Thalaba

Ashes to Ashes also offers a very free-form system. Basically, you can preproduce any spell-like effect from any BRP game (including CoC and the various RQs) by comparing the practioner's magical ability against the power of the spell effect on the resistance table. Magical ability is not straight up POW, but is calculated using a number of factors. This means there is no restricting spell list, no spheres, no techniques, no skills, no manipulations - nothing. Just magical aptitude vs. the power of the magical effect. The various spell lists are used a a guideline to gauging power, but are not meant to restrict the effects a practitioner might come up with. I've never tried it, so I cant vouch for how well it works, but I thought it was an interesting way to handle freeform magic.

Couple of thoughts: 1. Steam engines varied greatly in terms of they speed over their evolution, just like cars. Also, the speed of a train depends a lot on how many cars are attached, how heavy the cargo is, and the grade of the track. A single MOV rating for steam engines isn't realistic (in a global sense), so just set the engine speed for whatever you think is appropriate. 2. The MOV given for horses is a casual pace, not a flat out gallop. I don't have my book to remember the running rules, but I believe you can double or even quadruple the speed of the horse at a canter or gallop. So, if you want to make train robbery chases more interesting, have the train accelerate such that for a reasonable amount of time a horse can run faster. But the amount of time that this happens is limited because the train is speeding up and the horses are tiring. I would just rule that if the train is moving at full speed, the characters only have 2 or 3 rounds to successfully jump onto the train before their horses tire and begin to fall back (maybe add one additional round at a more difficult rating to heighten tension). Alternatively, if the players can approach the train when it's going slower, they will get correspondingly more time jump onto the train. This keeps things exciting by limiting the amount of time a player can act (making those jump rolls more crucial and exciting) and allowing players to engage in some tactics to alter the situation in their favour. Maybe, before hand, you could plan out the train route a little, deciding that it adds a car here or loses one there, where it goes uphill or downhill, and so on. Then from that decide on what it's speed will be through various sections of track (25 climbing through the gulch, 47 on the flat, 35 between Black Rock and Buffalo Jump, where it will also stop for water, etc.) You can reveal some of this to players that have observed the rout before hand, otherwise they take their chances.

That would certainly be a good match, and probably a good seller, too. I like that setting.

The Culture setting by Iain Banks springs to mind. But honestly, why do so many people want licensed settings? I'd much prefer to see a clever and thoughtful setting created by a writer of RPG games than a writer of television shows or films.

Thanks for sharing. This looks very interesting, and I'm looking forward to reading through it (though this will take a while, as I have many other pressing projects on the go)

Hi Rich, I just wanted to say that I got a hardcopy during the latest sale and, although I won't have time to read it for some time yet, on a quick thumb-through it looks very impressive. Rubble and Ruin (and The Green, which I also ordered) both set a very high bar for layout and illistration. Thanks for taking the time to do that.

The Resistance Table is really just a simple mathematical formula that even I can do in my head (and I'm poor at math). It's presented in a table for easy reference, but most people don't need to refer to it once you get the hang of it. It works like this: It's used to compare 2 values that are not normally more than 10 apart. You use it to overcome someone else's POW with your POW, or to overcome an object's SIZ with your STR. There are many uses. To use it, start with the assumption that there is a 50% chance of success. Then, for every point of difference between the two values that are being compared, you add or subtract 5% to the total. So if a person with 15 POW is trying to overcome a person with 10 POW, you find the difference (15-10=5) and multiply by 5% to get 25%. Since the person making the roll is the higher value, add the 25% to the base 50% chance to get a total of 75%. The person with 15 POW thus rolls 75% or less to overcome the person with 10 POW. A Person with 10 POW has only a 25% chance to overcome someone with 15 POW (50%-25%) A person with 13 STR has a 65% chance to move a rock of SIZ 10. (50%+15%) Etc. It's that simple.

Advice from someone who has used strike ranks from 1989 to 2010, keep using them over the DEX system, as it makes combats more tactical and interesting. But don't use the method presented in the book for multiple attacks - you should revert back to the RQ3 method. With that method, you get 2 combat actions, choosing from attack, parry, or dodge, per round. If you have a skill over 100% in any one of these, you can split it to perform that particular action twice. If this results in two attacks, the second attack takes place 3SR after the first. Note that a character can always get a second attack in a round without having a skill over 100% forgoing a parry and attacking with the off hand weapon. Tactically, the character must decide if sometimes offence is the best defence. It's because of this kind of tradeoff that I love RQ3, and that system is full of tradeoffs. EDIT: Oh, and I think your proposal will result in too much complexity - especially as a GM trying to keep track of all your NPCs and goons.

Sure: The Pastel City Here's a couple of links: http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/h/m-john-harrison/pastel-city.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viriconium The former shows the cover, the latter has a more critical analysis. Turns out he was, himself, inspired by Vance - so there you go. For the recrord, I didn't especially like the book - certainly not as much as Michael Moorcock did, whose mention of it in Wizardry and Wild Romance (IIR) was the reason I picked it up in the first place.

