steamcraft

Thanks. Cthulhu Now is helpful on updating things to the 80's and has the updated character sheet. Although I am looking the unofficial character sheet. They have already made their PCs using the one for Cthulhu Now, but I will give them to option of switching to the more colorful one if they want.

I happen to own the 3rd edition of CoC from 1986. That is also the year of the last Stranger Things season. I thought it would be interesting to play a CoC adventure set in 1986 using the rules from 1986. Initially the goal was for them to be teenagers that were part of a gaming club that played CoC. Instead of D&D references, they would make CoC references. However, I probably don’t want to repeat the plot where there is the upside down and psychic powers. I need Cthulhu monsters and cultists. I need 9-12 hours of content. I am open to them not being teenagers. I am also open to using an adventure if I can get it on PDF. However, I would like to know how to expand out CoC adventure to eat up time while keeping the players interested. Any suggestions on published adventures I could modify or suggestions on how to approach the scenario without just copying Stranger Things?

Well because when you start getting into settings and non-fantasy genres, things play differently. There are other percentile games. So is it just the percentile you like or is there something specific about this family of percentile games?

There is BRP, OpenQuest, Legend, etc. All of these seem to have almost the exact same rules (but maybe I am missing something.) In any case, when it comes to these games, what do you like the most about them? What do you dislike about them? Given that you could use BRP for non-fantasy games, I am pretty much just interested in the fantasy genre at the moment. I am thinking more in terms of the rules and play rather than the settings that may go along with these rules.

I am not a lawyer, I am a publisher so I would say that whatever gamer lawyer you are talking about doesn't know copyright. The US Copyright office is clear that you cannot copyright instructions: https://web.archive.org/web/20181118195041/https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf And https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf According to the office, " Copyright law expressly excludes copyright protection for 'any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied.'" The procedure, process, system, method of operation are just ways of saying instructions. This is why recipes cannot be copyrighted and other forms of instructions cannot be copyrighted. Has there been a final ruling at the highest levels dealing specific with table top games? Nope. I do know that there is a huge issue dealing with coding. Code is instructions? What parts of code can be copyrighted? Companies are using patents instead of copyrights. If you are looking to make money in law and IP, then I highly recommend getting into the issue of what is legally protected in coding. Billion dollar companies suing each other and fighting trolls seems to be a good market to be in. But again, if anyone is worried and there is an OGL of some sort, then I suppose you can use it to give you some piece of mind.

I took a look at the link. Thankfully enough, the preview was character creation. Based on that, it does not look like that mechanics I am after. It says to assign points to attributes. Then you get 3 times that many points to allocate to skills underneath that attribute. It is an interesting mechanic, but not exactly how I described.

Thanks for the replies. It was none of those. I was likely just mixing up Eclipse Phase with other games. However, my main reason for finding the game was research. So I at least have a few games to go look at that I have not looked at before.

You can do a search for it. You shouldn't have to, but I believe here it is: https://support.drivethrurpg.com/hc/en-us/articles/208596786-Monte-Cook-Cypher-System-Creator

It really depends on how you publish it and what references you use. In the United States, instructions cannot be copyrighted. Only the means of expression are copyrighted. Therefore, the rules for any system are not subject to copyright, but the text used to explain the rules is. (Notice how many of the games use the 3d6 and the same stats that are percentile based.) Trademark is different. Trademark, in theory, was intended to protect the consumer. However, thanks to Edgar Rice Burroughs, it has become a tool for companies to control intellectual property. Fundamentally what that means is that name Basic Role Playing is trademarked. You cannot use that without permission. That same would apply to any of the other systems. The key issue would be is if you want to use the text from any of these games or if you want to say it is compatible with a certain trademarked property. In theory, could could say that something is compatible for Basic Roleplaying and not violate the trademark as long as you are clear that Basic Roleplaying is owned by someone else and you are not affiliated with them. But, as I said, trademark has become a tool of companies, and not consumer protection anymore. You can say it is for use with percentile based system. As long as you are not copying text from another book or telling players to go refer to something is some other book, then you are clear to publish a setting. People can then use BRP, OpenQuest, or whatever they want for the mechanics. With that said, if you are worried, then get a license. It should not be a concern, but since T$R suing over things that were clearly not protected, people in the gaming community have been extremely concerned about lawsuits. Lawsuits, however, do cost money and those suits were a significant contribution to TSR's bankruptcy . . .

