RosenMcStern

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?

P.S. It might be a good idea not to use the spot rule for impaling weapons. A spear or arrow would probably punch a hole through the shield and strike the personb behind it rather than chop or bash a shield into kindling.

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.

Thanks for the conversion link. Why do you suggest that? It seems similar in flavor, but Runic Magic seems sort of weak compared to other options available. How does it compare in actual play to the strength of BRP Magic or BRP Sorcery? I would like for magic-users to be fairly powerful.

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.

Well, the notion is that it draws from the same source as magic. It's meant to be play balancing so you could be a powerful magic-user, or powerful "runic warrior", or a hybrid blending the two. So really I'm just trying to figure out if permanent POW expenditure is the way to go, or "dedicated POW". Are there weird side effects to the game play if a bunch of people are running around with POW scores close to 0?

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.

However - and just for the sake of discussion - how about this? If you look at the Attack / Parry / Dodge matrix, you see that for any result where a successful parry has downgraded a more successful attack, the parrying weapon (or shield) takes damage - either 2 or 4 points. The mechanism you need is already there - it's just that Primitive Shields seem maybe a bit too sturdy in this instance.

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.

I'd be tempted to reduce the Primitive Shield AP/HP to, say 2 or 4, from 10. That way it'd withstand one or two blows from a greatsword, no more, but be absolutely toast if it ever took a Crushing blow. It would mean we didn't have to change the rules - just the spec for the shield.

How does that work?

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.

I appoint Shaira the official "rules explainer" from now on.

:thumb:

It also means that, to a certain extent, the parying weapon is pretty irrelevant as parrying with a knife has the same effect as parrying with a wooden door strapped to your arm.

Still, if a leather shield has fewer HPs than a wooden one with fewer than a metal one then the progression is sound. I'd expect a greatsword to chop through a leather shield pretty much straight away, though. They are fine against long spears, not so hot against stabbing spears and not much use against big blades being swung by a maniacal berserker.

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.

Our group soon realized that the game mechanics of the Stroyteller system sound reasonable, and make a lot of sense, but don't hold up in actual gameplay.

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.

The fumble chance was one reason why I never considered "skill check hunting" to be a problem in RQ/BRP. That any the fact that while "Joe Adventurer" is feeling clever about getting a "free" check in his Left Handed 1H Spear, the dark troll is using his club and probably is bashing his skull in.

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.

Building on the wealth of information that exists about 16th and 17th century Japan is another example.

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?

A steampunk setting would also be cool.

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.

My conversion notes to use the Mongoose RuneQuest SRD are at Alephtar Games - Glorantha

Historically, this system's success is due to it being linked to licensed supplements about the fictional works of two authors: H.P. Lovecraft and M. Moorcock, with Moorcock's Multiverse being currently portrayed by a BRP-cousing, Mongoose RuneQuest.

A further step would be finding some other licenses about other genres, neither fantasy nor horror, and using them for new and stunning RPG products. A fantastic idea with no franchise involved (Fractured Hopes is a good example of this) will not do the trick. I am still convinced that an anime setting could be something to try. But this has a drawback: it requires a lot of money, something that both fans and Chaosium (I suppose) lack, I fear.

So what is left to do is putting out Real World settings like Rome or Mythic Iceland, hoping they will attract some attention. Good timing is of the essence here: a Rome setting that is out the exact week that the Gladiator is in the theatres has a good chance of being a hit. One that is out when, say, Star Wars is the movie of the week is doomed to marginality.

Anyone has some idea about a setting that does not require a license?

Storyteller System (multiple D10s): The double whammy of varible difficulty and required sucesses to perform an action means that, statistically speaking, the best way for most characters to drive a stake though a vampire's heart is to hand the vampire the stake and hope he botches.

If between 1 and 5% off all aircraft pilots actually fumbled on take off or landing air travel would be bannded. Likewise, big nasties such as dragons, can't really assauslt a castle successfully, becuase one of those archers manning the walls is going to get a critical.

The suggested range of critical successes/errors should be applied only to actions that involve PCs, which require a more frequent occurrence of extreme situations for narrative reasons. In other situations critical rolls should happen only at GM discretion. Moreover, a fumble when landing with an aircraft could also mean you damage the craft gear, not necessarily that the plane crashes.

I was thinking of using the a x10 scale, but just "factor it out" before hand. So 15d6 would be 1.5d6, or 1d6+1d3 "mecha scale". When mecha fight mecha, everything would be treated as a normal man vs. man fight in BRP, with much smaller numbers. When the mecha interact with "man scale" items/people, just muttiply the results by 10.