@Harshax: Long time no see. Welcome back! The connection I see is with M. John Harrison's Viriconium setting, but then I've never read Vance.

My thoughts on this: usually as the GM I rule where REPAIR ends and CRAFT begins. If it requires specializes skill, tools, knowledge, or an artistic sensibility, it's a craft. Repair allows a PC to fix a broken shield strap, but not make a shield; to patch a garment, but not to make a garment; to knock the dent out of a helm, but not make a new helm; to fix a wagon wheel so it lasts the rest of the journey, but not to make a new wheel. Generally, repair is used to make a quick fix to something to make it useable until such time as the proper crafter can repair it properly. This means that an object remains functional until the next town can be visited, or until that object undergoes more trauma. It might mean the object is functional, but impaired (eg. the wagon works, but speed is reduced by 1 until it gets seen by a cart-wright). If a character has the CRAFT Chainmail skill, then they would use that skill to repair the item properly, or they could use REPAIR to patch it up well enough to last until they reach town, or until that piece of armour absorbs one or two more serious blows. In our game, we combine REPAIR and DEVISE into a single skill which represents how much of a handyman that character is. In play, this gets used much more in its devise capacity than in its repair capacity. CRAFT remains a separate set of skills

Cool Avatar! (but... is it blowing me a kiss?) In previous versions of RQ at least, encumbrance and fatigue did not affect the movement rate - instead it affected how long players could sustain that rate. In other words, you could move just as fast, but not as far as when you were unencumbered.

One of mine is in the downloads section already: http://basicroleplaying.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=202 It won't be to everyone's taste, and it's more RQ3 than BRP, but it will show you some of the things you can do with Excel or open Office.

I use Open Office Calc (MS Excel) 'cause I like my sheets to do the math for me. That way if my STR changes during the game, I don't have to recalculate my Damage Bonus, ENC, and skill category bonuses all over again. As for fonts, I change them up all the time, depending on the mood I want the sheet to convey.

I've read the example on the page you mentioned and, I have to say, I don't really understand it - but since nobody else has stepped up, I'm going to try to answer your question anyway. As the GM, it's up to you to establish how you want to set up weapon skills for your game, depending on the level of detail you want in combat. There are basically three choices: This first choice is to treat each of the Weapon Classes on page 257 of the Gold Book as a skill. Thus, you weapon skills would be: Axe, Bow, Brawl, Club, Crossbow, etc. If you choose this route, then all of the weapons listed under that skill could be used equally and without penalty. So if the skill was Axe, then a BattleAxe, Great Axe, Hand Axe, Vibro-axe, or wood axe could be used equally well. The second way of doing skills is to give each particular weapon it's own skill. Battle Axe would therefore be a separate skill from Hand Axe. If you choose to go this route, then technically the guy who is skilled in Great Axe would have to start at the base when he picks up a hand axe for the first time. But since there is some degree of expertise that can be transferred from one weapon to another similar weapon, you also have the option of allowing the Great Axe wielder a little more skill with new weapons of the same category. The book mentions two ways for doing this. The 'more severe' method is to allow the Great Axe wielder to pick up the hand axe and use it at either its base chance, or at half his Great Axe skill, whichever is greater. The other method, from which you quoted, doesn't make much sense to me as written. I would ignore it. It seems to be suggesting that if the weapon you want to use has a different base skill, then you could use your existing weapon skill, but modified by subtracting the difference between the two. Thus the Bastard Sword user (base 10%) could pick up the a short sword (base 15%) and use it at his bastard sword skill -5% (the example suggests adding 5%, though I can't imagine why, if you trained with a bastard sword, you should be able to use a short sword at a higher ability). If this is the intent of the rule, I would personally ignore it. Hand Axe (1H) and Great Axe (2H) both have the same base, despite one being a one handed weapon and the other a two handed weapon - in which case by this rule there would be no penalty for using one or the other, despite them being really quite different. Anyway, the third level of weapon skill granularity is to reduce the weapon skills even more, down so say "Melee Weapons" and "Ranged Weapons", and that's it. By the third method, a PC would have the same chance to use ALL melee weapons. By the first method, a PC would have the same chance to use all axes, but would use other types of melee weapons at their base chance (or, if similar and at GM discretion, at half their Axe skill). By the second method, a PC could only use his Great Axe at full skill. Other axes could be used at a reduced skill, and other melee weapons of other categories would be used at base skill. As the GM, you should consider which method you will be using at the time of character creation, and adjust how many skill points you allow accordingly. In a game where the only skill is Melee Weapons, you won't need as many starting skill points as in a game where each weapon has it's own skill and characters will be equipped with a sword, a shield, a bow, a dagger, and a long spear. Hope that helps!

