Smoking Frog

Devil's Advocate question: if the truth was that the books you might be buying will become worthless, what would they say?

They'd say the exact same thing, of course! Since they have an economic self-interest in making the new rules compatible, I suspect that any problems will come not from their intention, but from the execution of their intentions. But I don't know the guys at Mongoose, so I'm just surmising what rational behavior would be.

I would echo the comments that since the BGB is an attempt at producing a generic system leaving things out is not a flaw. That is also true of the decision to include loads of things I don't have any need for. Rules for starships would be one more thing I would be very unlikely to use. And the book weighs in at a hefty 400 pages already.

If you do rules for a specific genre and setting, like the authors of MRQII were able to do, for example, being tightly focused is a big advantage in writing. But I have learned to enjoy the task of adapting the generic rules to a specific setting. It gets my creative juices churning, and among other things, it makes me really think about the rules and the setting and how best to combine them. If someone else had done that for me, I'd have to "house-rule" all the decisions he made that I don't like.

The problem I see with this approach is that the players actually are in no trouble

at all, they can just shrug and pretend that their characters are never afraid or

shocked, no matter what they have to face. Think of Beowulf.

Beowulf is a good example of the difference I was thinking of between "normal" and "supernatural" opponents. All the fighters are obviously heroic material and would not likely be shrinking from any human enemy, but everyone except Beowulf is afraid of Grendel and, as you point out, against the dragon the chosen warriors perform about as well as the French Army in 1940. The problem of not caring what happens to a character would be even more dramatic, I think, if instead of his own character, the player could send forward a hireling or follower.

Player: "My character, Weasel-wulf, says to his loyal retainer: 'Aedmund, go poke that monster a few times and see what happens. We'll be right here watching.' Aedmund walks up the monster and starts poking.'"

GM: "It eats him in one gulp."

It might have been that Beowulf and Wiglaf were the two PCs and the rest of the chosen warriors were the NPCs needed to fill out the war band.

Having a fright/morale system could also put a premium on charisma and leadership: Part of the job of the leader of the war band would be to make sure the band is fired up and ready to kick some butt, not run like little girls.

It seems to me that Mongoose are the epitome of a Garbage In, Garbage Out company. If the author's manuscript is a good one then the resulting product will be competently laid out and contain a random number of editorial foul-ups. If the author's manuscript is a poor one, the final product will be just as poor with the added bonus of editorial foul ups.

I only have a couple of Mongoose products, so I can't opine too much about them in particular, but in general it is obvious to me that the computer really is a blessing and a curse to the publishing industry. It is now much easier to produce professional looking books. But that fools people into thinking that since the mechanics are simple, there must not be much to being an editor/publisher. It's obvious that some folks don't even think that proofreaders are a necessary part of the process.

About half a clack, passed through the digestive tract of a broo.

Very well said, sir.

I would say that the "modern" approach to developing a setting is to adapt it to a popular or at least "main stream" rules system, in particular one that has a track record of being playable and already has an established community of gamers. For a long time I've thought that it was a shame that the Tekumel setting, which has some unique features and is really detailed and rich, has "languished" so to speak with such a mish-mash of rules systems and out-of-print source materials. BRP would be an obvious system to use to update the setting, but it's surely not the only one. Maybe the folks who control the setting don't have the time or energy to really do something with it. But when I see what can be done with a setting like Clockwork & Chivalry, just to mention one example, I don't see why someone could not do a lot more with Tekumel.

Yes, indeed. What I had in mind was a maneuver where the shield was "sacrifi-

ced" by being discarded when the opponent's axe "got stuck" in the shield after

a defensive maneuver aimed at making this happen. The opponent would then

either need a moment to "free" his axe from the shield or have to discard his

axe, too - both resulting in a free attack option for the defender.

"Sacrifice" indeed. Not much of a sacrifice to trade your shield for his weapon!

PS: Any assurances the rules won't be changed (just the name)?

We have their assurances that they won't muck them up, which is worth whatever it's worth. But it seems they understand they have an economic interest in not mucking up the rules. The Mongoose blurbs I've read seemed to be at pains to assure everyone that the books you already own and the books you might be buying in the meantime won't become worthless.

There was some discussion of this sort of thing on the RQIII mailing list not too long ago. The topic in question was how to tweek the RAW for charging horses, since the OP thought the RAW were too light. I had suggested something like a modified Fear spell effect. But, another poster sagely pointed out that in situations like that (a foot solider facing tons of charging horseflesh), the "fear" shouldn't have to be engineered by rules, but should be generated by the players being aware of how much trouble they're in.

