dieselpunk

A lot of interesting thoughts. g33k: Are you suggesting that because no one pays attention to the kids they have more chances to get easy rolls? One thing I'm not too clear on is the personality traits and passions angle. I looked up personality traits in BRP and it reads as a guide to role playing NPCs. How does this help PCs? I don't have the new BRP and neither BGB or CoC7 seems to have rules for passions. Internet comes up with a variety of different takes but basically it's roll it for a possible bonus. Anyone give me a quick summary of the "official" one Jason's talking about?

I'm interested in creating an adventure where the PCs are pre-teens or teens inspired by the Kids on Bikes RPG and shows like Stranger Things, ET, Goonies, Red Dawn, etc. where the protagonists range from 11-19. Looking for strategies for character creation. Realizing that BGB is generally assuming adult PCs. CoC7 has some recommended adjustments to characteristics based on age, but I was wondering more about skills. The "realistic" approach would be that kids aren't going to be great in the academic skills since none of them are going to be in a professional tier (i.e., skills >51%). Physical skills might be pretty high since a lot of pro athletes are already really good as teens. For fun's sake, it would be nice if every skill weren't capped at 50% (the amateur tier). Or I just explain the skills in terms of a genre convention. Like science is really [high school] astronomy. So the kid astronomer with 80% isn't going to outperform a university researcher if they were head-to-head, but for the sake of the problems the PCs would encounter it's enough.

Kind of like the pulp vibe, but it definitely wouldn't have aged well.

Lol! I'm a big fan of the original BGB, but one of the most perplexing things was the encumbrance/fatigue portions. I have to buy this new one now just to finally see what was actually intended. Thanks for putting this all back together!

An aside, but I like how bgb handles the multiple actions per round by each one of the actions being 5 Dex lower. It's still the best way of handling multiple attacks I've encountered in rpgs. I also like the ascending Dex (or int) statement phase followed by descending Dex or int actions.

Bonus points for using the term Skulduggery! I might have to steal that.

My latest revision based on some tests creating a Pulp Cthulhu swashbuckling aviator. I made the character first using normal rules and then tried to see about recreating it under my latest version of the abbreviated skill list. I used the CoC7e Option 5 Quick Fire Method (i.e. 70, 60, 60, 50, 50, 50, 40, 40, 40) to get the starting skill percentages. Having fewer skills and a pre-made point pyramid definitely made things faster. The character after starting assignments looked like this: Skill % Persuade 60 Fine Manipulation 50 Repair 40 First Aid 30 Knowledge 20 Science 20 Science (Navigation) 60 Insight 5 Spot 40 Dodge 50 Athletics 40 Stealth 10 Drive 20 Pilot 70 Firearms 20 Melee 50 He is reasonably competent across the board with an emphasis on piloting, navigation, and people skills (inspired from the swashbuckler archetype in Pulp Cthulhu). I'd throw in another 100 personal interest points for customization with a starting skill cap of 80% on any particular skill. The biggest deviation from normal BRP/COC is how I'm choosing to handle Knowledge and Science. The default chance for someone succeeding at any knowledge or science skill is INTx2. This is my attempt at heading off the problem of "Does anyone have Science (Botany)?" because no one thought that would ever come up in play. If you do want to be a Botanist then take Science (Botany), write it in, and assign points (with INT x2 as the base). Functionally, Science and Knowledge are the same, but I kept the terms as a helpful way for players to think about specialties. For more precise builds, each skill has a starting base percentage (with ties to certain characteristics likely to be higher than the normal BGB starting levels). I haven't tested this, but it seems like a starting pool of 560 points (sum of the CoC quick start pyramid + 100) would yield an appropriate start for a pulpy character. Since the skill list is short, I wouldn't bother with occupations other than as RP concepts. Skill Base Notes Persuade APP X2 Includes Fast Talk and Intimidate; Charm is a charisma roll Fine Manipulation DEX x2 As in BGB Repair 10 As in BGB First Aid 30 As in BGB; medicine is a specialty in Knowledge or Science Knowledge INT x2 Base chance for all knowledge ; can only be improved by taking a specialty Science INT x2 Base chance for all science; can only be improved by taking a specialty Insight 10 As in BGB Spot 20 As in BGB Dodge DEX x2 As in BGB Athletics CON x2 Includes swim, throw, jump, climb in BGB Stealth 10 As in BGB Drive 20 As in BGB; add pilot skill with base of 1%+POW if needed Firearms DEX x2 As in BGB but no specialties Melee STR x2 As in BGB but no specialties Not sure when I'll get to play test this. For a campaign and players that enjoy the system I really don't have many issues with running char gen RAW. But for a one shot, quickly making competent characters, NPCs, or introducing new players this may be an alternative.

