Algesan

7 minutes ago, Richard S. said:

His point was that at the time of writing, Tolkien wasn't making a generic fantasy book.

I know that, but my point was that Tolkien was writing an epic that has become the modern generic fantasy...and that what Tolkien was righting was merely a copy of older literature, for example, the Odyssey.  I've run plenty of campaigns and played in many others that were all based on the same thing.  Whether they were good or bad depended on the details, which is what differentiates LOTR from generic fantasy as well as Dune from generic space opera....

On 7/25/2018 at 2:01 AM, TrippyHippy said:

They only produced three thousand copies, before it was pulled as a limited release. They sold out in minutes, from memory. I recall buying my own copy, and the seller (at gencon) actually tried to put up the price when selling it, on the grounds that he knew it would be worth a load as a collectors piece when he sold it. If you buy it from eBay now, it costs.....oh.....let's see: 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dune-Chronicles-of-the-Imperium-Core-Game-Limited-Edition-NEW/253715007118?hash=item3b1297c68e:g:6HUAAOSw-3FZAtAD

It can also be found on Scribd, but that is another story....

On 7/24/2018 at 2:48 AM, TrippyHippy said:

Dune isn't a generic space opera. It's a classic space opera that has been imitated and referenced a lot. It's like claiming Tolkien just wrote generic fantasy.

Have you bothered to read OD&D and AD&D books?  Played any MMORPGs?  Yes, today Tolkien's races and basic settings are pretty much generic fantasy.  You can pretty much define almost all dwarves, elves, halflings, goblins and orcs right out of the pages of the Hobbit and LOTR.  Amusing since Tolkien created those divisions from English folklore and it can be argued that "the little people", dwarves and elves can ALL be considered different names for the same group of beings.  Oh, shall we ever forget the Type VI demon?  These are standard fantasy tropes you can find in all literature and games for the last few decades.  Oh and the epic of a group that travels to finish a quest while meeting fantastical beings just happens to be several thousand years old.

On 7/24/2018 at 1:47 AM, Atgxtg said:

For much the same reason people want a Stormbringer game-it's basically a generic  dark fantasy setting with elements that can be found in all kinds of similar stories. Elric was, originally created as an anti-Conan. The bits related to the various individuals, groups and families are what make the setting. 

Stormbringer (the original game) worked real well for that when no other game system of the period would.  Yes, today, in pop terms, it is just a generic dark fantasy with some detailed bits.  At the time it wasn't and since we had already lost the idea of a classical education fifty years ago, the concept of a doomed hero (which is closer to what Elric is, although there are other influences, that is the major one) goes back so the earliest myths. 

Yes, details make the setting, but for a Dune setting to actually work would require the same kind of twisting that the original Stormbringer had in it.  Otherwise, I could simply make up Imperial troops, Noble troops, etc. that would fit.  I do notice that one thing that almost everyone forgets, games include combat and from a RPG perspective, Dune is pretty much a super martial arts setting for individual combat.

On 7/24/2018 at 1:27 AM, simonh said:

(snip)

That may not be enough nowadays though. Game of Thrones is huge, and there is a licensed game but I hardly ever see anything about it.

Heh, I was pretty much forced to sit with my big sister and watch the first season, because "I really, really, really needed to watch it."  I got about half way through, got tired of "the books are really better", so I downloaded the novels and ripped through three or four of them in a couple of days, then scanned the wiki for several more.  Best thing of the entire experience was that after pointing out that not only was it "he dies, she dies, everybody dies", but that all of these characters got established personas and even character growth of some sort, but then every last one of them broke character and either died or caused people close to them to die...or both.  Weaned my sister right off of it.

On 7/17/2018 at 12:51 AM, Atgxtg said:

(snip)

You can used fixed armor without hit locations. Just go with the normal protection for that tpe. Padding stops 1, leather stops 2, etc. So you could just make you 5.5 armor 6 points.

Yeah that does make armor much more useful in HERO. But then HERO is a much more forgiving system. 

 

It's not normally an issue for me, but Amber will will require that I have to deal with some things that don't crop often enough to become an issue in a typical BRP campaign. I just ant to try to be ready for anything that could derail the campaign. 

(snip)

Some variation of the fetch might work. That is something that the player can slowly improve that ups his POW a point at time. You could do that with a wizard's staff or familiar and it could start off weak and grow as the player devotes more POW to it. 

Another option might be not to raise POW at all but simply raise the refresh rate.  A wizard could have an ability or skill tat let's them recharge their power at a faster rate, maybe twice as fast? Say the tap a ley line for POW and their recharge rate is tied to their success level.

