Questbird

Systems like this work quite well for modern or sci-fi settings, or perhaps large medieval cities where goods themselves are not in short supply but maybe finance is, and where there are different 'classes' in society. Where goods are handcrafted, prized and bartered, society doesn't need 'wealth levels'.

Ray Turney's Fire and Sword (available on this site) has an abstract wealth system, and he has provided some excellent design notes about why he chose to use it:
 

Quote

 

Traditionally, FRP rules don't go into economics in detail. They basically present a price list for various items that characters might want. These lists are often very long, with prices for everything from flasks of wine, to magical artifacts. This has several problems.

First, keeping track of minor expenditures is an annoying bookkeeping task. In a novel, no one asks whether the hero can afford a beer. I did not want players in our game to have to have to take their attention away from the game and do bookkeeping every time a character spent some money. Second, many goods, like wine, come in varying degrees of quality. Almost all characters can afford a glass of wine, but it usually will not be the equivalent of a thirty year old bottle from a premium vintage.

So I created the abstract FTE system, on the model of the civil service in Czarist times. This defines the level below which expenses do not have to be tracked, provides for a small savings rate at the higher level, and provides a convenient way to define the quality of a good that comes in varying levels of quality. Forexample, and FTE 10 outfit will be better than an FTE 6 outfit, and proclaim the superior social status of its wearer.

So we {my co-GM and I} did this, and for a while did not give out any loot at all. The players got tired of this, since getting loot and spending it is sometimes central to the fun of a role playing game. So we gave out some loot, and provided a price list of major items to spend the loot on. This price list ignores wine, backpacks, and adventuring supplies, on the theory that all characters have enough money to pay for these. It covers things like armor, warhorses, war elephants, and magic items. These are the things players want their characters to have, but which the characters might reasonably be unable to afford. The price of these is therefore likely to create a dispute between the GM and the players, and the rules should provide a way to quickly resolve these disputes.

 

 

-- from Designer's Commentary on Fire and Sword, p.8

The science-fiction game I am playing is Coriolis The Third Horizon:

Moderately hard science fiction -- well its a bit softer and star-warsy, with handwavy artifical gravity etc.

Set entirely in a future Solar System -- a set of interlinked systems, but at least of stars we know (not Sol). I wanted a constrained physical space for my sci-fi campaign, so I still got that.

which is not filled with horror and Cthulhoid monstrosities -- There's some space horror but no Cthulhu. The horror is more general uncaring universe stuff.

but (possibly strange and Vancean) flourishing human societies in space. -- Check, true dat.

No interstellar drives (except long-departed generation ships) -- Check, true dat, but there are interstellar portals created by an ancient and probably alien civilisation. But hey 2001 a Space Odyssey had that, and no one is saying that isn't hard sci fi.

No aliens (except for the genetically adrift human inhabitants of future interplanetary society) -- Almost true. No live aliens..

Probably no psi-powers, though I don't mind technological or biological enhancements. Hmm, there are psi powers.

I'm still enjoying running this game even though it hasn't exactly met my criteria. It has a great background, a human vs. human universe instead of human vs alien. The science is not totally off, eg. wormholes and generation ships vs FTL. It has a constrained area so that you probably have to return to places you've been. It has pervasive religion, which elevates any sci-fi game I think. Ruleswise, it's a simple system which suits online play.

I am getting some sci-fi RPG inspiration from the game Elite: Dangerous. In that game there is a background political system which is affected by the actions of the players. There are three 'superpowers': the Federation, Empire and Alliance. Each system has a clutch of local factions, usually about seven. Some factions operate in multiple systems, but their influence and relationships to each other in each may vary depending on their relative influence. Some systems are 'controlled' by a faction; others may be contested. Bases and planetary settlements may be controlled by different factions. Each of the factions is connected to the superpowers (occasionally there is also an independent faction). The factions have different forms of government, broadly autocratic, democratic or corporate. Factions with roughly equal influence in a system will be in competition if they are of similar governmental types, or at war otherwise. The total influence of all the factions in the system is 100%. Doing missions for a faction will improve its influence (and that of its parent superpower) at the expense of others in the system.

Anyway, long story short, this faction system creates plenty of opportunities for local mercenaries, pirates, bounty hunters and couriers. One faction's pirates are another faction's righteous privateers. One faction's agitators and propagandists are another faction's couriers of vital electoral information. One faction's 'system security' might be an oppressive police state to their opposition, etc. Behind it all, the super powers (the equivalent of your MOO space empires) are playing the local factions in their game of thrones.

I'm using a system inspired by this for my online Coriolis: The Third Horizon game, which has 10 Horizon-spanning factions. In each system I make sub-factions with allegiance to one of the game factions. As the players help or hurt these organisations through play I adjust their reputation with the governing factions accordingly.

