Jakob
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Everything posted by Jakob
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Thanks, makes sense! I read the advise as "things you should keep in mind when creating your character", so I was wondering if there were some hidden extra-points to spend ...
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Using this question for a quick rules question: The MW player tipps suggest that you should make sure to have a combat skill at 101%+ ... but is that even possible for a starting character with no extra age? The way I see it, you get a maximum of base 25 (e.g. warhammer), 9 points STR bonus and 60% for one occupation skill (culture doesn't provide weapon skills, and the free bonus points you receive at the end don't stack with your occ. skills). That makes 94%. Am I missing something?
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Sounds reasonable - especially since dwarves and elves are in the MW rulebook, anway, so it's easy to re-introduce them if you want them in your campaign. Regarding species: does "main species" mean that these four are the only playable species? Or will we see all kínds of cultures and creatures as viable PC choices besides those? I always felt that BRP lends itself perfectly to the latter, even though it hasn't been done that much.
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Oops .. I actually alway read that wrong - thanks!
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This is great. Now that I finally own Magic World, I'm pretty impressed with it - and I love all of those little snippets from Rain Dragon Press, so I'm really looking forward to a full setting!
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Hi Sean,
I just read about your licensed Magic World project- Congratulations - I like all of the snippets of Skaerune/Skae I've seen yet, and I'll love to see what you will come with for this new setting.
If I understand correctly, you're not working on this project alone - so is there a way to get in on it? I've only just started reading MW, but it feels very familiar (I've been playing Stormbringer for years and still consider it my favourite BRP iteration for most purposes; and I have played many other versions of BRP, from CoC to RQ and from OpenQuest to Mythras).
While I have worked on and published RPG material before (mainy for CoC), most of that is in German, my native language (though I have finished writing a scenario for Pelgrane Press's Ashen Stars, which is not yet published) . That's one of the reasons why I don't want to go the self-publishing route - I just need native speakers to proofread my stuff ...
As most role-players, I've been working on my own heartbreaker setting for years; however, by now I understand that for me, it is more about toying with certain elements and ideas than about building a setting from the ground up on my own. I keep including certain core ideas in my running campaigns, so all of them are in a constant state of flux. From what I've read on your website, your planned settings sounds like something I'd love to be part of as a creator.
So, if you're interested, I'd like to polish some of my material and send it over to you, for you to see whether I might be a good fit for the team or not. To be clear about that, I'm not looking for a setting where I just can toss my ideas in - I just want to give you a sample of my work so that you can get an idea of its general tone an quality.
You can find a very short and un-polished snippet here on my blog: http://swanosaurus.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-moss-eyed-acephali.html
Thanks in advance - and I'm really looking forward to this new fantasy world, be it as a contributor or as a reader/player!
Best,
Jakob
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Jakob
Thank you for the kind words, I did not realize anyone read my stuff.
Yes please go ahead and send a sample over. There won't be any rules changes and such, but there will be... setting specific tweaks if that makes sense? So even if the stuff is not a good or perfect fit, I am hoping to enlist folks experienced in writing and design and just playing in this system to do play tests of material and such. So you could be a big help in a lot of ways. Thank you for the offer.
Sean
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Okay, I finally caved in and ordered a copy. I've been sneaking around MW for years (a major part of my rpg upbringing was Stormbringer 1st). I hope it will fall somewhere in my sweet spot between OpenQuest and Mythras in terms of complexity. And the continued fan interest by a small, but dedicated group here did a lot to convince me that MW, despite its problematic history, is actual a very good Iteration of BRP. Let's see that fanzine, now!
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While the second and the third book are quite different from the first, I'd suspect you wouldn't like them either - most of the characters have more or less serious mental problems which, among other things, lead to pretty counter-intuitive decision making. Didn't want to be a dick about it, too, btw. - it's just that your initial post sounds extremely derisive about a book that I happen to hold dearly ... EDIT: BTW, the POV character of Annihilation is paranoid, so you're probably not supposed to trust her decpiction of the other expedition members ...
