RosenMcStern

A tank is protected with its full 24 points against a laser. At most, you can adopt the optional rule used for body armor (half value against energy weapons if not specifically designed to stop them). I think that the effectiveness against only one type of damage is valid only for "armor" bought as a power, not for actual body armor. Which makes sense in most cases. The body armor assigned to, say, the Hulk, represents the extreme hardness of his muscular mass, which will stop any kinetik attack. Its effect should be lessened against energy weapons, though. As for the fact that you will not see the Hulk damaged by lasers in the comics, the point is that he should be given some energy/radiation armor, too, possibly given by his gamma-ray saturated body. But there are two different "reasons why" here, so it is correct that there are two different powers to buy. That said, I am in favour of introducing a (very costly) power called toughness that simply lets you ignore the first X points of damage from any source.

Okay, now re-read what you and Atxtg have written. Do you really define this method simpler than the official rules (or the SB variant of 10%)?

Which is doable, but I do not see it as being easier or more intuitive than the RAW. For crits and fumbles, you only need to remember five magic numbers (10-30-50-70-90, i.e. the odd tens) and you know whether you criticalled/fumbled or not. It is a bit more complex with specials, but you usually do not need to make calculations in 95% of the cases. If you roll above 20, no problem. If you roll very low, no problem. If you roll in the "twilight zone" and you had modifiers, you need an on-the-fly computation, but this is usually an acceptable trade-off for a more detailed combat. I still have to see a player who is happy to give up half of his chances of an impale (often the only opportunity he has to bring down a really powerful opponent) just for the sake of using doubles and avoiding a division of his adjusted skill by five.

My advice is to stay with the RAW for criticals/specials. In any case, you have two viable and tested alternatives. a) 1/10 of skill (used in SB and MRQ) is easy but not so compatible with using also specials. doubles are crits is even easier, but it is useless if you allow skills above 100%. In general, avoid it for high-powered campaigns. Both alternate systems halve the chance of a special success, because you are supposed to just not use specials when crits are 10% of the successful rolls. As victory in a combat against strong foes is heavily dependent on specials, using these variant rules might even slow down combat in some cases. So the advice is: get ready for some more math and use the standard rules.

Hmm, I re-read the description, and it implies that big shields as they are now would become almost unbreakable: a big shield would need 52 HPs to break in a single blow, a sword only 16, and the big shield would take no damage from a critical that does not do at least 26 points of damage. My suggestion is still to let shields absorb the damage (ALL the damage, not just the part that overcomes their AP value) from a higher success level attack. Shields should be easier to parry with, not harder to break.

Which is more or less what I was suggesting as an optional rule. I only have the Italian version of SB, which is a mixup of editions 1-4, so I did not know this version of the rules, and the 1-4 version is a bit too harsh (as reminded, old versions of SB have criticals at 1/10th of basic success, and automatic break of any non-demonic weapon the opponent is wielding on a critical success). I think it is the best solution, although it is a bit more complex.

Well, it surely has disadvantages: fail a SAN roll and your character becomes affected by all kind of nasty phobias >:->

I agree with frogspawner here (and we seldom agreee on anything, so you can guess this proposal doesn't sound so good ). A good spot rule / houserule should be as less intrusive as possible, and reworking criticals is intrusive. There are other ways, including the reintroduction of APs in the parry for shields. I think all these optional rules should be listed in the wiki, so that everyone can have a look at all of them and choose which he or she likes for his or her game. If no one else volunteers, I'll manage to add some of them to our Wiki as soon as possible. And of course the debate is still open.

I have proposed a spot rule that does something similar on another thread last week. I disagree totally. In RQ if someone scored a critical and the opponent parried, the opponent either was unharmed or a least he stayed alive (a broadsword does 9 pts. on a critical hit, and your average parrying weapon absorbs 10). In BRP, if your opponent scores a special, either you score one, too, or you are hit! Damage is more, not less, frequent.

I would call option i) a Block, and option ii) a Parry. Unfortunately, no RP makes a difference between them - well, GURPS does but only in the name. I have split the mechanics in my MRQ houserules, obtaining a greater realism, but even experienced players find it hard to use the difference in game, so I think this is not the way to go. Lots of people with combat experience have the same idea. It was them who persuaded me (on the MRQ forum, not here) that unsing APs for parries is unrealistic.