In other words, the other poster was of a mind that fear rules were unnecessary. He had a good point. SAN works because you sort of need a mechanism to simulate the unreal horror of the Cthulhu mythos, but for more mundane terror, perhaps a rules mechanism is unneeded. The GM just needs to make clear through description how much hurt they're in for. Of course, in a game like BRP, players also need to be aware of the rules and how deadly combat can be.

In "The Short Happy Life...", I'd say Macomber revealed himself to be a BRP PC while Robert Wilson was a D20 or even a Savage Worlds PC.

This is a good point, and I've been mulling this idea for a while because on the one hand I don't like the idea of telling a player what his character decides to do, especially if it's stand frozen like an idiot going "um um um um um" while quaking. On the other hand, I was looking for a way to model terror that was anything but rational. When you see the charging lion, the rational decision is: I can't out run this thing. However small a chance it may be, the best chance I have is to just shoot him now. Turning tail and running is irrational.

In your example of the footmen deciding to run or stand against the charging horse, I think it is similarly too late to decide to run. If you try to escape, you'll be just mowed down, the usual fate of routing troops who are not faster than their buddies. I would think the time to rationally decide this is a bad idea is when the commander tells you to form up opposite the horse.On the other hand, depending on the era, footmen may be well able to stand up to cavalry charges. Certainly modern infantry (with all sorts of very nasty anti-tank weapons) have no reason to run in terror from tanks the way their WWI predecessors might.

I also think an irrational response might be more likely in response to a supernatural being appearing than a natural one. Depending on the setting, you might want mortals to pale in comparison to the simple awesomeness of supernatural beings on the order of demons and the like.

It may also be that you want to use one system for NPCs like flunkies and hired help and another system for PCs.

But I agree that your basic objection is a strong one.

Morale check!

I feel like if I call something a "morale check," someone will want to wash my mouth out with soap. We gotta have a better term than that.

It sounds like since I already have RQIII (and MRQII for that matter), I don't need to make the new Magic supplement a priority purchase. There are a lot of books in my "must buy" queue.

Hmmm, Shaggy and Scooby Doo scream like little girls and run like the wind at the slightest hint of the unusual. But pull out a fresh pizza and they're all good. Either they don't actually suffer SAN loss, or they recover SAN "hit points" with sufficient nourishment, or they're just plain crazy anyway, so it doesn't matter.

Shag and Scoob are easy to explain: The meddling kids drive around the country in a van with no visible means of support. Hmmm. I wonder how they finance their travel? Perhaps they sell something along the way. What sort of product could they sell that they would not advertise but would bring in big revenue?

Then these two numbskulls sample so much of the merchandise that they get so paranoid and jumpy that they bolt from anything remotely harmful looking -- and probably run from the invisible spiders crawling on them too. And they suffer from such massive cases of the "munchies" that they will consume an entire refrigerator in under 15 seconds. It all sounds really fishy, and I'd say there's more than reasonable suspicion for Officer Jones to pull them over and have his trusty dog take a sniff or two. I bet Velma is the kingpin of the operation. Those nerd glasses don't fool me.

Thanks for the thoughts! These are all excellent ideas. Stunning, "mental stress," and adopting the fear spell (or fearshock) all seem like very good ways of doing this. (I do not have BASIC Creatures, but I'll have to add it to my ever lengthening list of books to get.)

I also want to work up some variation based on the character's background/experience, so a dragon may be terribly frightening to a hobbit who has never been out of the Shire, but a dragon may be no big deal to a crusty old Fighter who likes to tell "the one about the time I faced a dragon with just my +1 toothpick." This is part of what it means to be Heroic.

The mundane version of this that I keep thinking about is that the Roman soldiers at Heraclea in 280 BC had never seen a war elephant and were routed by them, but at Zama in 202 BC they were old hands at elephant fighting and just deployed their collection of anti-elephant tactics to neutralize them.

And I had not thought about the issue of animals. Even if a character has the guts to stand his ground against some nasty demon, his faithful dog and horse might be seen heading for the hills.

Au contraire - those trolls are experienced IRS auditors ...

Ah. I'm beginning to see clearly now. This explains so many things!

You might also be able to model these effects with something like the optional Aura Attack, which can leave your victims mesmerized or even demoralized.

