icebrand

Our group has elimiinated shield as a skill, and simply adds the base chance of the shield to the characters parry chance.

simply genius!!! i will definitely use that!!!

What i have so far for my F&S based BRP:

• Attack and Parry are different skills

• ANY combat skill can be used at 1/2 (hard) best skill [but must be improved from its base]

• Shields give +1 armor and Large Shields give +2 armor (rolling D4-1/D6-1/D8-1 for light/med/heavy with +1 from helm; iron armor increases the die by 1)

• Shields parry missiles at full chance, and have passive 30/60 & 60/90 passive missile defense

This makes shields superior to weapon parry, at no "exta" cost. What i'm worried about is that a fighter-type needs to spend too many checks; im giving checks like F&S to keep up: main weapon,main parry, shield parry, missile weapon, + pow & cult lore, thats 6 out of 7 checks right there, maybe one in a characteristic and i'll be just officially GMing every other game where if you want to fight well you can't raise other skills. =/

So - anybody care to have a stab at defining 'good roleplaying'?

Kill the stuff and take their things? Or was it the other way around?

Anyway, in soviet glorantha Uz kill the PC's and take their stuff.

Joking aside, i don't think there is such a thing as an unified concept of "good roleplaying". In my games, "good roleplaying" means playing a character everyone "likes" (as a character concept), like it should/could act, AND have some fun.

Unfortunately my players think that power-crazed tapping addicts and humakti are "fun" so the games revolve around "killing things, their stuff and their families and burning it all so noone takes it".

Las session i had the sorcerer *BURN ALIVE* a blacksmith and his whole family just because he wanted to charge a little extra for a shield after the PCs woke him up. Note that they have no financial troubles at all, and specifically roleplayed this instead of just declaring "i get another shield on my way out boldhome"...

Now that i think about it, it was to be expected, this people actually *SPENT POW* to bind a ghost and threw the item into a lake, so the spirit would suffer an eternity of nothingness.

>(in which case it shouldn't use an action, otherwise if you give me a couple of bound spirits i can defeat the cacodemon!)

Hi, I'm using the houserules for spirit combat that Simon posted on his huge website and I allow for a concentration roll (INTx3) for the characters to do anything else than spirit combat when attacked by a spirit. I guess for shamans I'd say a INTx5 concentration roll, as they're more used to it.

However, Icebrand's mention of the cacodemon makes me wonder, what can this demon really do (with Simon's rules) against spirits??? Can he fight them and still face wordly oponents? What's his skill in Spirit Combat???

The """problem""" with simon rules (as they would work on our games) is that it makes the spirit+physical opponent combo way deadlier. I guess it works if spirits are rare, but in my glorantha, while not being dime a dozen, they are somewhat common (especially for rune levels).

The cacodemon itself should face no threat against the strategy i described (since he probably has chaos spirit followers as well as fiends), but the PC's facing him, if able to defeat fiends, won't be anymore cause of said spirits.

In addition, any group with a shaman can make short work of anyone/anything that has no spirit block... "oh, they are just 3 dream dragons, lets just hurl a couple of spirits at them and then just kill them while they can't fight back"

PS: i haven't actually read simon rules, im using my interpretation of what you said . I guess spirit block is a (more) popular spell at simon games

PS2: im STILL looking for viable spirit combat rules; Fire & Sword's are nice, but i need some kind of "damage" *and* im not sure fighting spirit combat to completion is the way to go (you used to be able to do other stuff while beeing pwned by a powerful spirit, in F&S you cant even cast spirit screen).

Turns out, this is the official rule from Elric!/SB5 - "Not more than once in a round per combatant, a critical parry allows a riposte to be made with the weapon (or shield) that didn't parry."

I had forgotten that one could only riposte with a critical parry - that also lessens the chances of it happening.

Ian

As far as i can remember, there were no specials on Elric! just 10% crits, so that would translate to a special on BRP (it it how i ad-hoced it)

I didn't like the combat mechanics (combat actions, attack, parry, ridiculous AP), but i don't like the MRQII mechanics either (combat actions and how combat works with running out of actions and maneuvers).

Also, the magic kinda sucked. I like BRP a lot more.

ATM i'm switching to Fire & Sword, with D100 (5% increments), adding some RQ2 rules (like defense and skill categories) and filling the gaps with BRP and house-rules.

