Questbird

Yes I think I like the cross the streams approach. In the context of the earlier part of this thread, it's like the Difficult shot to aim for the one spot, but (for large creatures) it halves their Resilience if you hit that spot. That's what I'd do next time. I use this hitpointless 'fully-functional or fully hors-de-combat' system specifically for Swords of Cydoria which is a pulpy swords and blasters wild west with ninjas science-fantasy setting. With this system the guns can blaze and the mooks swarm. If you go down shooting, it may not be the end for you. Guns in BRP are generally too lethal, even more so if you include Rakkhadian plasma rifles. Even though Swords of Cydoria suggests 'heroic' hit points for characters, I find this system better and quicker for large fights. Plus, you don't need to track hitpoints for swarms of Sand People when they attack the lizard-wagons.

In my system, the wound severity is determined after the fight. The whole system comes down to the question: is this combatant still able to fight in this battle? And, as I found the other day, I strive to simplify the resolution of that question as much as possible. I don't think I got it quite right the other day, but no matter.

Well, seventeen months* passed between the session with the Terax lumbering out of the ruins about to eat the PCs and the next session, which we played a couple of nights ago. I'm sorry to say I forgot the finer points of nearly all of the above discussion, and had to look up my own hitpointless system. Fortunately I had written it down, and it's fairly simple. I went for simplicity with the Terax fight too. I used its Resilience (CON+SIZ+POW)/3 rather than its hit points and I allowed the players to shoot at it like a Swarm of Bees, allowing cumulative damage for the round before the beast made its resilience check. This was an approach I had rejected early in this thread. The net result was that the Terax was downed in about 3 rounds, with no player casualties. When the cyberdroid with the plasma rifle appeared at the top of the temple steps things went downhill quickly for the Terax. I'd forgotten about the approaches explored in this thread. Next time I would probably do the 'aimed shot halves Resilience' of huge creatures, just to keep it simple and memorable and consistent with the rest of the hitpointless system (ie, don't track hit points!) * my group plays monthly, but there were two alternate campaigns between Swords of Cydoria sessions

The BRP character generator I'm still occasionally working on has 'genres'; it would be interesting to take these conversions and see how easily they can be added.

A sorcerer in my campaign certainly used Flames of Kakatal to scorch a number of bandits.

I've used Carse, Tulan and Cities for a long time in my games. The two cities are easy to incorporate into almost any campaign. I later acquired Jonril and The Sunken Lands. They are less polished and a bit harder to integrate. They weren't published by Chaosium, so have worse maps and I think no interior artwork. The town of Jonril is heavily dependent on the Sunken Lands, which is a weird jungle in the middle of a mountain range next to a European-style medieval kingdom. Not so easy to replicate. Still, never say never.

"A sol is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds, whereas a day on Earth is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds." Kim Stanley Robinson once again has been all over the solar system in his mind before we got there. In his Red (Blue, Green etc) Mars books the 43 minutes difference is kind of 'magical time'; in other words on Mars the clocks just pause for 43:31 between 11:59 and 00:00 the next day. In the books that time is when various kinds of stealthy or transgressive behaviour happens. In practice if such a system were adopted it would be like Daylight Savings, where the 'stolen' time just vanishes while you sleep. I guess it means Martians would be well rested at least!

Kim Stanley Robinson got there first too. In his book 2312, the Chinese were hard at work terraforming Venus. They had hijacked one of the smaller icy moons of Saturn and launched it into Venus (the Saturnians were displeased but couldn't do much about it). That provided a huge amount of liquid water, though I can't clearly remember the other steps which were required.

Nice. Ours is also in Python, and so was Hkokko's encounter generator (he helped me out with the fuzzy Mythras Imperative damage bonus system).

Progress has been very slow but it is happening, I didn't really want to post about it until we have something concrete to show, but the name of the thread was too tempting. I'll post more here as it develops. Pansophy's generator is mentioned in https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/62-brp-computer-tools-multi-platform-for-preference/?do=findComment&comment=60165 I have commented on that thread too but I can't remember getting it to work on my Linux box (not to say it didn't, just commenting on my memory). I suspect a web-based solution is the best for this sort of thing; solves the cross-platform issues anyway.

This won't help you much yet, but colinabrett and I have been collaborating (so slowly!) on making a new character generator, which will work with BRP, Magic World and Mythras Imperative, with scope for other systems.

There are advantages to both pre-generated adventures and published settings. The pre-gens help time-poor GMs. I often use bits of adventures cobbled together. They give a rough structure or framework which any PCs can work with (except for the very railroady ones). As for official settings, I think the advantage there is that a little pre-knowledge of the world can help new players. I run a campaign in Fritz Leiber's world of Nehwon. Players can read the books or the comics (which are good) and get an idea of the world without necessarily 'spoiling' any adventures I have planned. It's also useful when they point to the map and ask "what's over there?" (the original Runequest Prax map was probably good for the same reason). However, the setting has to be actually interesting and worth investigating.

I think that 'strategy' can be overused. For example, the many almost-exactly-the-same editions of Call of Cthulhu. I still have my Games Workshop hardcover from the 80s. Sure it is not well-indexed but the system hasn't changed too much since then either (until 7e at least).

