RosenMcStern

Not vehicle, mecha. The real advantage of a mecha attacking a ship is that it can circle around it and find the weak spots in the armor - hence the impale. Those are SMGs, not cannons. They cannot be as powerful and precise as M1A2 ordnance. Single-shot ballistic weapons are almost non-existent in the anime mecha genre. The dreaded "Autocannon/20" is a Battletech construct that I have no intention to put into BRP Mecha.

The point is that in the new BRP philosophy, optional is better. The problem here is that, if the skills are separate, there is no reason why the offhand skill should start at half the righthand skill. Suppose you have 70% in Dagger and you fight with two sais. He uses a riposte and gets a check in his offhand attack, then raises it to 28% with his experience roll. Eventually he trains his main hand skill to 60%. Now, if he had not raised his LH skill separately, it would be 30%, but in fact it is now 28%. Or examine the case of a character which starts at 50% in katana, trains it to 70% and then starts using Musashi's two-sword technique. Which is his starting skill in the offhand, 25% or 35%? And if it is 35%, why did he get these 10 free skill points over another samurai that started play at 50% but was fighting with two swords from the beginning? Worse, if you are using skill category modifiers, and your skill is not very high, the halved skill could be in fact lower than default+modifier. If you want them to be separate skills, then the player should invest points in both at character creation, not treat the offhand as a default until some arbitrary point in his career when he gets an experience check in this. However, I have played such a character in RuneQuest 3 and can tell you one thinng: fighting with two weapons is really fun, but keeping track of several separate skills adds nothing to the fun. A better solution would be to create a procedure to make a character ambidexterous and use only one skill, so that a character willing to use a two-weapon technique can do so at full effectiveness if he takes the time to achieve ambidexterity. But this procedure already exists, (although I do not find it really satisfactory) as a character with DEX 16 or skill over 100% already has his full skill in the offhand weapon. Okay, let me clarify this: the defender has two weapons and makes a riposte on the same DEX rank or Strike rank of the original attack. The attacker can only parry the riposte if he has two weapons, as he cannot parry with the same weapon on the same DEX/Strike rank. Or he can dodge it. Unfortunately, it is more an amendment to a forgotten detail than a house rule. If you use Strike Ranks, it is already so in the rules as written, they most likely forgot to add this for DEX ranks. Furthermore, this rule does not represent the fact that you are hitting at second 8.5 in a 12-second rank, but the fact that you hit with the non-parrying weapon while your attacker's weapon is engaged by your other weapon. We have tested this situation in real combat, and a two-weapon user can easily block his one-weapon-user opponent's weapon for just the time it takes to sneak in an unparriable attack. Finally, you can rule that the parry is downgraded to a normal success if you want to make a riposte, so that the riposte becomes less common - you cannot use it against a special attack, and in some cases one can prefer to just damage his opponent's weapon instead.

I prefer the simple rule that attacking with a weapon in the off hand is Difficult, and keeping the separate skills as optional. So if you get a special parry with your weapon or shield, you have a free riposte with your shield or main gauche, but your attack is at half percentile. Note that if you use the house rule I proposed one year ago, that a weapon cannot be used to parry and attack on the same DEX rank (it is already so with Strike Ranks), then your opponent cannot parry the riposte with the weapon he used to attack - deadly but realistic. Despite the fact that BRP does not have ads/disads, I think that rules for ambidexterous characters should be introduced to complement this spot rule.

You may have noticed that I already posted the stats for some of the "Shogun Warriors" (name used only in the US) one year ago. No stats for copyrighted materials will be there, of course, but you will be able to build your own versions. Some of the examples in the chapters I have already written are taken from Shogun Warriors anime. As for giant monsters, the ones that mechas fight are usually mechanical in nature, more cyborgs than Kaiju. The few exceptions are easy to stat for a clever GM. But I could include some stats for cyborg dinos and haniwa genjins.

Better avoid these. They have limited impact on mecha combat and make things more complex. Exactly. In some kind of campaigns you have unlimited (or humongous) amounts of missiles. In others you have realistic ammo supplies: 100 rounds per SMG and 4-10 missiles per launcher. The battleship in the core book would have 4 APs and 48 HPs on mecha scale (not exactly so, as it would have locations/sections with, say, 16 HPs). A 400mm gun doing 3d6 would disable a section with an average of 3 shots. Attacked by, say, Zakus, it would be hit by SMGs doing 1d8 (need a good roll to pass armor) or missiles doing 2d6. Enough to do some damage and disable some systems. Note that a spaceship would possibly have similar statistics. Char Aznable managed to destroy three spaceships in a battle with a Zaku, which is hardly believable given the average damage above, but Char has at least 90% skill, and SMGs can impale, so it can be done. All in all, the stats for guns and ships are not too "wrong". Of course energy weapons would blast through those armors in seconds. And spaceships have mostly energy weapons and missiles doing 3d6/4d6 at least.