All I can say on the random armor, it seems to be working well for this type of game, especially when you consider it is pretty much torso & head armor only.  In a more melee oriented game, I'd prefer the fixed armor values myself.

Actually, that should work for any system where the armor takes points off the damage. 

Agreed, I worked on various details for my campaign.  Only one thing I'm not happy with, but hasn't been a big issue, is the special rules for the various energy weapons.  Each faction has their own and each have their own little "trick".  The game hasn't progressed far enough for that to be real important yet, so I still have some time to work on it. 

Not getting into the debate over the various rights, but one of the biggest problems with doing anything with Dune....who's Dune are you going to do?

You have Frank Herbert's Dune (which includes The Dune Encyclopedia as a source) and you have Brian Herbert's "Dune" which bastardizes, rewrites, condenses, shortens, simplifies and contradicts the work of his father as clearly shown by The Dune Encyclopedia, which Frank considered canon in the main (as any author would, Frank considered some of the details variable, but that was covered cleverly by the backstory of the book, written long after Leto II was dead and supposedly from records preserved by Leto II in a no-room).

I can guarantee that no Dune rights controlled by Brian will be sold without supporting his abridged version over his father's original.

Next question: Without all the bits relating to the various individuals, groups and families at the top, Dune itself is nothing more than a generic space opera (kind of) with elements that can be found in all kinds of other stories.  So, why bother with buying the rights?   I could see some interesting campaigns run with it off to the side in some of the action not around the MCs of the books, but as an entire campaign book layout, probably not.

On 7/13/2018 at 1:46 PM, Atgxtg said:

Except for the high minimums. Someone with a two dice db is still going to do at least 4 points of a sword hit. 

Yes. And it's really only a BRP/CoC problem, too. What happens is that, thanks to db, strong characters, animals and monsters end up doing more damage in melee than a firearm can do, making firearms less desirable in game terms. Realistically, the big advantages of firearms were shock value (which doesn't translate into game terms), ability to penetrate armor (which is moot when you got a really high db),  how easy it is to use (it's not much different than other missile weapons) and how much eaiser it is to improve compared to a bow (the same in BRP).

I think variable armor is part of your problem. You just can't rely on it. I think you need fixed armor, or at least some sort of bell curve. 2d3 instead of 1d6, 2D6 instead of 1D10+2. It makes the armor more reliable. 

Okay, I'll bite. Tell me about the Axis modified Gorillas. I must of missed that episode of Nazi Mega Weapons on the History Channel. 

I think the problems are due to:

1) The db is a flat mod, and so applies to all weapons equally (so a penknife wielded by a troll hits like a Greatsword)

2) That the db is independent of success levels (turns a graze into a kill, and  minimized the value of skill.) 

3) The db is multiple of d6s ( that gives  a high minimum, so you can never get a light hit, a bell curve, and 3.5 point increments.

4) The game only has lethal damage (so getting punched is just as bad as getting stabbed with a weapon)

5) That everyone always uses their full db (not realistic-especially with animals. While the random roll helps, the bell curve starts to flatten out just when you need more variance). 

6) The weapons can actually take a full db (i.e Superman might have a +13d6 db, but I doubt there is a sword that could withstand the force of the blow)

 

I think the reason why no ones done much about it, or even cared is that the problems don't really start until you get past the normal stat range for characters. With the db at +1D6 or less things work out. Monsters are supposed to be monstrous, and big tough animals aren't too bad if you are smart about it (ranged weapons, shields, battle magic), so it's still okay. 

To really "fix" the problem, I think we need a smoother db progression, and to integrate the db into the weapon damage. That way it also gets tied to success level. Something along the lines of what they did in the Bushido RPG. Basically you shift the weapon's damage die up. 

Another option, I'm considering (from another RPG) is to assume that stronger, larger creatures have more muscle to cut through, and thicker bonus to support their weight, and tend to get better partial parries, and to have dbs cancel out. Sandy Peterson did this to some extent in Gateway Bestiary, by linking most creatures armor to db, and they kept that in RQ3. But if db just canceled out, then most of my problems for Amber would disappear. Cowin's and Eric's db's would cancel out and the'd just being doing their normal weapon damage. Factor in a high CON and more hit points and it all seems to work. 

 

Except that high skill handles that. And if you got Land of the Ninja, you got Ki skills, which solve the problem nicely.

Add to that the fact that unarmed attacks in BRP are already doing too much damage (a kick does the same damage as a club), and the lack of non-lethal damage, and it's just overkill. 

