SDLeary

Another find, though I'm probably late to the party here, is Scrivner. This is very much a writing tool than a design tool, but has the ability to export directly to ePub and .Mobi (they call it compiling). More importantly it gives the ability to organize and manage your project, with the ability to add files to the Project that are used as Resources. Support for breaking the project down into separate documents, footnotes/endnotes, comments, a full screen Compose mode, and other things that I'm just beginning to uncover. SDLeary

In RQ 3, IIRC (don't have the book handy), you can train characteristics the same way as skills thru training. Something like the characteristic x25 hours to get a gain of 1d3. I do seem to remember something in the BGB that paralleled; I would adopt something like this. With regards to POW, thats a tougher question unless you want to have POW teachers as well. SDLeary

Ah, yes. I was figuring on using an alternate for specials and criticals. Perhaps doubles for specials and skill match for critical. I recall a method, like what your proposing, being mentioned someplace else before. IIRC, it was decided not to use it because it felt that it would cause confusion because the goal was both to roll high under skill and to roll low for criticals and specials. SDLeary

We are thinking across similar lines... SDLeary

I'm not aware of any rules that allow you to do that, but there is the Blackjack mechanic, which is presented as an option in the BGB. Using this, the goal is not to roll low, but as close to your skill ranking as possible. Thus, if you have a skill of 69%, rolling a 69 on the dice is your best possible outcome. This allows easier opposed rolls, as the highest roll under skill wins. Now, thinking about this, you could assign task difficulty on the 100 scale; roll over that assigned number to succeed. That way, if someones skill is too low, they don't have a chance of success... though you could always consider a roll of exactly skill, a critical or automatic success. I think something like this is used in UA for some tasks. SDLeary

That would be somewhat setting dependent though. I'm thinking more in terms of generality... something of a way to lessen the mortality rate for fights that shouldn't be mortal to begin with, and to allow perhaps better scaling of the system to comic book levels, as mentioned in the Superworld thread. YES! I know I mentioned weapons in the first post! If we can come up with something core and solid, then perhaps it could carry over to powers as well, without having to totally rewrite the damage system of the game. SDLeary

Similar to what I've thought... also in the other thread. Both of our methods though assume that an optional rules system is in place. Fatigue with yours, Hit Locations in mine. The easiest way, and one that doesn't involve the use of optional rules, would be a slight revision of the Weapons Tables, appending a K to the weapons involved, and forcing people to use the Knockout rules. Like you though, I think there should be more. SDLeary

I agree with this. In fact, take a look at the Less Lethal thread. I tailored the questions based on the discussion on Blackjack damage, but there is no reason it can't be expanded to include this. All energy being the same OTOH I actually find as fault. Photonic, electric, and decay (radiation) energies all react in the world a bit differently. Even in the comic books, hero's will be able to withstand one form of energy but not another. And Physical attack IS just another form of energy... Kinetic. It should cost a lot to make a character that is heavily resistant to all types of energy! SDLeary

The thread on the listed damage of a Blackjack got me thinking... Many things in the world that are used in fights are not lethal, much less in the single landing of a blow. How often will 4 or 5 punches actually kill someone (Brawl + DB)? A small club, quaterstaff, or as in the other thread, a Blackjack? I'm certainly not saying that they can't kill. There are recorded accounts of someone dying from a punch to the face, but they seem to be an extreme rarity, and make "news" when it happens particularly because of their rarity. Even when people are bashed on with items like clubs, death seems to occur less than as molded in BRP, and people today tend to not wear armor! So... Do we need to model Less Lethal damage better? How would you go about doing it? What weapons or classes of weapons would you place under this? How should they be listed in weapons charts? SDLeary

Yes. And if someone were to write a good effects based powers system for BPR, it would become less tough. Superworld could create some amazingly powerful and resilient characters IME, but the higher the power level, the more cumbersome things became. BRP, at its core is a Street Level system. I think its power level can go a bit higher than what you've outlined, but not much; say to X-Men (sans Phoenix), Avengers (sans Thor)... oddly mostly things on the Marvel side come to mind. Most DC hero's are the ones I'd have trouble with. SDLeary

