Jason D

It'll be a little while before I get anything figured out. I am swamped right now and am still (probably foolishly) hoping that Charlie will respond to emails or pay me for the work I did on BRP.

Dustin is almost always prompt in replying to emails or phone calls. I've known him personally for years (he even crashed at my place for a few days while on a road trip through Seattle when I lived there), and I consider him a friend. He is, unfortunately, not the problem, and is so geographically removed from the home office that his role as a problem-solver is somewhat limited.

My family is doing fine, I'm healthy, and work is awesome.

Probably, with an existing system or perhaps under the %-based system I've been working on inspired by what I learned from writing BRP. Either someone else or self-published. It was never officially announced. ` Yes.

Haven't decided as of yet. I have informed Chaosium of my intent and am waiting to see if they're going to try to salvage the business relationship. Umm.... no. I really wanted to finish it and publish it for BRP.

I'm sorry to announce that Interplanetary is, for the time being, indefinitely delayed.

You know, I've been biting my tongue for a while, but it's become obvious to me at this point that things aren't going to get straightened out. Barring a miraculous change in the current situation, Interplanetary will not be proceeding as a BRP project. I've done everything I can to try to work with Chaosium, but the lack of communication and financial issues are insurmountable obstacles.

I use the STR+CON rule option exclusively in my heroic fantasy games, and it's worked well. It does give the players a feeling of superiority over normal characters, but then since it's not too difficult for a critical or special success to overcome their major wound total, it's not a huge problem. Yes. It's a deliberate power balancer, and gives non-powered characters something to do with those power points. In a way, fate points are a generic universal multi-faceted "power" available to everyone.

I'm in the middle of some stuff, but here's a quick clarification (hopefully not muddling things even more). The volley fire rules apply specifically to thrown/self-propelled weapons. These are almost always utilized at the rate of 1 attack per combat round, with the RoF used for volley fire. The Difficult modifier applies here. The vagueness with ROF rules and how they are applied is more-or-less deliberate, or it's more a case of "I know how I like to use them, but some folks might want to do them the other way." My preferred method is as follows: a firearm/energy weapon can be used up to its RoF in a combat round, with each attack staged at the DEX, DEX-5, DEX-10, etc. rank. If you lack the DEX to fully exploit the RoF of the weapon you're using, then you might reconsider your weapon of choice. Some folks like to play Call of Cthulhu style, where all shots go off at the Investigator's DEX value. I am not one of those folks. I (hopefully) let the rules be vague enough to allow for both approaches. The damage values for the generic firearms were deliberately selected to balance against the RoF. A problem I later realized with the playtest (and, had I the time, would have addressed) was that many of the playtesters were BRP veterans, and as such often ignored the rules as written with an attitude of "yeah, I already know how that works" which unfortunately caused some oversight, particularly when changes were made. I'm just as guilty of it as a writer, as I've been using BRP games for something like 25 years and occasionally didn't explain them clearly enough to a newcomer. As for the lack of follow-up, I can't really call myself an official voice. I'm just a freelancer at this point, and am sort of waiting for some stuff to be straightened out before I'm even a Chaosium freelancer again.

Congratulations, Nick! I look forward to reading it!

One thing to keep in mind is that if one of your "player characters" is killed or otherwise incapacitated, it makes things a bit awkward having them still around. Do you evict the player, or do they play someone else?

Not especially happy news. The manuscript is on hold for the time being due to the recent death of a family member and the ensuing issues it spurred, combined with a demanding time at work in my new job. Plus there's the usual dearth of free time during the holiday season (I get Thanksgiving, wife's birthday, wedding anniversary, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year's, and my baby's birthday in a 40-day period). There's also an issue I need resolved with Chaosium before I can get back to work on it, and communication is typically slow there. So the update would be "Manuscript to be turned in to Chaosium Q1 2009" if things are straightened out.

I've actually run campaigns of BSG and Serenity, and have written for Margaret Weiss Productions on both game lines. The statement above is a gross exaggeration. Ads/disads can be abused by min/maxers, but then most game systems can. Used rightly, they're awesome for adding unique aspects and quirks to characters. They're not in the BRP core book for the following reasons: a) BRP combat isn't as based on a hex map, which rules out "feat" style advantages. Advantages or disads that affect skills just didn't make sense when comparing with the skill/experience system. c) Aside from those in Superworld, they'd never been a part of BRP and we weren't out to reinvent the game. d) A large part of the audience is people familiar with BRP games... I found few of the playtesters interested in such a system, and many were vociferously against them.

I was specifically thinking of the Force when I wrote the deStormbringerized version of Allegiance.

Angus.

I appoint Shaira the official "rules explainer" from now on.

Still in development. An unexpected job change due to a company shutting down, and the death of a family member (father-in-law) after a months-long period of hospice requiring a lot of attention put me way behind schedule.

The first set of guidelines. Grumble....

Which is ironic, considering the character the game is named after arguably only has a STR and CON in the average range because of the intervention of powerful (and expensive) potions and/or one of the most powerful magical artifacts in the Multiverse. Prior to attaining Stormbringer, Elric was sickly and feeble without the aid of medicinal draughts. When separated from it and without his drugs, he's barely able to do much more than lie defenseless and weakened to the point of immobility.

Off the top of my head, I think that all of the extra effects from special successes assume that at least 1 point of damage is done.

Just as a point of reference, the first advantage/disadvantage system I can think of showed up in Champions, 27 years ago. One might argue that ads/disads are also quite dated.

I did think it was kind of funny seeing BRP criticized for being "dated" in a time when every week sees the release of some copyware version of original blue box D&D. Also, I didn't really follow his logic with stating that it's dated in that it lacks advantages/disads, which most modern games have, but then he later goes on to say why they wouldn't be ideal for BRP.

Nice to see that!

I actually ran an X-Com adventure back in the day, though I used a different system (the one from Hidden Invasion). It was quite a lot of fun... the players had no character sheets to start with. I began with an intro that described them all as veterans fully-kitted out with retroengineered alien/human tech gear, a few had psychic powers and were barely human by that point, etc. They were on their way to the assault on Cydonia. I hit them with a line saying "It's hard to imagine, as the space transport hits the alien atmosphere, that less than 19 months ago you were all just normal humans responding to your first landing" and then handed out intro-level soldier character sheets. We did the whole adventure with an intro landing, combat, hunt-and-seek, and then when it was over, I handed out the upgraded sheets and we played the end encounter with the alien hive queen. It was a blast.

Awesome, simply awesome! I can't wait to see the stats for aliens and equipment.