If it helps, it was not 3d6 for attributes. It was a point allocation. I recall some of the base values being ~20 or greater.

Thanks for the replies. It does need to be the actual attribute value. I read the game around 2011-2012, so not EP 2E. It might be Transhuman I suppose. That was 2013 which seems a little late. I don't have it saved in my usual PDF folder either. I was reading many percentile games. It is possible that in remembering, I am just mixing a few things together.

I am trying to find and RPG that is percentile. I have not had luck finding it, so I thought maybe someone on the d100 games forums might know. You assign attributes. Each skill is correlated to some attribute. The attribute rating is the base chance in a skill. You can then add points to skills resulting in your overall chance of success. For example, you might have Dexterity at 15, so everything with DEX is at least 15. Then, you have 20 in Gunnery, giving you a 35% skill in Gunnery. While I am thinking of uses the entire attribute rating as the base, not a certain percent of the attribute rating. At first, I thought it was WH:40K, but that is not it. Eclipse Phase does have this mechanic. However, character creation is very long with a lot of points to spend. While it may be Eclipse Phase I am thinking of, I feel that what I had in mind. So, is there another RPG with the mechanic or just EP? Thanks

The Blade Runner movie was from the 1982. Gibson was actually worried about that when it came out because he thought people would think he was copying that world's look. However, the look is because of the director. The film is very different than the short story it is based on. The concepts in the Matrix may have existed before, but not in cyberpunk form. I don't consider Judge Dredd to be cyberpunk. This isn't to say that people are not influenced by other people. Often people are pulling together concepts from different areas and then merging them together. It then becomes something greater than the sum of its parts. Further, people look for a definitive example of something to serve as the model. Gibson's work did that, and then others followed. It is possible that one of those other writers would have put out a book even without Gibson. In fact, the lack of having something definitive to point to can create problems. IBM forecast that steampunk would be a 20+ year trend. While I can see elements of steampunk design in many different media, there is really nothing that screams steampunk. Steampunk, to an extent, it on its way out. It was at its peak and now has retreated. It likely will not be coming back. The reason it did not take off as much as IBM had forcasted is because other than a general aesthetic, there is nothing definitive to crystallize and serve as a defining media. There is no TV show or move that has come out in the past few years to point to. While there is steampunk 'music' the only steampunk thing about it is their look - and not even all of them. Book publishers have used the term steampunk to refer to a wide variety of different books, making it difficult to define by example. So steampunk has a slap a gear on it and call it streampunk definition. That wasn't enough.

There are various reasons for this. One thing Chaosium could do is make an OGL. A publisher now has the choice of asking permission (which may or may not involve paying them money) or making their own. Percentile is easy enough that BRP fans would be able to pick up and play another percentile system. BRP (not the games based on it) doesn't seem to have as much of a fan base as FATE or Savage Worlds, so using the BRP name doesn't appear to be much of an advantage. Or at least it is not an advantage worth not creating your own percentile system over. Finally, there are OGL percentile systems out there to use. I am not saying an OGL is the direction they should go. I am just saying that if you do not want so many custom percentile games out there, then this is the minimum that is required. They could go Savage Worlds method of having OGL for fan stuff, but must approve the quality of commercial products. However, in order for publishers to want to use BRP, they would need to be able to reproduce the rules in their game. They can't tell players to go buy BRP. Players mostly want a complete RPG in one book now. Unless it could be demonstrated that using the BRP name would sell me more books, then I would simply write my own system if I could not copy/paste the BRP rules into my book. Doing this, however, might not be to the financial advantage of Chaosium. I suppose it depends on if people seeing all of these BRP games would decide to buy the generic rules or not. At the very least, I think it would raise the profile of the system and other Chaoisum games, especially if they all became a unified system between their own products.

Or maybe they should make all of the various games more compatible?

