Baulderstone

I've tried downloading this repeatedly both last night and today. Every time the download has failed. Is anyone else experiencing this, or is the issue on my end?

I haven't run it since the '80s, but that sounds right. I think you just need to deal with a master when going becoming an Apprentice or when going from Apprentice to Wizard. I could be wrong, but that's the way we did it. The multiple Wizard careers really underscored the problem for other players. The Wizard just got to keep going from Wizard career to the next, while other players had to keep bouncing around into arbitrary career choices. I will say it wasn't all the game-breaking. We had a lot of fun with the game. It's a minor enough problem that I could deal with it. It's just not worth carrying over, which you aren't planning on doing anyway.

The XP cost is 100, but you still need a master to become an apprentice. The epic The Enemy Within campaign presented a grand total of one master willing to take on an apprentice in its whole run that I can recall. It brings up the issue of setting intent vs. mechanical implications. The setting of WFRP 1E is very low magic, with Wizards widely considered suspicious, meaning even those that exist keep a low profile. Are you trying to model the mechanics or the setting? Moving onto another topic, I wouldn't worry about trying to emulate the advancement system. The character generation system in WFRP is great, giving flavorful characters, but having run several long campaigns, the advancement system kind of sucks in play. It looks nice at first glance. Players get to pick a broad class, then randomly get a career within that class. I meant that most of the players had a clear background and motivation to move towards the actual career they wanted. That provided some fun initial hooks. For example, one guy wanted to be an expert burglar. He took the Rogue class and rolled Escape Artist as a career. He was a guy who was leaving the circus to become a burglar. It was a good setup. It wasn't too long before he made the career swap. Unfortunately, it also wasn't that long before he hit bought all the Burglar improvements. He now had to switch careers or stop improving as a burglar. The rest of his character progression was a series of swaps based on the numbers he could get that had nothing to do with his vision of the character or what was happening in the game. The career system went from adding a sense of reality to actively hindering it. It was the same with most of the party. The magical careers provide a long path, but almost any other career maxes out in a few sessions. Ironically, the "slayer" options provide a long stable path considering the whole purpose of the career is to get yourself killed. My advice is to keep the idea of picking a class that lets you roll a career off a list during character generation. From that point on, stick purely with BRP advancement.

I've got River of Heaven on my shelf and haven't actually given it a proper read yet. I need to get on that.

I'm not actually saying they don't have a use in the setting. I think they make great NPCs, if used sparingly. I'd just be very wary of opening them up for players to use, more so than the other Elder Races.

Personally, I wouldn't unless the player was deeply into Glorantha already and had a very cool concept. Everything that is interesting about them is at odds with having them wandering around adventuring with a typical adventure party. I know the setting has outcast, individualist Mostali that do wander off in search of adventure, but that just feels tacked onto the setting to give people an excuse to play Mostali as people with a different stat build.

That also makes sense. I was going from the interpretation that the NPCs critical would give a permanent effect, never dealing with the PC again, while the PCs success means they do get one last win as they lose the contact. I need to think more about it.

Some kind of opposed roll mechanic would be the best way to handle that. It gives a wider range of information than a single roll. Using your examples for opposed rolls with a blackjack mechanic: "You succeed, but she will never do business with you again" The player rolls a success on the Persuasion check. The NPC rolls a critical to resist. The GM interprets the result as the PC getting what he wants, and the NPC deciding to cut him off forever after this deal. "You fail, but you're positioned very favorably for the next round". The character rolls a failure, but the opposition also rolls a mishap, leaving the character at an advantage. Using this system would likely require percentage values to impersonal challenges so that opposed rolls can be made even when an NPC isn't the opposition. Obviously, this system requires a lot of handwavy interpretation, but I think that's the case with any system like this.

RQ6 uses 1/10th is a crit, but get away with this problem with its blackjack comparative rolls. In case you don't know, Dudemeister, a blackjack roll is when you compare two rolls of the same success level by having the high roll win. To explain in more detail, in an RQ6 comparative roll, the player with the greater success roll obvious wins. A crit beats a success, and success beats a failure. However, if an attacker and defender both roll a success, you look at the number on each die, and the high roll wins. This means that in order to parry an incoming attack, you don't just have to roll a successful parry. You need to roll higher than the attack roll or get a higher level of success. It's a nice system as the higher a skill you have the higher a number you can have on a die roll that still counts as a success. Say you attack me with a 70% skill when I have a 50% skill. You roll 66%. It's impossible for me to roll a normal success that beats 66. However, I can still hope to roll a critical.

This is a lot older the Fate. Deadlands had it in the '90s with Fate Chips. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had it in the '80s with Fate Points.

Another option is to use something like the Luck Points in RQ 6. You get three a session, and you can spend one to re-roll any die roll that affects your character or to downgrade a Major Wound when it occurs. It still keeps the game fairly gritty, but players can at least minimize limb loss a bit.

It seems like a decent way to handle "sanity-lite", meaning that players suffer a psychological toll, but aren't going to lost their characters when the become 0 SAN empty shells. I could quibble with some of the effects. For example, killing a hostage might provoke someone to lash out in rage rather than weaken. I'll think over that more. You might want to look at the quick start version of the new Delta Green ruleset for ideas. It's sanity system is designed heavily around the stresses that combat and danger can take. It also replaces with Magic Points with Willpower, which seems similar to your idea with Resolve. Here is a link.

