Jason D

Way too early to tell... (The notion of leaving Texas to go to Germany for barbecue is just... peculiar.)

Just a bump for newer forum members... I'll be there, wandering the halls. The lack of a Chaosium booth and my own goal for getting new freelance gigs makes me more of a ronin this year than a proper samurai, but if anyone from the forum here recognizes me, be sure to say "Hi."

I would absolutely love to see someone revise Superworld to harmonize with the current BRP rules.

The other posters have summed up my feelings on the matter perfectly. Skills should be based on the knowledge base at the time. The Roman horseman with Ride 90% is theoretically better than 89% of the population at this skill, just as the Roman astronomer's skill of Science (Astronomy) 90% means he knows 90% of what's known about astronomy at the time (whereas his skill compared with a modern astronomer might be more accurately described as 05%). If you're dealing with someone accustomed to riding with saddle and tack but is forced to do without, then that's best represented as a circumstantial action modifier (described on page 177 of BRP), ranging from -15% for no saddle if saddled is the norm, or +15% for a saddle if bareback is the norm.

That pic was in Superworld and was printed in color, but I think the original was black-and-white. As far as I can tell, aside from some of the cover images reproduced in the intro chapter, none of the book's illustrations have ever appeared in color. The page layout elements in grayscale were likely in color originally but were turned into black-and-white for the layout. If anyone's at Gen Con, they should definitely corral Charlie and demand a HC BRP.

Thanks! But I'm just another freelancer these days. The game rules are as much yours as mine now.

Absolutely. Look at some Olympic gymnastic events and figure out what these athletes do - from things like balance beams, swings, cartwheels, flips, tumbles, walking on hands, tightrope-type walking, etc. Make those use the Acrobatics skill. If you were doing anything gymnastic like that, use that skill. Then use the DEX roll for less basic stuff that anyone without training but high reflexes could do, like catching things, landing on your feet if you're pushed over, etc. Anyone using the Acrobatics skill successfully will look like someone who's trained and is highly skilled. Using the DEX roll successfully will look like you managed to do it, but it looked like it was raw reflexes rather than any sort of training.

I remember long ago reading of an incident where a perpetrator with a concealed pistol opened fire on his arresting police officer. The officer pulled his own firearm and each of them emptied their clips at one another, with neither of them hit. The officer then reloaded and the perp surrendered. The twist was that perp was in the back seat of a police car, firing through the mesh at the officer in the front seat, who was firing back. Two men, shooting at a distance of roughly 4 feet at one another, missed almost 16 times between them.

Yeah, it was a crying shame the SB5 edition died so rapidly, but Slaves of Fate was actually support for Dragon Lords of Melnibone. Sure I could do an interview. I now have oceans of time on my hands.

I say change it if you'd like. Given carte blanche I'd have shortened the combat round to three seconds and completely done away with Strike Ranks... but I was trying to maintain the integrity of the system. The 12-second combat round really breaks down applied to anything beyond melee combat (where you can use the D&D handwave of "there's a lot more going on than just a single attack"), and is utter abstraction when dealing with firearms. When working on the firearms tables, I called my former army/cop friend James, and asked "Imagine you've got a fully loaded Glock, and have it pointed at a target. How many shots could you get off in a 12-second period?" His answer was: "Probably all of them, and I'd be already ejecting the clip and reaching for my spare." I can only imagine how much faster an energy weapon with no internal moving parts might be. Faced with two paths: 1. Compatibility with previous rules sets and more-or-less utter abstraction or 2. Abandon all backwards compatibility and strive for utter realism, which would eventually require changing every system in the game at some level I picked path 1.