Hmmm, I've never really seen it that way. "I swing my sword at the Evil Wizard..." would seem to work in either sense. Now what you describe can be mitigated somewhat by removing the extra bits, like Combat Maneuvers, and going back to a straight roll and success level round, narrating the actual effects in accordance with your vision of what your character was trying to do (note that this is the way most variants of BRP seem to be written). The only difference at this point would be that there will be the damage roll, as "Damage" is factored differently between the two systems. I honestly do not see one as being potentially less narrative than the other. Now, I'm not saying that some people don't play them that way, just that most BRP games I've been in have simply had a ton of narration... ESPECIALLY in ages past when I played Superworld. Now this I really do agree with. That is the main issue, scaling. HQ as written, scales much better and is in my mind superior for super heroic games, especially those that incorporate wide swaths of abilities, from the lowly Street Urchin to the most powerful Deity or Superhero, allowing them all to participate in the events that unfold. I do prefer fixed resistances and the use of higher Masteries for many things, as written in HQ1, but have no problem with the sliding scale in highly cinematic situations. Superworld did prove that BRP can scale quite a ways, but as written it became very cumbersome above a certain level. SDLeary

And lets not forget Heroquest! SDLeary Rosen beat me to it!

Sweet. I'll need to look at the project page when I get the opportunity. In this case I have to blame the tablet makers as they have almost universally designed their tablets in a landscape factor, to match TVs and computer screens. Thus people think thats the way they are supposed to be used. Apple and Amazon, thankfully did not do this. Odd that these are the two most popular tablet makers at the moment! ;-) Government and business documents still need to be printed. Thus PDF is the best format, just as it would be for a game book that was meant to be printed. eBook formats are designed for electronic distribution and consumption, with little to no need to print the entire document. AH! We are on slightly different wavelengths. I'm not saying that any eBook format should supplant PDF, especially if those documents have a requirement (government or business documents) or a need/intent to be printed (heavily formatted digest/A4/Letter). Note that I am not even considering online/web documents, fill in forms, etc. If a publisher (specifically game publishers) decides to release their product in an eBook format, the iBook format specifically provides them with some options that were not there before. Embedding rich media into the product to create a more visually stunning product, possibly with interactivity too (zoomable maps, hot points that take you to the town/castle/dungeon you clicked on, 3D models that show you an item or location, etc). We do, of course, have to remember that this is a 1.0 implementation, and that things might change. Also, full ePub3 authoring and reading apps are not out there yet (to my knowledge), and that those might match or exceed the capabilities of what Apple is pushing now. The best way to think of this is as the electronic version of the glossy 4 color printings that so many game companies are currently fond of. SDLeary

Or, if using Hit Locations, an opposed roll (or resistance table roll) against the HP in the location. Target doesn't win the outcome, stunned, falls down in pain, etc. Specials use rolled damage as lethal, critical... well thats the cracked skull. SDLeary

Agreed on the license cost of InDesign... not so much on the learning aspect. I will agree that anyone can get the basics of the program down in little time. Once you start delving into setting up proper Character Styles, Paragraph Styles, Object Styles, remembering to break things out into chapters so that the Book functions for TOC generation and page numbering work... this all for long documents like textbooks and game books... someone new can quickly be overwhelmed. Also, what if you are on a shoestring budget and can't afford the license? Does anyone know what Scribus is doing in this area? (serious question... just came to my mind and haven't looked at that project in some time) Digest format could, under certain circumstances work. I have noticed though that a lot of people do use their tablets in landscape mode, and while digest certainly will fit into the horizontal space, you then end up with scrolling issues on a per page basis (depending on your PDF reader and settings of course... most don't know or care to change these for some reason). PDF is supposed to be the standard for electronic distribution of print documents, simple letters to heavily formatted ones. It has grown beyond that of course, but you tend to make some compromises when moving from that core design. ePub should be the standard for electronic documents (even Apple reads these files in iBooks), and hopefully ePub 3 will move us more in that direction. Oddly enough, the only large alternative to Apple in the tablet space (devices and eco-system), Amazon, doesn't support ePub (someone may have released an app for the Fire, but its not a supported core type). SDLeary