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I consider all three books great. Maybe you just shouldn't expect something Lovecraftesque, they're a completely different animal ...
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Nice ... I must confess that I'll probably give it a pass, since I have so much unplayed retro-sf already on m shelf - Space 1889, Rocket Age and now Odd Soot ... but still good to see that Mythras keeps expanding its scope.
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So, is this teasing a new setting ...? H.G. Wells, okay - but "Worlds United" sounds like a Kurd Lasswitz spin on it ...
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Just reading Odd Soot (and having a great time). One thing occured to me: Where do the nuveri get "replacement bodies"? If the question is answered in the book, I couldn't find it. If replacement bodies are "donated" by nuveri whose head has been destroyed, leaving an intact body, that would probably mean that they are in very high demand - which would imply that there must be some kind of criminal activity, probably involving murder, to sell bodies, even with the nuveri taboo against violence. Or are the headless bodies "grown" in some way? Or can nuveri give birth to headless bodies? Would that be something that just happens, or something they are able to do willingly? Which brings me to the question of sexual reproduction ... Anyway, Odd Soot has some fascinating aliens!
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In West-Germany, punk was still a big thing in the 80s - but generally, you're probably right. I guess the 80s were the times when punk already had become pretty commercialised ...
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@Rosen McStern: Sorry, mixed that up!
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That' s probably a point - I've been playing RQ3 back then, and we never used Glorantha (since there was practically nothing Gloranthan published for the German translation, which we were using). So RQ was first and foremost my system for "gritty, swingy, with a potential to get to either do something badass or die screaming for everyone." I can easily get that together with real-world mythology like the Odyssey or the Ilias, much better than any D&Disms. If it hasn't been such a good match for Glorantha back then, I would suspect that this has been rectified with the new edition. I've been playing it for a while, and my character seemed pretty badass from the get-go on a mundane level (though she still has good reason to get very nervous about a fight against a troll ...), starting with Battle Axe at 95 (now 103). And while Glorantha has been presented to me as a world of great heroes and powers like Herak and the Crimson Bat, I don't experience them as such a dominant factor, and wouldn't consider their existence (or the ability to go head-to-head with them) as the core of what feels "mythological" about Glorantha. EDIT: Thinking about it, I guess I got the original post wrong - sorry about that. I took it as the general demand that "mythical role-playing" needs to be high powered, when it was in fact about the very specific expectations generated by certain RQ supplements that I don't own and haven't read.
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I actually consider everything mentioned features, not bugs, with regards to mythic play. If you look at the Odyssey, it is certainly not characterize by Odysseus having tons of HP, killing cyclopses left and right and succeeding at resistance rolls against siren's song. It's characterized by him being a smart and somewhat ruthless guy who keeps running into trouble, but who also knows when to tie himself to his ship and when not to pick a fight with a giant monster. I'd say that works pretty well with most BRP games.
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If I remember correctly, Revolution is capped at 100.
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Revolution has "Advantage" which is similar to a Special success (no criticals, though). You succeed with Advantage when your ten die is higher than you ones die - this means that the chances for a succes with advantage increase exponentially the higher your skill goes. I actually really like it, it is elegant, avoids additional math, and you get a sizeable extra benefit from being really good at a skill.
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I think a connected question is whether you consider dice-rolls representative of someone's performance - that way, it actually seems more consistent to say "the lower the roll, the better you perform." But I have moved away from that assumption anyway. Performance can be part of it - but especially when a quite competend PC fails or even fumbles, I tend to interpret such a result as some fluke event that impedes the PC - a fly in his eye, a loose stone ... If you look at it that way, a major part of the die roll just represents a number of more or less favourable circumstances.