I've seen it handled in a few games (Aberrant, Continuum, DC Heroes, etc.) and they're a good model for how to do it without unbalancing things. I haven't looked at 4E specifically, mainly because I'm uninterested in generic fantasy. Here's how I'd handle it (reflecting some of the suggestions above): It's absurdly expensive. Like 100 power points per level. Each level lets you "remove" your SIZ from the natural flow of time. It costs an absurd amount to utilize. Like 20 power points per activation, per round of use. The range is your POW in meters from where you first activated the power. Go beyond that, your body readjusts to the normal flow of time. It lasts as long as you've got power points to fuel it, or ends at the end of a combat round if you don't spend any more power points on it. To do anything funky while the power is in effect, you've got to make an Idea roll to maintain concentration - it might be a Difficult roll if your action is really elaborate. It's slightly more difficult to manipulate things while you're in time stop mode... perhaps for any resistance rolls, everything's SIZ is doubled (purely in terms of mass). Or it has a STR added to it based on any momentum and/or kinetic energy it may have stored (so it's not so easy to wrench a bullet out of someone's path). Anything that leaves your own "radius" loses its kinetic force and freezes in time, and actually loses its momentum when you switch back to real time. So if you fired a gun, it would go as far as the end of the barrel and just hang there... and when you switched back, it would fall to the ground. (Yeah, the science on that one is complete hogwash.) You could, however, wallop anyone as much as you'd like with melee weaponry. Having it "break on attack" is too inexplicable - aside from the fundamental psychological difference between attacking someone and manipulating something, there's little other than "the GM said so" as a reason to enforce that. If you want to shoot someone... stop time, walk up to them, put the barrel of your weapon at point-blank range, end the time fugue, and pull the trigger. I'd definitely be a stickler for anything that seems completely silly, like the Tomb Raider scene of "turning a time-stopped knife around in midair so it flies back to the guy who threw it". Make sure everyone knows the difference between momentum and kinetic energy.

I'll pore through my files and see if there's anything suitable for submitting to the site.

It's coming along well enough - a couple of speed bumps in June and early July have caused me to ask for an extension to turn it at the end of August instead. My schedule has opened up immensely, though, and I'm going to see about finishing it before then if at all possible.

Thanks! The download page is enough. I created those things for a game, not for distribution, and as such the attribution wasn't necessary. I just didn't want a download represented as being "by me" when it was based on the work of two other fine authors.

I hate to be a pain, but is it possible to credit the two authors whose work was used for the basis of those writeups somewhere? Maybe in the "Download" title page? I used the writeups from Philip Masters and Jon Woodward as the core of those Call of Cthulhu versions, and don't want anyone to think that I'm plagiarizing their work. Thanks!

People are already complaining that the book is 400 pages long. I think a list of "readymade" gadgets, while very cool, should be the province of an equipment book or in a setting book.

I don't know anything. You can always email Charlie at Chaosium, or ask him in person at Gen Con.

Much of the feedback was in the "this power is too expensive" or "this power needs to provide greater range/flexibility/etc." for the power expenditure. Most of the use in the playtest, as near as I could ascertain, was from people who were using the powers to do other stuff, like create vampires, demons, etc. I did my own local shakeout on powers, but must confess I would have liked to have had more of the playtesters trying to run actual supers games using the power set. Oh well... perhaps another edition will see more focus along that line. As it is, I had to fight to keep powers in the book at all - I had some pressure from Chaosium to cut powers entirely and make it a separate book.

Ironically, one of the best games I ran using the rules was at a convention where I did a Watchmen game called "A Cure for Cancer." It was a pretty grim game, set in the summer if 1969, with the players taking on the roles of the "Watchmen" - with the Silk Specter 2 character getting to handle Dr. Manhattan. It was loosely inspired by the novel Bug Jack Barron, and featured a plot with a massive medical conspiracy involving harvesting the organs of illegal immigrants to provide wealthy patients with clean bills of health. The corruption was deep, connected to the govt. and some improper use of Manhattan-inspired technology.

I played and ran a lot of it back in the day. Both the Super-World set from Worlds of Wonder and the boxed game. Probably a couple of dozen sessions, and I've used the rules for one-shots a handful of times over the last couple of decades. It worked well enough, though as you can imagine, it played best when dealing with more "street-level" superheroics than the heavy-hitters.

Pages 238-247 cover equipment with characteristics and powers. You could also take the generic powered assault armor and add all kinds of extras to it, though that might take some GM approval.

A site I've found useful while working on Star Trek Online and Blackstar: THE WORLD DREAM BANK: PLANETOCOPIA THE WORLD DREAM BANK: Carpentry Tips for Worldmakers THE WORLD DREAM BANK: World-Builders

For the bestiary and NPC digest, all writeups were given skill percentiles to reflect those of an average representative.

I think it's been modified for the BRP rules set, but am not 100% on that. (No pun intended.)

It's a "where appropriate" rule, when the skills have some relevance to one another, and is only to be allowed at the GM's approval. For example, a Science (Mathematics) skill might be halved for a Science (Physics) skill attempt, but a Language (Spanish) would not be useful for a Language (Sanskrit) skill attempt. The infinite number of potential combinations prevents any hard-and-fast rule about it, or equivalency chart, so the GM should be the final arbiter.