Questbird

I agree that its stability is a virtue but GURPS (like BRP) is a terrible name. Another way to achieve stability for your game rules is to pick one of many out of print titles

I do the same thing but instead of one spell I give them a choice of spell lists (I use RoleMaster's Spell Law for this but there are many alternatives). Like Chaot, I usually ask fot some justifcation for the spells picked (and they still get a Chaos point per list chosen). That gives a bit more flexibility than individual spells. But it depends on the magic power level of your game.

People talk about this and I can see it might come up in theory, but I've never found it a problem in my games. I've never even noticed things like players changing weapons in combat (except for things like changing from a missile weapon to a melee weapon) for the purpose of getting extra skill checks.

Interesting to hear about Burning Wheel. I'd never heard of it. I've subsequently read up about its use of roleplaying as a tangible mechanic.

I got a lot of my Pavis information from River of Cradles, though later I also bought Borderlands and Shadows on the Borderlands. I've used chunks of all of those in adventures. One thing that was disappointing though. At the time (this was a few years ago now) there was very little available supplemental material about the Big Rubble. Even though the Troubled Waters campaign finshed there I didn't have much extra information.

Makes sense to streamline the roll. Might adopt that. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay uses the inverse of the attack roll to determine the hit location, though it handles criticals differently to BRP.

Would it work better with the 'ones' die? The 10s might mean that the more likely you are to get a critical, the less damage you do. There are a few games (Fire and Sword, WFRP) where all 'hand weapons' do pretty much the same damage, and it's not a terrible premise.

There were two goals with the hitpointless system. One was to allow fast combats by not tracking anyone's hit points and making the blows that did hit hard decisive (you can easily model minions/mooks in this system by making their resistance rolls Difficult).The other was to allow pulpy swords and blaster combats without making the guns overwhelming (see other threads about lethality of gun damage) and killing the vibe of the game. I don't use the system all the time, but I do find it good for its purpose. The system skips the 'chipping away until dead' and so doesn't need to consider degrading combat effectiveness. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Troy, but there's a scene when Achilles faces up to a huge giant. They stare at each other with their armies waiting. Then Achilles leaps up, stabs the giant in the neck and he falls down dead (or unconscious -- but it doesn't matter) immediately. Fight over. Admittedly that's Achilles we're talking about, but that's the kind of quick combat resolution I had in mind. I can see the appeal for certain types of games. I used to love the limb-flying days of original (Games Workshop) Stormbringer. But even that had variable armour if I recall correctly. Just very dangerous criticals. I skipped or fudged the games which had hit locations and never got into them, even when I used their material.

The approach I eventually took for my hitpointless combat system was to use fixed damage for both weapons and armour, the maximum for each. If you are hit, you subtract your armour rating from the damage rating of the weapon. You compare that value to your Resistance (or Hit Points) on the Resistance table and roll to see if you are still OK to fight. If not, you work out how injured you are later. There's only one variable (your Resistance roll), no hit locations.

Infection and disease are better in historical games or horror ones.

I actually liked the lethality of levels 1-3 D&D. When you made a new first level character you never knew if you were going to make it past the first encounter. The shortage of spells and hit points made everyone paranoid -- in a good way. It was some of the sillinesses* of mid-level D&D that pushed me into the BRP world and I haven't looked back. * I think in my case it was a party of 5-6th level characters, admittedly well-equipped with magic items, slaughtering an *entire* tribe of orcs (as rolled up in the monster manual) in a pitched battle without taking a scratch and -- which is worse -- without any interest. It was just a grind, and it killed my interest in D&D for many years.

Just you and the other 41% of poll respondents.

Another quite good setting was Alan Moore's Top Ten, set in a city where *everybody* has super powers. The Top Ten were super cops with various abilities.

I loved the GW Stormbringer. The random characters, the demon summoning, the very deadly combats. Different nationalities had wildly differing starting attributes. Magic using characters were very rare (you needed at least 16 POW and 16 INT, though if you were a Melnibonean or a Pan Tangian this was more likely), but bound demons were very powerful. I enjoyed the total randomness of character generation (inherited to a lesser extent by WFRP): your life as a Vilmirian peasant would be very different from that of a Melnibonean noble!

INT slots are quite limited and opportunities for increasing INT are rare. If you enforce each level of each spell taking up an equal amount of INT-space then your sorcerers will be very limited one-spell wonders. For not much gain in play, I reckon. Also, I would imagine that casting a lesser version of a known spell would not require much extra knowledge. Just burn the purple flame a little lower, chant more quietly to the Outer Gods, or use only a quarter of the specified juju paste...

I agree, unless you are running a world where magic is extremely limited.

Weren't Lovecraft's writings mostly public domain by the time Chaosium started writing Call of Cthulhu? I'm sure that interesting genres or settings could be similarly revived from past works without necessarily requiring licences. Except perhaps in the USA where there hasn't been any public domain releases for some years due to copyright extensions -- now standing at author's death + 70 years. Maybe something from two centuries ago could serve...

Stormbringer was always intended to be a high lethality game. However I do think a bit more of a bell curve for armour rolls is a better idea.

If you have hit locations, you also have to keep track of exactly what armour covers where. So instead of just saying, 'My Steppes warrior has barbarian wood and rings armour', you have to specify that he's got leather sleeves, wood breastplate, leather boots, wicker helmet etc. So the complexity gets added elsewhere in the game. The variable dice roll for armour substitutes for 'you hit the weak wicker bit behind the knee'.

Ah Mythos, not a bad game, though it did almost bankrupt Chaosium back in the day. I have a Dreamlands deck and a real world one. Nice find!

Back to damage dice again, like the gunshot thread. The above change is certainly a very simple one to implement. My only problem with mucking around with published damage dice for armour or weapons is an administrative one. Players and referee will refer to published tables and rulebooks for some stat, then have to make a mental adjustment or see a supplemental table. However there are fewer armour stats than weapons, so the problem is minimised there.

The artwork reminds me of some Rolemaster or Angus McBride MERP covers. This is not a bad thing!

Your lump of red agate looks like a lump of meat.

Obsidian Portal is a site where GMs record their campaigns from all sorts of role playing games including Call of Cthulhu. I host my various campaign notes there (user: nehwon). There is a feature called 'Games Nearby' which allows you to find games near you geographically, and the ability to contact those gamers through the site. Some campaigns advertise that they are looking for players, others might well accept a new player anyway. That might be another way to find local gaming gangs. Good luck!

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay probably explored this the best (Rolemaster also to an extent). You have a 'current' profession which allows you to improve certain skills or attributes. Or you can 'level up' by changing profession to something else, possibly related. Some professions are gateways to others, eg. Masters Student might be a gateway to PhD. But I agree this is not BRP.