Yeah, and BRP is pretty much lethal. It takes some work to scale it down. 

Funny you should mention that. I've been looking at The Princess Bride RPG Quickstart. It's written for Fudge (where Fate came from, and mostly the same system), and where I got the idea of DBs canceling out. I was thinking that PB might be a good fit for Amber. It's got enough to pull of the fencing, the attribute ladder and scaling would handle Amberites easily enough ( I'm thinking Human +0, Chaos +4,  Amber Rank +6), automatically factoring in for the Amberite's STR and toughness without warping things, and, IMO it's easier to port stuff from the Amber Diceless RPG to Fudge than to BRP.  But I'm a big RQ/BRP fan, so I'll probably stick with BRP and maybe port over a few things from PB.

Tricky. I think it depends on how much you want the characters to pull off. Both in terms of quantity and quality. Here are some options off the top of my head, maybe some of it will help:

1) Most Power casters characters in BRP/RQ/MW  have some sort of way to store some extra power (Fetch, Aliied Spiriit, Familiar, Staff). 

2) You could let them use something else other than/or in addition to POW to pay for the spell cost. For instance is spells made the casters tired you could use Fatigue Points to power them or give the caster the option of using Fatigue and/or POW in some combination.

3) You could just double the effectiveness of spells (1 POW in= 2 POW out)

4) You could give extra POW for high magical skills. This is like the "free mana" approach, only more limited. So if someone got a magical skill up to a certain point (50%), he'd raise his POW by 1.

 

I'm not worried as much about minimums in general, because Big Axis Gorilla SMASH rolling all 1s would = no damage to the characters.  Average damage at 10.5 and 14 (named NPC) are more of a problem, but appropriate to the game with 4.5 or 5.5 average AR.  It means in that case, each hit (if it lands, my guys have been doing some dodging and using fate points on the occasional crit vs them to force a reroll) will slowly chip away at their hit points on average.  Not that big hits don't happen, one of the guys had to run a red-shirt for a couple of sessions while his character was hospitalized for a few weeks after eating a major wound.  I balanced his "time out" by giving him some free d6 rolls to simulate some reading in some of his mental skills.  If you are worried about the minimum damage, then go with my solution because it reduces the minimum by removing the dice.

Heh, missile weapons pretty much always end up getting the short end of the stick in the vast majority of RP games because of the one great advantage, missile fire doesn't allow you to get beat to death.  The gorillas or melee zombies would plaster the squad (party) except the squad always guns down most if not all of them on the way and the one that gets through is met by the shotgun wielding CC specialist who gives them a fast 4d6+1 blast before simply surviving while one of the others closes to point blank and unloads.  One big solution I've applied since D&D days..."old" armors are at 1/2 effect vs firearms as short & medium ranges.

Actually, I'm using the variable armor because both my players and I dislike adding the step of hit location to combat in our games regardless of system.  So, the variable armor works to ignore if it is a shot right to the thickest part of the armor or to where it is basically unarmored.  In this case, the balance of weapons vs armor on the average damage side works our fairly well with the most common hits being for 0-2 points of damage.  Assault rifle average = 9 pts, armor average = 7.5, so lots of nicks mostly.  In general, it works for melee because it is 5.5 armor vs 5-7 attacks.  Of course, getting hit with explosives, shotguns at point blank, heavy weapons, etc. cause problems, but they are used to doing the tactical thing in this kind of game.

Heh....Dust 1947 = Weird War 2...ignore the prices, the links are for the professional painted kits, much cheaper primed

Gorillas 1       Gorillas 2   Zombies 1    Zombies 2   Zombies 3   Cthulhu 1   Cthulhu 2

Yep, converting a tabletop wargame into a RPG setting for some fun with my friends.

Another solution to some of the high damage, especially for animals (I stole this from Hero) is giving them double hits (2x claws) with 2x base damage + 1x db and divide by two before applying vs armor.  Although, virtually all of the animals I run have relatively low to hit chances generally, so it is fairly easy to dodge or parry their attacks.  Again, this isn't a direct issue for me because pretty much the only time an OP db shows up is against a something rare like the gorillas.  I'm really not running a melee oriented game where db becomes an issue, although I am looking at it for when I run my fantasy campaign.  For the giant sized threats, I use the simplified spot rule for Big and Little Targets, 2xSIZ = +20% to hit and 1/2xSIZ = -20% to hit.

