Jakob

I probably wouldn't depart as far, but interesting. It actually sounds a little like HeroQuest/Questworlds.

I thought about that, but then I noticed that I actually like the idea of having the skill scores being more independent from characteristics. I don't know if it's realistic or anything, but I like the idea that someone might generally not be very agile (DEX 7), but still a great climber (climbing 80%). The guy with DEX 16 and climbing 40% will have about the same chances of success based on his natural agility, but he probably still won't be able to achieve as remarkable a result if he just depends on his characterstic score; however, he could try to remember what he has actually learned about climbing, roll on his skill and maybe achieve a special - but chances are that his little knowledge will actually confuse him and he'll be better off just trusting his instincts (by rolling DEXx5). BTW, by the GM "should" I mean that a rule like this makes little sense if the GM only applies it when feeling very generous. If one would use it, one would have to use it regularly.

Since I'm still kind of looking for the BRP that hits my exact sweet spot somewhere near Stormbringer/Magic World, I decided to give hombrewing a shot. I don't know if this is going anywhere, I just want to write it down somewhere and see if I get feedback. I'll take the new SRD as starting point. One of my main gripes with BRP games has always been the sometimes weird role of characterstics and the x5 rolls in relationship to skills. E.g., as an example for situations in which a DEXx5 roll might be appropriate, the BGB mentions climbing - which, however, is a skill in its own right. Mythras solves this by getting rid of characterstic rolls, which is an elegant solution, but I'd like to try something else The GM may (actually, should) allow the player to roll a characterstic x5 roll even in situations where a skill would be more appropriate; however, a success at such a roll is always considered as "just scraping by", and you can never achieve special or critical successes this way. I'd even allow to use STR (for big, heavy weapons) or DEX (for smaller weapons) this way in combat, with some caveats: The damage die size is reduced by one, you can't bring a positive damage bonus to bear, and more importantly, you can only attack OR parry OR dodge in a round - basically, taking a combat action with a x5 roll instead of the proper skill takes up your whole round, because you are using your weapon in the most primitive way. That way, you can actually get a lot of things done with high DEX and INT; but a specialist with a high skill score will usually outshine you, and in combat, you'll have little chance against anyone who know how to use his or her weapon. That's for the start - other ideas are about major wounds and skill category bonuses, but I still need to do some thinking on those ...

The good thing about that is that you can, but you don't have to! I've played a lot of different games in the last few months, some old (like "Das schwarze Auge") and some new (like Tiny Dungeons"), some new iterations of old systems (like Mythras), and when the old rules and settings serve well, it's often a good idea just to use them just the way you used them 20 years ago. (Still, I'm kind of a system junkie and alwas want to try out the new stuff.) Apart from that, would be great to see you at the Otherland in Berlin - drop a line when you're planning a visit!

I'm okay with it by now. Ran a short rules-lite campaign with Tiny Dungeons, a short campaign with Troika!, and at the moment, I'm playing RQ: Glorantha and the old game I began with, "Das schwarze Auge", with my old group from school days online. We've been using Zoom, Google Hangouts and Skype; for some reason, Zoom seems to have the most consistently good video and audio quality. However, I'm doing most of this playing with people that I'm very familiar with at the rpg table; I also took part in a two-short with mostly unfamiliar people, and that didn't really work that well.

Sounds very good! Also, having John Snead involved is very promisinig - I really liked his "Worlds United" setting for Mythras.

There will be; I'm working on a translation, and I already have found a native speaker who is VERY well-versed in all things Mythras for editing out bad English. But it's probably still a few months away ...

I don't see why you shouldn't be able to have your cake and eat it, too. Keep repulsor fields and antigravity, but make it something that either can't be employed easily (maybe flying cars only work in citys with a big-and-expensive-as-hell antigrav reactor in the center) or is highly controlled (maybe it has a terrible potential when used as a weapon?); so if you can't afford or get your hands on the technology - or a legal license to use it - you might just have to hollow out an asteroid and spin it around. And maybe that's what most people are actually doing! BTW, if you're interested in the whole asteroid habitat thing, you just have to read Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312. It's quite the opposite of space fantasy, but it is still fun, I'd say, and he is really good at making the scientific explanations entertaining!

That's no coincidence; my mindset was pretty much "take what I loved about those old DSA scenarios, add open-ended choices for the characters."

Anticipating, here!

Well, d100 games are traditionally not that much about balancing. EDIT: At least, she's not a Melnibonean.

Great to hear - I hope you'll like them!

These two are out in print now - "Die gute Nadel" is by me, as I mentioned. I'm working on its English translation! It has dead fish, posh goblins, family rows and even a small dungeon.

That party looks like they had a rather bad argument - that guy with the scrolls looks a little abashed, probably from being berated by the Duck! Oh, yes, I like it!

Bought!

If I include the social combat rules, I'll certainly keep it optional; I'm not quite sure yet if I'll do at all; maybe it would bloat the text too much.

I think this makes sense - I must confess, I'm looking forward more to the Sky-Raiders system, but that's quite fine!

Thanks for looking it up!

Wouldn't that mean that the first mastery is effectively worth two bumps (by turning your succes range into your crit range AND giving you a bump)? I guess the passage might be read like that, but it would seem strange that this isn't mentioned anywhere else in the rules. I must confess that I'm confused now ... I always considered it part of the elegance of the system that rolling 10M against 16M works exactly like rolling 10 against 16.

I can't imagine that - that would play havoc with the system, wouldn't it? It would mean that if I roll 10 or less, I have a critical AND could use my mastery to bump the other side down. I read the passage as saying that effectively, 10M means that I need to roll a 10 or less for a crit (and an 11-19 for a success), because I'll always get the bump up (except when the opposition also has a mastery - that is why it says "Unless opposed by similarly exalted resistance"

Hey Shawn, whatever setting you'll come up with in the end, these are certainly some interesting questions! Since you've asked about things that other published works don't quite deliver and that we would like to see: I'd really love to see a fantasy setting that deals in an interesting way with social change triggered by a major epistomological change; a "true" Renaissance game, not in the sense that it has some real-world historical trappings of that era, but that it really deals with people developing a whole new view on what it means to be human (or whatever other intelligent fantasy species you might happen to belong to ...). Take, for example, a fantasy society where magic has always been bound up in religious ritual, but recently, a more scientific approach called "sorcery" has been developed - what does it actually mean if humans can wield magical powers without recourse to gods or spirits? What kinds of upheaval would follow from that? You wouldn't even have to combine something like that with a Renaissance-like technology level, it could just as well be a stone-age setting. Are the gods real? I consider both "they are definitely real and active" and "There's no proof of them being real whatever" interesting; for some reason, I don't really like the "they're probably real but keep in the background" middle-ground. And I'm not very interested in "good" and "evil" gods in a pantheon. Still, they can serve as interesting philosophical concepts in a gaming world. Ideal stakes for me a medium, it just seems most playable. I tend to like my game worlds either utterly alien or very down to earth - once again, what I'm least interested in is the middle-ground. Harn feels a little to familiar to me (I'd probably like it better if it were a humans only setting). I love weird settings with lots of intelligent species like Talislanta, but I want them to make sense (I played Numenera for a while, but all of the cool elements where just there, with no connective tissue that made them feel like they were belonging to the same world and being in relation to each other). I don't really like any more or less creative new takes on elves, dwarves and the likes - they have been done, and they have been done well, but I really don't feel a need fo any more of that. Regarding details: I kind of prefer slim, but focused setting material. Give me a lot of broad strokes, but also some very detailed elements that I can use right away. I find that I can make most uses of the extreme ends of the scale at the gaming table - very broad descriptions that just give me a general idea of a place, and fine details about one thing or the other (a castle, a group of NPC, an inn ...). I like to have some near future history of the world (two or three years), but only in very broad strokes and only as suggestions what will happen if the PCs do not interfere. Also: yay to city states!

Wow, hadn't heard about Afterthought before - in all it's briefness, it sounds awesome. @Sean_RDP, please show up here and tell us more. Actually, is there a way to get in on this as an author in a small way? I haven't done a lot in English (yet), but I'm starting to get my RPG writers legs back (with some community content for Gumshoe and some Mythras in German), and right now, I really wan't to do something with QuestWorlds, and I REALLY want to be involved in an sf rpg project that, conceptually, is as interesting as this sounds ...

Now that's interesting! I kind of love to hate these books - they drew me in like little other fantasy I've ever read, but there's also a nearly ritualistic repetitiveness to some elements of them that feels like it's truly grinding the reader down ("Scranc to the horizon ... and more Sranc, and even more Sranc ...")... and the highly violent nature of the story (and I'm not just talking gore, it's really terribly violent on so many levels) is hard to digest. Still, I couldn't put it down and kept buying each new volume. Great author, great prose. I'm really curing about how it informs Jackals.

Good to hear! I'm working on that right now - I've just read the companion, which might change things a little bit because I noticed that the scenario has at least two possible scenes that might work well for the new social conflict rules ...

Yeah, that's mine! Finally! (Although it actually went quite fast with the 100Questen Gesellschaft from manuscript to publication).