Generally true. Both the winning formats in your example had the market dominance behind them. Apple has a track record of turning things on their head though, so I wouldn't count them out. For example, digital music existed before iTunes; smartphones before the iPhone; tablets before the iPad. And while the iBooks Author is generally applicable to any ebook published with the iBookstore in mind, that Apple themselves has taken a very narrow focus. Textbooks aimed at the K-12 crowd, with interactivity used to keep the reader engaged and to display information that is not possible in pen-and-paper books. Now, oddly enough, the greater range of the K-12 crowd (say 4-12 or 6-12) is generally where kids start to learn about and begin to pick up RPGs. The industry has had difficulty picking up new players, primarily because of other games that are interactive and engage the player, Computer Games. With iBooks Author now, or an Amazon Kindle publication app with a similar feature set in the future, a game publisher can begin to add items that might keep the attention of at least some of those that would turn to the Console instead. Perhaps spinning globes that unfold to a map of the game world, zoomable, with linked major features that take you right to their write-up when you click on them. Oh, and thanks for the link to your eBook. I'll pick it up this weekend and take a gander! SDLeary

Happy Birthday Triff! And thanks for maintaining this site! SDLeary

Excellent! I wish Amazon well in this! If they become "the standard" then I also congratulate them. They do have a long headstart. They were selling eBooks before Kindle. Apple still has issues on the distro side, no questions. For example, I still can't read an iBook on my Mac, whereas I can read a Kindle book. Talk to me about production of a rich Kindle book though. How easy is that? How much does it cost to get outfitted with the right software to do it? Can the software automatically account for page orientation? Embedded 3d models? Animations? Slide show or videos? iBook Author is certainly not the last eBook publishing app... but its probably a pivotal one. SDLeary

Well, yes. Apple is not producing their app for Android. Neither are they producing it for Windows. Unless they get a groundswell of requests (the way they did for iTunes after the iPod was released) I don't see them producing one. Just as I don't think MS would produce their eBook production app for OS X or Android/Linux. What I'm interested in is the fact that we now have a consumer level app that can produce very good looking, INTERACTIVE books. This can seriously improve the ability of the small publisher who doesn't have the time or ability (read cash) to learn InDesign, Quark, or all the HTML5 stuff that can enable this. In InDesign for example, in order to handle the format shift of a tablet, the layout guy has to do two different layouts, substantially increasing the cost of any given project. iBook Author seems to take care of that. And, I imagine that someone in the Linux/Android camp is now working on a similar project. MS will probably have something in the next six months to a year. Now, Apple does have to take care of the potential licensing issues as listed in the EULA. Unless authors and potential authors cry publicly about this though... very loudly... nothing will happen.

They seem to be trying to follow the same format that they did with iTunes. We will honestly have to see how that turns out, though they do seem to have three major Textbook publishers on-board, or have at least convinced their CEOs enough to interview for the Apple produced video shown at the event. Until the licensing and distribution issues are ironed out, its certainly not going to be relevant, save for small independents. What I'm more interested in at the moment are the capabilities of the iBook Author program itself and what that could show us is actually possible with the (psudo) ePub format that Apple has presented. InDesign has decent capabilities, but even it has to be tweaked somewhat after export. I would love a more open distribution scheme and ePub3 export. To be fair though, I'm not aware of any readers that support ePub3 yet. SDLeary

Shelved! At least for now (or again?!). SDLeary

Yes, hence the licensing and distribution questions issues I mentioned in the first post. On the other hand, if used to produce non-commercial or free items, you don't even have to go thru their ecosystem. SDLeary

Speedy second impression... Its PDF export is poor when viewed in Acrobat Pro X; looks fine in Preview. At least it was when I exported one of the built in templates. And, cannot seem to find a way to start with a blank page. SDLeary

I just finished watching Apples Education press conference/announcement and came away really impressed. Despite several questions/issues with licensing, distribution, and file format, their new authoring program, iBooks Author, could be a real boon. Why? It supports tables! Now I just downloaded the app to my Mac and started playing with it. Has anyone else delved deeper into it yet? It would seem that Gaming books would be relatively straight-forward for this app to handle. SDLeary

Sounds similar. The One Ring is the two perfect bound books with a section above the books for an insert that holds the dice. Now that I've thought about it a bit more.... a good intro, packaged in this way, would be a cleaned up Quick Start edition (and slightly expanded) of BRP, and perhaps Val-du-Lup, cleaned up and typeset by Chaosium. They could include maps, perhaps a couple of hand outs, and a set of dice. SDLeary