I'd go with a fail being whatever needs to happen for damage not to be inflicted. It's a fail. The only other add I'd do for any of these situations is to make what would be narratively interesting the thing that happens. Have it affect the environment (e.g. starts a fire) or cause some other consequence (e.g. exposes a secret passage way behind the book shelves). Anything that keeps a conflict from just being a series of hit/miss reports until one side dies.

Yeah, my 2nd grader learns addition this way and I listen to him reason it out all the while thinking he's suffering from a bout of madness.

I did glance through RD100, but they also have traits to expand the skills which I'm not interested in doing as it just moves the problem around. In fact, I'm annoyed by Knowledge and Science being somewhat duplicative, but kept the 2 to have some more ways of differentiating characters. The point allocation "problem" is closely related to reducing the skill list. The one thing with BRP that's bugged me is that points have to be distributed across so many skills that it's easy to be crappy at everything (e.g. No skills of at least 75%). I need to test, but hoping the standard number of points will work fine. Having characters with multiple high skills encourages people to try things. I'd rather see (and play) a character who has a high chance of success at a skill doing difficult things then feeling like I only have 30% chance of success at a normal skill check. But this is another topic.

I've noticed about 50% of my players don't like dealing with skill lists or assigning points to skills during character creation. Many see it as a chore more than empowering describing a character concept. Usually these are the casual or new RPG players, but honestly even I tire of trying to keep lengthy skill lists in memory. My last few games run using FATE Core has shown that my game sessions don't suffer at all with just 18 core skills. So with FATE Core as inspiration I took a shot at whittling down the BGB skill list down to 15 skills that I'm thinking may be a good way to streamline whatever game I try next. It's aimed at settings roughly late 19th-present century. Labels in parentheses are the Fate equivalents. Communication Fast Talk (Deceive) Persuade (Rapport) Manipulation Art Fine Manipulation (Burglary) Craft (Craft) Mental Medicine Science / Knowledge (Lore) Perception Insight (Empathy) Spot (Notice) Physical Dodge Athletics (Athletics) Stealth (Stealth) Pilot/Drive (Drive) Combat Firearms (Shoot) Melee (Fight) The only non-native BRP skill in the above list is "Athletics" which is what I would lump jump, swim, climb, and other feats of physical daring into. I suppose I could really condense things down to just 6 skills by using the categories, but I do like having things finer grain than that. Anything else not covered I'd just boil down to characteristic rolls. Anyone else play with a greatly reduced skill list? If yes, how have you adjusted the starting point allocations?

The low to high Dex rank with statement of intent then actions from high to low. Sometimes I throw the random roll in there if I want to get a bit more chaos. If I'm not with a combat oriented group then just Dex rank works too. I'm about the simple.

Just bought the print and PDF. Thanks for putting out SF RPG material. This book looks great and I'm looking forward to diving into the origins, and computers/hacking portions the most! I really like the new art direction in this book too. As interesting as some of the pieces were in M-Space, I found some of the full color pieces in that work to be more fantasy than SF and mostly disconnected with the content. The companion pieces are much more integrated. My favourite is the portrait on p. 57.

Where's this idea from? I feel like I've read it before somewhere too. Good idea! I haven't had a chance to spin up a BRP game since posting this, but one of things I like about crunchier rule options is that you can dig out stuff like this and make it a mini-game for a session or two.

BRP (and variants) has a lot of skills. Not GURPS level amount of skills, but enough that there's 3 skills to notice something (Listen, Sense, Spot) and oddly specific ones like Gaming, Fly, and Psychotherapy. Much the same with Mythras. Revolution takes this down to something like 15. Yeah, I know, toolkits, I can add/remove. Do people generally game with the out-of-the-box character sheets and skills or do you actually trim them down at your table? I used to really get into discrete skills, but increasingly I find it more distracting. It generates more questions for new players and GMs have to make more calls as to what skill is most appropriate. As a player, I find I have a lot of skills that are generally garbage and a few decent ones - even after 20 some sessions. I'm in a CoC game and run a Fate/Atomic Robo game. The latter has 13 skills and it doesn't seem like players are missing anything. Would BRP/d100 systems be better served with fewer skills in general?