Jakob

11 hours ago, General Kong said:

Klingt vom Titel her, als sei es vom Hintergrund auch in den Neuen Reichen spielbar. Ist das so oder eher nicht mehr oder weniger als andere fantasyabenteuer auch?

Die ausführlichere Antwort:

Hängt ein bisschen davon ab, wie dicht du die Neuen Reiche an die Jungen Königreiche anlehnen willst. Das Abenteuer hat keine "tolkienesken" Elemente (also keine Elfen, Zwerge, Orks, Goblins) usw., alle auftauchenden Geschöpfe passen auch gut in die Elric-Kosmologie, und auch die Schauplätze wären nicht fehl am Platz. Wenn du aber SEHR dicht an den jungen Königreichen bleiben willst, gibt es ein kleines (aber auch nicht unlösbares) Problem:

Most recently, I've come across this approach in the Mothership-based RPG Cloud engine (which is a very rules light d100 game, BRPish, but even more inspired by old editions of Warhammer, if I'm not mistaken). There, every NPC just has one percentile statt called Instinct - they roll it for everything that they might have some degree of competence in, if they should be forced to do anything that wouldn't be part of their skillset, it's GM fiat.

For a super-light RPG light Cloud Empress, I think it works really fine (though I haven't tried it at the table yet, only did some cursory solo-gaming). I'd be finde to use it in other BRP games as well for minor NPCs. If you want to get fancy, maybe give them a specialty at +20 (Viking 45%, Drinking +20), or a passion at +20 (Viking 45%, protecting his little brother +20).

16 hours ago, DreadDomain said:

Based on what Mark has posted on Discord, and the draft character sheet:

• The skills list seems about right. For some (not me), it may look too long but they are grouped by Arcana (4 or them) which will make quickly finding a skill more intuitive. Also the list covers everything including languages and combat.
• Skills are based on the addition of two characteristics (and maybe by Arcana as a "skill category")
• Success levels are easy to figure out (special at 1/2 skill, critical at 1/10)
• Passions, Drives, Arcana, Masks, Voice, Aura - it feels like there will be plenty to shape your character personality
• Sanity! Love it.
• The 8 BRP characteristics
• "Burning characteristics" (aka exerting oneself) to improve success level sounds cool.

All of that I love so far. Mark also mentions the following:

• No resistance table, you compare success level (as it is in RQ or BRP for skills), I assume it will be the same for characteristic rolls (CHAR x5 I assume)
• Hit locations but no hit points per location - I assume major wounds will be a thing.

All in all, this is shaping really, really well...

Wow, that sounds kind of ... perfect. Especially the "burning characteristics" thing - I just kind of came up with that idea myself (though I'm certainly not the first one ) and would love to see it implemented in a BRP game!

I know I shouldn't be impatient ... but isn't it time for something official on the chaosium website? There must be a cover by now, right?

1 hour ago, g33k said:

My experience of "furry" species is that they're too much "rubber forehead" aliens -- they're anthropomorphic animals that are too anthropomorphized:  basically humans, with (maybe) one or two stereotypical elements from the "animal" they're derived from... but usually still within the "human" range of motivations.

Let me add to the "furries" derailment of this thread  - I'm also not that fond of furries in sf; to me, they feel like "convenient fantasies"; we are used to thinking of wolfes, dogs, cats, bears and mice in an anthropomorphic way, anyway. We're used to ascribing them human characteristics, to interpret their behaviour as an expression of things that we think and feel, as well. We often associate them with positive character traits or with traits that just seem kind of cool. We often feel that we have a relationship to them that is similar to our relationship to humans, anyway, so further humanizing them is a trivial effort.

Therefore, I have a hard time accepting them as "alien" (even though all these animals, in reality, are probably a LOT more alien to us then we think). They feel too familiar, to relatable. I have a much easier time accepting insect-, reptile-, arthropod- or octupus-like aliens. It's not that it is much more likely that those would exist than furries - it's just that while playing a reptile-creature, I have a much easier time feeling that I'm playing something that is quite definitely not-human than while playing a cat-creature (which ends up just being a more badass type of human).

