d(sqrt(-1))

He Failed, I’ll Try

It is a common occurrence in any role playing game, for one player to say he or she is going to have his or her character perform a skill or characteristic roll, then failing that, another player says he or she will try, followed by another and then another. Take listening at doors or picking a lock for example. The absurdity of this situation becomes apparent when you try to visualize what this event must look like. If the GM feels this is being abused, one way to handle it is to have the players choose the character with the best skill level for the job and have him or her make the roll. In this case, if the roll was a failure it can be assumed that any further attempts by other characters will yield similar results. After all, if the STR 18 barbarian cannot bash down a door, what chance does the scrawny STR 9 magic-user have?

Yes, exactly, we have used that very rule in fact.

Mark

Off the top of my head (so totally unplaytested) what if when xp is worked out every player rolls a D20 and then distributes that much between the skills ticked? That way the realism of only improving skills you use is maintained but people aren't getting to rush ahead on xp because they use loads of skills - meaning that a rough equivalency is kept up and there is no need to go tick-hunting even if you're a min-max player.

If you wanted to remove the random element from it entirely you could even just give 11 points to everyone and have them distribute that among the ticked skills - although I think a fun part of BRP is the randomness!

I quite like the basic idea, although 1d20 might be a bit too random! I agree with keeping it a bit random, maybe only 1 roll is made and that applies to the entire party, size of roll determined by GM, e.g. if roll is 4d6 and roll = 15 then every member of party gets 15 points to distribute. You could even say that the maximum amount you can spend on any skill is something like (100-skill)/10 i.e. if your skill is 10%, then you can spend (100-10)/10 = 9 points on it, whereas if it's 90%, the max you can spend is (100-90)/10 = 1 point, or something similar. Minimum of 1 point perhaps? Might be too slow a progression for skills over 100 though. You could always use something like (150-skill)/10 I suppose.

cheers,

Mark

I have wondered previously about a system whereby you only learn from failure i.e. you only get a skill tick for failing a skill roll. If you combine that with only letting them roll for things that will have adverse consequences if they fail then you get a system where they have to weigh up the risks of failing against the benefit of an advancement tick.

Another option might be to say that the higher skilled PCs should attempt certain things first - after all, if you need to disarm the poison gas trap, who would you sooner have try, the 10% novice so they can get a tick, or the guy with 90% disarm traps?

Or you could just say that they can't just tick everything that they successfully roll, it's not that arduous to monitor, unless you don't trust them, and if you don't trust them why are you playing with them?

cheers,

Mark

Maybe it's just me, but I've never had any problems like that with any type of system (hm, well, Secret Arts for Weapons of the Gods still fries my brain, but that's down to the way it's written, not the system itself), and I've never played with anyone who has in 30+ years of RPGing. If we did play with someone who couldn't cope with rolling high/low, 3d6, 1d100, 5d4+2d6, working out percentages etc,etc I think we'd probably give them some very strange looks! If they were rabid complainers about it I don't think they would last very long. It seems to me to be a more online theoretical complaint than a real one. TBH sometimes I feel that a completely unified system would be less interesting, as every roll would feel the same - I certainly found that with HeroQuest anyway.

WFRP scales everything to 1d100, but that then causes problems for large creatures - if a human can (even theoretically) get 100 STR, what do you do for bigger things?

If the 3d6 range is too near to zero at the bottom, you could always use 2d6+6 for humans, as per INT and SIZ.

cheers,

Mark

One tweak that I was considering was to allow more than one tick to accumulate on a skill, subject to GM approval. When the time comes for skill increase rolls you get +1% on the chance to improve for each extra tick over the first.

e.g. skill of 50%, you accumulate 6 ticks on it. For improvement you have to roll > 50, but you get +5% to see if you improve. You still only get a 1d6% improvement though.

Then there is a trade off between improving lower skills esp weapons, and getting a higher chance of improving already decent skills.

We've never really seen the golf-bag of weapons effect though, since a PC will usually be fairly good at one type of weapon, and not so good with others. If they want to risk using a lower skill weapon, they can!

cheers,

Mark

It looks like Chaosium has fixed the snafu with In Search of the Trollslayer. While the page still mentions the "technical difficulties," I was able to download it successfully from My Account | My Downloads.

At 50 pages, it looks to be good value for the <$10 price tag.

Same here, no problems with download (well, except I had forgotten my Chaosium password...)

Mark

1. Yes agreed, that's what I tried to summarise in my intro. Obviously I failed!

No I don't think you failed at all, I was just trying to remember the differences between SB1 and SB3!

2. Thief certainly had lots of skills and I think that they were pretty random so that may be the one

Could be Thief - if I remember I'll have a look when I get home.

Mark

White Dwarf #25. That's definitely Old School!

Hm, I did wonder about WD, but dismissed it. Thanks for the info

WD #25 Old school? Bah! These newcomers with their double-digit issue numbers...

cheers,

Mark

BTW Stormbringer 1 is more random ISTR, later versions toned it down quite a lot - I prefer the earlier version. There are random additions to attributes depending on nationality, and there's at least one Profession that you roll d100 for skills ratings in - Crafter perhaps? Skills from other classes can easily be 50%+ at start. If you just want to roll randomly for everything there's not much point in classes at all really.

cheers,

Mark

Can't remember which game I got it from, but I always do random determination of handidness as follows: roll 1D6 and 1D12. If D12 > D6 the character is right handed; if D6 > D12 the character is left handed; If D6 = D12 the character is ambidextrous. Sure I picked it up from a published RPG, but can't remember which one...

Nick

Hm, strangely enough I also do the same thing. I also can't remember where it came from. I almost thought it might be DragonQuest, but that only uses d10s.

Mark

For those of us going to Tentacles, should we pre-order, or will there be copious supplies available?

cheers,

Mark

Hi,

Mark, usually d(sqrt(-1)), or sometimes hemulen. Been RPGing since white box D&D and black book T&T, picked up RQ1 and Traveller 1977-78, CoC in 81.

Sad to say that I haven't played much CoC/RQ/SB etc lately, as our group has been into D&D 3.5, but I will play most things (at least once!). Am also into Eurogames (this year is the first that I can't make it to Essen Spiele since about 1995) and a fan of Reiner Knizia, Belgian and German beer, cooking.

Have a dream of setting up an RPG/Board gamers retirement home. Probably have more Hawkwind albums than strictly necessary.

cheers,

Mark