2 hours ago, SDLeary said:

For Twilight: 2000 or Traveller 2300, another option might be Delta Green. Handles firearms better.

For a BRP like take on WFRP, I'd still start with Renaissance, and then pick and choose other bits from there. 

SDLeary

 

 

 

Yes Renaissance will give you that 17th cent vibe in BRP including black powder weapons. If you want to tweak the magic after that, go nuts. Blood Tide also deserves an honourable mention, though that is more focused on Pirates of the Caribbean themed campaigns.

Also if you aren't limiting yourself to BRP but want a WFRP alternative you could check out Warlock! by Fire Ruby games. It has the careers and d100-like skills, plus its own magic system that you could investigate for your needs.

The link for the bundle of holding has expired but here it is on Drive Thru RPG https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/312204/Warlock

Unfortunately, it's gone. This thread explains why:

12 hours ago, Imaginosmusic said:

I was very reluctant to start play online. I relented after using Roll20 for maps during face to face games for several months. That soon evolved into using the tool for character sheets as well. Now, I play mostly online. I have to say, I don't miss having a group in my home. I have found the online experience to be interesting and very fun. I have been able to play several different systems with people from all over the world.

 

 

I'd never played RPGs online before last year. I've managed to squeeze in a couple of face to face sessions over the last year and a half, but also quite a few online sessions. Like you I've been able to try some new systems and play with friends in different countries. I still prefer face to face but when online, why not use its advantages? It's good not only for connecting with distant people, but also for in-game sound effects or ambient sounds, and visual props.

I've played D&D and Coriolis: The Third Horizon on roll20. It's great to know I can play Elric! there too.

Unfortunately one of my Elric! regulars refuses to participate online.

6 hours ago, NickMiddleton said:

*sigh* there was a fantastic, original setting planned (and largely written) for Magic World that never saw the light of day, alas.

 

 

Any chance that mostly written setting might one day reach the light of day in some form?

22 hours ago, Mugen said:

But something like "roll under the tens of your skill" doesn't require much math either. It may not be as automatic as spotting a double, but I think that when you compare 06 to 7X, it's quite obvious that it's also lower than 7. And it scales seamlessly with no extra rule or effort with skills over 100%.

You don't even have to remember if 08 is a crit or not if your skill is 75, which can be a hassle, given not all games agree on the convention to use.

 

 

I don't mind this system at all, especially since it works well with my favourite system Elric! which only has criticals. Does this method work the same way for critical failures? For example, if you had 60 skill and you rolled 65, would that be a fumble? (Not that Elric! has critical failures except for a fumble on 99 or 00).

17 hours ago, NickMiddleton said:

I am a grumpy old grognard - I loathe "dice trick" systems that  involve analysing let alone manipulating the actual dice outcomes as other than reading them as a number, and I like the clarity and directness of "roll under, roll low"; and I have a real fondness for the asymmetry of the classic five classification of results as critical / special / success / fail / fumble.

I think it is an important, impactful feature that things we care about enough to test with actual die rolls are a step more granular on the success side than the failure side; but I am also someone who dislikes the simplistic "a fumble is automatically the most ridiculously debilitating thing that could happen to a PC".

 

 

 

I'm not a fan of the dice flipping idea either. However I do sometimes find dealing with Specials and Criticals a bit too fiddly.

I did experiment with the Harn system (0 or 5 units is a critical success or failure) for my hitpointless combat system. It gives the right spread of results and and makes calculating the critical fumbles easier*. I changed it to 1 or 2 on the units die to preserve the sense of 'roll low is better'. It hasn't quite stuck (partially because I only used the hitpointless system in one campaign).

I'm no maths-phobe but late at night those 'visual' dice methods such as in OpenQuest (ie. doubles are criticals; or @deleriad's variant which adds the exact skill as a super critical), or even the "units less than tens die" method mentioned by @Zit and @Mugen have appeal.

* "5% of your chance of failure" is not intuitive for fumbles and the players have no interest in getting the calculation right anyway!

Following on from the discussion in --

I pulled down a selection of my games from my shelf to compare how they handle criticals. Looking down the list (which dates me as a gamer; I've asterisked the ones I actually play with any frequency) you can discern some of the BRP family tree. It's notable that the concept of Special successes is only found in a few of them: RQ3, BGB, and Magic World. These days I crave more simplicity in my gaming and am inclined to use a system with only criticals. I like the idea of the doubles-as-criticals idea from OpenQuest, but I haven't used it yet.

