Jakob

1 hour ago, Mugen said:

I thought that was changed, as the rules in the Quickstart for OQ3 use a variant of the "roll under blackjack" mechanism, where the highest roll wins (or lowest if they both failed).

https://d101games.com/2021/04/07/openquest-3-quick-start-the-lost-outpost/

 

Your absolutely right - it has obviously been changed for the finished OQ3 (and I'm quite happy with that).

Opposed rolls ... yeah, I see the point.

OpenQuest - in its current third edition - just modifies the active skill according to how strong it is compared to the resisting skill (half, double ...), but that leads to some very wonky edge cases ...

I'd say make it player-facing and simple: Just let the player make a skill roll and assign a difficulty based on the skill value of the opposition, along a scale somewhat like this:

00-20%: +20 to player's skill

21-50%: normal skill roll

51-80: -20 to player's skill

81-100: -40 to players skill

above 100 ... well, not sure there.

It also leads to some wonky edge cases, but in many cases, you'll end up with something along the lines of 50/50 success chance where both skills are about equal (or lower, if the pc has a very low skill value to start with, which seems okay as well).

I think I should try something like this for BRP games, it seems to be the easiest solution.

38 minutes ago, AndreJarosch said:

My first thought when i heared about the Chaosium boardgame (back in the eary 1990s): A wargame about who of Rome, Greece, Egypt, Spain, etc. get to control the sea? 
Middle Sea is the word for word translation of "Mittelmeer", the german name for the Mediterranean Sea, and my english was much worse by then. 

Actually, I keep thinking about how I would translate "Lords of the Middle Sea" to German ... if you translate it word for word, you end up with something that's totally misleading, because the term "Mittelmeer" is already taken in German, as you said ... maybe something along the lines of "Die Mittlere See" oder "Meer der Mitte" would be possible, but all of that sounds pretty awkward.

I'm also pretty impressed by it - the setting really feels like a living and breathing thing. Not sure about clash points in combat yet, they might be a little to fiddly for me, but on the other hand, their use seems to be mostly reactive (counter-attack, dodge missiles, enhance a succesful attack), so maybe they won't lead to that much analysis paralysis ...

Like the mettle/valour concept (though it seems that it makes fighters a lot hardier than in standard BRP).

On 2/16/2021 at 1:35 PM, Jason D said:

New Sun novels, Bas-lag, Neveryon

 

Just felt the need to quote you on these three!

EDIT: Oh, didn't see the last post about Bas-Lag. I hope that license isn't cursed, sounds a bit like it ...

12 minutes ago, rsanford said:

I wonder if Osprey would be willing to do something like MU with Jackals. It has a lot of the same appeal as Magic World but much better production values. Jackals might be the new Magic World. What do y’all think?

I"m still waiting for my copy, and I'm definitely curious about what it will bring to the table in terms of rules.

On 2/20/2021 at 7:18 AM, DreadDomain said:

I have to admit that a new edition of Stormbringer by Chaosium (especially with the much improved quality of the products under the new management) would feel like things are right again. In my youth, Chaosium was Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, Pendragon and Stormbringer (with a good nod to SuperWorld). It feels like almost everyone is back home.

I share that feeling. I'm looking forward to new stuff like the Lords of the Middle Sea rpg, but a part of me also feels that Chaosium still has a Stormbringer-shaped hole in it ...

Over here

https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/13532-why-magic-world-failed/page/4/?tab=comments#comment-214240

I've talked myself into wanting a "Magic World Multiverse" as some kind of vehicle to let people create all the weird, gonzo BRP adventures that I always felt were implied by the existence of Stormbringer. I wouldn't necessarily associate "trippy" with a high power lever, but with a lot of "anything goes". In a way, the opposite of a deep setting like Glorantha, were a lot of stuff goes, but a lot of other stuff would just feel wrong for the setting ...

12 hours ago, DimensionalRambler said:

I mean, there's a ton of third party DCC RPG stuff being produced, and Goodman STILL manages to sell a buttload of their own stuff. Chaosium has the lineage, they've got the quality systems, and now they've obviously gotten the exposure (2nd on Roll20 is huge). 

I dunno. I'd buy a new fantasy line; especially if it had the vibe and looked like it was going to receive support in the form of high quality modules. 