And lets you parry a halberd (average damage 13 with a 1d4 damage bonus) with a buckler (AP 15) The Rules as Written make a difference between a shield and a parrying weapon only when you try and block a missile thrown at you, something that is not possible with a sword. This makes shields useful only in the field in which they were most often used historically: mass battles, in which the enemy usually throws sharp, painful things at you. Which may be fine for some of us (I prefer this over the old RQ rule that uses APs). However, many of us wonder what use is a shield in a standard BRP melee. In this situation a shield user has no real advantage. To be more precise, a two-weapon user has no real advantage in melee over a 1-weapon user, not only a shield user. Several spot rules have been proposed in recent threads. Read them carefully and you might find something that suits your tastes. I would not recommend using Armor Points for parries: if both MRQ and BRP have dropped this classic rule, there must be a reason

It is a bit more complicate than your houserule of making Dodge Difficult on the same DEX Rank you attack, but it works similarly. Let us see why. Basically, this means you cannot Dodge at full percentiles when you have used all of your MOV score. This may happen in three cases: a) you have moved half your MOV but not your entire MOV and attacked at one quarter your DEX Rank you have moved less than half your MOV and attacked at half your normal DEX rank c) you have not moved and attacked at your normal DEX rank Note that option c) above implies that a dodger cannot attack at his normal DEX Rank, because this would leave him without MOV points to spend to Dodge. Options a) and imply that whenever you move and wish to Dodge you must leave some unspent MOV points for possible Dodges, something like APs in good ol' X-Com. This may work rather fine, but requires some bookkeeping and some thinking in advance on the part of the players. All in all, it is a very tactical approach that makes a move towards miniature play. Not that I dislike it, mind me.

Not in this incarnation of BRP, where a parry is all-or-nothing. The difference between dodge and parry is slighter now.

When mounted, for instance, you can only Dodge at half percentile (-20% if also in armor). A cavalry fighter does not dodge in BRP.

Yep. In fact this is one of our houserules that we wanted to post to the Wiki, but I have been too laz.. er, busy writing stats for Anime robots to actually do it. I will do that after a bit more of playtesting.

Hello friends. The recent thread about shields and armor points has highlighted several interesting solutions to handle the advantages a shield gives in combat without making it too overpowered if compared with a parrying weapon. However, I am still wondering whether it would be a good idea to give extra advantages to a character who uses two weapons. In the current rules such a character has little or no advantages over a single-weapon user, as the main advantage is the fact that he has a spare weapon if one breaks. Has anyone any suggestions about how to make two-weapon combat more unique without making it too overpowered (or making too many changes to the rules)?

First of all, if your veteran is skilled in Shield or Dodge, switching weapons leaves his defense skill intact, so he is not at so great a disadvantage against a poorly trained veteran who is familiar with his weapon. The problem arises when you have an unfamiliar weapon and NO shield, in which case I think that it is realistic that our veteran is a bit impaired. But I think that in this case using the highest weapon skill rating as a complementary skill to the lowr one can solve the problem without too much houseruling. Example: Cormac is thrown in the arena with a sword, with which he is totally unfamiliar (25% between skill and modifier). He has 90% in Axe, so he uses his fighting experience with it as a complementary skill, which raises his combat ability to 25+(90/5)=43%. Unfortunately he has no shield and loses his fight against the other gladiator who uses a great axe with competence. Signy is thrown in the same arena with only a dagger, but since she relies on dodging she has her full 100% chance to defend, whatever the attacking weapon, and easily dispatches her opponent (a lion). Sounds familiar to anyone?

True. In this case the damage that overcomes the shield AP/HP goes through to the defender, but the shield is not damaged or broken. All versions of BRP have always had a "spot rule" specifying that impaling weapons do not damage weapons.

