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Baulderstone

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Everything posted by Baulderstone

  1. In fact, I am just sending a copy to a friend who is just looking into the system. I was going to complain about the omission of Corum, but I remembered just in time that it was actually a supplement.
  2. Delta Green works well too. You pick your profession, which gives you all the skills related to it at the required level to perform the job. You then get a big pool of free points to spend to flesh your character out. However, they also provide a long list of background packages that cost the exact amount of the pool. You can allocate the points yourself, or just pick a package and copy it down. Or you could take a package and juggle the points around a little bit.
  3. I'd be surprised if occupations/backgrounds of some type aren't included. I see them as a big help to new players. BRP has always been a simple system, but back in the '80s, I can remember the character generation being a hurdle for some players. Being given a giant pool of hundreds of points, then spreading them over a wide range of skills was a real chore for some players.Having occupations and backgrounds give players some structure to fall back on. If some groups find it overly structured, it's always easier to loosen up how players spend points than it is for a group that wants structure to have to make up a list of occupations on their own.
  4. I wouldn't say that I am opposed to that. Still, I tend to associate BRP with having a lot of separate power systems all with their own flavor, quirks and power levels. It certainly couldn't hurt though, for one of those individual power power systems to be what you are describing.
  5. I can agree with this. Ultimately, what I want most from this is something that people not playing BRP can download and get excited about.
  6. *unconvincingly attempts to laugh at your "joke" good naturedly, quietly biding my time until I can completely screw over your character when you least expect it.
  7. I tried it many years ago, and it was a bad idea. I think the only way it could work would be to use point-based generation, with the assumption that they are playing a fictionalized version of themselves. You might not be able to afford everything you believe you should have, and some people might have abilities you don't believe they could. It's not like you are every going to get a perfect simulation of the players anyway. Might as well do it in a way that does the least damage. Even the anonymous averaging idea seems perilous to me. Someone's feelings are just as likely to be hurt, and their resentment can be spread across the whole group. And personally, if the GM asks me to judge every other players stats, I am not doing it, even if the data is going to be anonymized. I'll just politely sit that campaign out.
  8. I agree there is a tension between writing a book that is a good introduction to a game and writing one that works well at the table over the course of a whole game. You always need to go with a good introduction to the game. If a book isn't geared to a first time reader, it's doubtful that they will get far enough to see how handy the book is in play. That said, I like to see a brief overview of the system at the front of the book. Nothing detailed, but just enough to understand the dice mechanics and how basic actions work. No more than 3-5 pages. That way when I look over character generation, I have a better sense of what the numbers mean. I don't think the issue with the BGB is its size. It's not that big by RPG standards. The issue is that it is a toolkit full of differing options. As a new player or GM, all those options are wearying. And, as you say, a light version is going to be too little to catch some people's attention. It's always better for someone new to the system to actually start with one of the specific games in the family like Magic World or Call of Cthulhu. Or, theoretically, as some point in the future, BRP Space. This isn't meant as a criticism of the BGB. I really like my copy. It's just not something I would ever hand to a new player.
  9. I'm with Mankcam on this issue. Having all the formulas on the sheet is handy during character generation, and then is just clutter that I don't need for every session after that. The joy of the Internet age is that within a week of BRP Essentials being posted there will be plenty of homebrew sheets posted online, in addition to separate character generation worksheets and scripted PDFs and Excel worksheets that do all the math for you. How Chaosium decides to handle things is largely beside the point.
  10. Runequest!? In the '80s, I was playing Stormbringer and Call of Cthulhu! Clearly this calls for a bitter edition war between us. That's something I will be curious to see. My apologies. I agree with that. There has been some drama in the scene about whether certain lines will continue to receive official support (RQ 6 fans worried about the fate on non-Gloranthan RQ 6, Magic World fans worried about that line disappearing forever), I'm not seeing any particular faction of the scene calling anyone else the Devil. I think it helps that a lot of people, like me, are on multiple sides of the fence. I like the lighter side of BRP when I run CoC, and I like running games with the heavier build of RQ 6. And while RQ 6 is my current go-to for fantasy, I have both Magic World and Advanced Sorcery sitting right next to it on the shelf to use for spare parts.
  11. If you don't think Gary Gygax ever ranted about people not playing by the official rules, you need to go back and read his columns from the early '80s. I don't think any BRP game has really crossed the line that both 3E and 4E did for D&D. Both of those editions completely broke backwards compatibility, which was a new thing for D&D. BRP is more like the D&D OSR but on a smaller scale. You've got multiple versions of what is all basically the same game with players freely mixing adventures and rules between them. Even CoC 7E, which is held up as a radical change, really isn't that different. I have played 7E, and most of what happened at the table felt exactly the same. Anything new could easily be jettisoned. BRP is just an easier game to mod than D&D as well. Level-based games come with an expectation of balance between PCs and against opponents that BRP simply isn't interested in. That makes it harder to throw the whole thing out of whack if you pull parts out of one BRP and stick them in another. I'm not saying there is no room at all for disagreement between BRP people, but the divides are a lot smaller in the BRP world.
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