 

I see where you're going with DCC - I do associate a lot of all-out gonzo elements that DCC has strongly with BRP, and especially, Stormbringer. I don't know if it's the same for other people. Stormbringer was really a unique experience for my group back then, it felt like nothing is as expected and everything is possible in that setting, with that rules; so weird stuff like DCC coming out for D&D clones/offsprings but not for BRP is kind of disappointing.

On the other hand, Chaosium has something great - and totally different - going on both with the Jonstown Compendium and the Miskatonic Repository. They might run the risk of watering that down with a less focussed "just all kinds of fantasy" CCP.

Still, I feel someone should try and put some momentum behind the idea of an "Open BRP Multiverse" that taps the Stormbringer nostalgia that is certainly out there and does more with it. It might be happening with OpenQuest, anyway, or maybe with Mythras, but it hasn't yet, so it might as well happen with the Stormbringer/Elric/MW development line of BRP.

I‘ll risk going on a tangent here:

For me, this is not about marketing at all (and btw., I‘m pretty sure that Chaosium did a superb job when it comes to marketing in the past few years).

I just feel that Magic World is ideally suited to fill something that I perceive as a gap in the chaosium line-up (and in BRP in general): A simple, flexible set of rules that will allow people to just publish whatever scenarios they come up with.

Yeah, I know, we have the BRP SRD. But that one is so bare-bones that it is really hard to use without creating and providing your own supplemental rules to it. Which is fine for people who want to use the BRP SRD to create their own, deep setting, but it doesn‘t really help if you just want to write a niftly little scenario without having to devise major portions of the rules yourself.

I think Jeff Richard mentioned elsewhere on this board that it makes no sense to have something like magic rules in an SRD, because you‘ll have to create those based on your setting, anyway, but that is just one way to look at it; it is true if you want to create a deep, consistent setting. It is not true if your focus is on creating a self-contained scenario that could be dropped into all kinds of settings, leaving the question about how it all fits together to the GM and her or his players. There‘s „Your Gaming World Will Vary“, but there‘s also the more radical notion of „The only gaming world that there is ist the one created while we play.“

The Old School D&D players create all kinds of scenarios and worlds using the highly idiosyncratic magic system of D&D – it might not always be a good fit, but everyone using the same magic system and roughly the same spells means that you can frankenstein all of this stuff together any way you like with no effort at all. Whether the result is beautiful or ugly is in the eye of the beholder, but it‘s nice that it can be done so easily. (At least if you‘re into D&D, which I‘m just not …)

In the same way, people could make the magic system from Magic World work in all kinds of settings or non-settings.

I think Magic World has just the right amount of crunch and summons up the right level of Stormbringer/Elric nostalgia to work as a catalyst for people to create all kind of weird or not so weird BRP mini-settings and scenarios (you could say: a multiversum of them). I‘m not sure if this would be better served by turning the rules part of Magic World into the „fantasy BRP SRD“ or by creating another Community Content Program. Either way, it would be great if there‘d be an invitation to do things with it that goes beyond „we‘re open to it, come ask us“ and sounds more like „We want BRP gaming to thrive beyond the specific settings provided by us, we want people to do all kind of crazy stuff with it, and we want to give you a slightly bigger toolbox for that from now on!“

To be honest, I‘d be absolutely happy and stop nagging about this if Chaosium just were to drop the rules text from MW in the BRP SRD, along with something like: „Here‘s the more expansive fantasy version, you can use it under the same terms.“

I vaguely remember a pretty artsy, CGI-heavy mythology movie with a vaguely greek feel that, I think, had a down-to-earth, tragic framing narrative in black and white, but I can't for the life of me remember its title or director. The image that stuck in my head is a warrior being felled by about a 1000 arrows in the back, slowly sinking back and resting on the arrows like a kind of giant centipede.

Anyone seen it? Somehow, I associate it with Glorantha.