9 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

Dang, what's the recent game I'm trying to think of where players can "buy" a stroke of luck by kicking a failed roll down the road to a later scene?  Because that's definitely a trope of pulp adventure.  Is that in the recent BRP Fate Point rules?

!i!

Maybe you're thinking of Haunted West, which has its own bespoke BRP-ish d100 system? There's a similar rule there, though it kind of works the other way round: It lets you send additional succes levels (called Jacks) that you don't need in the current situation down the river to use them as a bonus to a differnt skill later. The catch is that a. you can only use them on a different skill later, and b. you need to make a connection between the skill that gave you the jacks and the skill that you are using them on ("I'm a surgeon, I know where to shoot him so that it hurts!").

It's a pretty cool and pulpy mechanism, because you don't get that feeling of wasting a great success on a less than important roll; you get to use these jacks to shine later, and probably in an unexpected way.

@DreadDomain Veering a little further off topic, I'd be curious to know what you thing about the 3D20 skill test of DSA5. It's been a part of DSA/TDE since 1988 (2nd Edition), though not from the beginning, and there are kind of two schools of thought about it in Germany: One is that it was a harebrained idea from people who had no clue about game design, but that somehow stuck; the other is that in terms of rules, it's the core of the identity of DSA/TDE and must not be touched, ever.

Of course, both might be true. It's just that it is something that is hated/loved to an extreme degree by the German rpg community. As for myself, I played years with 3D20 skill tests and kind of liked that each skill test had it's own little dramatic arc (Yay, I made Courage - oh no, but I failed Strength by 6 and have only 4 Skill points left!) - but it could get real tiresome as soon as you had to roll a few tests in a row ...

1 hour ago, DreadDomain said:

The Dark Eye - ok, this one might feel weird because TDE that goes as deep as Glorantha and the rules can be as detailled and rich as RQ or GURPS... but it doesn't have to be. I read DB and I cannot stop thinking the TDE can easily offer the same kind of generic fantasy casual gaming but with the benefit of offering so much more (both in rules and setting) if wanted. And magiv in TDE is a lot more interesting than the generic magic in DB.

The first edition and the early adventures for The Dark Eye really felt a lot like Dragonbane - back then, it was Elves and Dwarves and Goblins and whatever weird idea the author of the adventure you were currently playing happened to come up with; there was a lot of silliness and obviously, no one cared too much about the world as anything more than an extremely vague backdrop for fantasy adventures.

With the second edition (beginning in 1988), they started thinking about how to make the continent of Aventurien a more consistent setting; they also started to publish a monthly in-world newspaper ourlining poltical events in Aventurien, which was the igniting spark of the living history of the setting - for a long time, every real-world year, the history of Aventurien advanced two years (later they started to advance its history only one year every real-world year, because obviously, none of the players could keep up). You would get adventures that tied into that history, so if you wanted to play in canonical Aventurien, you had to think about which adventures came before or after others. That's also when a lot of these scenarios became very railroady, to make sure that the characters wouldn't mess with the highly detailed history.

In the mid-nineties, halfway through the third edition, they started their big campaign about the return of the most powerful dark sorcerer of all, and from then on, they really went a little bit overboard both with the detailed setting as well as with how much they kept changing the setting. Back then, we we're playing TDE once or twice a week, and still we just couldn't keep up with the official events.

After that, there came the fourth edition, which kind of settled on a new status quo for the setting, but now the REALLY went overboard both with the rules (more than 1000 pages - I played a knight, and fighthing from horseback was four tightly packed pages of rules that interacted with all kinds of other rules - frankly, it was a nightmare. I prepared myself days for a big battle where I finally wanted my character to fight from horseback RAW, and everyone was just groaning when we went through with it, including me ...) AND with the setting description - there were 16 setting supplements, most of which came in at about 200 pages, so there was about 3000 pages of setting description (and these were pure setting descriptions, with no adventures and often preciously little material that was actually useful for adventures - though some of them were brillant explorations of historically inspired fantasy cultures, including their food, their clothes, their languages, their religion and the exact population of most of the villages).

