weakness of older RPGs: Most tasks are a simple succeed/fail roll, while combat is broken down to a series of rolls. If you actually try to use BRP to handle a real battle, EVERYBODY would be fumbling multiple times during the fight. A typical warrior would fumble, on average, one a minute!

The rpoblem with the inevitable fumble is that it comes up far too often one the dice than it should to be the realstic gaming you are talking about. If 1% or more of the airliners taking off fumbled every day, the FAA would shut the industy down.

Getting a fumble in combat is much more likely since you are making two skill rolls per round. Even at 1% fumble chance. Your typical 4 on 4 fight that lasts for four rounds is pressing its luck.

Oh, and as far a believability goes, the Bond RPG combat system is far more believable than BRP. It is also a lot more brutal.

Hero points are not layer fudging becuase they speficially have a mechanic that addresses their use, and restricts their number. Sort of like DI in RQ. GM fudiging has no such limits, and generally the better the GM, the less the need to fudge. So what happens is that the ones who do the fudging tend to be the ones who shouldn't, and then they overdo it.

Rurik,

Actually you can inflict a lethal wound with any weapon. It is just a question of how fast it takes to kill the guy, and if they are incapacitated or not. That is what I loved about TIMELORDS and CORPS.

THe problem is that most RPGs tend to focus sorly on enegy/power rather than placement. A .25 ACP round through the Eye is a lot more damaging than a .50 cal round round through you left pinky (unless said piky is in fromnt of the rest of you).

The 9mm/45ACP argument is way to complex for BRP. While I agree with you about over penetration, there is aslo the fact that even if a weapon transfers all of it energy, it doesn't mean that much it it is spread over to large an area. Most rifle round will overpenetrate a human body but still inflict more damage on the way through than slower mocving rounds.

Considering how fast this thread is growing, maybe it would be a good idea for Jason to do a new thread (part2, part3, etc.) once a week or after the thread gets to a certain size?

And why, again, won't luck rolls do pretty much the same thing?

Because LUCK rolls are an uncontrolled element (you can't be certain that a character CAN blow up the Death Star, defuse the a-bomb, etc.), a unimplemented one (I've never seen Luck rolls used to reduce damage from a sword hit. In BRP, LUCK rolls have generally been an afterthought), and an unlimited one (your LUCK roll never goes down. So if you got a POW of 19+ you can pretty much expect to make the roll).

Now if the difficulty of, say using LUCK kept going up everytime you used in during an adventure, like in EABA, then LUCK rolls could be used.

Hero/fate points just seem like a metagame distraction to me, similar to gimmicky dice mechanics like 'flip flops'... maybe I'd like them better if their use was limited to before the damage is rolled.

THe do provide some nice advantages. A great example is with small groups. IN RQ/BRP the consequnces of failing a roll can be pretty severe. THe consequnces of fumbling are disaterous. Okay, unitl you do a little number crunching and realize that every PC is going to fumble eventually, and that said fumble isn't too far off in the future.

Besides, unless the GM is a nut you're not playing 'against' him... and since fudging is assumed to be done in secret so how can that kill the sense of danger any more than heading into the 'big battle' with a fist full of hero points? I'm assuming the GM doesn't say, 'Ok, I'm gonna fudge that roll you just made...'

Easy. Lets say you have a group that is doing fine until Joe PC rolls a fumble, rolls bad on the funmble table and ends up cortically hitting his closest buddy and himself. With BRP is is impossible to "fudge" that without the Players knowing it.

It is the GM "fudging" for you that really sucks. Esepcially if he is secretive about it. I've seen it lead to players getting reckless (hey, a frontal assault worked the last time!) to arrogant (they knew the GM would save them). So the game got sutpider and stupider until eather the PCs become invincable, or the GM has enough, stops fudging, and has to deal with a bunch of confused players.

It's just a matter of taste I suppose... no right or wrong... leave them as thoroughly optional and I'm fine.

Partially tastes, partially style or genre. For instance, my favorite implementation of Hero Points in the the James Bond RPG. In that game the points serve to allow PCs to pull off those longshot stunts that a James Bond type character should be able to do. Frankly,the game wouldn't have the right feel without them. Since the points are used up when spent, and not replenished (you have to earn more), it keeps the players from getting too cocky.

If I were going to incorporate Hero Points into BRP, the JB version would probably be the way I'd do it, since it bumps up the degree of success. 1 pt turns a miss into a hit, or a hit into a special success, etc. Very useful for shooting the villain who is about to nuke the city, even though you are a thousand yards away, hanging upside down from a helicopter, during a rainstorm, at night, with one broken arm. That's the sort of thing that a GM can't fudge.

Atgxtg- When I did that recently I found that CoC pistol damage was way overrated and that there were other anomalous figures. I would be interested in seeing your results as a check on my own.

"+8 SIZ per doubling in BRP" What does this refer to?

