Smoking Frog

There's also the rule that aiming for a particular location is a Difficult action (so 1/2 the normal chance to hit). Depending on how crunchy you want your system, you could use the "half or under" as another level of success, and then apply a different amount of damage for each success level (SUCCESS, UNDER HALF, SPECIAL, CRITICAL). Then you'd just have to worry about 4 "target numbers" rather than using small increments. But if you want something really crunchy, this may not have enough nuts for you . . . .

You can't call the Great White's taking a taste bite a warning. He's just taking a sample to see if he wants to order it for his main course. Predators who were in the habit of giving their prey fair warning went extinct a long time ago. The elephant and others who give a warning are not interested in eating you whether they eventually kill you or not. I think you have to divide animals into those who want to eat you and those who don't. Those that don't may give a warning so that they don't need to waste their energy (and risk possible injury) trampling you. But the ones who want to eat you (or are mistaking you for a delicious seal) should just get on with the job at hand of killing you however they can and then having dinner.

Herakles, who killed the hydra among other super-monsters, wore a lion skin to show how tough he was, so at least old school mythology goes along with this view of things.

I'm simply amazed when I stop to think about stone age people hunting an aurochs with bows and spears. Talk about Epic level characters! But that was the equivalent of a normal day at the office. The problem with fantasy games is that when you have dragons, behemoths, demons, and so forth, the "mundane" creatures start to pale in comparison. It's easy to think "it's just a lion." But historically, people would have thought about killing a lion the way fantasy characters think about killing a dragon. I don't know that there's a good way to balance this out: you probably need to have fantasy monsters at the top of the "pecking order," so to speak, but having normal or even heroic level characters easily dispatching a boar (truly a nasty beast) or lion is just unrealistic.

Christian -- This looks quite interesting. Is there a tentative schedule for how long it will take to have this published once it's been submitted?

You really have to distinguish the stats of cows and bulls, at a minimum. Bulls are a lot bigger and meaner than cows. There are plenty of bulls that would be more massive than a polar bear, and probably most are a lot meaner. When I was about 10 years old, I visited my great uncle's ranch, and a Black Angus bull charged across his corral and slammed into a gate to scare my brother and me. It was almost like having a small car slam into the gate. We almost peed our pants. That bull was immense (I know I was 10, but still, it was freaking huge) and it was incredibly mean. There are plenty of cows, on the other hand, that aren't particularly huge or mean.

The "dragon bones" are very interesting. Several years ago, I was in the Shanghai Museum, and I was really surprised at how small the scapula and plastrons were. It's hard to see from pictures the small scale of these objects. With a historical fantasy setting, I like the idea of using the magic and myths the way the people of the time would have thought they worked. So I would make "pyromancy," or whatever term you want to use of divination with the scapula and plastrons, actually work. Because of the nature of the system, you can't ask open-ended questions, like "what should we do?" Rather you should make the players chose a yes-no question, like "should we attack soon" or "is Li Bu's illness caused because he was impious"? Or they can choose a sort of "multiple-choice" question like "is the traitor in the court (a) Cao Cao, ( Liu Bei, or © Xiao Bing?" This sort of limit should keep the use of divination within reason and not let the players use it as a substitute for actually investigating things. As far as how to decide whether the answer given is "correct," I think you would need to have the diviner make a skill check to see if he set the whole thing up correctly, and then have a separate determination of whether the god or ancestor that you wanted an answer from is going to be helpful. At a minimum this would depend on the piety of the character needing the information -- if you forgot to leave food at the ancestor's grave this year, you should be out of luck when it comes to getting helpful information. This may also help to "force" players to role-play the culture. The Chinese venerated certain ancestors and gods in the expectation that help would come back to them here on earth. As far as using the remnants of the divination as "dragon bones" in medicine or magic, I would think the easiest thing to do would be to assume that the divination process, in which an ancestor or god works through the bone or plastron, would leave some level of latent power, either in POW or magic points or whatever is appropriate. Then you could use the "dragon bones" as ingredients in a potion, healing spell, and so forth. That is, rather than giving them a particular magic effect, you could just have them be a potent magical ingredient that would be part of a larger formula for a potion or whatever needs to be made up.

But does the Jump skill in the BGB fill that niche? Even if we aren't whittling down everything to a bare-bones rule set, I'm starting to think we might not need all three of Agility Characteristic Roll, Dodge Skill and Jump Skill. [scratches chin in thought]

I'm not convinced that vehicles should have "hit points" unless they are living creatures, like the Vorlon ship in B5. The Yamato's ability to absorb damage comes from its armor and the distribution of various systems and components. It's hard to knock-out one thing that renders the ship inoperable. The Hindenburg on the other hand has no armor at all and would be easily shot down by puncturing enough of its gas cells or with some luck just setting it aflame. If you're going to model vehicles like this, I think you need to have a somewhat sophisticated system of damage: what sort of weapons can get through what part of the ship, and what damage to various systems can do. The famous demise of the Bismark is food for thought: crippling one system (steering) might be easier than reducing the hull to Swiss cheese. Of course the USS Arizona and HMS Hood are examples of one or a few explosives penetrating the right place and blowing the ship up instantly.