At that point, TDE had very much become about the excessively detailed description of a setting that STILL kept changing all the time (so if you really wanted to get what was going on, you'd also have to keep up with current adventures AND, at times, search out older material), which finally made me give up on the gaming world I had invested most of my passion in for 15 years. It was simply overwhelming.

I think the current fifth edition dialed all of this excesses back to a certain degree, and maybe the "old" TDE, that was very much about going on adventures in a relatively down-to-earth fantasy world that still had room for occassional craziness and silliness shines through again ... for me, it's all weighed down by decades of heavily detailed Aventurian history. I don't want to belittle the achievement of the 3rd and 4th edition: The overall consistency and quality of the setting material was really impressive. It was just too much to be of any use.

On a sidenote: Uhrwerk Verlag, the German publisher of Dragonbane, has just announced that they are going to publish a licensed regional sourcebook that will allow you to play in the world of TDE with the rules of Dragonbane. So I guess I'm not the only one who sees a connection there ...

41 minutes ago, Mugen said:

 

No, because when you attack, you roll to reach your goal, which is to reduce your opponent's hit points to 0.

When you roll for defense, you do it with the hope nothing happens in the round and no-one gains anything. Like if the current round never occured in first place.

If you never win initiative and always defend, or even if your opponent just wins initiative more often than you, a defensive strategy will lead you to defeat.

It's also very uncommon in games to completely have to forfeit your actions of a turn in order to defend yourself. You may have an option for "full defense", but it's usually an option for better defense, not the default defense.

 

Well, your main goal might very well be "not get killed" rather than "kill the other guy".

And fighting defensively only means defending when your opponent actually lands a hit - when s/he misses, you get your opportunity to attack (and if they attacked first and missed, they can't defend!). So really, I don't get it and I haven't experienced in the one-shot I've run, where characters tended to act defensively due to generally low Hit Points. They still managed to win to fights.

Also, there's usually a lot of context in combat besides to opponents just taking their turn attacking and defending.

EDIT: Actually, I guess I'll just have to accept that I don't get the problem - when you're talking past one another because the other person seems to claim something that fundamentally doesn't make sense to you, it's usually because somewhere down the line, there is a difference in core assumptions that you're not aware of. So I guess we'd have to dive deep into a discussion about assumptions about how combat works in RPGs, about the readiness to employ seemingly or objectively sub-optimal strategies and all that kind of things. without that, I'm at a loss.

3 hours ago, smiorgan said:

I find that Dragonbane hits the "Stormbringer-sweet spot" in the complexity-simplicity continuum.

I'd love Chaosium to publish something like that for BRP but with more sword and sorcery vibes (Howard/ Leiber/ Moorcock). Call it not-Stormbringer / not-Magic World. 

I look forward to Lords of the Middle Sea to be like that, but I think there is room for a fantasy cousin.

Reading Rivers of London, I felt like its take on BRP would make for a really good introductory game - skills are simplified, SIZ has been omitted (which is an attribute that always seems to confuse people, including me), and a lot of the little bits that usually come with BRP are turned into options that players can/have to choose for their characters (like Damage Bonus). I haven't tried the system yet, but the crunch parts of RoL really read like a very solid BRP light with some modern bits attached - which is exactly how Dragonbane feels, though it goes in a different direction.

I know that it has been stated a dozen times that Chaosium has made the experience that "generic fantasy RPG's don't sell; we need a great and original setting attached to our RPGs", and I absolutely believe them. But I also think that, based on it being an interesting new take on BRP, a RoL-based generic fantasy RPG might attract a lot of interest. Or otherwise, a cool new introductory level fantasy RPG based on RoL with an original setting attached (maybe something more city-based, with a more early modern flair?). I know that Chaosium doesn't want to give Magic World or something similar another try, and I get why - but there are other options to try things a little more streamlined and modernised with BRP, as RoL proves.

Apart from that, I'm really looking forward to Lords of the Middle-Sea to scratch my Stormbringer low-crunch BRP nostalgia itch!