Reading it right now (I'll probably use it as a one-shot to introduce my current group to Mythras). As with Hessaret's Treasure, I really like the presentation of the characters (both PCs and NPCs); you can really see the story unfolding from their actions. There's also some good advice about how to handle Customs roles to see whether a character will stick to their cultural preconceptions (with the Customs skill working very much like a Passion in this context). The "roll how your character feels about something (and/or how s/he acts on it" systems of Pendragon and Mythras are interesting, but also always a little problematic with regards to character agency, and the advice to the GM not to say "no" if a character wants to act against an impulse, but to say "Yes, but", seems very good to me.

Just to add another "Why I (at first) ignored Magic World" story: I actually thought it was a Magic/Fantasy supplement for the BGB; and since I tend to have relatively little interest in toolbox systems (I do tinker, but I like to start out with something that is playable out of the box), I gave it a pass. Only much later I found out that it was actually a reworking of Stormbringer/Elric! (had I known earlier, I would have ordered it right away.)

1 hour ago, ZedAlpha said:

okay, that makes sense now, but it still means that lower masteries are actually less effective than just not having a mastery, until you have enough masteries that you can reliably succeed with them. 

Not really.

if you have a score of 19, you can get between 0 and 2 successes with your roll: 0 on a roll of 20, 1 if you roll anything from 2-19, 2 if you crit with a natural 1.

With a score of 2M, you get anything between 1 and 3 successes: 1 Sucess on a roll of 3-20 (0 sucesses from your roll, +1 success from Mastery), 2 on a roll of 2 (1 from the roll, +1 from mastery), 3 sucesses on a 1 (2 successes from the Crit +1 for Mastery).

So for any given number you can roll, you're either better of with 2M than with 19, or at least just as well.

If you roll a failure, that doesn't mean you failed at the task. It just means that you derive 0 successes from your roll, but you still get successes from your masteries and hero points; there is no scenario where having no mastery is preferrable to having a mastery.

5 hours ago, RosenMcStern said:

one thing is having an infringement with your "open gaming" logo slapped on it, and one thing is having it appear in a section of your marketplace on DTRPG.

Probably true. That's why I feel that it might have been best to make the rules part of MW part of the BRP OGL, giving those who want to publish generic fantasy scenarios something meatier to work with.

It's an interesting idea. OQ already gives you races/ancestries. What else would you want to "port over" into OQ? Classes (like classiv fantasy does)? Fire-and-forget spells? I think you could do classes simply as templates - basically, suggestions of how much points to put into which skills. If you want characters to level up, you could take a page out of Classic Fantasy and give them more Hero Points in regular intervals, so that they can reasonably take on bigger and bigger foes without getting kiled.

To be honest, I wouldn't try to re-create "vancian" D&D magic in OpenQuest, but that is simply because I generally prefer magic points systems to fire-and-forget; it's just much less hassle. But you could place restrictions on which spells become available at which skill level in sorcery.

Jason has to stop teasing this on FB. It's killing me!

30 minutes ago, albesias said:

You could give a different flavour to your D&D homebrew setting and nothing would change. BRP is a different kind of monster, is flexible, every nuance in mechanics, magic systems or cultures means a lot. It’s  suit better to differents approaches to fantasy role playing.

Generic has never been a proper term to brp based games. From my point of view brp represents mechanics potential to serving the game or setting. RQG design or CoC7 are great examples.

 

I see it just the other way around: I have no trouble at all to adapt most d100 systems to different settings, because they are - as you mentioned - pretty flexible, and they also tend to make sense on a fundamental level. It's easy for me to understand how BRP and its relatives work and what the implications are if I change something. That makes it pretty easy to adapt a more generic BRP Fantasy ruleset like Magic World or OpenQuest to all kinds of settings by modifying the elements you need modified. MW has a small sidebar on modifying magic to fit other settings, for example, and that really goes a long way with very little effort.

Now try adapting any edition of D&D to your own fantasy setting - you'll have to deal with its highly idiosyncratic magic system, which I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to modifiy without breaking it, and from 3rd edition on you'll have to deal with tons of class features that don't necessarily make sense in other settings - classes like Druid, Monk or Paladin are really pretty narrow in their definition. Also, not all settings take well to stuff like the extreme Hit Points progression of D&D: Hell, by now, D&D is its own genre, and a quite different animal from most fantasy settings that I can think of from, say, literature. With D&D, I'd say you're usually best served to not even try to adapt the system to the setting - you'll just have to adapt the setting to the system, so if someone wants to play a druid, you have to have D&D druids in your setting, with all its implications. But using something like MW or OQ (or probably also the Big Golden Book), you'll have a much easier time to make the rules fit the setting.