I don't like the "barely hit" = massive db, but part of what I'm looking at is that it doesn't really apply so much, at least not more than a few d6.  Exceptions appear like giants, but they will get hit with the negative to hit and as for their weapons, they are oversized ones.  One thing to note, a giant swinging a d8 sword (with +xd6) can only double that base damage, which does limit how deadly it can be.  I'm not going to get into the strength of materials issue on swinging a sword that big, but I will note that the most famous large humanoid weapon is a tree trunk, which will take a lot of abuse...

What you and I are discussing is doing the "shift the die up" to a certain degree. 

Sorry, for me, all Brawling does a d3, I don't care if you punch, kick, headbutt.  You can get bonuses for brass knucks, fist loads, daggers, bucklers, fancy fighting gloves, etc., but they won't be any more than +3.  If I restricted MA to Brawling, I wouldn't even care much about the issue.  I only have a real issue using melee weapons with the way the skill advances.  I'm torn between making it training only, only advances by 1 point, you must beat your weapon skill (NOT your MA skill) to advance it or some combination of those.

Heh, I think part of the issue here is that you are focused on the high Amber stats and I'm looking at the more generic game with more normal stats. 

Yep, I'll probably go with the spell storing solution in some way or manner.  Scrolls, potions, etc for newbies and items for the more experienced crowd.

20 hours ago, simonh said:

The 'Hardness' of any SF setting is on a spectrum. I consider The Expanse to be pretty hard SF. It picks a few very specific things to fudge and then for the very large part sticks with that. What I really dislike is fiction that arbitrarily shifts the rules around on you. 

Heh, virtually all of the "hard" SF stories do that.  The few that don't are actually hard science with extrapolations from current tech and tend to be, at the most, solar system adventures.  Best example I can think of off hand would be Pournelle's High Justice books and although he considers them different, many have pointed out that they do tie in (somewhat vaguely) with the updated (since the fall of the USSR ended the original premise) CoDominium universe books with the main fudges (outside of the political setup) being the Alderson jump drive (for FTL) and the Langston field for defense.

On 7/10/2018 at 4:44 PM, Atgxtg said:

Yeah, something like that, although I think I might just mess with the db die. Full db is d6, Special d4, Hard d3, Success d2. 

 

I think I still want to up the "soak" values for weapons and armor from Amber though. 

Yeah, and it doesn't always work out all that great. For instance, in game Bears and Lions have great dbs, and, that's to bell curves and minimum rolls, are pretty much guaranteed to kill/incapacitate a man every time. Yet in the real world unarmored people do survive such attacks. Scaling the db helps with that. 

ooh, good point. IMO Martial Arts doubling shouldn't really apply with weapons. I find it hard to believe that master swordsmen do know how to use their blades effectively. Frankly, I don't buy it with unarmed attacks either. A 1D3+1D4 punch is a bit overboad. Fortunatly I don't have to cross that bridge yet. 

Not sure If I follow you here. Do you mean special shot as in special success (1/5th chance) or that they make a call shot that automatically becomes a mahjor wound, targets a body part, or bypasses armor? 

Yeah. After looking them over I think they could work nice for this. especially since I expect the PC Amberites to have high POW scores. I'd also expect that this is some form of shadow manipulation, and that Pattern probably helps, so I might gie the PCs a discount on this. Maybe only 2:1 for damage reduction instead of 3:1?

Okay, altering the dice like you suggested would work as well and perhaps better.

EDIT:  Heh, you know this is only a problem for melee combat, which makes it really funny when one of the things in the Amber books was finding and formulating a gunpowder that would work in Amber itself.  Or how looking at the history of swords, polearms and armor, you can see the gun driving their evolution.

Which is why I have a problem with the straight db rules outside of fantasy campaigns where quick healing, parrying, dodging, etc. all work better.  Right now, my players are wearing d4/d8+4 armor (melee/ranged), which works real well against d10 or 2d6+2 base firearms and d3 (punch) or d6 (knife/bayonet/e-tool) melee, until they run into one of the Axis modified gorillas with +3d6 db to their punch.  Either of our solutions using quality of hit to affect db would help with that one.

Martial arts needs a justification.  Your standard master swordsman is very good, but one with MA had done an extra study...think Samurai vs Kensai, or Boxer vs Shao-lin monk.  I don't have an issue with the mechanic, especially with unarmed combat since the MA character simply knows where to hit, grapple, etc. to do extra damage using nerve points or knowledge of the body structure and similar effects work with weapons, especially since many people don't realize that there are a LOT of moves in the old martial arts books (Western and Eastern) that include punches, kicks, throws and holds in weapon training.    That is one example, there are others (including the infamous knee to the groin in the bind)...to the point where at least one scholar in the HEMA world has posited the position that all fencing is derived from wrestling (which includes what we would call boxing). 