The movie version punked Dracula...

One of my many issues with Blade 3...

The comic version of Blade wasn't all that badass until after the movies (he was primarily in comics that only had him fight vampires, and held little, if any, continuity with Marvel's main universe), when they basically took the movie character and ported him to the comic. He rarely showed up in 616Marvel, and when he did, it was with/against mostly peripheral characters.

Now things are different. One of the next Wolverine stories has Blade and Wolverine at cross purposes, and I'm sure there will be at least a 3 or 4 page spread of them at each other's throats until they finally realize, as in every comic, "we're actually both on the same side".

Does anyone here read comics regularly? (I realize I've put this thread to bed)

A storyline I expected to see Blade in came out in 04 or 05, in the New Invaders (totally underappreciated mag). There was a few issues dedicated to Captain Britain and his mates, and the main story during that period was a cult of vampires. The story involved a lot of characters' unfinished business from the 40s-70s, and had an AWESOME/HORRIBLE antagonist that was little more than a vampire baby. I was so disappointed that it didn't go anywhere, but it was a little extreme for Marvel...

I read ironman and that's it. And volume4 is *FRIGGIN AWESOME*

The movie version might have a chance if he understood the difference between them and vampires he's used to (hint: stakes are pretty much worthless) as he appears more superhuman than any routine Buffyverse entity. But that's what you need; avowed superhumans.

Well, the movie version (especially the 2nd and 3rd) seems to have potence, celerity and vigor (or whatever the resistence discipline is called) at 8+ dots

Blade could probably take them out!

The axe was popular because it was relatively easy to make and generally (but not always) used less metal in its manufacture, making it much less expensive than a sword.

So, an axe wielder has a penalty against someone with sword and spear? -10%? -20%? What about maces?

THATS... (oops)... Thats 2h Axe vs 2h Axe. If one of the combatants were armed with a 2h sword or spear, that combat would have probably been a lot shorter, as they are much more nimble weapons than the axe. For the sword, do not think of large roundhouse "Conan" type swings.

But the axe was a very popular battle weapon; i doubt a spear or sword would be much better, otherwise noone would have used axes!!!

Thats a bit extreme I think. If you are going to impose a penalty, it should be based on the weapon. As stated above, its much easier to dodge a heavy slow weapon like a long axe or mace/maul than it is a more nimble weapon like a spear, sword, or dagger.

The problem is, i disagree with that. If you see spear fighting forms or fencing, they are not "slower" than a knife in any way, and actually have much more reach! And people actually prefer those (sword, axes, spears) to knives, so they must have a reason!!!

There is a huge difference between martial arts sports and unarmed combat. Put the guy with the knife against people who learned unarmed combat with the police or the military,and his success rate will go down considerably - probably to zero if he faces an unarmed combat trainer of police or military.

Well, one of us is 3rd dan karate instructor and police officer. I also happen to train with several (three last year, one this year, but hes away atm cause he broke his shoulder) leos, and they are not better than regular judoka at all.

By the way, it is very similar with fencing weapons. Even an excellent sports fencer has hardly any chance against an opponent who trained combat oriented fencing, because the sport uses and allows only a very limited selection of all the possible maneuvers. An extreme example is sabre fencing, where the sports rules disallow more than half of the possible attacks.

Do you have a source for those claims? In my experience, the high physical conditioning and excellent reflexes of an elite athete usually win against "more maneuvers". Also, they get a lot of experience in competition (something that "combat oriented folks" do not). Usually a few mastered techniques used and proven time over time, under competition stress and full resisting oposition work better than the other stuff.

I really don't picture a world-class fencer getting beat up by an sca guy because he cant hit certain spots!

A fire axe - it's bigger and heavier, so it's MUCH, MUCH easier to predict where it is going. And once the wielder has committed to a particular move it's MUCH, MUCH harder for them to change it significantly, as the weapon has so much momentum. Knives are terrifying - they move incredibly fast, making them far harder to predict. Sure, iff a fire axe or maul connects it'll do a lot of damage, but connecting with a large heavy weapon is much harder than with a small, agile weapon. Which is why pre-firearm infantry favoured spears and spear-like weapons - they have reach, but are generally more agile.

