simonh

One of the positive effects (well, the ONLY positive effect) of Greg diverting his attention from d100 games is that BRP stuff is no longer prone to being Gregged...

Because of course extensively using Glorantha as the default setting has caused crippling Gregging issues for Mongoose Runequest that have almost killed the product, such that you can hardly find it in games shops, unlike BRP which.... er... hang on a minute!

Simon Hibbs

It is the concept of "giving the players what they want", that if taken too far is nothing more than spoiling your players. If meat-grinders and Monty Haul start explaining your gaming sessions then it is doing little to encourage roleplaying.

In my experience, players want challenge and conflict not unearned rewards.

A long time ago I was taught that you never tell a player "no", you just determine difficulty.

It's a great approach. I try to avoid the "N" word as much as possible. "Yes but..." is much better, especialy when it's a realy big "But".

Simon Hibbs

Players like these seem selfish and lazy to me.

They think about what THEY want, and ONLY about what they want.

Have your players define a small set of “personality traits” or “motivations” for their characters. Whenever the players role-play these traits well enough in game, you could reward them for good roleplaying by allotting them a few Fate Points.

That's a nice idea. I'd make two modifications. One is to have a vote at the end of each session to allocate one FP to a player that the group feels role-played their character's motivations the best. This Makes it a democratic group decisions and eliminates yet another instance of top-down GM fiat, there's no reason a GM would be better at determining this than anyone else.

The other is to limit everyone to a maximum of 2 FPs each. This prevents FP hoarding - use them or lose them.

Simon Hibbs

The link above only has a very low resolution image, but I just did a search for "maquette de rome" on Google Image Search. There are a lot more detailed images of the model available.

I've been fortunate enough to go to Rome several times, but this model realy helps put what I remember of it into context.

For Roman history buffs I'd also like to recommend the History of Rome Podcast. I subscribed via iTunes and have been listening to them for a few years now. I can't wait for each podcast as it comes out every week. The episodes start with the mythic orrigins of the city and each episode goes step by step through Rome's hitory from there. Outstanding stuff, and recently voted best educational podcast of 2010. Witty, informative and entertaining. One of the main reasons I bought BRP Rome was because this podcast primed my interest in the subject.

Simon Hibbs

I'm very interested in using BRP for an SF campaign I'm working on, so this is right up my street. Sold!

Simon Hibbs

How about the piecemeal approach?

The economics don't work. Say you have a $20 book that's 200 pages long. It's not economical to print four 100 page books for $5 and maintain the same margins. The production costs aren't linear with page count. You're more likely to end up with four $10 books. This mainly applies to printed books of course, but laying out four 100 page PDFs is more work than laying out one with 200 pages and you need to charge for that work.

Even for PDFs the end result would be to make less money than you would have. I don't care about sanity rules or allegiance rules, that's at least $10 you wouldn't make from me that you would have if you sold me the full book. That sounds like gouging for unneeded content, but it's not realy. It's just a natural consequence of a multi-genre or setting book where not everyone is interested in all the settings. Anyway one day I may be in a game someone else runs that uses those rules, or I might change my mind, or they might inspire me to use similar mechanics for another purpose.

Simon Hibbs

On first reading the description of this book I took it to be similar to some of the other BRP SF monographs, in that it's primarily a scenario book with supporting material to establish the setting.

On further consideration, that doesn't seem to be the case. A roster of 30 alien species is pretty extensive and implies more of a setting book than a scenario book.

How would you describe it. Setting book with a suggested campaign? Campaign guide with supporting setting material?

Simon Hibbs

I should realy read posts more carefully before posting.

What? Sharks with ducks attached to their heads?

Of course not, that would be silly. Obviously it's ducks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads.

Simon Hibbs

Another point to bear in mind is that packaging the game system into the setting is a proven model. That's exactly what Chaosium did with all their previous games.

I think it's a decission that will need to be made on a setting by setting basis. If a setting uses a lot of resources from the core BRP book then it doesn't make sense to repeat all that again. On the other hand if a setting uses a completely new power system, or a customised skills setup, or new game system options, or no power system at all and a lightweight subset of the rules as CoC does then I think it could make sense.

Simon Hibbs

Isn't this what Cubicle 7's The Laundry already does? I think Chaosium's system is already set up for this.

Excellent, I'd missed this one.