The biggest issue with the MA skill comes from the way players can level it up.  If it is just the regular raising of the skill, it can become problematic.  I'm working on that one for when I do get a fantasy campaign going, but the fact of parries and dodges mitigates a lot of the issues. I have several alternates in mind besides just double damage including using it to raise the success of the hit, raising the success only vs dodge/parry, making possible to ignore dodge and/or parry, etc.   In a multi-race campaign you could even make it a Difficult skill to use vs. other races because the body structures are different enough that the patented punch to the solar plexus is just a hair off or ineffective  (Yep, you just bounced your fist off that lizard man's belly scales). 

Yes, use the special/critical hits to give some bonus but not a damage multiplier.  Ignoring armor, halving armor, automatic major hit regardless of damage, stun, bleeding, etc.  Although, again, I may be letting my current primary firearms bias be showing here because with a gun, you don't give a crap if the bullet gets "stuck in" the body of the enemy, but with melee impaling weapons, there is that issue with having to pull the weapon out of the body after an impaling spec/crit.

Main thing for that is: how hard do you want to run the game?  Lethal?  Don't change it.  Occasionally lethal?  I'd start it as it stands, but inform my players that change may be needed and it is always easier to enhance than to nerf (although don't be afraid to do that).  The fate system works great for a no magic system based on firearms and I think would also be good for a low fantasy game with little or no magic....but then Sorcery would be more appropriate for that kind of game.

Since I want to run a high fantasy game next myself (and have a player who always likes to run a glass cannon caster), I'm actually struggling a bit over POW myself since 1POW = 1 mana, but without using the Classic Fantasy Spell Lore mechanic (which reduces the mana cost of spells so at high Spell Lore skill you get "free mana" to simulate the old school high level fireball while using 1 mana) or otherwise OP starting casters by giving them a multiplier to increase mana (which if you don't technically under powers the skilled characters or turns them into some kind of warrior with some nifty casting tricks)....although technically D&D uses a "Vancian" magic system and using POW straight actually makes it more like the original Dying Earth magic system Jack Vance used with casters mainly using stored POW in scrolls, items, etc because they could only cast a few spells each day.

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

 

(snip)

 

The problem, IMO is that db is completely separate from success level (other than the fact that you have to hit) in the game, but not in real swordfighting or in the novels. It's not that big a deal for normal characters but it becomes one when the db gets up there. What I'd like to do is scale the db with the success level so that a character needs a good hit to get his full db, and that nicks and scratches are still possible. 

Yeah, I think you're right. It will help the PCs soak hits better, although it does eliminate the possibility of losing a arm like Benedict. But I do think fixed armor is a must, or at least some sort of dice curve. Variable armor is one of the things that made SB such a meat grinder. 

I'm going to check the Fate Point rules in the BGB. They might give me the "out" I'm looking for. 

Crit Success = Full DB

Special Success = DB -1 level

Hard Success (50% or less) = DB -2 levels

Success = DB -3 levels

I use "Hard Success" all the time to provide a bit more to the system with a "Hard" counting above a "Success" (so a Hard hit requires a Hard (or better) parry or dodge).

The problem being this is a "piling on" type of system because it just gets nastier and nastier....unless you tone down the game mechanics for Crit and Special Successes with the application of the damage bonus being the reward for higher success rates.  Of course, the most lethal tends to be Impaling since x2 damage rules the roost....and amusingly enough, dealing with things that are immune to impaling damage with firearms cuts them down quite nicely.  Perhaps consider Impaling to be a variation of Bleeding that goes at double rate?  Or requires something more than a quick First Aid wound binding?  Or simply toss out all of the excess verbiage and flat out consider the DB bonus to be the reward for better hits.

One thing to remember is that it seems that BRP uses the DB mechanic to simulate stronger and bigger creatures damage.  Giant with Club, does a d6ish like everyone else....except with his STR + SIZ, he does +?d6 that isn't changed by any critical or special roll, but that may not be too bad given that if it has +5-6d6 DB, then any hit will still be 3-4d6 which isn't too shabby.

Another consideration would be Martial Arts with any weapon, because of the automatic 2x damage (only 3x if combined with Impaling hit), it is that doubling of damage that starts taking things off the chart with higher damage weapons.  Right now, I'm provisionally limiting it to half of the weapon skill, which is actually working out quite well, but with a primary shooting game, nobody is pushing hard at it.

Special shots can be either major wounds, cinematic or allowing targeting of a body part by halving the hit chance (or simply bypassing all but minimum armor, which increases the chance for a major hit).