I would rather use the x10 damage rule, with 15d6 being (1d8+1)x10. This way you can have more granularity for armor or hit points

This would also "factor out" the stat differences at mecha scale. a STR 120 mecha vs. a STR 100 one would be treated as a 12 vs. 10 on the resistance table instead of a overwhelming 20 point difference.

Smart! This could also solved the "The Thing vs. The Hulk" problem posed in the other thread.

Ideally, I love to get it so people can just plug in the stuff like tonnage, kph, and powerplant ratings and get usable stats for BRP. It would make crossover games a lot easier.

It is not that difficult anyway. SIZ comes out of tonnage, and STR and POW are easily worked out of the reactor output (kW power divided by 10).

She can translate Japanese?

She stated she has lived in the Land of the Rising Sun for some time, so I suppose she knows some Jap.

This is one of the circumstances in hand to hand combat that HeroQuest handles better. You just skip rolling individual "goons" as attacks and add them to the Big Bad Guy's AP total (or use them as augments).

Jason integrated the concept of augments (assisting) in simple skill resolution in the new BRP. It is a pity there is no equivalent for combat.

You are absolutely right. I kept the weapon damage in multiples of 10 exactly to allow this simplification. Still, a x15 is not an easy multiplier. Hmmm, the range is 15-90 (average 52.5). Maybe a 1d10x10 is a better choice.

Not really. The Palladium version is based off of Robotech rather than Macross.

Let us draw a curtain on this sorrow Macross/Robotech story, and its unbelievable Battletech spin-off.

THe best solution would probably be to have someone to do up stats from scratch based on the actual data for the mecha.

Someone who can read Japanese, you mean.

Hmmmm.... Shaira?

Apparently putting Grendeizer in the same setting as Mazinger has caused a bit of trouble.

AFAIK, he was compelled to throw in Koji Kabuto as a co-protagonist against his own will. Another case of Marketing versus Creativity.

The mechanics for plotting one characteristic against another are designed with the 1-20 range in mind. Assuming Spider-man is STR 40 or so (well, he is 50 in TSR's Marvel SuperHeroes, but the scale is different) you can still handle his feats with a Resistance roll. Throw in Superman and the scale of powers is 100+, and the Resistance table breaks. Of course you can still resolve the matter with an opposed roll on STR x1, but this is a concept that is rather new to BRP and no one here has experimented with it so far.

I do not see any reason why. If you have Dodge 80%, then you simply dodge 4 blows out of 5, or less if you are facing multiple opponents and incur in the -30% penalty. This mix of active and passive defense adds very little to realism, and decreases playability by splitting the defense mechanics between active and passive.

However, in the new rules you get three apparently small tweaks which have considerable effect on gameplay - namely the "Complimentary Skills", Cooperative Skill Rolls" and "Opposed Rolls" rules. In HeroQuest terms, these effectively give you Augments and Simple Contests (when you need them)

....

I have a lot of respect for the HeroQuest skill system, and think it can provide some useful feedback into the BRP system - especially in the *mindset* you use when approaching the rules. I'm not houseruling at this stage, but am experimenting with the optional rules in the BRP book "in the spirit of" HeroQuest, just to see.

Thumbs up for Shaira here. I do agree with Simon that HeroQuest is probably the most suitable rule system for playing supers, but the new BRP has a lot of options that can be used to make it HQ-like if you wish. It is just a matter of knowing how to apply the rules.

There's a lot there already without having to houserule.

Again, I completely agree. The first time I took a BRP-based game in my hands I felt the urge to houserule a lot of things, but I later discovered that very little could not be accomplished by simply using the existing rules correctly.

Jason has stated on these forums that he liked the concept of Defense that was in RQ2, but did not insert it because it would become a super-skill more valuable than any other skill. In any case, it is still there as a super-power so you can easily add it. But I would not recommend doing so: Dodge represents this better.

On the notion of speed and with heavy combat, I was thinking about having a ton of bad guys fighting. With a d100 I would have to roll them individually in order to best assess their results and not getting the dice mixed up with one another, while with a d20 I could pick up as many d20's as there are bad guys and just roll them all at the same time, immediately dropping any that roll over their skill.

You can still roll D20 for mobs and d100 for PCs and important characters. It reeks of D&D but it should work.

But my idea as a GM would be to just say: "You picked a fight with 50 bad guys? Well, you are dead!".

Also used in the Unknown Armies percentile mechanics I believe.

Yes, but remember that this system does not work if you allow skill scores above 100. All these variants (d20, doubles) make it simpler to read the dice, but decrease realism and detail.

See above for varitech. I am not a big Macross fan, although I appreciated the anime when it was produced 20+ years ago. Besides, there is a Palladium RPG about Macross & C, so a Palladium/BRP conversion should be the best solution for this, not rebuilding the stats from scratch like I did with Mazinger.