Given a preference, I'd have a 15th century English Bill-hook as my weapon of choice, but that's personal preference...

Nick

Well, a fire ax was a poor choice, scrap that, make it a battle ax:

Not so easy to dodge anymore huh?

As long as I can move unhindered by heavy armour or anything else, I will take the guy with

the fireaxe - if I can avoid his first attempt to hit me, he is out of the game, because I can

do a lot of nasty things to him before he can get his weapon ready for a second attempt. The

knife fighter would be a far more dangerous enemy, he can move as fast as I can, and his

attacks are far more unpredictable.

I scrapped the "dodge" skill. Now it's just unarmed combat (you do attack, parry and dodge with that). The catch is, it's DIFFICULT (1/2 skill!) to dodge someone who's armed when you are not!

We actually try that with friends when we meet for martial arts training, we got people from all martial arts, (karate, sanshou, kickboxing, judo, ju-jitsu, taekwondo, box, muay thai), and the guy with the plastic knife and no weapon-specific training (whomever picks it up) has about a 85-90% kill rate (unless you run away or manage to grapple him, you are preety much dead).

I figure someone that doesn't actually know how to fight would fare even worse!!! My assumption is that

a) you stay and fight (not run away, that's another kind of contest!)

you have a weapon (otherwise you would end up rushed and bleeding on the ground, weapon vs unarmed is almost in the automatic success area)

Im actually off to meet the guys now, ill see if i can film some plastic bottle vs unarmed action

PS: Im pretty sure a kali/kendo/fencing or even aikido/sca guy would do better, but we don't have any of those

This seems SERIOUSLY wrong. It makes combat a total mess, i tried running this as an example combat among two of my RQIII PC's to demonstrate how it worked to the group, and it was HORRIBLE.

At 150% (not that hard to come by, especially with magic) riposte rules make you roll like crazy. Since ripostes eat up the character's skill levels, high skilled characters just riposte over and over until someone dies. That means 4+ attacks per round, all riposted, all parried, in the course of 5 Dex ranks.

In the best-case-scenario, in a game without magic and with "novice" masters (or 100% cap), you get (90% characters)

DEX SR-13

Player 1 attacks (90%)

Player 2 parries & ripostes (90%)

DEX SR-12

Player 1 parries (90%) and ripostes (60%)

Player 2 parries (60%) and ripostes

Until someone fails or dies. Thing is, with 150%+ this becomes completely unmanageable!!!

The point is the capacity for damage and the easy of avoidance don't really relate directly. A maul or a greataxe are going to make a horrible mess of you if they hit, but they're, if anything, easier to dodge than a dagger. I

Is it? Why? The axe has more reach! Would you prefer to face someone with a fireaxe or a knife?

Where are those extra HP? The shields have like... 22 HP? and the normal weapons have like... 20 :S

AND you lose 2 HP each time a parry bests you, maybe 4 once in a full moon... In any case both the sword or shield will outlast your character!!!

Maybe i misread something???

For the HP to be of any use, they should be lowered by X each time you successfully parried, and if they outparried your attack they should roll weapon damage vs. yours; then maybe shields would be worth considering.

ATM the HP rules for weapons are (in my opinion) unnecessary bookkeeping.

Cheers,

Alex

You can use:

- RQ2 CHA increase Rules

- MRQI Companion Reputation and Renown rules LINK

- Fire & Sword has a lot of *simple and useful* rules for reputation, fame, politics, etc

Cheers,

Alex

Does any of you guys have wyrms 11 lying around?

I'm kinda curious about londra of londros stats; could you PM them or at least give a basic idea (atk, parry, defense, rune magic points).

Cheers,

Alex

Who wants to do "Twilight - The RPG"?

Joking aside, with the right approach and a license from the Twilight creator, it might be quite profitable.

I was thinking that a game system like Cortex or Savage Worlds would be a more suitable for the Twilight fan demographic. However, seeing how well BRP works with CoC and the type of people who like to play BRP CoC (more focus on story, less on mechanics), then BRP could be a good match for Twilight.

Food for thought.

May i bring my humakti to the twilight game? *ALL* of them? :D

With regard to the disease risk, I've always palyed it by the RQ spot rules on diseases. Ie roll you CONx5 if you fail, you roll again until you pass. The number of times failed would give you the severity of the disease. I'm sure there was a Cormac's Saga about it.