Fate points work quite well in my game to avoid an untimely crit or bad skill roll, but most characters with normal stats only can do about two of the better ones and even high POW characters only get three.

On 7/8/2018 at 3:23 AM, Sigtrygg said:

I have added spaceships to my setting but they are very hard science, no reactionless drives or artificial gravity. The gates remain the only method for FTL travel.

Heh, I've had a bit of an argument with some guys about this before over the years...

You have added spaceships to your setting, but they are very hard science according to the current state of the art without reference to theoretical applications that are not yet able to be engineered, so no reactionless drives or artificial gravity.  The gates remain the only method for FTL travel, despite the entire concept being a theoretical applications that are not yet able to be engineered. 

Yes, your game, your fun, your rules.  I'm not trying to piss all over your world concept, it just irks me when people toss out "hard science" like it means something real, when the "hard science" of the present was often times the "SF" or even "pseudoscience" of the past. 

It could be a lot of fun with a gritty SF game, but I'll point out that Van Neumann machines, a doable "hard science" concept has mutated from the original concept of some kind of robotic macro factory, to nanomachines, to 3D printing style devices over the last sixty years.  Which points out how what is "hard science" changes over time as reality catches up with theory and SF.  Heh, it also points out a number of issues with some of the current popular "proven" theories to the point of making some of them unscientific in many senses, but that is another issue.

On 6/22/2018 at 3:00 PM, soltakss said:

A friend of mine calls it the Brasso Movie, as they were all in dull armour until Lancelot shows up, then they are in shiny armour, as though Lancelot brought a case of Brasso.

I think it was Playboy that gave it an "award" when it came out: "Clumsiest sex scene in a movie".

1 hour ago, TheyCalledMeMrDennis said:

You're probably right about them not knowing about the RPG, though Chronicle of the Black Sword by Hawkwind was released in 1985.  

Oops, wait, I missed that album, I've just heard some of the earlier songs from the 70s.  Quick check says Moorcock wrote (or assisted) with the lyrics for one of the songs on Chronicle.

No idea if they knew about the RPG, but by then they might have been avid players in 1985.

No problem, I'm rolling up some more, but not as fast.  I actually have another set almost done, but I did them on a long trip on paper, so I have to transcribe them.  They are going to be replacement NPCs for something I'm converting as well as random NPCs for campaign use.  It started out as a test of the way the thing worked for making up PCs (which is why the PC friendly stat rolls) and my group thought it was cool and in many ways better than the point spending version from the regular rules.  They would just prefer to be able to pick their race, class and profession....they rolled some of the wilder combos....

20 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Oh there were aware of Elric, and Moorcock's literary work. Moorcock even cowrote some of those songs. But I don't think either band were aware of the RPG

IIRC, the BOC and Hawkwind's songs were both prior to the release of the RPG, I would think you are right.  Ahhh, at the risk of sticking my foot in my mouth since I think I brought up the songs originally, they helped create the popular climate for the RPG to gain its popularity along with ease of setup and play, etc.  I do remember conversations about how it was just impossible to simulate the Elric saga using OD&D...heh, although one GM at the time could have probably done it, but he already tossed elves out as a player race because (as he put it),: How stupid would a virtually immortal race be to let their children run around with non-magical gear at 1st level....

4 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Hit locations can also make the game less lethal. With general HP characters can fight on until they run out of hit points, or, if the option exists, take a major wound. With hit locations it's possible to knock someone one (reduce head to 0 HP while the body still has HP) or disable an arm so that the opponent can't or won't continue fighting. And three or four points of damage spread out over various locations can often influence someone more than 3 or 4 points of generic damage. 

Only if you force fully random hit locations, which doesn't fit outside of a D&D style of combat simulation where it is assumed many attacks are attempted during the round and X number of them get a chance to hit.  Games where you are actually shooting or swinging a weapon (like BRP) also need to allow for limited hit locations or specific hit locations.  Look at any martial art or shooting training where the student is taught to go for a specific place on the body, be it center mass for shooting, upper torso/head for striking melee forms or limbs/neck for grappling based forms.   Especially in melee, the actual restrictions on the human form tend to force the chest/head area to be the prime targets.

In either case, a couple of generic hits for a few points don't do much to a character, but the same two hits on the same location then cause death, crippling or severe  injuries requiring excessive recovery time.

17 hours ago, g33k said:

I presume that all the well-known BRP damage options -- Hit Locations, general HP's, Major/Minor wounds, maybe others I'm forgetting -- are ones that Chaosium still considers "part of" BRP, and might (hypothetically) use in some future BRP product; am I correct?