For the example of your cubes and a truck, leaving SIZ out accomplishes everything you want: you know the carrying capacity of your truck -- assume for example, it is 12 tons -- so you know it can carry the cube of water and the cube of steel, but not the cube of gold. Haven't we solved all the problems that the GM and players would have in that situation? The question is whether this fits in my truck and if it does can I cart it away. If I know mass and dimensions, I'm in business, so long as I give my vehicle a carrying capacity in a real measurement, like mass rather than SIZ or ENC.

I don't think you have to abandon SIZ altogether. But there are times when mass or dimensions are much more useful. For example: my backpack holds a certain volume, but I can only carry a certain mass. So if I fill my pack with lead, I can't lift it; if I fill it with feathers, I can lift it with one hand. I don't see the use of giving the pack, the lead, or the feathers a SIZ value. When we care about things like lifting, we just need to have a table for how much mass a certain STR (or STR + SIZ or whatever) can lift and carry. For extremely large things like a dirigible, battleship, blue whale, etc., I don't think SIZ really does any work for us. So my suggestion is just to ignore SIZ when what you really want to know is dimensions (what fits) or mass (how much can I lift). SIZ works for a rough approximation of the difference between a man and a cow, a big man and a shrimpy man, and so forth. It works as an approximation like an opening is SIZ 10, so a SIZ 13 person will have a tough time getting through and that difficulty is represented on the resistance table. But do we need to know if something is SIZ 640 because an opening is only SIZ 600? So I don't see the need for giving a very large object a SIZ. But maybe someone else can give an example of when knowing something like a certain ship is SIZ 350 rather than SIZ 325 matters.

I've suggested limiting SIZ to uses where it is a handy approximation of something. (We can argue about what the limit of those situations is, of course, but presumably the damage modifier is one place.) But for other purposes, dimensions and mass are much more useful. What, really, does it get you if you could actually come up with an "appropriate" SIZ for a blue whale? My answer would be: not much. Since we know they are around 180 metric tons and about 30 m long, it's friggin' huge and won't fit most places. And if something can't lift 180 metric tons, it's not gonna lift a blue whale. And if the whale fell on your character, he'd be jelly; no need to roll 53D6 + 17D4 + 13 to see how much actual damage he takes -- just start rolling up his replacement. And how often is the SIZ equivalent of 1,000 pounds (or kg) of grain going to be helpful? Since I know its mass, if I know the density, I can tell you roughly what volume it has, so I can know whether it fits into whatever it is I'm trying to fit it in. If a 50 kg barrel is hard to lift because it's awkward to hold, I can make an easy ruling about the ability to carry it for a distance. I don't need to try to quantify a SIZ equivalent because it's bulky just to fit into a rule about what SIZ someone can carry. Why not just have a rule about how much mass a person can: lift with arms and legs, lift with just arms, and carry on his back while traveling some distance. Then I could deal with oddities like a barrel that is heavy and won't fit on a character's back. However helpful SIZ might be in some instances, it doesn't seem to make sense to try to force every game mechanic that deals with mass and dimension to accommodate SIZ.

Yes. If you're going to have something like Agility = DEX x 5 as a percentage, then Dodge as a skill just to jump away from things might be expendable.

Speaking of the Rome campaign, I'm eagerly awaiting its debut. I can guarantee at least one sale in the US.

Yes. You can't talk about the economic viability of BRP in the abstract; you have to talk about the viability of Chaosium and the various books or series that they publish. Or about the viability of the other companies doing BRP or BRP-like books. Call of Cthulhu has been a viable product line for decades. The BRP system has some independent value, of course, but I can't see it helping out "stinkers" like "BRP Protozoa: Adventure Roleplaying for Single Celled Animals" or "BRP Sloths: Roleplaying a Really Slow Pace." But RQ Vikings (and presumably Mythic Iceland) will have some viability just because every red-blooded RPGer has got to like vikings at least a little.

I will add that one factor that BRP does not seem to model well is blood loss. Any wound that is bleeding is going to cause you to go into shock sooner or later -- sooner obviously if you are losing a lot of blood. There is no respite from low blood pressure, even if you are very pumped up. In fact, the more excited you are, the more likely your heart is to pump that blood out of you faster. If you get timely first aid, you may even be reasonably functional. (Next month, the president is going to award the Medal of Honor to a Ranger who was shot in both legs and had his hand blown off by a grenade. Three tourniquets later he was not moving much, but he was able to direct his subordinates and use the radio. Without the tourniquets, it's pretty clear he would have died from blood loss very quickly. Of course, Rangers may be Epic level characters, so I don't recommend this for you kids at home.)