Oddly enough, it was massively play tested. WotC took more of it takes a village to build a game approach. It wasn't corporate design per se, but rather all of the fans that wanted certain things in the game. That is why it got built the way it did. Additionally, the play testing served as PR. Then it was followed by bringing in Gygax, but they ignored him and just touted him out to try and get 1E players on board. It was a very slick production effort to make 3E a success. D20 is designed around the idea of splat. Adventures do not sell very well. You want books that all members of a group will want, not just the GM. So, you end up with producing more rules, options, spells, classes, etc. That is how you make money. Adventures do not sell very well. Only GMs will buy it and only a small number of them will. I do think one could make the plausible claim that BRP is 80's game design and WotC era D&D/D20 is modern game design. I think BRP based games avoid the splat and therefore have to survive off of how 80's games survived - getting new players, replacing damaged books, and adventures. Primarily settings sell, not systems. BRP in terms of just the generic rules will not be something that is hugely popular. Games built off of its rules can be. D20 took off and then when people played it outside of D&D, it was a flop. GURPS is only holding on because of loyalty that Steve Jackson has for its fans. It borders on money loss. Cortex Plus came about through established IPs and then the generic rules. It is not a flop, but I do not think it is that successful. Newish indie/narrative games that are generic have some limited popularity. AWE was tied to a setting but was generic enough to be used for other games. FATE is the only rule system not tied to a setting that enjoys contemporary success. But, that took basing it off of another existing rule set (FUDGE), 10 years, and then licensing the Dresden Files to do it. After Dresden, then FATE by itself became popular. But, even talking about popularity is a misnomer. FATE was a top 5 seller at one point, but it has no where near the sales volume of D&D/Pathfinder in a year. If you were going to talk up BRP for the rules, and you believe the rules fade away, then that is what you need to say. You claim that it is rules-lite, flexible, avoids splat, and that it allows you to focus on the game and not the rules. Of course once players see charts and lots of modifiers, they might not think it fades away.

I would not say that D20 is American. I think it was a poorly thought out attempt to bring D&D play style to other genres. It basically failed and IMO has hurt D&D because it allowed Pathfinder to exist. BRP is a skill based system, which almost all non-fantasy RPGs are in the US. It may be more popular in the EU than the US, but CoC is popular here. So I am not really sure what about it would make it an EU style game.

Thanks. That certainly seems like the martial arts as spells approach. That is the direction I seem to be leaning. It fits somewhat with what I have done in the past with melee weapons.

I took a look at Mythras Imperative. I like the direction you are going with the combat effects. I just do not how they are triggered. I think opposing roles often make sense in terms of game mechanics, but in terms of mechanics I prefer fewer roles. I would rather just a single role and that determines things with the possibility of a save. Thinking about this thread, I think I am leaning towards the more spell like approach. It seems the closest to accomplishing what I want. Of course if I ever get a hold of the OOP books I might take a different approach.

They are called skyscrapers there.

I see your point and I mostly agree. However, I have this problem. Melee combat/fighter classes = boring. Compare this with a magic user who gets to do many different types of effects. Martial Arts can be exciting. The problem is that if you just limit a player to a role to hit/miss then it is still boring and the character type is very limited. I also do not like random GM narration as an attempt to make a numbers game seem more interesting, i.e. the PC hits and then the GM says you give the person a bloody lip. I am looking for more control and more options for the player. I just do not want it to be overly complicated or time consuming. I also want to minimize any min/max on the players part. I want them to think tactical and/or theatrical. For example, the PC does an attack to temporarily paralyze an arm to make the target drop his weapon, or a knock back attack to temporarily stun the target for the rest of the round so other PCs can subdue the target or do massive damage because the target cannot protect himself. What I do not want is choose X style and gain +Y damage and -Z defense. To me, that is just a numbers game and if I want to stick with only numbers, I would just go with hit/miss. I would go with a style option. That sets base damage range. It then has a list of special abilities that can be learned. Each one has a chance to doing an additional affect if successful. It looks like The Celestial Empire is just as unavailable as Dragon Lines. Seems like I should have had an interest in all of this 5 years ago.