I don't think these are actually BRP specific damage options, most RPGs include all of them as optionals.  For example, hit locations generally just make the game more lethal for everyone involved, which isn't always bad, but are often exploitable by characters.  After all, if you can hit them in the head then you can aim for the head, right?  Oops, I just splattered that demon with my uber sniper rifle, sorry Mr. GM. 

The flip side, character instakills because the NPC happened to roll head (or other vital location, I haven't used hit location in BRP yet, easier to just roll damage, subtract armor and go with it).  Given that I'm running a Weird War 2 campaign based on Dust 1947 and the players are currently in the ruins of Zverograd (where pretty much every darn shot is Difficult because of all the cover unless one side or the other can pull off an ambush), what is the big deal then about going for a Difficult head shot?  Oh, it is "double Difficult" (1/4 chance)?  No problem, take extra aiming time, shoot a burst, etc.  It is all good.  Using generic damage means one shot kills are possible, but usually it takes several hits to put down a soldier.(average shot = 9 pts, average armor = 6.5), which works out about right, including having several characters have to sit out a couple of sessions to heal up because they got shot up.

On 5/19/2018 at 7:27 PM, g33k said:

Please please PLEASE don't suck the forums down a political-theory black hole.

(n.b. despite quoting Algesan above, this is a plea to EVERYONE on this tangent; politics is so divisive these days, and political POV's can be so ardently held, that it can quickly render any forum into a toxic apocalypse).

Sorry, didn't mean to go that way, but when one gets into some of why Moorcock wrote what he wrote........

Politics aside, it still made for a lot of entertaining reading and you don't really need to know this stuff to enjoy reading it...and quite frankly it doesn't hurt once you do know this kind of stuff anyway, at least for his stuff up to 1980 or so. 

ACK, did I just create a literary black hole? 

4 hours ago, Joerg said:

(snip)

Moorcock's one-dimensional axis of Law vs. Chaos probably is too much of a simplification, much like "left" vs. "right" in the political debate.

(snip)

Which fits right in with the politics and/or philosophical leanings on display.  Anti-establishment, counterculture, postmodernism, existentialism, etc. all think in purely simplistic terms which make up for false worldviews.  They tend to be socialistic in nature and consider fascism to be the adversary, especially the Nazi brand.  What keeps getting obscured in the "common sense" claims of National Socialism being "right wing" and International Socialism (a.k.a. Communism) being "left wing" are that they are both socialist.  About the only difference between Red Fascism and Black Fascism is that Red Fascism definitely appears to be the more efficient in slaughtering its citizens and "undesirables".

On 5/14/2018 at 3:31 PM, Joerg said:

In a fantasy setting with rather different ethics and morality (and negotiable value on human lives and dignity) I see no reason at all to assume a "war on drugs" mindset. Yes, this is fascism and racism/exceptionalism turned up to eleven and even higher, like playing Gloranthan ogres. I think it is quite healthy to have a game that lets you fall into the trap of perceived necessity and disregard of non-tribal life, to fall into the mindset that led to the failings that were justly prosecuted in the Nuremberg trials.

 

Let me suggest Martin van Creveld's book Hitler in Hell to you.  It can make for some slow reading at times and appears to be a bit of an apologetic, but it is more of a commentary on modern politics in a round about way.  It is actually quite fascinating.   I'll let it go at that since this is way OT.

On 5/2/2018 at 6:38 AM, Mugen said:

I think StormBringer is the reason why RuneQuest was never a big hit in France. It was translated before RQ, and its simplicity was more in accordance with french taste. It became a standard in the late 80s here, and both it and HawkMoon were very popular. HawkMoon even had a second edition, based on Elric! rules.

As for myself, StormBringer was my first encounter with BRP, and the first RPG rules ouside (A)D&D I read. The way it handled experience, without classes or levels, was a refreshing change for me.

Its major issue was how weak the characters were, with ridiculously low skill starting values. Unless, of course, you had the chance to roll a Melnibonean, whose INT and POW ensured they were sorcerers, and their skills were way ahead of other characters.

I didn't like Elric!, which was too close to Call of Cthulhu to my tastes. I didn't like neither the fixed skills base values nor the minor magic. I would have prefered a new version of StormBringer, with better skill values.