 Basic Roleplaying (Big Gold Book) *
     Special ⅕ skill
     Critical 5% skill
     Fumble 5% of failure chance
     Any skill of 5% or higher will always have 5% chance of success
     Easy skill rolls x2 skill
     Difficult skill rolls x½ skill
 Call of Cthulhu 3rd Edition *
     Impale, for piercing guns and some melee weapons, ⅕ skill
 Clockwork and Chivalry (Renaissance), 2nd ed.
     Critical ⅒ skill, fumble on 00
     01-05 auto success, 96-00 auto failure
 Elric! *
     Critical ⅕ skill
     Impale (for thrusting and stabbing weapons) on 01
     Fumble 99-00 for skills less than or equal to 100%; for 101%+, on 00 only
 Lyonesse (Mythras)
     Critical ⅒ skill
     01-05 auto success, 96-00 auto failure
     Fumble 99-00 for skills less than or equal to 100%; for 101%+, on 00 only
 Magic World
     Special ⅕ skill,
     critical 01-05, (Errata'd to 5% of skill, thanks @NickMiddleton)
     fumble 99-00 for skill < 101%; for 101%+ on 00 only
 Mongoose Runequest (I)
     Critical ⅒ skill, fumble on 00
     01-05 auto success, 96-00 auto failure
 M-Space
     Critical ⅒ skill
     Fumble 99-00 for skills less than or equal to 100%; for 101%+, on 00 only
 Nephilim
     Critical ⅒ skill, fumble on 99-00
     Skills over 100%, critical ⅕ skill, fumble only on 00
 OpenQuest 3rd edition
     Critical on doubles roll on d100 that is less than skill
     (Approximately equivalent to ⅒ skill or just under)
     Fumble on doubles roll greater than skill
     00 auto fumble except for Master (100%)
 Runequest 3rd Ed.
     Critical 5% of skill
     Special ⅕ skill
     Fumble 5% of failure chance

Yes it can derail things if players don't spot clues using Spot Hidden checks. It can be hard for players to put clues together even if they find them, let alone not finding them at all due to a random roll. You can partially hide clues by, for example having something in a cupboard that won't be found unless the player states that they're looking in the cupboard; but they automatically spot it if they do.

Spot Hidden could be used to get even more information from a crime scene, ie. extra clues. Also, used passively you can keep players nervous by calling for random checks; that way not every check means there's actually something to see. If they succeed you could confirm that they're not being followed, or give them some random clue for your investigation.

On 9/25/2019 at 6:46 PM, deleriad said:

I did spend a while back experimenting with something this. Using d120 (d12+d10) for "hard skill tests." A fumble was rolling over your skill and rolling 100+ or rolling a natural 120. 116-119 was a failure regardless of result. It might be interesting BRP variant where you modify dice rolled rather than skill value but you really needed a d16 as well. 

 

Fire and Sword by Ray Turney (available here on BRP central) uses a d20 system for skills, but a d10 for 'easy' checks and a d30 for 'hard' ones.

11 hours ago, deleriad said:

I use doubles for criticals/fumbles when playing with people who are basically non-gamers. It's simple and quite intuitive "twice as good/bad." I also use exact skill rating as auto success (e.g. 73% skill, roll 73 is auto success and even better than a regular double) and 00 as auto-fail. I don't use 01-05 as auto success or 96-00 as auto fail.

I don't use skill modifiers. If something is hard I'll say you'll have to succeed twice or if it is easy, you get two chances to do it. Really hard is only doubles will succeed. (Really easy is you succeed but you can roll to see if you get a double if you like.)

I have occasionally mulled over trying this in a "real" campaign but life has got in the way of regular role-playing. 

I did try using flipping for a while but it always felt kind of awkward. 

 

 

I like the simplicity of that. It's like the basic d100 system: explaining it is easy. Roll under your skill = success.

In this case you could add:

Roll exactly your skill = super success

Roll 100 = fail

Roll doubles = 'crazy fate', twice as good or bad, depending on under your skill or not.

On 8/20/2021 at 7:27 PM, Mugen said:

You'd have 45% chance of criticals. 10% of the cases would be ties, and half of the remaining cases would see 10s being superior to units.

You could use someting similar to Pendragon, and add the 10s of the skill above 100 to the tens. For instance, rolling 34 under 127 would be a crit, as the 2 in 127 would be added to the 3 of the roll. But it's not a very simple mechanism, IMHO.

 

 

With 45% chance of critical at 100+ skill, confilcts between Masters would probably be short and sharp, instead of "bif-bof-bif".

For skills > 100 you could change the rule to 'ones less than or equal to tens' is a critical.

20 hours ago, Mugen said:

As it's a topic that is completely different from this thread's and would require a long explanation, I'd simply say that it's something [b]I[/b] consider mandatory in roll-under games to have a meaningful skill range. 🙂

However, I'm not comparing it to, say, RuneQuest's way of handling Criticals and Specials, which requires some maths (except if you've been playing the game for decades). I won't deny spotting a double is automatic, but judging that any roll between 1 and 8 is lower or equal to the tens of 87 is also very quick.