To my mind, BRP is actually better equipped than D&D to present a generic fantasy ruleset than can easily adapted to any kind of fantasy setting. Both Magic World and OpenQuest do just that, they just lack in marketing and visual design.

I'm just curious to see if OpenQuest will be able to do what MW didn't really get the chance to do: Become that simple, flexible d100 fantasy ruleset that will enable people to adapt it to whathever worlds and scenarios they can think up.

EDIT:

@Orlanthatemyhamsterand @SimlasaOh, and for the record - it seems there are at least two people in the world who actually like the title "Bland World", sorry, "Magic World"; one of them would be me.

1 hour ago, rsanford said:

I am kinda wondering if Jackals can be the easy to get into, low complexity BRP fantasy that Magic World is but with a more involved setting and better production values. This might be a home run for them. I am supposed to get my copy on Feb 9, I can't wait...

 

I think that Jackals and OpenQuest 3rd edition are both good candidates for that - OQ3 will probably the first really good-looking edition of that system, and it looks like it is going to get a lot of support with several planned supplements and settings.

I'm really looking forward to both of them, and since they'll probably be pretty compatible, it's going to be easy to port stuff around.

1 hour ago, rsanford said:

So when you say crits and fumbles on doubles you mean like Delta Green or something else? Does OpenQUest normally do crits and fumbles on doubles?

Yes, I think Delta Green does it that way, too. I know it from Unknown Armies and Eclipse Phase. If I remember correctly, OQ is moving to doubles as crits in the upcoming 3rd edition - I think up until 2nd edition, it was 1/10th (but I might be mistaken).

I've only watched the first 30 minutes yet, but it all sounds quite interesting - the cultures feel believable from what little can be glimpsed (the alchemists as outcasts whose services are nevertheless very needed sound especially interesting, and the concept has a lot of historical precedent); the rules feature at least two elements that I tend to like in D100 games (crits/fumbles on doubles, which makes dice-reading much easier, and checkmarks for succesful tests) - and the author mentions that "generational play" with characters retiring from the pack and new ones joining is kind of the expected playing style. Also, there is a well-defined societal niche for adventurers.

Yes, I'm pretty excited for this ... preview looks great!

I still feel that chaosium missed the opportunity to use MW as a "Fantasy SRD" for BRP. It is a pretty clear and concise set of generic fantasy rules that is easily applicable to all kind of home-brew settings (as opposed to RQ or CoC). The current BRP SRD really isn't really helpful as a set or rules - you basically have to develop your rules from it.

I don't know why MW failed, but it could definitely fill an important gap in the chaosium line-up as a system that makes it easy for everyone interested to just use it as a complete and self-contained fantasy rule-set for a homebrew world without having to do any of the heavy lifting in terms of rules. Basically what OpenQuest does for the "Mongoose Branch" of BRP.

On 1/10/2021 at 8:37 PM, jajagappa said:

It's in the old Cthulhu Companion book from 2nd ed. days. (There's also an article in that about the Cthulhu Mythos in Mesoamerican Religion.)  The Castronegro scenario is actually set in New Mexico, but could probably be shifted readily.

The Terror from the Stars book is set in British Honduras set around ancient Mayan ruins.  Again an old work, but could be shifted into the Yucatan.

 

Thanks for the tips; but actually I'm looking formost for stuff to read on Mexican history (I know that Cthulhu scenarios are no history books, but it is always fun to read them side-to-side with history books), not really something to play a campaign in Mexico, so shifting a scenario there wouldn't really help ...

I'm really curious what "streamlined" means here ... is it just a relatively slimmed down version (as opposed to RQ)? Does it try to bring more coherence to certain aspects of the game (like CoC7 did)?

The part of the character sheet we've seen in the photo looks pretty familiar - the Effort Roll being STRx5 suggests that they've kept the classic characteristics range, there are obviously fixed base chances for skills (but no skill categories). But there's a lot we haven't seen yet ... will this be Stormbringer/Magic World with passions added, or will there be bigger changes?