Handling infected objects is the standard digficulty of CONx5. For wounds I'd go to CON x 3 or thereabouts epending on frequency / severity of wounds. I'd allow a first aid to 'clean" up each wound.

Spirit combat. I've never really liked it. Its too dangerous and 'final'. I'd be tempted to allow a 'rematch' after 24 hours to allow the players to regain control and go from dominant possession to covert possession. Without a Shaman in the party or as froendly npc, spirits are a real pain.

Yeah, i found those spot rules (it's basically the same on the BGB) after posting the message , Still, the new ones are better.

The problem with dominant possessions (as far as i remeber only ghosts do that) is that you are possessed by a life-hating totally insane spirit *or* a controlled one. Most of the time that means instant suicide, so rematches are kinda off (as a spot rule, i would say a random ghost would commit suicide unless you succeed on a luck roll).

Also, on spirit combat, i dont know if i should make it instant (i.e: roll the whole combat to its completion at once) or go round after round (in which case it shouldn't use an action, otherwise if you give me a couple of bound spirits i can defeat the cacodemon!)

As for "permanent", usually (on most literature) once you are possessed that's it, they need to call an exorcist (beware with the shaman union if you plan on passing those "rematch" ideas, they are not very kind to those who try to undermine shamanic ways of income!!!). This mean they can call a shaman.

Westerners SHOULD have a method of exorcism, since they are not shaman-friendly!

Yesterday i ran episode 3 of troubled waters (campaign on River of Craddles) for my BRP/RQ characters.

They got to fight the broos, and since they have the total Hit Points, i went tactics-heavy on the folks. The weasels stayed out the fight in a separate chamber (they tried to make a run for it at the end), and everything went dandy, except for spirits.

For the spirit combat part i used the RQ3 rules on MP vs MP, but i really should have used POW vs POW (since in my incarnation of the magic system external sources of MP are very hard to nonexistant to come by, and using MP vs MP would make spellcasting not worth it at all unless you are rune-level). I ruled that the spirit can possess you if it has 10+ MP than you do (to enable possession whithout having to take you out first). A special did 2D3 damage and a crit did 1D3+3.

Of course, spirits kicked my PC's ass into next week. The animist got possessed by a madness spirit (POW 15, no real chance to win) and the vingan almost got possessed too, but i let the animist make a hard spirit lore roll to taunt the fear spirit (POW 12) come attack and possess her [that's what happened by the way].

Demoralize by Toadface wrecked havoc, and regretably i had to make Grandpa cast dispel magic on the PC's (the alternative was run away, wait untill the spell wore off, and come back, and it seemed WAY anticlimatic).

Then we got disease. Four of the Broos had the wastes, but on RQ3 it did not say how they actually pass that on. I just saw the "disease carrier" mutation for them, but i spot-ruled that they are possessed by a disease spirit, so when you kill them it attacks you [i know, it SUCKS, specially since those have 3D6+6 vs 3 to 8 current MP characters], so i got two PC's with 2 wastes spirits each, the whole party has 2 spirits covertly possessing them.

Finally, they ended with the broo menace. Toadface would have REALLY complicated stuff for them if he joined melee, but i used him as spellcasting support and tried to make a run for it when stuff looked REALLY grim -he got killed by a robinhoodesque special arrow to the chest- [we roll hit location and disable that instead rolling on the major wound table, i dont like tables and i find that hit locations make excelent major wounds, i get the best of both systems]

So, questions time:

1- How would you make the broo pass their diseases?

Since they are magical in nature, they may need to be "covertly possessed" by a spirit (or maybe just blessed by malia). If so, what happens when they die? I would need to "spirit combat after death" thats a chaos feature itself, only cooler (you get attacked by one of malia's handmaidens instead of a stupid goat-headed dimwitted dead broo).

We can also use the "mutation" for a 2D10 or 4D10 disease, and we avoid an uneccessary spirit combat (i don't really want people calling the crimson bat just because 5 feral broo attack a farm, and having them run around with 3D6+6 life-wreaking spirits that present a 10x menace than the broo itself doesn't seem that good).

