Questbird

21 hours ago, Jakob said:

Why should the GURPS fans have all the fun if we can be BURP fans?

 

 

😆Yeah saying you like playing BURP and GURPS isn't a great way to introduce new players to RPGs.

However @g33k I do enjoy the discussions and company on brp-central 😀

A BRP by any other name would smell as sweet!

I can't remember exactly either, but didn't Corum willingly release the dead minions? (Or maybe I'm confusing it with Aragorn and the Paths of the Dead in Lord of the Rings).

On 3/21/2023 at 9:41 PM, Joerg said:

The acronym BRUGE reminds both me and google of Bruges/Brügge, the biggest city in central Europe in the middle ages and financial capital of the Hanseatic League(s).

 

I prefer BRUGE for the re-release. BRP always sounded like..burp. I suppose time has contracted Role Playing to role-playing to Roleplaying.

There is a SB5/Elric character sheet on roll20, which would be close enough to Magic World, if you ignore the graphics as the README suggests. But I think @GothmogIV has probably already found that; he was just hoping for some more VTT conveniences.

https://github.com/Roll20/roll20-character-sheets/blob/master/Elric/ReadMe.md

8 hours ago, GothmogIV said:

I am still trying to figure out the best way to run this system on Roll20. One year later, the best I can come up with is a lot of work on my part: creating monsters as characters (that is, making a character sheet for each monster I want to use), writing spell books that aren't rollable, adding a lot of PDFs. I wish Chaosium would update the Gold Book and get it on VTT. <Sigh> 

 

Yeah I don't know another way except for monsters-as-characters on roll20 (though I use it for Coriolis, not Magic World) if you want to take advantage of the rollable character sheets. Of course you can just roll the dice straight. For the spell books you could consider a Deck of cards -- at least it could be randomised.

That's the version I have too 😀

9 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Is this a one time thing or do you keep  rolling until you shrug off the pain? 

 

You would make a separate roll each time you get hit. On a failure you get a 'stunned/unable to act' for one round and if it's a special failure then you make all rolls Hard until the end of the combat. Although if you roll a critical success on a future roll you get one Easy roll, then back to Hard. Basically if you roll 2 failures in a row from separate wounds, you are out of the combat.

9 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

How about you just increase the difficulty of the resilience roll instead? Otherwise I can see a plethora of double attack weapons (twin barreled stun guns).

I  think it is easier/more intuitive to double the damage rather than halve the resilience.

For example Joe's assault rifle would do 14/28/56 damage, adjusted to 9/23/51 for neglible/neglible/automatic success for Joe.

 

I did try the double damage idea first. I was only doubling on a critical (not special also) so it made no difference as you noted above

I had 14/28 damage for normal/critical which meant neglible/negligible chance for Soldier Joe to take down the T-Rex, which wasn't what I wanted. Halving the Resilience made much more difference than either doubling the damage or making the Resilience check Hard, though I agree it's less intuitive.

9 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Oh, and I suggest using the 5% minimum chance of success for something like this because we've all been stunned for a bit by a minor injury, bee sting or some such. I once hurt my back while rising out a pair of socks in the sink (I don't know how) and spent a few rounds on the floor checking out the dust bunnies under the tub. I was messed up for a good week, until a friend brought me to the Emergency Room and they gave me Valium. Then I spent 6 hours rolling around the hospital in a wheelchair with the brakes on. 

 

For characters, I agree.

Thanks for the suggestions.

I'll test some simulation battles and reboot my hitpointless combat thread to make this idea easier to find.

On 2/7/2023 at 6:53 AM, Atgxtg said:

That mostly came from games like Timelords, CORPS and the James Bond RPG. I was frustrated that in most games, if an attack doesn't kill or disable someone, they can just continue on as if nothing happened. RQ is a bit better about that, thanks to hit locations, but people still shrug off gunshot wounds. In Bond, however, there is a Pain Resistance roll that a character must make whenever they get injured, and they can't act until they recover. There is a similar mechanic for stuns too, which allows people to beat each other up in fistfights without necessarily suffering serious injuries.

 

Well, BRP didn't really have anthing to cover that sort of thing. It the reason why fistfights don't work out well in BRP. By the time somone is taken out of a fight, they have broken bones or some such.

 

 

 

 

I'm thinking that maybe the 'can you fight or not?' question is maybe too essential. So here's an idea for the effect of the Resilience Roll which makes it a bit more nuanced while still not requiring hit point tracking.