Give your magicians Befuddle or Emotion and see what happens to their opponents..... Seriously, Rune Magic is powerful if used by the warriors directly. I suggest you give your warriors a couple of spells, too. +1 to damage for a metal rune is nothing if compared to one casting of Bladesharp 4 (or 8). On the other hand, Rune Magic lacks direct attack spells, with the exception of said befuddle. For magic users use BRP Magic or MRQ Sorcery (with fixed spells you get from the wiki) to represent a magician. I prefer MRQ Sorcery 'cause it is less PP dependant, but BRP magic is fine, too. Yes, they are extremely vulnerable to magic. Don't stick to the concept of POW per Rune if you want to rune-load your characters. Use Honor or other adequate Personality traits to determine how many runes they can have tattoed. POW is just used to balance things downwards, do not use it if you want to balance things upwards. And dedicated POW does not solve the matter: try something new. Hmmmm, tattoed women appeared on a desolated Earth in the comic book "Adventures of Lone Sloane" by P. Druillet in 1969 or so (here I am showing my age a bit....), and Druillet stated they were coming from "The Universe of Elric the Necromancer". But I cannot recall seeing them in Moorcock's books. But I have not read many of them.

1) Your concept of magic is best represented by MRQ Rune Magic. Just use the spells from the SRD. Conversion notes that allow use with BRP are at Alephtar Games . 2) Use Rune Magic and allow rune integration with other means (Hero Point loss, free rune for each 10% you get in Allegiance to a certain principle, etc...) 3) This has never been done in BRP. Just split percentiles for skills below 100% if you like, but I do not advise this. In truth, I think you should use MRQ and not BRP for your game. It fits your ideas much more (with Heroic Abilities, Rune Integration and Combat Actions) than BRP, and it is admittedly very "cinematic" in its style.

Yes, it is there, and just using the RAW is fine for me. Better than the old RQ solution of parrying with weapon APs - about which I had a long debate one year ago on the MRQ forum. The spot rule only addresses the difference between shields and weapons (or blocks and parries), something that might be important to me or my group, but definitely not for everyone. I think the RAW should work fine for 80-90% of players. Why should the primitive shield be three times as easy to break than a primitive hatchet (HP 12)? The point is that in most cases you use weapons to deflect damage (parry), and shields to absorb it (block), even if you usually attempt to deflect even with a shield.

:thumb: Ahh. Now that everyone agrees about how the rules must be read, Simon is playing the Devil's Advocate. Can I resist the temptation of joining him? [Makes roll against Rules Lawyer trait ......] >:-> FAILED >:-> Okay, BRP adopts an all-or-nothing mechanism that makes the parrying weapons APs irrelevant when actively defending. Is it an improvement over Chaosium RQ (and early MRQ) where weapon APs were used as armor in parrying? YES, it is. Having GMed legions of warriors who invoked Humakt's blessing on their tempered iron hoplite shield to obtain the 36-point ultimate parrying weapon (roughly equivalent to an Iowa-class battleship plating if you check the armor values on page 271), I think an all-or-nothing mechanism that models a parry as a deflection of the blow is more playable, if not utterly realistic. But what about Simon's leather shield blocking a greatsword (or worse a halberd)? The situation described is realistic. Therefore I hereby propose the following Spot Rule When the attacker achieves a higher level of success against a defender who is parrying (blocking) with a shield, the damage does not affect the target but the shield. If the damage is greater than the shield AP/HP, the shield breaks and the excess damage affects the target. If the attacker achieves two levels of success more than the defender (critical vs. success) the shield APs are halved, rounding down.

I see no point in BRP where shield APs are used to deflect a blow, except when they are slung over a location, in which case they only provide half their APs. The given value is in fact HPs rather than APs, useful when you use them to block a special success (2 points of damage to parrying weapon). The concept of APs as a measure of being able to deflect a blow is a legacy of RQ, where you used your parrying weapon APs as armour. It is no longer so in BRP.

To me, it does not even sound reasonable. The atmosphere is great, but the game system is an example of how you can botch it completely by trying to be original. Yes, but this does not prevent the (in)famous scene of casting Disruption at the fleeing trollkin to increaste one's POW, a classic in my games. I disallowed POW growth rolls in these cases long before Jason fixed it with his 50% rule.

Nothing would please me more, but with two supplements already available for RuneQuest Japan (old Land of Ninja and new Land of Samurai) I would not call it a priority. It's already there and very easy to adapt, why rewrite it? This one I would love, instead. Either a "classic" steampunk with zeppelins fighting alien starships, or a fantasy steampunk like the Arcanum computer game. As for the Fantasy Europe settings, I'm certainly in favour of them as I have written one myself (and I am slowly cranking out episode two) but again, there is plenty of them, and we know that 75% or so of gamers do not like them.