I'm wondering to what extent someone with a copy of CoC could just pick up most BRP supplements and just run with them. I suppose they'd be missing the magic systems, powers, mutations, etc.

And I wonder how many more might do so if the BRP book was a slimmer, focused, cheaper product.

Chaosium would make less money on a cheaper product, and anyway the product would be a lot less useful. I don't think that would work.

Simon Hibbs

That's good to hear. My expectations may be way off base. As the range of available BRP supplements expands hopefully it will reach a critical mass that will prove attractive to new audiences as an ecosystem.

I believe there are several obstacles to BRP becoming popular as a generic game engine.

The first is the name. This has to problems. One is that 'Basic' implies simple or minimal. That's simply no longer accurate, as the new BRP core rules present a highly sophisticated game system with numerous of options to adjust the complexity and setting or genre appropriateness of the system. Customers who aren't interested in a minimalist set of rules might get the wrong impression.

The second problem with the name is legacy. Previous BRP editions have been little more than pamphlets with a truly minimalist set of rules, but not enough to actually run more than an extremely limited game. Anyone who has had exposure to the previous BRP editions may quite reasonably be put off by the BRP moniker as the new edition is a totally different beast.

Aside from the name, another problem is that while I like it a lot, as a truly generic game engine it is far from perfect. The game systems presented are a hodgepodge of material from the archive of past BRP powered games. It's great to have it all in one volume, but I'm a long standing BRP fan. For someone with no history in BRP it's not ideal. Obviously a lot of effort was put into bringing it into a coherent whole and adding guidance notes and options to fill in the gaps, but it's still a bit of a grab bag. There's also the problem that the plethora of different options scattered throughout the book detracts from the coherence of the system.

Right, time to get constructive. I feel really bad criticising BRP 4th Ed because I love it. Clearly it was a very worthwhile project and the author did a great job. Top marks for hitting the target the book was aimed at. However I don't think it's a product that is ever going to significantly expand the BRP community. It's aimed squarely at the existing community and as such it's a great lynchpin to hold that community together. The fact that a rich and varied array of monographs and supplements have sprung up around it is proof of that.

So how to move forward? If BRP itself isn't going to expand the community, any supplement you aim at it is limited to that community. To use BRP Rome you need BRP. You don't have BRP - you aren't going to buy BRP Rome.

GURPS tried a program a while back called Powered By GURPS. There were several games released like this, including Prime Directive based on the Star Fleet universe. This made sense because these games were aimed at an audience beyond the GURPS crowd, who wouldn't all want to buy into GURPS to play in that setting.

So is this something that Chaosium or third parties would be interested in? Would Chaosium be prepared to license other publishers to produce games Bowered By BRP? Would third parties be prepared to do the work of building the BRP system into their product and paying for the privilege?

Apologies if this subject has been discussed before. I don't see anything recent on this anyway.

Simon Hibbs

Sounds a lot like the way Nephilim manifest in a host. If you have that game, you could mine it for ideas.

Simon Hibbs

>In the interest of full-disclosure I'm running a version of RQ, but I think my method works.

It sounds like a good system. My problem with systems like that is that it strongly discourages players who want to have characters who have good skills in several related skills from doing that at character generation time.

Say you want a hard science character with good skills in Science: Physics and Astronomy. You have decided on a budget of 125% for these skills. The maximum you can raise any one skill to is 75%, so you raise Physics to 75%, then raise Astronomy to 50% (ignoring the base 1%).

You know that the GM will often let you substitute one of these skills for others though. In many situations you might well be able to roll for Astronomy tasks at 38% for free. What do you do? If you can later develop an Astronomy skill from a base of 38% for free using a skill check, or as a result of a critical success, thats another strong disincentive to spend any skill points on related skills during character generation.

So I fully sympathise with the sentiment behind that rule, but without balancing options during character generation the result could be to distort the player's options when creating a character.

Simon Hibbs

Ringworld had a system like that. You could buy up the base skill to a maximum based on the sum of two stats, and beyond that you had to buy up the more specialised sub-skills.

The problem was that there were loads of skills, many of them with many useful specialisations. To a large extent, this was probably motivated by the fact that Ringworld characters could be hundreds of years old, with thousands of skill points so the skills system was designed to soak up skill points like a sponge.

Still, the basic idea was sound.