When a combatant is wounded, instead of tracking hitpoints, the character makes a resistance roll of Resilience vs. maximum weapon damage, after armour has been subtracted.

Resilience roll result:

critical success :: the pain gives you focus: your next action is Easy
success :: you shrug off the wound
failure :: you are stunned by the pain and miss your next attack
special failure :: as above but the pain is intense: from now on actions in this combat are Hard
critical failure :: you are out of this fight, unable to perform any actions

'Special failure' can be hard to calculate, and also not in any players' interest to do so. You can substitute odd failure and even failure for the two types.

If you get a another 'stun' result while you are already 'stunned' then you treat it as a critical failure -- you are out of the fight.

On 2/7/2023 at 6:53 AM, Atgxtg said:

What you could try in your system could be to just double the damage for each success level. That way a 13 point bullet wound that gets a critical would be doubled to 26 and then again to 52, making it capable of dropping an elephant. Of course such a hit will take out any normal humanoid opponent, but that's to be expected, and really isn't all that different from what a critical hit would do in BRP.

 

Yeah, as long as the values stayed under 25 or so everything would be fine. Most games are designed with a certain "sweet spot" in mind and the rules are optimized for that. RQ/BRP was really designed around humanoid characters with under 30 hit points, and works well for that, but gets a little wonky at higher values as everything doesn't scale proportionally.

 

 

 

 

Currently I ended up on:

With a a critical attack it ignores armour; and the Resilience of the target is halved for this attack.

A Tyrannosaurus Rex (BRP pp.339-340) has Resilience of 34 ((CON 35 + SIZ 53 + POW 13)÷3), with 10 point hide, though I would halve this vs modern firearms

Time Soldier Joe shoots it with an assault rifle (BRP p.255), max damage 14

A normal hit would require a Resilience check of 34 vs (14-5)=9 which is a negligible chance of failure but the thing might be felled if it rolls a '00'*.

With a critical it would be 17 (ie. 34 halved) vs 14 --> a 65% chance of success for the creature to stay fighting -- still not great chances for Soldier Joe but them's the breaks when you fight a tyrannosaur by yourself.

OR

To try your suggestion, Resilence could be halved for a Special and a critical. That would mean:

A normal hit would be as above, a 125% chance of shrugging off those bullets

A special hit would halve the Resilience. The tyrannosaur would be rolling 17 (ie. 34 halved) vs (14-5)=9 --> a 90% chance of success for the creature to stay fighting

A critical would quarter the Resilience and ignore armour. The tyrannosaur would then be rolling 9 vs. 14 --> a 25% chance to ignore the injury

* in fact it has 125% chance of success, which translates to a 6% of being enraged and focused by the pain if you also use the Resilience roll results suggested above

12 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Oh,m that's really old. I think I posted it before the BGB came out., back when everyone around here was all enthusiastic about the announcement and hoping that it would actually come out and not turn into vapor.

 

If I had seen the BGB first, I'd have used difficulty modfiers (easy x2 , hard x1/2, etc.) which were in my first draft, instead of the flat percentile modifiers..

 

Yes I was mentally subbing in 'Easy' and 'Hard' rolls when I looked at your table.

12 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Yeah, probably. If I recall correctly I was trying to introduce a hit pointless wounding system similar to what was used in BRTC's Timelords system which compares the ratio of damage taken to total hit points to determine how serious a wound is in a manner very similar to the resistance table. 

Since the resistance table relies upon the difference between damage and hit points rather than the ratio between the two, you might have a problem with light attacks having no effect as hit points increase. For instance a 13 point wound on a 52 HP elephant is in the 25% category (13/52=25%) where on the resistance table anything below 43 points of damage will get lumped together into the "automatic failure" range. If I were trying to offset that, I'd divide hit points into some sort of threshold, like 10% of hit points, or 25% of hit points and then compare damage taken to those threshold values.  So an elephant might have a 5/10/15/25/30/35/40/45/50 thresholds, or 1/13/26/39/52 thresholds depending on how graduated you want it to be. 

 

If you want any help or insight into what my warped brain was thinking when I wrote that stuff,  just let me know. 

 

Oh, and if it helps I have another method of handling opposed rolls and success levels that doesn't use the resistance table or the critical/special tables. While I was planning on using it for opposed skill rolls, it could also work as an opposed  wounding system.