 

The ones less than tens method is quite interesting. Someone with 50% skill would have an 11% chance of critical while another with 70% would have %22. This is fine, and a good idea for a game like Elric! which has ⅕ criticals. But how would it scale to skill levels above 100%? If you had for example 120% skill wouldn't all the 'ones' be less than the 'tens' on d100 and therefore you would have 100% chance of a critical?

4 hours ago, Nikoli said:

@Questbird, I’ve just bought the Warlock bundle and also Warpstar, thanks to you! 🙂 Warlock looks very nice. I read online that a possible conversion to percentile is skill 1 is 10% (because 19 and 20 is a success on a D20), and every number after is +5%. So 10 is 55%. It looks like a fine system as is. Warpstar also looks great. I’m very interested to see how it works. I like simple but not too simple. 
 

Warlock doesn’t have any different mechanics for the races (communities), so my inkling is to use something like the career skill. I would probably use Fate Points as per WFRP, and fortune points as per WFRP 2e, but only allow fortune rerolls for race-relevant things. An elf shooting a bow, for example, or a Dwarf doing an endurance test. Maybe a table of relevant adjectives can be drawn up related to the races, like ‘keen-eyed’ or ‘doughty heart’ etc. Humans are ‘adaptable’ or ‘survivor’ or such. Just some way to get the races involved as ignoring them altogether is too simple.

I think the magic is interesting, though I’m not crazy about everything being about scrolls (easily fixed) or about priests and wizards having the same spells. I’m not too sure what to do about that. I’ll read a little more. There might be a fix in a later compendium. 
 

Thanks for bringing it to my attention!  🙂 

Nikoli

 

 

 

 

You are welcome 😄. If you bought the full bundle, one of the Companion books has different careers for non-human communities.

There's some good discussion of stripping down skills to the basics in this thread:

Many of the current crop of Free League games like Coriolis and Forbidden Lands are doing similar things, simplifying the skills to a manageable core. Coriolis has a single 'Pilot' skill for all vehicles. I would probably at least distinguish animal control/riding from vehicular travel. You're right in that not every game would need all of those skills. A campaign set in the old Inca Empire would have no need of Riding, Sailing or Driving! (Actually not quite true; there would have been animal handling though not riding, and some boating would have happened on the coast or mountain lakes).

It's not Elric! or BRP but there's currently (2021-08-06, and lasting for another 11 days) a bundle of holding offer for Warlock! https://bundleofholding.com/index/current/name/Warlock. It's a terrible, unsearchable name for an obscure RPG. However, I bought it and it is quite a pleasant amalgam of WFRP, Dragon Warriors(?) and Fighting Fantasy (the "best of British"), though mostly the former. All the classic professions and advanced professions are there, with a skill system that could translate quite easily to BRP/Elric! You roll a d20 and add your skill and if you get 20+ you succeed. As @Nikoli was hinting at, each profession has its own 'profession' skill as well as others. It has an ok looking magic system too. Maybe worth a look for your research?

How hard would it be to get OpenQuest 3 an ISBN? It's not a big deal, I ask merely because I wanted to add it to my Librarything RPG library. It didn't show up in the search there, though the Jackals games do (they have ISBNs or ASINs or whatever). Several people on Librarything, including me have added various editions of OpenQuest manually, but those aren't shareable.

Since the Got my OpenQuest rulebook today thread is closed, I'll add that I got my OpenQuest3 rulebook today! 😄 Thanks Newt! I like the layout and font choice more than OQ2; it just seems more readable to me, enticing even. So far I haven't got to any bits which are vastly different in content than its predecessor but I'm looking forward to reading it in full.

I admit in spite of good intentions I haven't used OQ in a game yet; probably won't while my Elric! copies are still intact. My gaming gang is stable and mostly play what we play. But OQ still interesting to mine for good ideas.

On 7/23/2021 at 6:45 PM, Simlasa said:

Why?
There are loads of Cthulhu games out there now... but not so many in space.

 

Well because it's Mythras (The Design Mechanism) we're discussing here not Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium). I think the two companies are respectful of each others' areas of influence.

2 hours ago, SDLeary said:

A full fledged version of Cthulhu Rising!

SDLeary

 

Probably not allowed for Mythras 😄 though

Swords of Cydoria has already gone a different route and has become Exiled in Eris with a non-BRP system.

Rubble and Ruin and Classic Fantasy are the two other monographs I've actually played (in monograph form), though I've enjoyed and considered playing most of the others you've listed.

19 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

Onboarding is Monday 11AM (online, work from home contract, they all working from home at the moment anyway). Just received an email from someone @ea.com. Yeah even got to sleep late on my first day! 😄

Soon I might even get my own @ea.com email! 😮😅

After that, the only way forward is working for Microsoft (you know who they are, don't you?) or CSIRO! (The Australian public research agency) 😄

 

 

And ironically in the time it's taken you to get the job it's now Brisbane and Sydney in lockdown and Melbourne that is COVID-free 😄