My head's usually in a simulationist space, FYI, so that's where my comments come from. In a Post-Apoc world, I would keep innovation very low, assuming there isn't much of a network for distributing ideas, and what networks there were would probably be very much controlled so that the contoller of the network benefited from the infomation, rather than everyone else. But in a Cyberpunk world, in a digital age - then yeah, why not? Here's how I think I would handle it: Rolling a critical on a craft roll results in something unexpected, perhaps even unique. If someone made a crit on a craft roll, and then made a successful Idea or Knowledge roll, they could then benefit from understanding how their innovation could be used in the future. I would ask the player to come up with a single, appropriate innovation based on the critical craft roll, and this innovation could be applied to future crafting of that item, and even be taught to others. Does that sound workable? It's not so different from what you said in effect, but here the innovation comes first from an accident of genius, and then is applied to the product. I suppose you could also use a critical Chemistry roll, or critical Physics roll, etc., to initiate the process, too.

I've had most success with www.nearbygamers.com. A glance shows several people in N.Virginia. There's also a player finder at www.penandpapergames.com, but it's woefully slanted to D&D - at least around here.

I'm inclined to agree - there's a lot more to innovation that just the desire to try and invent something. We tend to think of technology as a progression because we can look back on it and see how it has progressed, but if we were to re-set the world back to the stone age and start over, technologies might have developed in a very different tree, based on need and circumstance. It doesn't seem quite right for a character in a game to sit down and invent something simply because the player playing him knew it was invented in our world.

Hmmm. It doesn't open well in Open Office, but to me, that sheet looks pretty square with lots of right angles and straight lines and "a touch too busy", which is exactly what you said you don't like. But setting that aside, if you like that sheet you could definitely do something like that in Excel, with drop down menus and probably even a questionnaire. Thing is, I'm pretty sure you'd have to customize for each game if you wanted to change the skill list and use different options. But I'm sure you'd have to do that with desktop publishing software, too. I still think Excel is your best bet. I'll attach our Excel made character sheet (well, now it's an open office Calc sheet), maybe you can compare. It doesn't have any graphics, but they can certainly be added. It's also for a modified RQ3 game, so would have to be modified for BRP. I think that once it was tailored for BRP, it would probably only take a half an hour or so to modify it for each particular game after that. You would first build the sheet with all the options, then simply delete the things you don't need and rearrange the rest in a pleasing fashion. Amelizar Charshee.pdf

I put an Excel character sheet in the downloads some time ago. It's definitely specific to our campaign, but serves as an example of what can be done. It's definitely 'square' since it's printed on an 8.5"x11" piece of paper, but then I've never seen a character sheet that wasn't. One of the criticisms of it was that it wasn't crowded enough (though for me that's a feature). Personally, I wouldn't buy a book of published character sheets because I doubt it would contain exactly what I was looking for in a sheet. I'm too much a DIY GM - which is part of what attracts me to BRP in the first place, I suppose. Merak, it might help if you could post here a sample sheet from another game that illustrates what you're looking for - then maybe someone will tell you how to make one quickly (if possible), or maybe even make it for you.

The trick with skills is to try to make sure there are meaningful consequences before calling for the roll. So, if the blacksmith is in a shop making a horseshoe on a saturday afternoon and he fails, then so what. He'll just start over or keep working on it until he gets it. So the practical consequence of failure is not "Sorry, you failed to make a horseshoe" but "You made the horseshoe, but it took you twice as long as you said it would and the farmer's kind of pissed off." So, if you're tinkering with the craft system, maybe make a little list of possible consequences for the various success levels, but especially failure. For a smith, these might include: 1. Took way too long to make. 2. You made it and it works, but it's so ugly that people keep commenting on it. 3. (for a sword): PC: "I hit him in the arm for 8 points!". GM "8 points? Your sword shatters with the force of the blow - it wasnt made well enough to handle that kind of abuse." 4. You didn't make that too well - there was a lot of waste and it took much more raw iron than it should have, making it cost twice a much in raw materials. 5. The balance is out on that sword - using it will incur a -5% penalty. 6. Theres something wrong with that horseshoe - any horse using it will be at -1 movement. (or a sword might be forced to strike in a later strike rank, etc) 7. Etc. If you define success as "being able to make a quality item in a reasonable amount of time for a fair price", then you will see there are many ways to fail.

LOL! 'Mighty fine grub' indeed!

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/1034874/monster-bug-attaches-itself-to-submarine Said one Norwegian: "Bah! We've been pickling and snacking on these things for years".

FYI I just got a clarification back from Dustin on this: Just thought I'd give you all the heads-up.

I think that sounds like a really interesting way to handle it. I might force it to be a combat, but I think that depends on the culture/gameworld and what makes sense. I like the metaphor of 'fighting for your life'. Personally, I like Ressurection to be very rare and for there to be a significant cost to those practising the ritual so they seriously weigh if it's worth it before starting. In another thread I once posited this: