Stan Shinn

Ah, there it is in black and white in page 125! "Your character cannot act on DEX rank 0, so any actions that would occur below DEX rank 1 are lost." Thanks!

Several factors can reduce the DEX rank in which you move or attack (aim, removing an impaled weapon, etc.). Let's say you have a low DEX score of 8. You want to move 20 meters which moves your turn to DEX rank 2. Then you attack with a weapon that has two attacks, so the first attack would on DEX rank 2, but the second attack would be at 5 DEX Ranks lower (so at DEX -3, if there were such a thing). So is the second attack lost? Or does it occur on DEX rank 0 or something?

I like the shield not suffering the -30% parry penalty, but on the other hand, I keep wondering if there is some way to make the 'kneel behind your shield' action have some sort of ripple effect. In D&D 5e for example, that would be going prone, and cost movement to rise from prone. Wondering if I should have some rule like once you've knelt behind a shield you forgo all further movement this round or something.

Asking about something my D&D players in my upcoming game are sure to want to know. Can you split your move? For example, if you're behind the corner of a brick building in the middle of a gun fight, can you move 2m around the corner to see your enemy and shoot at them, then take the remainder of your movement and run back behind corner of the building (moving into full cover out of line of sight), all as part of your turn? Thanks in advance for any insights on how to handle this! 🙂

Very cool! I would certainly use it once available! 🙂

Feels like a stray bit of text from another game I think! Thanks for the feedback.

p. 142, under 'Autofire', in the new BRP, it says "Unlike most missile weapon combat, autofire or bursts occur on the attacker’s DEX rank, rather than at the beginning of the combat round before DEX ranks." Does Missile Fire occur before DEX rank actions? For the life of me, I could not find that rule.

At some point could we get a vector version of the 'Powered by BRP' Logo? The current one here is a raster image and is low-resolution and won't look good in print: https://www.chaosium.com/orclicense/ Also, it would be nice to have a white-on-black version in addition to the black-on-white version. The current logo only looks good on white or light backgrounds but I would like to have some black or dark covers on my products and I can't figure out a treatment that would look good with the current black-on-white logo. Thanks in advance! Excited about this new edition!

A Hyperborea setting (essentially Conan / King Kull). A Star Trek setting in the original series era.

Thanks for all the feedback so far! I think I'm starting to get how shields work. Let me toss out an example and let me know if I got it right. Sir Celderic (I'll use the 'Knight' statblock on p. 241 of the latest BRP) has these two stats: Long Sword 75% Kite Shield 65% Here's the combat example: In round 1 of combat, Sir Celderic is standing and parries an attack from NPC #1 and uses his Long Sword to parry, with the skill at his normal 75% rating. The parry is successful, and future parries (even with shields) will be at -30% this round. NPC #2 attacks, and again Sir Celderic parries with his Long Sword, this time his skill is rolled at 45% (75% minus the 30% prior parry penalty). This parry fails (Sir Celderic takes damage) and the parry penalty is increased by another -30%. Then, a group of enemy archers in the woods shoots a volley of arrows and one of these flies towards Sir Celderic. Missiles work a bit differently ("while used in hand-to-hand combat a half or small shield has a base 15% chance to block a missile, a full shield has a 30% chance to block a missile, and a large shield has a 60% chance. If your character kneels behind it, a full shield has a 60% chance to block a missile, and a large shield has a 90% chance."). The Kite Shield is a large shield so it has a 60% chance, but Sir Celderic has already attempted two parries, making the parry penalty -60%. Due to the parry penalty of -60%, Sir Celderic cannot roll his 60% large shield defense. If Sir Celderic had earlier declared he was going to kneel behind his shield, then his shield would have had a 90% chance, and be rolled with a -60% parry penalty. If Sir Celderic survives the incoming arrow, as the new round starts, the -60% parry penalty goes away and combat continues. Does all this sound correct? Am I correct that you cannot kneel as a reaction, and you'd have to have earlier declared that you were kneeling behind the shield? Maybe you could have said during the statement of intent that 'If I hear the hiss of arrows, I will crouch down behind my shield' and then you'd have gotten the 90% rating? From a strategy perspective, it seems that you'd always want to parry with the highest-rated parry skill device (in this case, a Long Sword) unless you are defending against a missile weapon, with the downside being that (a) parrying weapons can take damage, and that a sword could eventually break if you always lead with it to parry, and (b) as Barak mentioned, if you fumble your parry with your shield and drop it you still have your hand weapon with which to parry and attack.

Here are my house rules. I would love any commentary or other ways to improve these approaches. Basically, I don't want my players to have to do multiplication or division during the middle of combat, so these rules aim to help with that. Easy Special Success/Critical Success Calculation: Any roll of 1-20 is potentially a higher success level. On a roll of 1-5, roll again. If the second roll is a success, then it is a critical success. Likewise, on a roll of 6-20, roll again. If the second roll is a success, it is a special success. Easy Fumble Calculation:If your skill is less than 100%, a roll of 99 or 00 is a fumble; if your skill is over 100%, only a 00 roll is a fumble. Easy Difficult/Easy Roll Calculation: At the GM's discretion, dice rolls can be made with advantage (flip the dice and take the higher of the two results) or disadvantage (flip the dice and take the lower of the two options). Easy rolls are made with advantage (instead of % x 2), and Difficult rolls are made with Disadvantage (instead of % x 1/2). I am also putting around some rules to make gaming with miniatures function more like other modern games (and wargames). Here's one rule I've used for that: Ambush: On your turn, you hold your attack and await an opportunity to act. Until the beginning of your next turn, you may react once and attack under one of two circumstances: Waylay: You may stop an enemy during its movement that moves within visible range to shoot at it (if within range) or engage in melee (if the target moves within 5’, at which point you make a free move to close with the target and attack). After the waylay attack resolves, the target may resume its movement and actions if it can. Return Fire: Immediately return fire against an attacker who shoots at you. Still wondering if reducing turn length from 12 seconds to 6 seconds, and making move more like D&D (30' for a walk, 60' for a run) might work better with miniatures.

Ah, that's a great approach!

What is "blackjack reading of dice"?

I'm a bit confused about how shields, parry, and dodge works in the new edition. Let's say I've got a shield and sword, someone is attacking me, and I want to parry with a shield. What do I roll? And is using a shield considered a parry, and having parried, I can't dodge, is that correct? Thanks in advance!

Interesting. Thanks for all the replies so far! I am wondering if I created a character sheet like CoC 7e with room for all the stats right on your character sheet if that would be useful? Seems like that's how CoC 7e handled things to reduce the need for math during the game.

I have a similar question; working on a sword and sorcery game and was going to emulate some Call of Cthulhu 7e (such as the bonus die and Pulp Cthulhu style talents, all written with original rules text), but wondering at what point house rules make it "not BRP". I was thinking if I noted the key rules changes maybe it would be OK and be called compatible with BRP, so long as you can still generally mix and match stat blocks and subsystems from BRP.

What do your players track on their character sheets -- do they only write down their skill rating and then manually calculate Special and Critical Success each time they roll? Or maybe people write down the precalculated 1/5 and 1/20 numbers next to the skill on the list character sheet? Only played BRP once about 10 years ago and really long the new edition, but constantly doing division will be a challenge for at least one of my players. Wondering what people typically do at their table to avoid excess math during the game session.

I'm loving just about everything I'm seeing, and very excited! I do wish there had been more CoC 7 innovations included (bonus die, pulp traits, etc.), but maybe I can house-rule those in. Is it just me (I'm reading the PDF on a Mac), or is the font in the tables nearly unreadable? This is an example of what it looks like for me, zoomed to 100%. Fonts that microscopic should use a sans serif font I would think. If this doesn't get addresses, not sure I'd buy a hard copy since I couldn't read it without a magnifying glass and would need to zoom 200% on my iPad. 😕

Looks like they are starting to make changes to the site. I noticed that this page: https://www.chaosium.com/basic-roleplaying/ Now includes Rivers of London (which it did not as of yesterday).

On the Salt & Serpent channel in Pixel Circus's Discord, they described the system as a 'd100 roll-under system' but that was as specific as they got.

The Salt & Serpent folks said it would be up on Youtube on Wednesday at 10am (presumably Pacific Time). I watched for a bit, but they spent almost no time at all talking about the system or mechanics in the time I watched, but maybe others will watch longer and pick up some system details. 🙂

Wow! Can't wait to learn more about what the updates change!

Thirded!

Ah, that's a good point about only getting XP from failures! Yes, that might just alleviate the concern I listed. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I don't the SRD rules specify where you spend your XP for a failed contest -- I think the XP you earn when failing can then be applied to level up any ability or breakout, not just the ability you failed at, that sound right?

In HeroQuest and QuestWorlds the cost to improve an ability, keyword, or breakout doesn't increase as the skill goes up. My concern is that I have players who I know will try to min-max their abilities, putting all their points into fighting skill where other players may more equally distribute how they level up their skills. It seems to me that after a few games I'm going to have some players with a 5M3 level skill rolling dice in a group contest where all the other players have at most a 5M1 skill (for example). I'm wondering how best to prevent this, since having one player always outshining others due to min-maxed skills is a drag. I'm considering this house rule: the XP cost to level up an ability by +1 adds the current 'M' value to the cost. So using the HeroQuest 1 XP = +1 to an ability model, increasing a keyword breakout by 1 level up to a rating of 20 costs 1 XP, increasing the breakout by one point when the skill is between 1M to 20M costs 2 XP for each 1 point level-up, and from 1M2 to 20M2 costs 3 XP per 1 point level up, etc. Seems like some system like this could slow down the advancement at higher levels and keep characters from having as much a disparity in skill levels. Thoughts on all this?