So, they have this mutation, how does it spread? They SURELY coat their weapons with feces, so you get to roll if you are hurt (it's a ritualesque thing, we all know there is no such thing as bacteria). Will the blood or spit of the broo transmit it? I would say the blood beeing its tainted chaotic life-force surelly has disease imbued all over, but spit? prolly not. Then again, what about pee? they sure pee all over everything, but are they THAT contagious?

Do you roll once per exposure, or once at the end of the scene?

2- Spirit Combat

Spirit Combat must work for all "levels". Sadly, on RQ3 spirits didn't scale very well. They were a terrible, terrible menace that could wipe out entire parties, and then you were a brand new shaman or acolyte-level (that sacrificed 2-3 pts of spirit block) and they became an annoyance alltoghether.

What i'm thinking of:

POW vs POW instead of MP vs MP. It gives a break to starting pc's (where most of the spirits wrecked stuff) and puts "MP" spirits on pair with ghosts and disease spirits.

This lets my PCs actually SPEND their MP instead of keeping them for "spirit defense purpose" (and may synergize well with spirit blocks/screens by trading "hit points" for chance to defend).

Special and Crits do more damage. 1D3 / 2D3 / 1D3+3 is what i ad-hoced, but it may be a 'lil excessive. Maybe 1D3 / 1D3+1 / 1D3+2 ?

Possession happens at 10MP less than the opponent a spirit can possess you once it has 10MP more than you. It still needs a POW vs POW roll to do that (and you keep fighting it if it fails, possibly closing the MP gap). This allows spirits to possess you without taking you off the fight MP-Wise, while keeping with the old (RQ2) style, and possibly with RQ3 (it was really pointless to keep rolling 95% vs 5%, chances to actually win that are probably less than getting the lottery).

That's all i can think of now!

Actually, skeletons should *BE* SIZ 3!!! How much effort would be to just pick a skeleton up and throw it away?

Unless they are double-jointed, actually picking up and throwing them away looks like a sound plan!!! (unless they have claws and/or a shield and scimitar!).

Also, their SIZ can be AP, and they should be immune to all kind of special hits!!! (they sure can't bleed nor be pierced, and weight so little that a crush just moves them around instead of doing more damage!!!).

The skeleton's advantage is its double-jointedness, if it has it (hard to actually pick up, since its attacks are multidirectional!!!), and their devilishly speed and dexterity. They must suck at grappling too, since they can be held onto and/or destroyed with brute force.

Their damage modifier kinda sucks too, since they're supernatural strength cannot make up for the lack of mass.

But! Unlike zombies, skeletons can be impervious to time, they are super-stealthy untill they move, they need no maintenance, and are actually good at fighting and dodging!!!

Siz never truly convinced me, after this thread, i HATE it.

By the way, human female siz is wrong!!! My female PC's are SIZ 13 (the kolati) and 14 (the vingan).

So far they were 1.75 (5'8'') & 1.80 (5'10''); that alone was pushing it, but hey, kristanna loken is 1.80! Anyway, now they are suppossed to weight more like i do (WTF!) so i can:

a) don't mind siz at all

tell my players they are actually on the big side of gloranthan heroines

c) modify the female stat rolls AND tell my players to change their characters AND avoid beeing hit with something.

So, what should females roll for SIZ?

2D6+2? [4-14, 9 avg]

2D6+3? [5-15, 10 avg]

While at it, maybe they should roll the same for STR and/or CON?

According to elder secrets, it has:

STR 340

CON 1200 [MUNCHKIN STAT!]

SIZ 204

INT 13

DEX 20 [DEX 20? WTF!]

it also has tons of out-of-the-rules attacks and %'s so high that preety much say "you cannot ever hope to defeat this, no matter what you do or who you are" thus making the stats themselves irrelevant.

By the way, on Dorastor it says that Ralzakark is almost as powerful as the red goddess. Since he has no cult, it must mean personal power; this means that the bat can wipe out every god out there in a couple of rounds.

PS: The crimson bat is VERY poorly stated.

what i would do for arm wrestling is: both roll STR vs STR.

both succeed or no successes mean no progress; if one succeeds and the other fails the one who passed the check gains an advantage.

I would also use 12 o'clock as a starting point, then you get "half way", "almost lost" and "defeat" as levels (a critical vs failure would win instantly!!!)

i always let the player roll. I don't care if the player is passive, they usually feel better when failing to resist sever spirit than when they die without rolling the dice.