For a while now, I've been musing about whether it might be useful in some genres or settings to have a rule for the effect of something terrifying that does not involve a loss of sanity. This would be the difference, for example, between seeing a charging Deep One and seeing a charging war elephant. In both cases, I might drop everything and run like a jack rabbit, but my terror in each case would involve fundamentally different psychological states.

I read a lot of Lovecraft when I was young and my first BRP game was Call of Cthulhu 1st edition, so I'm pretty comfortable with the notion of people going insane from learning how horrible the universe really is, casting a blasphemous spell, etc. And the optional SAN system in BRP is expressly intended to be useful in non-horror settings; the rule mentions possible SAN loss from seeing, for example, the giant shark from "Jaws" or a spider the size of a car. Being severely tortured can potentially cause significant SAN loss.

The rule is also clear, however, that SAN loss for seeing a monster is not appropriate for fantasy worlds where everyone knows monsters exist. That, of course, makes sense because seeing a dragon does not force a change in your understanding of the universe; although it might force a change in your understanding of your chances to get out of this alive. But if you've read "The Hobbit," you probably remember the point of great drama when Bilbo screws up the courage to sneak into Smaug's lair to reconnoiter. Obviously Bilbo believes in dragons, that is the problem, in fact; it's just there's a big difference between knowing a dragon exists and sneaking into one's lair.

Another example of this problem is in Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis McComber": While on safari, Mr. McComber turns coward, drops his rifle, and flees like a little girl, when a wounded lion charges. (While his wife is watching, of course.) Obviously he knew lions existed; he had just shot this one. Fortunately for McComber, the experienced guide who was with him calmly blasts the lion with his .505 Gibbs, so nobody gets mauled.

In combat situations, there is clearly a difference between a highly trained veteran who can calmly remain effective during really terrifying situations (like the guide in "The Short Happy Life"), and the green recruit who may bolt when he "sees the elephant" for the first time.

I'm curious if anyone has played with a system something like this or has some ideas how it might add or detract from a game. And obviously what sort of game you're running will be a big factor in whether this would help or hurt. I've thought that maybe the simplest way to model this would be just to use something like the rules for temporary SAN loss, where the consequence of blowing the roll are going to be mostly just running away or freezing, but without keeping track of permanent SAN loss and not worrying about permanent insanity.

On the other hand, there is the issue of the permanent harm to your psyche when you calm down and reflect on your having run away like a coward in front of everyone, especially your shrew wife who is already sleeping with the guide. This may be something like the SAN loss from being severely tortured: you don't have to reexamine what the universe is like, but you do have to question your carefully constructed notions of "who am I," to use the question Machiavelli asked after he had been severely tortured.

This has been a long and rambling post, which probably reflects my muddled thoughts on the issue, so even responses like "that's a load of bollocks, just forget about it," would be welcome.

Yep, the only thing trolls really are mortally afraid of.

Those trolls have obviously never been audited by the IRS.

I agree 100%. You could use the CoC supplement "Secrets of Japan". Although it is set in the 21st century, it does feature the onmyoji + a lot of other cool stuff. And it is culturally & historically correct (if you remove the mythos stuff, that is)

Nice suggestion! I've had "Secrets of Japan" on my "maybe" list for a while, but this is a good reason to move it up in the queue. As I said on another thread, "so many settings, so little time."

(Apropos of nothing, it always amazes me how much of the oddest stuff comes from the real history).

Something with which fiction writers are familiar. I think Philip Roth described this as when you write history it just has to be true, but when you write fiction it has to be plausible.

I'm very interested in the 17th century in general and the English Civil Wars in particular, but I was never too excited about the clockwork angle of C&C. (I am very interested, on the other hand, in 17th century alchemy and magic.) But it sounds like the C&C books have a huge amount of useful setting information, even if I'm not going to use all of the alternate history parts. And there's always the benefit of supporting those fools who spend all their time and effort making RPGs. They deserve our deep concern and sympathy.

I've got quite a few books in my "to buy" queue, and my wife has Detect Husband's Unnecessary Spending at 114%, so I may need to put this on my Xmas list. So many settings, so little time . . .

Then how do those players expect to survive in a campaign?

GM: You see some trolls on the other side of the bridge.

Player: We rush the bridge an attack!

GM: Are you sure? Don't you want to count and see how many trolls there are, first?

Player: Count? I have to count? What sort of game is this! I have to do math?!! What, did we loose a war or something?