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It's really strange - I prefer "roll highest within the margin of the respective succes level, and you win", since it minimizes adding/substracting numbers, and I never had the slightest problem wrapping my head around. Since I'm neither a programmer nor a math person, I'd suspect that it may be simply a matter of overthinking the whole thing in one way or the other. Maybe it helps to think of your skill rating as a target number - that 's the potential you wan't to reach, but if you're overreaching, you'll fail ... of course, the problem remains that critical are on the lower end of the scale (though one could use the "doubles are criticals" approach or even the advantage approach of Revolution d100 to solve that problem). In the end, I don't care that much - owever, subtracting two-digit numbers doesn't come as fast and easy to me as substracting one-digit numbers, so I tend to avoid it. And since BRP games are practically my go-to-systems for most cases, I can hardly accept the suggestion that "they are not for me anyway."
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Of course, sorry about that! Another rules comment: I think fighting with two weapons has already been discussed as rather advantageous with its extra action. I'd suggest just dropping any specific rules for it - two weapons simply give you flexibility, a shield has the bonus advantage that you can use it to parry missiles; also, if you're disarmed, you still have the other weapon. For attacking with both weapons in one round, you can simply use an all-out attack. Some thoughts about the bestiary (whether as a book on its own or as a part of a cleaned-up version): Maybe some more advice on how to handle typical player character races like dwarves, elves or ducks - especially how to use the point-buy characteristics method for them. Regarding that, it might be useful to not only list the average characteristics, but also their range in the monster stats. What I would really love to see, if there is a separate bestiary, would be spot-lights with immediately playable additional material related to some of the creatures. For example, give us a generic dragon, but also a specific dragon with stats, a map of his lair and a list of his treasures. A specific werewolf along with a sketch of the village he lives in and how he keeps his dark side a secret from his friends and familiy. Nothing in-depth, just a page or two each, but with a focus on adventure hooks and practical play-aids like maps and short descriptions of places and people. Keep it true to "monsters are people, too."
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Well, the bonuses for good role-playing are actually in the 2nd edition, even though in a very minor way - I was actually suggesting to do away with them.
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Going through the book, I've found a few more things that I always thought could be changed slightly - most of these are simple matters of preference and probably not very important, but nevertheless: Modifiers for skill tests: I'm a big fan of the "use only significant modifiers" philosophy, but I don't like +/- 25 as a step. It just makes the math a little more complicated - why not stick to modifiers dividable by ten, like 20/50, 20/40, 20/40/60 or something like that. Calculating 38+20 is just a little bit easier than calculating 38+25. Also, I'm wary of suggesting "good role-playing" as a factor for granting a bonus on a roll. People tend to view all kinds of different things as "good role-playing", from good problem-solving to cooperative spirit to playing you character to the hilt, possibly at the expense of everyone else at the table. In the end, a bonus for good role-playing is simply a bonus the GM can give if he likes what a character is trying to do for one reason or another. This doesn't quite ring true with the BRP rules principles for me. It's a very small thing, basically a sentence of little consequence to the rules, but I have made horrible experiences with discussions about "good role-playing", and I feel a little rush of panic everytime I read those words. However, I'd love to see player-controlled passions as an optional rule (if I remember correctly, RoH has them, but OQ2 doesn't). I'd suggest having them work similar to RQ:G, where the player can decide to roll on them and they have a positive effect on a success and a negative effect on a failure.
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I think Newt mentioned somewhere that he wouldn't get around to writing more Gatan material in the foreseeable future. But I suspect the three-book option might involve folding Gatan into the d100 worldbuilders book as a kind of extended example. EDIT: to be honest, what I consider most important is that whatever ideas come out of this thread don't create a "River of Heaven Companion" situation for OQ, where some new element that is planned for a new edition/refresh becomes a roadblock to the whole thing (and maybe further OQ products). So while I'd love a new edition, it's probably important to keep the project managable.
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BTW, the notion of a unified magic system for OQ is at the very least interesting - it seems like a big break with RQ/BRP traditions, but I'd still like to see OQ3's take on it.
Yes please go ahead and send a sample over. There won't be any rules changes and such, but there will be... setting specific tweaks if that makes sense? So even if the stuff is not a good or perfect fit, I am hoping to enlist folks experienced in writing and design and just playing in this system to do play tests of material and such. So you could be a big help in a lot of ways. Thank you for the offer.