 

 

My system, which I've playtested in Swords of Cydoria, was derived from the ideas in Fire and Sword. Ray Turney was saying that players don't track hitpoints properly so it's good just to have a roll to determine the essential outcome: Can I still fight?

My system:

Quote

When a combatant is wounded, instead of tracking hitpoints, the character makes a resistance roll of Resilience (avg of STR, CON, POW) vs. maximum weapon damage, after armour has been subtracted. If he fails, he is incapacitated for the rest of the fight. At the end of the fight the character will be in one of several wound states based on a CON check.

 

I also tried to incorporate the BGB rules for different types of weapons, to varying degrees of success (those rules seem to add clunkiness however they're applied).

In practice, my system had a few flaws.

1. Calculating Resilience was slightly different to standard HP (I did that so that it could slowly improve -- there's no POW limit for humans), though I just use HP for NPCs
2. Weapon and armour damage became max instead of rolled -- which does cut down on rolls but makes for one more change to the rules.
3. I couldn't think of a way of doing -- as in your system -- you are stunned, shocked, out-of-it temporarily. My 'temporary' was enough to knock you out of action until afterwards. Maybe failing 3 sequential damage resistance could mean 'permanently out of the fight'
4. It didn't work with huge creatures (as we previously discussed)

Apart from those I was OK with the system, which was very useful for a swords and blasters science-fantasy settting (in the real world, the blasters would tend to predominate).

On 12/28/2007 at 5:55 AM, Atgxtg said:

I just uploaded a new file with rules to handle eventually fatal injuries in BRP. The option can be used with in in place of the normal Hit Point system.

 

I found this in my Downloads folder when I was cleaning it out. I like it! I wonder if I can combine it with my own hitpointless combat system, which uses the Resistance Table.

On 9/17/2022 at 8:05 AM, svensson said:

From where I'm looking at it, it seems to be more a 'get a franchise IP on the street' sort of thing. Pushing a Bladerunner K/S instead of getting promised support for The One Ring out. It took them over a year after The One Ring's print K/S shipped to get one of the stretch goals out to the public, for example.

 

The Blade Runner game does look very good though (I was a backer, but not of One Ring or, so far, of Dragonbane/Drakar Och Demoner).

Not bad for the stats, how did it go with scenario generation?

On 10/16/2022 at 4:58 PM, Agentorange said:

 

 

.This is correct ! However we have good news. One of the teachers at the  school is setting up a beginners D'n'D campaign for people who have never played before or have very little knowledge of the game and my niece is part of the group, so she should pick it up.

That said she has asked me to bring every RPG rule book I own when I go up to visit at Christmas so she can look through them......😊

 

 

What about Blueholme, our own @Vile Traveller's adaptation of Holmes Blue basic D&D, and Blueholme Journeymanne, its extension (disclaimer: I was a backer)? Holmes wrote very clearly and my recollection is that this one evokes his style nicely, while still being recognisably 'D&D' and therefore easily transferable to 5e. 'Prentice' is pay what you want of DrivethruRPG, and Journeymanne (which goes up to 20th level) is not pricey.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/109409/BLUEHOLMETM-Prentice-Rules

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/208800/BLUEHOLMETM-Journeymanne-Rules

I don't know if those are available in printed format though. You could ask @Vile Traveller😃.

The Character record sheet might hint at the readability level: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/218957/BLUEHOLMETM-Character-Records?manufacturers_id=3982

I have Octagon of Chaos and it's not bad, though I haven't run it. Theater of the Mind did mostly Cthulhu titles. Some of their scenarios, including OoC have a 'timer' mechanism which dictates certain events will happen at certain times, whatever the players are up to. In practice I've found such timers constraining, and have dumped or fudged them in actual play (players are none the wiser in any case).

On 11/8/2022 at 1:37 PM, el_octogono said:

Sorcery in the Conan stories feel very much like Call of Cthulhu spells. If I'd make a faithful adaptation I'd use that magic system.

 

Yeah there were no good sorcerers in Conan's world.

40 minutes ago, Morien said:

What Darius and I spoke about earlier also gets this effect: Since you are effectively playing a one-shot (or a mini campaign), it doesn't matter so much if the character survives. You are going to fast-forward to the next generation anyway. So it is better to go out heroically if the opportunity presents itself, than survive as a coward. Which is the story you'd rather have told of your previous character in the next generation, after all?

I made a con-adventure that was pretty explicitly about that. Where the right choice was to embrace that sacrifice and die heroically so that others might live. Worked very well, IMHO.