I recently read a collection of early Conan stories and I was struck by how Lovecraftian some of Howard's monster/gods were. (Slimy, tentacles, utterly indifferent to human well-being.) Howard was a correspondent with HPL, so it's not surprising. I think you could definitely mine CoC for some ideas of the sort of things that lurk beneath the decadent, effete cities. As far as magic being limited to NPCs, this seems to be an issue of whether you're trying to emulate the Conan stories or the Conan setting. Obviously Conan would have no interest in a sorcerer's library, unless maybe he was out of toilet paper. But that's because REH wrote him that way. You have to cater to your players' interests, and not everyone wants to be a steel-thewed barbarian with the reflexes of a panther.

If you live in a world where the only two options from being shot in the chest with an assault rifle are (1) instant death and (2) staying up and functioning, then this discussion would be of some value. In the world in which I live, when you are shot in the chest with any type of weapon, three things can happen: (1) you instantly die, (2) you suffer some level of disability, including falling down, and (3) you can stay up and keep functioning. Today many people survive battlefield injuries that in prior wars would have been fatal. That is partly a result of the excellent body armor troops have, but it is also to a great extent a function of the level of medical care and the availability of rapid evacuation to a hospital. None of that has anything to do with the ability of someone to shrug off any particular type of wound, that is, to stay up and keep functioning. I previously referred to the numerous attempts to quantify the "one-shot stopping" power of various handgun rounds. Again, the idea is that whether someone ultimately survives or not is irrelevant: what matters is whether I can knock him out of the fight. Unless you have studies that describe the likelihood of staying on your feet and continuing to function after being shot in the chest or abdomen with an assault rifle round, you really can't say how far from "reality" the BRP rules are merely because the vast majority of people will be knocked down when shot in the chest (if they have no armor). To say most people survive in the real world is not relevant, unless BRP has most people instantly killed when shot in the chest, which it does not.

There's WAY too much to this system. Too many B.S. rules. I'm using the rock-paper-scissors with best 2-out-of-3 for all combat. I'm tired of all this ridiculous rolling of dice and looking at numbers foolishness. If you need something more "detailed" than rock-paper-scissors, you might as well be playing D&D 4E.

At some point, it seems that you would benefit from ignoring SIZ and just assessing things by dimension and mass. So your cargo bay has dimensions and your space ship has a limit on how much mass it can carry. When you know the density of any item you want to take with you, you can figure out how much of it your ship can either hold (dimensions) or lift (mass). Along the same lines, it seems you should just go with a blue whale's dimensions and mass. Then you can easily decide whether he fits somewhere or if he can be lifted by something. SIZ seems to be an easy short hand from some purposes and for some sizes, but as we've clearly identified, there are places where SIZ just mucks things up, and short circuiting it is so much easier.

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That range sounds about right for epic guys. A real epic character like Cuchulain should be able to eat a twerp like Conan for breakfast before going out to kill 27 warriors with one swing. So he's got to have at least super strength. I'm seriously considering using a SIZ limit on STR for my Heian Japan setting, because the average person is considerably smaller than the "normal" range under the rule for SIZ = 2D6+6. Since the normal range for Heian era males is something like SIZ 6 to 13, with an average SIZ of 9.5, imposing a limit of SIZ + 8 for STR may be in order. Otherwise you could potentially have someone with SIZ 6 and STR 21, which is just too out of balance. I'm also thinking that the STR will determine the character's mass; if the STR is at the high end of what is possible for that SIZ, then the mass has to be at the high end of the range for that SIZ too. That way you can have short burly guys, but no super strong twerps. But I'm trying to do a historical/heroic level, so people who are unusually strong need to also be on the large size. If I were doing an epic level Heian setting, I'd have to let warriors be so strong that they could sink a ship with one arrow.

You might want to consult the BGB page 16 re: maximum initial starting characteristics. You are incorrect. Your point now may be something different, but the point you made previously was that someone should not be allowed to have a small SIZ and high STR. My point in response was that a player might want to have a character like this. Your response was that players shouldn't get anything they want, the proof being the question: What if they want a 30 STR? To which, I correctly responded, that under the rules as written, they can't have a character with a 30 STR, at least not at initial creation or under the rules for increasing characteristics. (Barring super-powers of course, but that's not the same as a 30 STR.) To put this succinctly, you were arguing that the rules as written allow players to create characters that should not be permitted. My point was that I saw a reason why such characters should exist. If you now want to argue about something else, fine, but I'm not sure I even know what your new point is, so I can't tell whether I agree or not.

Okay. I'll bow out of this discussion. You're not responding to my point, and I don't see any point in just repeating myself.