4 hours ago, Mugen said:

That would be true if you were guaranteed to gain something when you defend yourself.

But it's not the case : if you fail your defense roll, you've just done nothing in the round, while your opponent has a step towards victory.

And even if you succeed, you've just nullified the turn.

Of course, if you score a counter-attack, you're a clear winner. But it's a rare case, and you can't count on it when you chose to defend

Defending yourself instead of attacking is a losing strategy.

 

To be honest, I don't get it. Isn't that the case in any RPG where you roll to defend (or attack)? If you take that option and failed your roll, you gain nothing. So you could just as well say that attacking is a losing strategy because you gain nothing if you fail your roll.

In the end, I don't see that much of a difference to any RPG with an action economy where defending is a meaningful choice in terms of how much you can do in a round - in RuneQuest 2/7, you lose Strike Ranks parrying, in Mythras, you lose an action point. When you're out of strike ranks/action points for that round, are you just standing still doing nothing when someone attacks you? Of course not. The attack roll assumes that the other side is trying to not get hit - otherwise, there would be no roll necessary.

Maybe it makes more sense if you consider a Dragonbane round half a "standard" round, where both sides get the "usual" two main actions but can choose to convert their attack into a defense or their defense into an attack at any time? The result would basically be the same, just with less rules overhead.

I‘m actually very happy with that action economy, because it achieves a few things that other games sometimes try to do with extra rules. Basically, in 1-1 combat, having the initiative and being on the attack means that you have the forward momentum; as long as you succeed with your attacks, you practically force your opponent to stay defensive. However, your opponent always has the option to suck it up and instead use their action for a counterattack, hopefully gaining the forward momentum by suceeding and forcing you into the defender‘s position; and also, as soon as you miss an attack, your opponent has their opening. I think it‘s pretty cool making defending a meaningful decision in that it actually puts you on the defense. It can also make armor pretty important, because if you‘re heavily armed, sucking up that one hit to get one in on your opponent becomes a much more viable option. It also means that you don‘t have to come up with extra rules for fighting offensively or defensively; both are options that arise organically from the system.

What I feel is a bit lacking is the magic. There‘s a lot of spells that are basically just upgrades of lower-level skills; I‘m just not that big a fan of learning „some kind of magical fire attack“ three times just to get more damage or the option to affect multiple targets; I would prefer a more flexible system that allows you to tweak and upgrade spells. And honestly, if you‘re going the „Heal I, Heal II, Heal III“ route, you could just as well just number the spells like that to make it transparent; if two spells are essentially the same, they should be called the same.

However, the latter is just a reading impression – as it has more to do with character progression, in the one-shot I have GMed yet, this naturally hasn‘t come up as a problem. I guess more spells for variety and maybe the option to „upgrade“ your spells more easily to the next more powerful variant would solve it.

I love Dragonbane as well ... have played only one one-shot, but that went beautifully. Funnily enough, it feels a lot like a cleaned-up, slightly modernized version of the first edition of Das schwarze Auge, which was (is, in it's fifth edition) the most succesful German rpg. I think it was also influenced by RQ, though it felt more like a mix of RQ and D&D.

On 7/16/2023 at 10:54 AM, Atgxtg said:

 

Personally, I'd be fond of having CHA be a pool of points that could be spent to shift the results of social skills. Something like a PC fails their Persuade roll by 5% and so spends 5 CHA points to bump the result to a success. CHA points could recover like POW points do.

 

This actually sounds fantastic - it's a little off-topic, but I could actually imagine that having three pools of this kind covering all skills could be used: Charisma for social interaction, Willpower for everything that requires just pushing through, and Concentration for mental tasks. All would be limited ressources, and all would make clear that you would have failed weren't it for your natural magnetism, your wheer doggedness or your ability to concentrate.

8 hours ago, Saki said:

I don't quite understand what kind of situations I would call for a Easy or Hard difficulty skill roll.  My understanding is that rolls should only be called for at all in stressful, difficult, dangerous, or unusual circumstances - a driver shouldn't have to roll to drive to the store, a surgeon to perform a typical surgery in a hospital setting, etc. 