Simon Hibbs

I ran a short BRP based Star Trek game many years ago. I used a copy of the CoC rules and made up my own character sheet. Literaly, I didn't even worry too much about character generation untill we actualy started the game. Pretty much the only preperation I made was working up the character sheet. BRP is a highly flexible game system and it didn't let me down. Nowadays with a fully worked out set of multi-genre BRP rules it realy shouldn't be a problem.

I let the players decide amongst themselves which crew possitions they would take and then generate their characters from a big stack of skill points. I only allowed one Vulcan in the party, I gave him an extra 1D6 POW, a mind meld skill and resolved mind meld attempts using POW vs POW rolls. Nerve pinches were just a hand to hand attack with POW vs POW to stun instead of rolling damage. Can't remember how I handled Phasers. I pretty much made up any further special rules I needed on the spot.

It worked fine. As is often the case, trying to anticipate the rules you will need in advance is just too much work. Better to just get stuck in and do it. I did spend quite a bit of time working out the scenarios I'd run and the situations I wanted to put the characters in. That's the key. Spend your efforts on what you actualy want the game to be about and you should be fine.

Simon Hibbs

I would hesitate to allow the use of related skills at half chance in all situations,

in my view this does not always make sense. For example, not every problem in

astronomy or physics can be solved with a good mathematics skill alone, often

more specific knowledge from the problem's field is required.

That's reasonable on the face of it, but the other hand whether or not I allow it any any particular situation is realy just an arbitrary decission. Resolving questions such as "Does the character's particular knowledge help them solve this specific problem right now" is one of the reasons we roll dice. In other words the rules imply that whether or not the characetr's sepcific Mathematics knowledge will help with a particular problem in Astronomy is 50/50 and I've no problem with the dice deciding that for me, so I'm incluned to stick with the half chance rule.

Given that, it makes sense to allow buying up the related skill from that half chance base.

Therefore I would

also hesitate to allow a player to use a related skill's half chance as the base for

learning a skill, because the basic knowledge even of closely related skills is not

really identical.

The fact that the basic knowledge isn't identical is IMHO why you get half chance and not full chance.

Just as in the real world, where someone who has studied mathe-

matics will hardly get a second degree in astronomy or physics in half the time.

But they could well get it in significantly less time. I can certainly believe they might be able to compete the second degree in say 2 years instead of 3.

Let's take the example of maths and computing. It's hard to imagine any maths student not taking at least some computing modules as part of their course, similarly when I was a computing student there were several mandatory maths modules and several more advanced optional ones. Someone with a maths degree would get credit for the computing modules they had completed as part of the maths course, and would also get credits for the maths modules they had already completed that were equivalent to the maths part of the computing curriculum.

These synergies are reflected in the rules, and I see no problem allowing them to have an effect in character generation. I have to confess though that I tend to err on the side of generosity to the players in character generation. I like to give them tough challenges in play, so it seems fair to give them decent characters with which to tackle those challenges.

Simon Hibbs

The Skills chapter the section on Skill Specialties suggests that some skills can be substituted for others at half chance. In which case, would it be reasonable to allow such related skills to be bought up from the half chance level.

e.g. The example on page 47 suggests that Science (Astronomy) could be substituted for Science (Physics) or Science (Mathematics) at half chance. So if a character has Science (Astronomy) skill is 70% my effective base chance at those skills is 35%.

Would it be reasonable to allow a player that has bought up Science (Astronomy) to 70% to then buy up their related skills from the base level of 35% during character generation?

Personally, I think I'd allow that. It doesn't seem fair to disallow it because that creates a disincentive to buy up logically related skills.

I'd suggest being cautious about this. I wouldn't allow this for otherwise apparently related skills such as similar specialisations of the Research, Repair and Technical skills as these relationships are better handled by the discretionary 1/5th chance bonus.

Simon Hibbs

I've just come across the rq_scifi draft and I'm goign through it.

I've used BRP to run games set in the Traveller universe several times, but not fully written it up or systematised it. I just used CoC as the rules reference, worked up a character sheet in word, adapted the Traveller/Ringworld weapons tables and went for it.

My first reaction to rq-scifi is that it's appears to be the sum of taking all it's soirces and addign them together, with little atempt to resolve overlaps. Separate PSI and POW stats? Realy? Five optional stats?

But then it also contains some realy useful resources and rules integration ideas. Combat is a bit stuck in an MRQ1 rut. How about moving to OpenQuest as the reference game system?

Simon Hibbs