I haven't been able to find Dragon Lines on DTRPG. I find this odd because the company still has other products, so why not make this available? I suppose I could spend $0.18 and buy a used physical copy on Amazon. I do not like the GURPS options listed and it does not exactly fit the three models I propose. When I say style as a weapon, then it is just that style that will do things. There won't be additional sub-skills. This is different from GURPS which just lists the style and then offensive and defensive skills that the style covers. Then GURPS also want to turn all of these into skills. Also, when I say style, I am thinking less in terms of say large schools like jujitsu, but rather a special small section of kungfu. The idea would be that there is already a basic kungfu style that covers most things, but using crane would be like switching your polearm for a sword. It is still just a melee attack, but it will be a little different because of the weapon. Having martial art abilities like spells would just be using an already existing mechanic and therefore not adding additional crunch to the game. I want something interesting and semi-meaningful, but I do not want things to be overly complicated or time consuming. I also want other people besides me to find such a style worth playing an interesting. Ignoring what Dragon Lines has or has not done, which of the three methods do you prefer and why? I am a light to medium crunch type of person.

It is the second quote that I have seen most often. Mike Pondsmith had talked with cybperunk authors, in particular Gibson about doing a Cyberpunk RPG. It wasn't a licensing thing or anything, just about how he was going to do it and using the author's works as primary source material for building the world and the game. Then at some point Gibson found out about Shadowrun. He felt it was essentially Cyberpunk 2020 mixed with fantasy, which to him meant taking his world and adding elves to it. I think it is a combination of the lack of originality and then bastardizing his work. Of course one can ponder if the original Shadowrun really was just copying his version of cyberpunk and adding elves and magic to it.

I have been working on a set up custom rules for martial arts. The idea is to make it less than a hit/miss mechanic. I am thinking of this not just to make it more exciting, but because of an idea I have for a Chinese influenced fantasy RPG setting. Martial arts is central to the genre. I have three models I am working with as the baseline. I am hoping to get people’s thoughts on it. Descriptive The descriptive model is the most basic. The idea is that the player describes what he is going to do. The GM then determines the damage based on the type of attack and then applies bonuses/penalties based on what the player is describing. For example, the player can say he is going to jab the target. This would be a simple punching damage and no real bonuses or penalties apply. On the other hand, a spinning round kick would do significantly more damage, but a miss would result in a penalty that would either hurt next rounds initiative or grant a bonus for the target to hit the PC. A flying jump kick would do a lot of damage, but might have a penalty to hit and a miss would incur a penalty. So it would really just be a chart that details out damage by type, e.g. hand, head, elbow, knee, foot, etc. and then another chart with bonuses/penalties to hit based on description, and then guidance about what to do in case of misses. Martial Art Styles as Weapon The second method would detail a lot of styles. Each style would do certain amounts/type of damage. There might be bonuses/penalties for certain styles. The key thing is that the PC would have like the Snake style, which would be X damage, and then there is the Monkey style that does Y damage. Switching a style would be like switching weapons. It results in different damage and/or effects on the target. I would likely make the PC train each of these as a separate skill, but it might not be necessary. It would just be that the PC would need to have learned these during the course of the game, but they all have the same Martial Arts check to hit. Martial Arts as Spell The third model has the PC learn attacks just like magic users learn spells. Each attach does a certain amount of damage or has effects. For example, a leg sweep would cause X damage, and then the target would on its back with a penalty to initiative next round. Chain punches would be that the target is hit by multiple (say 1d10) punches that each causes a minor amount of damage. A nerve punch might paralyze an arm for 1d4 rounds. Do any of these models seem like a good basis for building a martial arts system?

IIRC, Gibson was very upset with the Shadowrun take. He did not like adding in fantasy races and magic. I think that is really the thing for most people. Do you want to have Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Native American tribes, Dragons, and spell casters? If not, then CP2020 is that game you want. In general, I prefer CP2020 setting to Shadowrun. CP2020, however, is a bit dated in terms of the setting given how old it is. CP v3 was poorly received. The world is likely a more plausible from 2016 as a starting point than CP2020 is, but it isn't one people find appealing. It gets into nanotech and bioengineering. Shadowrun has managed to keep the core setting essentially the same, but has updated it to try to keep it futuristic so that is a plus. With CP2020, you get a pure version of 1980's Cyberpunk. While outdated, I do find the setting more enjoyable.