The Magic Book is really best viewed as The Glorantha Magic Book. It's the rules for how magic works in that setting. That isn't to suggest that you can't transplant them to another setting though. One of BRP's strengths is that it has a great variety of flavorful magic systems. You are already familiar with Call of Cthulhu, to provide another example. D&D has had a large number of setting, but except for a tweak here and there, you have the same basic wizards and clerics casting the same basic spells in all of them. BRP settings are a lot more likely to have magic built from the ground up for that setting. Once you build up a library of BRP books, you have a rich variety of magic systems to use. Magic World and Advanced Sorcery provide nine more magic systems all by themselves. Elric of Melnibone for MRQII has four more. Unlike D&D, there isn't a lot of thought put into balance. These systems are designed to work the way the designer sees magic working in the setting. Without classes and levels, balance doesn't mean a whole lost anyway. Even within the same setting, magic systems often aren't balanced against each other. In Glorantha, sorcery is just really powerful. So why aren't all PC spellcasters sorcerers? Because magic usually have social connotations in BRP settings. Sorcery is frowned on in a lot of parts of the world, and your social connections matter a lot in RuneQuest. Following Divine Magic and joining an accepted cult is going to have a lot of perks that being a recluse sorcerer isn't going to get you. Part of the fun of BRP is being able to pick and choose between all these systems, not just picking based on powers, but thinking about their place in the setting and how they are perceived. How do they different types of practitioners see one another? Are there institutions that teach this kind of magic, or is it hidden? You can get all kinds of campaign ideas simply thinking about the ways various magic types could interact in a world.

I've only been coming to this forum since October, and it is one of the friendliest places to talk about RPGs that I have ever found online. To answer your question, not really. My first RPG was D&D B/X back when I was in middle school. After a couple of years of that with some AD&D thrown in, my best friend picked up the early BRP game Stormbringer 1st Ed. There was universal consensus among my gaming friends that everything about it just made so much more sense. While we never played BRP exclusively from that point, we never played another game of D&D for the rest of my years at school.

As someone with a family history in retail and extensive personal history in dealing with both shoplifters and police, shooting at shoplifters seems highly unlikely to me, even 50-60 years ago. Maybe if the shoplifting in question is a big smash and grab and Tiffany's.

Good advice. Another thing to consider is the have opponents actually value their lives as well. In most RPGs, NPCs attack relentlessly. Six orc bandits might attack the PCs. Even after the three of them have been cut down by the PCs, the other three keep on attacking. Have NPCs that run away when the odds look bad or that beg for mercy. If an hired guard takes a big hit, have him go down and hope the PCs leave him alone, even if he is mechanically capable of fighting. Of course, there will be fanatical and driven opponents who do fight to the last man, but by only doing it when it makes sense, it actually takes on significance to the players. Rather than taking if for granted, players will wonder what motivation made these NPCs so willing to sacrifice their lives Granted, this advice could apply to a lot of games, but it carries extra weight in games like BRP where combat is for keeps.

If you have been playing Call of Cthulhu, you will probably be fine. Most problems occur when people come over from games with more restrictive classes and levels, like D&D.

That's a nice design. Very inviting.

Another thing to consider, if a player put points into Throw with the expectation of tossing around heavy weapons, I'd allow a player to redistribute the points in Throw if I wasn't going to allow it. I have had a number of occasions where a player bought a skill or ability, thinking they could do something I wouldn't allow. Letting them remove that skill and buy something they can use makes things go down a lot easier. Of course, it's the kind of thing that usually comes up in a first session, so it doesn't break reality. The character hasn't been clearly established, so a little skill juggling doesn't matter. In fact, I usually go with the house rule that after the first session of a new RPG, players can fiddle around their points now that they have seen the game in action. However, if you make the call late in a campaign, it can be more complicated.

Minor nitpick: The Sword of Shannara came out after D&D.

I could see the Bond rules working fantastically for that. The current rules allow for your old Bonds to be weakened as your Bond to Delta Green grows. Simply replace the Delta Green Bond with the character's Bond to the Internet/Cyberspace/Machine Consciousness. The character gradually becomes more attuned to their electronic input than they are to the people around them. It's interesting how the Delta Green Bond makes the organization psychologically similar to a cult, replacing connections to others with connection to the group. It would be easy to use these rules for playing a game where the PCs were actual cultists.

This is a pretty cool system. I'm curious how this will interact with the Stealth penalty for having high Power. Sacrificing Power for Rune Points will lower your Stealth penalty, but you will actually be brimming with more magical power and the attention of the gods will be even greater on you. It should be easy enough to deal with. I'm just wondering if it has been worked out yet.

The Sanity and Bond rules would actually working pretty well well for a tense, psychological, espionage game with no Mythos elements. While I was running it during the playtest, it impressed me with how it captures the alienation of living a secret life. Just plugging in the UA Sanity mechanics would have been cool, but they really did a fantastic job tuning them to fit the game perfectly. While the downtime mechanics are basically just choosing some rolls to make, the players all got into coming up with stories of what the results of the rolls meant exactly. The characters all felt like they had real lives between missions rather than just being in suspended animation between them. Getting results like a character's marriage starting to crumble as he becomes obsessed with studying an alien artifact? That's good stuff.