phrog

Greetings! This post is probably premature, but I figured that the utility may be in a state where it is useful to someone needing to generate basic BRP/RQ stats. I have a 'pre-alpha' version of an RQ/BRP character available for review: http://frogpit.homeip.net:3030/character (this is a dynamic address pointing at a laptop sitting behind my cablemodem; I make no guarantees that it will be up and available, but I'll try and keep it running as time permits) The utility does require javascript to be enabled for some of its input forms, and it's not been tested in any browsers beyond Firefox and Safari. It is all kinds of crashy and buggy, so don't be alarmed if it yells at you - at this stage, that's expected behavior. The good news: this is an open-source project - the code is freely available to pull down and tinker with, and that the application is fundamentally web based, so if you can get it running on a network-enabled server, all you need is a web browser to use it. The bad news (for 95% of the intarweb): it's written in perl - my particular itchy/scratchy - with a lot of 'post-modern' perl libraries that require some work to install. I do my primary development under Mac OS X, so I can verify that you can run it under that environment - and I expect that if you're a reasonably savvy perl hacker, it should be relatively easy to set up under linux or any of the unix variants. If you are AT ALL perl-literate, I urge you to take the source code and run with it - I'll try and keep pointers to my current versions here: F R O G P I T » RQCad ..with the eventual aim of releasing everything under CPAN. Cheers!

A lot of really good suggestions in this thread For the sake of completeness, I'll mention an approach I saw in the RQ rules mailing list, that I cannot at the moment properly credit. I have NOT tried this in a live game, so, YMMV, but it kind of intrigued me. The approach is to roll an additional 20 sided die to track the level of success - call it a 'crit' d20. If your main attack is a success, and your 'crit' roll is a 1, you've critical'd If your main attack is a success, and your 'crit' roll is a 2, 3, or 4 - you've special'd. If your main attack is a miss, and your 'crit' roll is a 1, you've fumbled. If you have over 100 skill, you have to play some extra games to see if you roll your crit dice more than once (ie. at 125% skill, if you roll under 25% you'd roll your 'crit' dice twice and take the best result - at least, at first glance that seems to make the math work ) The math geek in me digs it because it's a restatement of the idea "When you hit, 20% of the time you will special, 5% of the time you will critical.", just moved into the time domain (wipes nose on sleeve) It's not the most particularly elegant approach, but it does have some side benefits - it 'fixes' the low-skill range oddity where a person with 5% skill in something will 'crit' 20% of the time they actually succeed. And it makes it easy to expand the number of crit categories, if you're into that sort of thing ('special fumble' becomes easy for example). If I were to use it in a game, I'd probably do something like : to-hit roll of '01' and a 'crit' roll of '1' would get you the original RQ crit (2x weapon damage, ignoring armor) that I always found to be a bit too lethal to occur 5% of the time. Anyway, food for thought.

Howdy! I've been playing RQ of various flavors since my college years in the early 1990s. I started off playing a lot of DnD, but RQ seemed to strike a chord with me; I've never really been able to play class-based systems since . Over the years I've assembled a pretty extensive collection of late 80s Chaosium products, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing the new BRP rule-sets. I've recently started a small campaign for some friends and co-workers living here in the central Maine area - Gloranthan, mostly RQIII.