I found this topic by looking for Living Steel, which I've just picked up and enjoyed reading through. A very detailed immediately post-apocalyptic setting on an Earth-like planet. This Desolation's Edge sounds interesting too. Obviously a lot has changed in the publishing landscape since 2008. I wonder if it could be adapted for Rubble and Ruin, which is also set only a decade or so after the apocalypse.

Maybe we should restart that thinking about criticals thread rather than derailing this one. There is some distortion of specials (1/5) in the visual system. They are more likely by 1-2% in the visual system for many skill levels than the equivalent in the BGB. That might be a problem for extremely low skill levels, but generally I can live with it. For example if you have just 02% in a skill, the visual system would give you a special success if you roll either 01 or 02, which is not great, while the BGB would correctly give you no chance of a special. Another example is 12% skill which in the visual system would give you a special on 01,02,11,12 as opposed to the BGB's 2%. But the criticals on odd '10's (1/20) are spot on, exactly the same probability as the BGB. It's possible to tweak the visual system to be even closer to the BGB result. You could make a roll of 1 or 6 on the units die to be a special. That makes the visual system differ from the BGB by a max of 1% for specials for less than half of skill levels. But 1 and 6 are not very memorable for a 'visual system', so I prefer 1 or 2. Another method which reduces the variance of specials to a maximum of 1% while preserving the 'visual-ness' is to use 1 or 2 on the units die for a total less than (rather than less than or equal to) the skill level ==> a special success. That results in a fairly even distribution across the skill levels of either the same or +1% chance of a special compared to the BGB.

Incorrect. The frequency of criticals and specials is the same as regular BRP, so the probabilities are exactly the same when rolling on d100. Check out Nakana's visual graph of the systems, for an example skill of 60%.

Of course maybe Masters (skills >100%) should not fail a roll in normal circumstances. Only if a task was difficult would there be any chance of failure. Or you could say that for skills > 100 only a roll of 00 gives a 'mishap' result to be interpreted by the GM. In fact BRP does have the concept of critical failure, it's just hard(er) to calculate on the fly than critical success, and with less incentive, for players at least, to do so.

I had 0 or 5 in my system originally too, but I changed it to 1 or 2 so that rolling low is still generally more desirable, also to clear the '10's for criticals. However my visual system does change 00 to be just a failure (for skills < 100) rather than a fumble and 01 becomes a special not a critical (10 is a critical instead as long as you have skill >=10).

A while back Nakana had a thread about criticals and I came up with a visual dice rolling method which could easily produce a special failure result. It works fine if you use a visual method but not so well if you calculate it on the fly because: + no player wants to report a worse level of failure than simple failure + As a GM, sometimes my maths brain just fails in the middle of a combat A classic fumble on 99-00 is a visual result: everyone recognises it without any maths. Here's the system I came up with: TL;DR Roll d100 1 or 2 on the units die is a special. If the result is equal to or under your skill, special success; over and it's a special failure (optional) If you roll an odd 'tens' result, eg 10, 30, 50 etc. which is equal to or under your skill, it's a critical success; an odd 'tens' result over your skill is a critical failure That gives you three levels of success and failure. In this system critical failure replaces fumbles.

Well, Panty Explosion is funny name for a funny sounding game. GURPS, BRP, FUDGE and Magic World are supposedly more serious, but sound silly. Sometimes you just have to answer the question "What are you guys playing?" from someone who really has no idea. And those times I'd rather say 'Panty Explosion' than BRP or (in my friend's case) Magic World. Ooops, there goes the forum triple post. Sorry about that.

Well, Panty Explosion is funny name for a funny sounding game. GURPS, BRP, FUDGE and Magic World are supposedly more serious, but sound silly. Sometimes you just have to answer the question "What are you guys playing?" from someone who really has no idea. And those times I'd rather say 'Panty Explosion' than BRP or (in my friend's case) Magic World.

Well, Panty Explosion is funny name for a funny sounding game. GURPS, BRP, FUDGE and Magic World are supposedly more serious, but sound silly. Sometimes you just have to answer the question "What are you guys playing?" from someone who really has no idea. And those times I'd rather say 'Panty Explosion' than BRP or (in my friend's case) Magic World.

A friend of mine has recently decided that OpenQuest would be his game of choice for refereeing, and I bought him a copy. He ran Classic Fantasy when it was BRP but he found Mythras (CF's new home) and Revolution D100 to be too crunchy for his tastes. He considered Magic World too, but hates the name. I think OpenQuest being still in print has also influenced him. Long live OpenQuest!

Some examples of social 'weapons' might be Know Embarrassing Fact, Understand Political Situation or Have Read Your Psychological Profile.

There was a futuristic Cthulhu scenario in Ripples from Carcosa which had a sort of post- End Times outpost of humans and Great Race in the outer Solar System. I have the End TImes supplement in PDF form and it is very thought provoking. It provides a good Science-fiction base for solar-system adventuring, along with Cthulhu Rising/Jovian Nightmares. All lamentably out of print.