 

So if a roll must be perilous or uncertain to even happen, shouldn't any Easy task just happen without a roll?  Conversely, if a roll is determined to be needed, the task is already difficult and uncertain enough that calling for a hard task seems superfluous - Every task you roll for is hard, that's why you're rolling at all!

 

Any advice or suggestions here would be appreciated.

The way I see it, "Easy" is the stuff you normally wouldn't roll for, except for cases were a failure, though unlikely, might result in something particularly interesting and/or dangerous. If everything hinges on being able to convince a dim-witted guard that yes, you obviously ARE invited to the wedding, you just left your invitation at home, that should be easy, but if you fail, it might change the whole adventure from a social challenge to an infiltration.

And yes, I usually reserve penalties for stuff that is really damn hard. A normal roll already means it is a significant challenge, as far as I am concerned.

So, RoL is out in the wild, and I just read that Mythic Island is in the final stages of proof-reading ... that leaves LotMS as the new Chaosium RPG with too little news about it. Will it be ready soon? I really like what Lynne Hardy&Co did withh BRP in RoL, and I understand that people are desperately waiting for Mythic Iceland, but LotMS is the one that I really want most, both because I suspect that it will be very close to my ideal BRP crunch level and because I want that setting.

@Ian Absentia

Just noticed that this thread is nearly 3 years old ... Are you still working on WRG? I remain intrigued.

Just now, Ian Absentia said:

The corporate team photo pose?

!i!

Damn, now I can't unsee it!

But I'd also be happy with a list of the changes for now, to satisfy my curiosity! I'm reading the rules again at the moment, and a lot of stuff is great, but some things seem like the same thing could probably be achieved with less fiddling - though honestly, I wouldn't know how myself. Fate is a good example, the whole activating/de-activating of motivations kind of makes sense to achieve the desired spend-fate-to-gain-fate-when-you're-fighting-for-something-important effect, but it seems to have a lot of mechanical overhead that might not be strictly necessary.

I'm not a backer, so I'm not quite sure if it would be fair, but I just want to say that I'd love to get an SRD sooner than later!

A thought for RD100 international: You might want to think about swapping the introductory adventure out for another one. I know that "The Quest for El Dorado" is a classic pulp trope, but I still don't feel that comfortable about playing a group of colonizers as heroes. I realize that the scenario has a nice little punch-line about the true evil, but that is kind of marred by falling back on the trope of "primitive natives worshipping europeans as gods". I guess it would just be nice if RD100 were to be represented by an adventure that doesn't take recourse to elements so uncomfortably close to real-world atrocities. Why not use the Mars setting from some the character creation example, for example?

I recently re-read the rules or chained conflict sequences, which I think are my favourite sequences rules because they stick closest to the general rules by just presenting an open-ended chain of smaller conflicts.

I also notice that they seem to take a page out of Fate, with Resolve working more or less like stress, including the possibility to buy off Resolve "damage" by taking consequences. Since that's one of the elements of Fate I actually like, I thought maybe there are some more things about consequences in Fate that could work in QW.

For one thing, I like the idea of not tying consequences to abilities - just write down how hard they are and what they are, and then decide for each conflict if they come into it or not.

Second, I like the idea of limiting consequences to three "slots" of -5,-10 and -15. Whatever comes next will take you out in some way. It also makes for escalating consequences, because if you already have a -5 consequence, the next one HAS to be -10. At the same time this should encourage everyone to only hand out/take meaningful consequences, not a -5 here and there.

Well, I'll cheer you on, both for RMR and RD100 international. I just re-read the rules parts of the quickstart adventure and feel it has just the right level of complexity for me; if RMR takes something like that as its baseline, I could feel very at home with it.

I kind of lost track ... is that new edition of the RD100 core rules still in the works? I guess that character sheet made me curious again, because it looks so wonderfully neat!

I'm not that keen on Urban Fantasy, but taking my first look at the system, I really like where they took it!