I usually read HeroQuest in bed. I must have fallen asleep while I was reading that paragraph

It has. The 100 words method is no longer there. You can still generate your PC "as you go" instead.

Thank you, Jason and Steve! Does anyone have the issue with the X-Men?

This is exactly how HeroQuest works. Nothing matters but your character's ability to cope with the situation. Equipment is an ability of its own. If you wish to adopt this approach, I think you should stop grinding BRP in order to make it more HeroQuest, and go for the real thing. It's as simple as typing HeroQuest – Glorantha | Your Gateway to Adventure in your browser.

Having played RuneQuest, the first thing I noticed with the Mongoose ruleset is that the Athletics roll that replaces STR tests and the like is bugged. A female character needed to lift a dead enemy to recover her stuff, and the only thing we had to simulate this was the Athletics roll. I found the result very unsatisfactory: the agile ranger had an excessive chance to lift the bulky warrior's corpse. The lack of realism in this case more than offsets the gain in simplicity. Also see the example in HeroQuest 2 about the difference in the Run Fast ability between the cowboy and his horse. The skill simply does not tell you how fast you run, just how likely you are to use the ability to overcome a challenge. You still need a measure of how fast you and the horse can run in order to know if a task is possible at all (credibility chek in HeroQuest terms).

Never say impressive, Newt! A new supplement is in the schedule: Merrie England, the Age of Eleanor. Author Simon Phipp (soltakss), it is about 12th and 13th century England, a more classic medieval setting than Stupor Mundi, it includes more in-depth rules for Christian magic, Judaism, Demonology, Alchemy and the like. It is for RuneQuest but as usual you can play it with BRP with little effort. And before someone asks: yes, you can play Robin Hood!

Except that POW would become an Uberstat in a game which relies on social interactions. But this could not be the scope of the OP. A balanced system has as many mental characteristics as it has physical ones. D&D is a balanced system: 3 physical and 3 mental. BRP is not so balanced: 4 physical and 3 mental, and one of the mental ones is almost useless. GURPS is awfully unbalanced, with 3 physical and 1 mental.

Jason mentioned earlier on rpg.net that one thing he would happily add to the resource scores a character has is Stability points for social interactions, losing Stability representing a "social" wound to reputation. It is not difficult to imagine what the base characteristic for these Stability points would be. So I think APP/CHA should remain as a characteristic. I would rather re-describe it as "The ability your character has to exert his or her influence in a social context." For the rest, the rules you suggest are workable, but I do not see any benefit them. You will see more players who dislike having all small weapons doing 1d4 than players who think it is an improvement. Dropping SIZ could be an idea, it takes away some calculations, but it also forces you to use STR to evaluate a lot of details for which you used SIZ before (can I lift the dead brontosaur? can I knock Big Baddie into the river?).

Here is the schedule for the next products that will be released by Alephtar Games. I think most readers here will be interested in knowing about this. 1) BRP Rome Scenario pack (by Conall Kavanagh, Pete Nash, Ken Spencer) – Sep 2009 1bis) Merrie England: the Age of Eleanor (for Mongoose RuneQuest, by Simon Phipp) - Sep 2009 2) Dragon Lines (for BRP, by Charles Greene) – Fall 2009 3) Stupor Mundi: Crusaders of the Amber Coast (for Mongoose RuneQuest, by Paolo Guccione) – Fall 2009 4) BRP Mecha (by Paolo Guccione) – 2010 Products 2) and 3) could be delayed by some months. I am not sure about if and when we will publish a full, long-spanning campaign for Rome, but it is among our plans. I also have a couple of BRP and MRQ submissions pending, and if we reach an agreement with the authors I will fit them into this schedule. If something in the above list is delayed, they could see the light in 2009. As you can see, we are trying to support both BRP and RuneQuest. I would love to publish something for HeroQuest 2, too, but I have no materials at hand. So if anyone has a manuscript ready, just honk.

Which is a very trendy way of saying "All rolls in HeroQuest are opposed rolls, while most rolls in BRP are unopposed rolls". This could be the ultimate roleplaying game.

Unfortunately, there are no real advantages for a two weapon user in the new BRP. It is one of the (very few) points where I find it lacking. The advantage should not be so devastating as it used to be in RQ3, but there should be one.