 

I would think that an aspect which distinguishes a generational campaign (though I've never run one or even attempted it) might be some way that the actions of your descendants or past lives/adventures could materially influence the present game/campaign.

There was a Call of Cthulhu adventure a bit like that, with three adventures spread across time Ripples from Carcosa. In that one you play a group of investigators in each era, and you could get flashes of memory about your past lives to know what to do in the present.

19 hours ago, Darius West said:

  I'd also make sure that the players understand that the generational aspect of the game is the big selling point, as players often get pretty involved with their characters and their progression, and will forget about the whole "generational" thing in favor of one more adventure with "Sir X the Unknown".

 

I've not played it, but the old post-apocalyptic military science-fiction game Living Steel had a 'karma' mechanic which I've not seen in RPGs before, which allows improvement points to be passed on to a player's next character after the first one dies. Since you can earn karma by being true to your noble warrior's path, even sacrificing yourself for the cause can be a sensible role-playing option. A mechanic like that could be used to encourage players to 'move on' to the next lifetime/generation, or at least not be so sad when Sir X the Unknown ends his final mission.

There's A Gift from Shamash for Mythras Imperative/M-SPACE too.

On 11/8/2022 at 12:31 AM, Nick J. said:

That’s awesome, thanks for sharing. I’ve also been ruminating on a Lankhmar campaign with MW as the base, but I’ve also been toying with how to adapt some of the DCC Lankhmar stuff into a BRP format. Spell Law is a great idea though; seems like that would be a good way to capture some of the unique flavor of Newtonian magic.

 

I've run two DCC Lankhmar adventures without much modification: Violence for Votishal and Unholy Nights in Lankhmar. I think for monsters and things I just translated DCC's attack modifiers to be increments of 5% added to 50% and went with that. It seemed to work OK, though my PCs' skills are quite good.

@Ravenheart87This has come up before on the forums. But well-spotted @Mugen, I also have a write-up on that campaign site. Spell Law used this way works well for Nehwon because the low level spells in Spell Law aren't that powerful. Also it allows you to make a diversity of wizard types; no two alike. @Nikoli has also made use of this system in his campaigns -- he has gone into much more detail about damage conversion etc.

I've combined several sources for how to make Nehwonian (Lankhmar) characters in Elric! for my long-running campaign. Basically I just adapted the Mongoose Lankhmar Unleashed cultural backgrounds for Elric! skills instead of Runequest II, and set the 'personality' skills from Elric!  to +10% instead of +20%, to make room for them. I use Spell Law lists for Nehwonian sorcerers. The results are at: https://nehwon.obsidianportal.com/wikis/nehwon-characters.

Not that any of my players in that campaign have made up a new character for a while, but it's nice to have the info in one place.

On 9/28/2022 at 1:56 AM, g33k said:

One thing I sometimes do as a player-reward is an "insta-check."
 

 

I give players an on the spot 1 point increase if they roll an 00 fumble.

On 9/26/2022 at 7:16 PM, DreadDomain said:

From a mechanical perspective, I always thought the intention was to circumvent the habit that some players had to try to roll everything and anything in the hope to get a check. With the bonus checks, it is now less of an issue (although, you are right, it is done in a way to encourage skills that are connected with your position, occupation and community)

 

That habit is easily circumvented by only awarding experience checks for useful skill use (GM's judgement). However it is true that some adventurer skills get checked a lot more often, eg. search, hide, move quietly; so characters have a tendency to become more alike (at least in those skills) as time goes by.

On 9/10/2022 at 1:41 PM, MOB said:

Thank you for including the Commonwealth in your remarks.

Whether people are sad or not, most of the commentary is ignoring or breezes past the fact the Her Majesty The Queen of Australia/Canada/Papua New Guinea/New Zealand/Antigua and Barbuda etc has also died.

[It’s weird enough we have a new “King of Australia” but the Australian Constitution recognises Her Majesty’s heirs and successors so things just carry on as normal. However, no one until now has noticed that the State of Victoria (where all of the Chaosium team in Australia live) has a weird loophole, where everyone here needs to swear a new Oath of Loyalty. Time for the Republic of Victoria I say!]

 

As a fellow Victorian, I find this amusing.

Or to put it another way: "We are amused."

Experienced Magic World players will avoid combat if possible; D&D5ers will embrace it. As @NickMiddletonsaid, D&D is now its own subgenre of wisecracking fantasy combat superheroes. Combat is mostly where its characters can shine.