Joseph Paul

Pistol damage might be overrated. It also depends on what edtion of CoC you use, too. I once started working on a correlation between CoC/RQ weapon damages and 3G, the weapon design system for BTRC products (Stuff! weapon rules were developed from it). The neat thing about 3G is that you can take real world data, plug it into the formulas and get rather decent game stats.

In fact, if I just converted the 3G weapon ratings over to BRP most weapons and pistols would be within a die size or two (d8,d6, etc). The tricky part would be working out the scale BRP uses for rifles and heavier weapons. 3G is better than Stuff! for this sort of thing, but Stuff! is much simpler.

One key thing about most weapon stats is that few games use (or should use) a linear formula for determining damage. Most RPGs use some sort of scaling system for weapons and armor, fso a direct linear conversion gives ridiculous results. Especially when location makes such a bit difference in the effects of a hit.

The +8 SIZ doubling comment refers to the SIZ chart from RQ3, and I think the one for CoC ,too. For every doubling of the mass, SIZ goes up by 8, at least for the bulk of the table. That would help in working up SIZ scores for mecha and such. In EABA an improvement of +2 or +3 is a doubling of a value (twice as much mass, twice the speed, twice the distance). So if I can work out the ratio (like +2 mass in EABA is worth +8 SIZ in BRP, for x4 ratio) then conversion gets easier.

I used to do a lot of conversions. I might take a crack at it.

Personally, I think the EABA/stuff! thing would be the way to go. BRTC'S 3G and VDS systems are probably the best/most accurate design rules out there and Stuff was based on those, but simplified. In effect we get a nice compromise between crunch and simplicity of play. You can pretty much design a tank, gun, etc in a couple of minutes. Then if you desire you can use the optional rules to fine tune your design.

I7ll pull out CoC and try to get a correclation between weapon damages. Should be able to do the same with stats. Just have to TIE EABA7s doubling scale to RQ/BRPS (assuming they are still using the +8 SIZ per doubling in BRP).

This is what I call convergent thinking. Click here

See what happens when I take a few days off and miss a thread?

Really I don't have anything against games with Hero points or whatever. I played a lot of ShadowRun with Karma Points and found it to be very enjoyable. I just don't see it as "better" than allowing for GM fudging.

I see it as "better". The reasons why?

GM fudging is very arbitrary, by it's very nature. The GM decides what to FUDGE. Perhaps he will save a PC's life, perhaps not.

The problem is that since the GM has such power and authority over the campaign, fudging tends to give players the feeling that their success and failure have less to do with how they are playing, and more with how they impress or annoy the GM. Fudging can completely kill the sense of danger in a campaign, or make a campaign totally frustrating.

With some sort of "Hero Point" system, the plays still fell like they still have some sort of control over things, but that it is limited.

One of the settings I am noodling away at for BRP is a Mecha setting, and I have no plans for a Mecha design system for it - it would take far too much time and effort to create and check, whereas a set of predefined mechs is perfectly feasible. And I played a LOT of Battletech in the late eighties and never used a Mech design sequence#.

BRP games / settings in general tend not to be detail oriented, and complex design sequences (GURPS, MegaTraveller) by defintion ARE, so I think in general they are a poor fit with BRP.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

#indeed, I don't remember there being one in the set we used: there must have been I suppose, but I remember none of the features of it at all.

Nick, you might want to look at BRP's Stuff! supplement for their EABA RPG. EABA is a fariyl simple, bstrat RPG, so the design process for Stuff! is fairly simple. The idea was to allow you to design a basic APC/Tank/T-Rex/.50 cal Machuine Gun/ALien Civilization (I'm not kidding pretty much anything) in a few minutes, with options to go into more detail IF you want to.

What is nice is that Stuff! was boiled down from BTRC's much more complex GUNS GUNS GUNS and Veheicle Desgin System. The upshot of this is that with Stuff! you can design something in a few minutes and get decent results.

The nature of the game makes the book somewhat suited towards conversions. It might be just the tool to help with working out vehicles and mecha for BRP. You could use the BRP and CoC weapon damages for bechmarks to covert from EABA to BRP and design away.

IT could help in working on some sort of values for things beyond PC scale.

Jason,

Thanks for the answers. Hope you get through the BRPer stampede!

More Questions (sorry, answers tend to spawn them)

1) You said all stats will get characteristic rolls. While most such rolls seem to be pretty intuitive, does this mean that the characteristic rolls will replace the resistance table for things like lifting or pushing?

2) Any there any settings in the works, and what are they?

Years ago Chaosium stated that the reason for the similar discrepancy between RQ and the Gloranthan board games was that RQ magic was individual spells, while the magic in the board games was a collective effort of several casters.

In theory, you could reflect this in RQ by allowing for some sort of community/rtiaual effect to amplify battle magic. For example, if a 100 man unit could boost thier leader's bladesharp to bladesharp 100, or give each man a 1 point bladesharp spell, you start to get HQ level effects.

Off the top of my head, if you took the RQ3 ceremony chart, replaced time with worshippers/followers, required a ceremony roll and charged each participant 1 MP, you could use it to calculate the "group bonus".