200 pages more likey, maybe a bit shorter. A 200 hundred pages book I would rather call Dragonpaedia.

Alephtar Games is glad to announce a new title in our RPG line for Basic Roleplaying: “Dragon Lines”. This supplement fills one gap that fans highlighted in the new BRP rulebook by providing specialized rules for the different styles and schools of Martial Arts, and introducing several new options and combat maneuvers for hand to hand combat. But Dragon Lines is not just this: it is a new and fancy background that focuses on a fantastic version of the Forbidden City of Imperial China, where dragon magic permeates the land and martial artists in the Heavenly Emperor's employ, who must face supernatural threats every other day, use incredible combat styles that are as close to magic as they are to Kung Fu. If you think that characters in Ang Lee movies do really weird things, have a look at Dragon Lines and you will change your mind. Charles Green, author of several Multiverse supplements, will be our guide to the world of the Forbidden City in late 2009 or early 2010.

Gentlemen, I don't want to play Simon's advocate, but I doubt he was thinking of this when he wrote Realism Rule #1

Most important: no hit locations, only general hit points.

I have read Pendragon's email and we are interested, indeed. The concept sounds good. However, we cannot publish this book before 2010 due to an overcrowded work schedule. You will understand this better when I make Alephtar Games' release schedule public (Trif, when will you be back from Indochina?) With this I do not want to discourage neither Pendragon nor other would be writers. Send us what you have and if it is interesting I will manage to have it edited, illustrated and published as soon as we have room for it.

Vivsavage (whom I thank very much if he reads this) has recently run a Poll about generic systems. I did not post the link before because I did not want to alter the statistical results of the outcome with a "Let us all go there and vote BRP". We can now consider the poll closed, as no one has posted on the thread for two days. Let us examine the results. Question: What is the best multi-genre RPG? 18.74%: GURPS 16.04%: Savage Worlds 13.90%: BRP 10.16%: HERO ... 6.42%: HeroQuest Well, the results were predictable, but these %ages tell us something: a) 6% for HeroQuest is incredibly good for a system that was not even defined as "generic" till the last edition, which, I remind to all, has been released twenty days ago. It was clear from the beginning that GURPS would win, but BRP is almost on par with Savage Worlds (it was second for one day, between GURPS and SW while the poll was still running). Given that SW is the "trendy" game this moment, it could be argued that BRP has the potential to be second once the RPG community has acknowledged the fact that there is now a real "generic" edition and some of the hype about SW has stopped. c) GURPS and BRP have rather similar mechanics (roll-under, skill-based, unopposed rolls with optional rules for opposed rolls) and amount for almost one third of the choices. Even HERO has some points in common with GURPS. So I dare to say that the roll-under mechanics is confirmed as the favored one, and certainly GURPS is the game to beat - and BRP is the one game that can do that, as it has the most similar mechanics. In addition to this, last week there were several other good threads about BRP, HeroQuest and GURPS on rpg.net. I recommend reading them. The one about BRP has really interesting comments by Jason and Ray Turney.

Very true. The stats given for Artillery weapons in BRP do not differentiate between HE and AP, not even for the tank guns which usually have at least three types of round available. We might try to provide more detailed rules for this in BRP Mecha, but since most of them will have energy weapons rather than ballistic ones I think we will not go very far with this.

120mm is the standard caliber for a Zaku MG, which is one of the least effective weapons in the Universal Century (think of it as a 37mm AT gun in WW2: good against early war armour, useless against late war tanks). Rick-DOM RPG launchers shoot 360mm HE rockets instead of 280mm. These are supposed to destroy a mecha with one hit. Which means that one single Universal Century mecha carries weapons as effective as those used by the biggest capital ships built in the 20th Century. Note: the 120mm ordnance does 1d8 in BRP Mecha, the 360mm rocket does 2d8, and I would rate a 400mm shell from the Iowa as 3d6.

We will see. Most mechas use energy weapons, so fudging a bit with ballistic weapons is not a great problem in any case. In the playtest game I run at Tentacles, we had 280mm rockets (I cannot recall the caliber used by US battleships HE rounds, but it is not very different) doing 2d6 damage, so the two systems are still compatible, in the results. And Grendizer has Physical resistance 70 (7 on mecha scale) in my stats, published here, so it takes a roll of 12 on 2d6 to really hurt it in a limb (torso hits no way), assuming a battleship can actually hit a moving superobot. On the other hand, if a static cannon like that of a battleship can actually manage to hit a real mecha: - a Code Geass knightmare gets vaporized (but most of them have force fields) - a Macross Valkyrie goes BOOM! - a Universal Century mobile suit loses a limb