With the recent discussion of a Homeric Greece supplement on my mind, that funny conversation sparked this thought:

Player (Achilles): Okay, I dry my tears and try to get my composure back. I'll let my god-like anger smolder rather than flame up. Then I walk out to view the Trojan battle lines.

GM: You see Trojans and their allies lined up as far as the eye can see, covering the plain. They appear to be eagerly awaiting battle.

Player (Achilles): Well, how many are there?

GM: You can't tell exactly, it's a huge host.

Player (Achilles): Well, how many to the nearest 1000?

GM: About 10,000.

Player (Achilles): Okay. I'll take three spears instead of two. Now those chumps are gonna rue the day that swift-running Achilles set aside his anger against Agamemnon, lord of men, and put the smack down on their sorry-looking Trojan butts.

Yep, and in many periods the shield was made of cheap materials and considered

disposable anyway. For example, some medieval duelling protocols mention the

number of shields each combattant is allowed to "use up" during the duel, and a

fighter taking a new shield because the original had been "spent" is mentioned

quite often in medieval descriptions of a combat.

Your mentioning the cheap materials for shields reminded me of an Icelandic saga I read (in translation, of course) way back in my university days. As I recall, the saga indicated that two men having a duel would sometimes have to stop to unbend their swords, which I assume was a reflection of them being much more flexible than brittle. And it seems that the dueling ethic required you to hold off and give him a chance to unbend or get a new sword if it was unusable. The saga also indicated that if you had a shield made of a soft wood, your opponent's sword might go into the edge and get stuck, which is obviously bad news for him. I assume this is not just literary license, so maybe one option for a critically successful shield block, or a fumbled sword attack might be "sword stuck in shield," rather than the usual disarm of the weapon being knocked away or dropped.

Gianni -- I dug through my "Old West Companion," which was my notes for running an old west game and had some juicy tidbits on pistols and repeating rifles. Here are a few significant dates to help spur further research:

1836: Colt introduced the first revolver (pistol with a revolving cylinder)

1857: Smith & Wesson formed to produce revolvers based on a patent for a bored-through cylinder with metallic cartridges (as opposed to the cap & ball revolvers)

The S&W patent expired around 1873, which is when other companies started producing revolvers for metallic cartridges, including the famous Colt .45 (aka Peacemaker)

1892: Colt produced the first revolver with a swing-out cylinder (M1892 in .38); before that the "break-top" model like the S&W was about the best you could do for speedy reloading.

Repeating rifles were used in the Civil War but became more common afterwards:

1860: The Henry repeating rifle and the Spencer repeating rifle were both introduced

1866: Winchester produced its first repeating rifle

Because of the limited size of the action, repeating rifles used rounds that were less powerful than what could be used in breech loading rifles like the US Army's Springfield in .45-70, or the Sharps (which came in a variety of calibers, including the "monster" .50-90). In 1881, Marlin introduced a lever-action repeating rifle that was big enough to chamber the .45-70 round.

One other technological point is that smokeless powder was not invented until 1884. Prior to that, all firearms used the slower-burning black powder, which created a lot of smoke that could obscure vision. The first smokeless powder was 3 times more powerful than black powder. During the black powder era, the basic way to get more powerful rounds was to just use more powder with a huge bullet. Hence the Sharps .50-90, which was developed for buffalo hunting. With the advent of faster-burning, more powerful smokeless powder, manufacturers started using smaller bullets that would have much higher velocity and so a much higher muzzle energy. The first commercial round to use smokeless powder was Winchester's famous .30-30, which was introduced in 1894.

Obviously my notes were skewed to what was happening in America, but this should reasonably reflect the "state of the art" for weapons at the time.

Hope you're finding lots of good stuff specific to China!

Some time ago I saw on the Yahoo Tekumel Group discussion that someone, I don't remember who, was working on BRP Tekumel. I've not seen anything in a while indicating what progress was made.

No, not really ...

This video shows a demonstration of the actual historical rapier style of the ear-

ly age of the musketeers:

It was a very fast and very brutal attempt at "one thrust, one kill", without any

cinematic swordplay at all.

One aspect of this video that I especially enjoyed was the number of times a technique involved letting the opponent commit to an attack, then move off line to avoid being hit, and counter-attack the opponent while he is in the process of executing his attack against the space you just moved out of. While I don't have a big problem with breaking up attack, parry, and dodge, if I were building a rules system from "scratch," I think I would wrap all the movement of the body and weapon, both offensive and defensive, into the weapon skill. Mastering the weapon includes mastering the footwork and body movements that go along with it.