 

Well, I don't consider the 1st Edition Stormbringe!r to be so bad and actually about the same as a starting (A)D&D game.  The percentages to hit line up well with AD&D numbers, with Warriors having a 50+% chance to hit with their primary weapon (same chance as a 1st level Fighter to hit AC10 in AD&D) and the "lesser" combat classes all have 30% or better chance to hit with at least one weapon.  Yes, you have to deal with armor subtracting damage rather than hit chance, but IMO that is just a wash.  Yes, the Beggar class was a bit lame, but either we simply ignored any "Beggar" rolls or nobody rolled them....as many games as we did of Stormbringer!, I'm betting it was probably the former.  The downside to the system was that there was no way to start an advanced game easily because there is no level system to automatically upgrade everything. 

This was good and bad (or if you prefer, a strength and weakness) of the BRP version of a d100 game.  It was just different if you want to put it that way.  In some ways it beat the crap out of the Fighter in gleaming magic armor & shield laughingly slaughtering hordes of low level stuff because they cannot touch him, but it other ways it was annoying because a random crit could take down an experience character quickly.

So far, given the way my game has been running (as well as experience from how most RPGs run, including MMOs), fatigue doesn't really matter for the most part.  The party simply "takes five (minutes)" and *boom* most of the penalties/effects are gone.  The only one I've seen approach it fairly well that I can remember is HERO, which uses a Long Term Endurance mechanic, which measures your level of effort for your load in terms of your REC stat and slowly burns your END stat during sustained efforts. 

Even then, applicability is spotty (mainly when the party is trying to drag out a dragon's hoard ).  In my current game, the party (squad) is about to seriously have to sneak around a contested city carrying extra expendable supplies and some extra weapons, which will start eating up fatigue in some manner.  Conrad's chart above looks like a good place to start on that and will require some extra accounting, but worthwhile IMO.

I've dragged out my old copies of the old Stormbringer and Hawkmoon after an earlier discussion and looked them over.  Yes, there appear to be a lot more "holes" in the system than I'd remembered, but since nobody actually rolled up some of the sillier combinations (the beggar from....oh crap, let me look....Nadsokor) and we were a lot more into RP'ing stuff rather than worrying about DPS and such, it was fun.  Pretty much as long as everyone did what they could, it was all good. 

One thing I remember liking about Stormbringer! was the idea of "the party is going to X to do a quest....okay, got your stuff and you are leaving...okay, you are there" instead of the more common D&D random encounters where you step out to go to the end of the block to pick up something from the convenience store and have to fight an encounter on the way, an encounter there and two on the way back type thing....  I mean, it seems like some sessions were spent getting our horses and getting to the city gate, then a session riding a few miles to the dungeon..then finally getting into the dungeon.  Yes, it filled out the play schedule but man the time it took to do anything besides hack'n'slash dungeon crawling...although, actually, that is a lot of what we did back then.  It might not have helped that I had automated most of the encounter tables and passed copies around so it was trivial to have pages and pages of pre-generated encounters...  Okay, I'm sliding off topic a bit here...

Anyway, I actually preferred Hawkmoon (even the books, Elric is cool, but for some reason the Hawkmoon series appealed to me more) and I would have truly loved to have tried out Corum, but that was released much later.

Interestingly enough, that might actually be why I like that fantasy character generator thing someone made up.  It works more like Stormbringer! and less like HERO than the standard BRP rules.

7 hours ago, g33k said:

No; REALLY no.

You have captured one of the customer-bases -- it's the Eternal Champion.  Sold.

There is a separate pool of non-Moorcock fans for whom this hit the sweet-spot for gritty, playable, flexible, etc; who bought the game having already dumped the Eternal Champion, just to use the rules (or who play in the default setting because it's the default; but would as-happily play in any other).

I think the success of the game (in terms of sales numbers) is in having BOTH those customer-bases; the MagicWorld customers and the Moorcockian customers.

 

Okay, some truth there, but maybe you don't realize the level of interest in Moorcock's Eternal Champion series and especially Elric among those that played RPGs at the time.  Heh, Chaosium published Stormbringer! in 1981, when Blue Oyster Cult, at pretty much the top of their popularity in 1980 put out Black Blade at one of their songs, followed in 1981 by Veteran of the Psychic Wars, as well as Warrior on the Edge of Time by Hawkwind back in 1975.  It may have only been one demographic, but it was darn sure a big enough one (at least in the Elric portion) to make sure of plenty of sales when you have that much exposure in popular culture for a niche market series.  Lots and lots of people who have little to know clue about who the Eternal Champion is are familiar with Elric of Melnibone. 

Yes, there is a solid, fun and useful game and system behind it, which helps with the popularity continuing, but being able to play Elric (which you could NOT do in anything resembling even a passing familiarity to the rules D&D or AD&D game) was a huge draw for us at the time.