Well, I'm not somone who complained ludly about the cover. I did vote in the "neh" category.

I think the problem is that nothing much is happening on the cover. It just doesn't grab you with a sense of urgency, nor does it realte well to what is under the cover.

Plus, people will probably be looking for the "ADVANCED ROLEPLAYING" book that goes with it.

Jason,

If you have a stroke answering all our questions, whose gonna finish the book?

Questions:

1) What the same?

2) What's new/different?

3) What do you think is the cool stuff that will surprise us?

4) When do you think the game will be released?

5) Is there an official character sheet that we could get a peak at?

Unless the pollster is trained in how to frame the questions I am afraid that an accurate response is the only one you won't get. With that in mind I would advise that we just enjoy things for a while, let Rurik have his fun, jump in or ignore as we please, and wait for Triff to post a poll. That will be the important one.

BTW what does atgxtg stand for anyway?

Joseph Paul

Well, "accurate response" and "poll" is probably an oxymoron. I should have said "enough answers to be statistically significant".

atgxtg stands for nothing, or I guess you could say it stands for my frustrration with reginesting internet IDs and remembering passwords. To make a fairly boring story short, years ago I used to use ATG (my intitals) as a log on handle to bulletin boards, Compuserve, etc. XYZ was my password. You can get an idea of how far back it was since 3 character IDs and passwords were still allowed.

Fast forward a few years, and suddenly I needed a net ID with a minimum of SIX characters. I tried various ideas, but they were all taken, and I7d wind up with stuff like Tony4966, or Anthony722. Not easy to remember, not very appealing. I catch enough flack for what I write, I don't want to suffer for what Tony4669 or Tony4696 or some such types. :confused:

Finally, I just got ticked off and used my old handle, ATG, with my old password. But ATGXYZ looked like something the kids would say if my zipper was down. ATGATG somehow looked even dumber. So I went with ATGXTG, and managed to get a unique ID.

Of course, then I had to come up with a six character password...:eek:

I kept the weird moniker over the years. People remember it, even if they can't spell it.

I suppose I should make up an an acronym, or claim it is the name of an obscure Mayan deity of numbered polyhedrals or some other story. Supposedly the name got used for a character in the Clacking City book, so I could claim that at the source, and see if anyone wonders how I predated the character.

I said it was a boring story.

If we explored the REAL folklore for elves and dwarves and such, we'd find plenty of color and flavor.

A few RPGs that use a historical base (as in the middle ages, but Dragons and Elves were real, etc.) provide very rich and interesting versions of elves, etc.

I used to run a RQ campaign set in Ireland, and drew on the old celtic myths and legends. The players found the setting very rich and colorful, more so because they had no knowledge of the setting or the stories I was drawing from.

Fortunately, Chasoium rarely publsihes the waterd down generic fantasy cultures.

We could have a poll to see how many believe he could to that.

How about a poll to see if people would want to have a poll about that? :confused:

I think the Tolkien hostility is partly D&D backlash, along with the fact that many fantasy RPG staples are little more than LOTR rip offs.

People DO NOT understand what a elf or dwarf is, they know the D&D versions, and assume that those interpretations are universal.

I used to run in a more Mythic Earth type setting, and the players found out the hard way that the Tuatha de Daan and the Alfar are not D&D "elves".

I think all polls should have a useful point. Just what IS considered a "useful point", however, is open to debate.

Too many meaningless polls tend to stop people from looking at any polls, and then the really important stuff doesn't get a proper or accurate response.

BTW, I believe that the number of votes outnumber posters in a poll can be attributed to the fact that it is faster and easier to click a button then to think up something to type. Polls are the "shooters" of the forums.I wonder if Rurik could do a poll with the same layout as the control pad for the PS2?

I'm actually in favor of even more degrees of success. In general the games that have them tend to be easier to play, and allow for better opposed task resolution, since then you can compare "degrees of success". I think several 10% or 20% brackets could work out well.

It's the ability to subdivide the D100 into several different results that is one of its strengths. If you use a simple succeed-fail mechanic, there is really little point in using percentiles rather than D20, D10, etc.

Cap would win.

Bucky would beat the snot out of Robin, too.

Oh, and it's Duck Season!

True, it is possible that Wakboth was more on Cthulhu's level instead of Hastur or Azathoth. If that is the case then the Gloranthan gods are toast.

Nah, a half dozen or so Lunars would get together, conduct a little ritual....

...and the Red Goddess has some new associated cults!

But It is really comparing apples and oranges. If you go by just the fictional writings, then there is no answer. Sort of like who'd win in a fight between Captain America and Batman.

CoC game, had a player who lost it and gained a permanent phobia...fear of guns. So he started carrying around a bandoleer of hand grenades.

ROBOTECH game. Has a character get trapped in a disabled Valkyrie and developed a phobia of dark places.

It eventually led to a situation where he paniced and fired off around 40 missiles....because it was dark out.

On a related note, I once wrote up a starship combat game based around the resistance table from BRP. That table is very useful for stuff like that.