Questbird

14 minutes ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

I kind of have a blindspot against that Mythras rule (it's in Mytras 2E as well, not just Lyonesse)... though I cant quite express why, should think about it again...

 

It's easy to implement because any weapon size is easy to guess.

It's not BRP but in my Tirikélu thread there was the idea that even on a successful parry the defender takes (the attacker's damage bonus) - (the defender's damage bonus); which further emphasises that it's better to dodge the attacks of huge creatures than try to parry them. Also possibly better to dodge if you're unarmoured vs. a strong opponent. In Tirikélu the damage bonus is just a number but in BRP it would be more fiddly because would mean extra dice rolling per attack.

One useful concept for this from OpenQuest and Mythras (at least the Lyonesse version) is weapon sizes. Weapons and shields are categorised as Light, Medium, Heavy, Huge (Lyonesse uses: Small, Medium, Large, Huge and adds Enormous for giant clubs etc.) Parrying with a weapon or shield of the same size or greater deflects all of the damage, parrying with one size less deflects half the damage; and if you parry with something 2 or more sizes smaller it deflects nothing. That's when dodging becomes suddenly useful! Also shields punch above their weight, so that even a buckler is counted as 'Medium' size for what it can parry against.

I still prefer the Elric! layout and compactness, and -yes @K Peterson, 'hanging togetherness'. The two-page spread chart about how to make a character is a thing of beauty, for example. However for bright young things wanting to try BRP for fantasy gaming, Magic World is still around (just unsupported).

2 hours ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

As I recall, they were picked to explore it after "oppressive empire" guards entering the ship failed to report back. Somehow they managed to avoid triggering ship's self-defense systems.

 

They did trigger it -- it was some kind of psychological sentry. But Blake snapped out of it because the Federation had been messing with his brain so much that he didn't have any scary memories to freeze him.

My group of Elric! players solved this problem by switching to WFRP when we played the Enemy Within campaign.

There's an Isaac Asimov story (a pretty good one) called "Profession" about a future society where people get 'taped' -- skills are instantly implanted in their brains. The Matrix and Cyberpunk's 'skill chips' use a similar idea. In a high-tech society the huge amount of technical knowledge might be widely available and stored in various galactic databases. Rather than worrying about your base skill in this and your specialised skill in that, imagine you are an engineer on a particular starship. You download a specific set of ship systems skills into your brain by chip/psychic power/alien technology and immediately you have 100% skill in each relevant system. Go to another ship though, and your knowledge is not so great. The "Profession" story examines a society where people don't learn skills from first principles at all. @Lloyd Dupont you could use these 'chipped' skills as your Knowledge slots.

Good luck, and Melbourne ain't that bad (well, at the moment maybe..).

10 hours ago, Kloster said:

Nice idea. I'll have to check. I thik it can be added without too much trouble to RQ, and can give a bit of swashbuckling. Let's see.

 

Dave Morris had played some Runequest and one of the things he disliked about the system was the potentially lengthy attack-parry-attack-parry sequences when two competent opponents faced each other. He's even written a recent article about it ( https://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2021/05/cut-and-thrust.html ).

Over at the recently-revived Tekumel BRP thread I mentioned a game by Dave Morris (of Dragon Warriors, Fabled Lands fame) called Tirikélu. This prompted me to have another look at the 1990s free game, which looks inspired by Runequest, Dragon Warriors, and shares some ideas with Fire and Sword. It has some interesting ideas in it which could be applied to BRP. Here are the ones I found, mostly to do with combat. (Spell casting is also interesting but I'll leave that for another post)

1. It uses a d20, roll low instead of d100 (as discussed in another BRP thread) Well, technically you roll 2d10 not 1d20.

2. Initiative is d20 + (DEX above 10) instead of straight DEX rank

3. You count down initiative ranks (like DEX ranks). When it's your turn you can act or defer, except for parrying or evading, which you can do in response to others' actions.

Combat actions

All actions either take a full round or half a round.

Full actions include

• an attack at full skill
• a parry at full skill
• a dodge (called Evade) at full strength
• plus a few others you'd expect like casting a spell etc.

Half actions include

• parry at half skill
• attack at half skill
• and some other lightweight actions like draw a sword, nock an arrow etc.
• If you do two actions in a round the second action happens at the very end of the round

Ripostes

Any time you successfully parry a failed attack on you, you have the opportunity for a riposte. This means you get a free attack which doesn't count against your limit and can't itself be parried BUT the target is whatever you rolled to do your successful parry. So in BRP terms if you had skill of 50% with your weapon and you successfully parried an attack by rolling 30%, you could make a riposte attack at 30%.

Weapon damage

All weapons do between X and 10 base damage. X increases with your weapon skill and is also modified by the type of weapon. For example a two-handed weapon increases X on average, while a dagger or punch decreases it. Your damage bonus is added to this, but in Tirikélu damage bonus is a maximum of +5, dependent as in BRP on STR + SIZ.

Parry damage (to people)

On a successful parry, you subtract the defender's damage bonus (remember +0-5) from the attacker's and the remainder goes through to the defender. Doesn't really matter for armoured opponents but can make a difference for unarmoured or against huge creatures (in such cases: try to dodge not parry)

Armour

Pretty straightforward, fixed values from 1 to 9, very similar to RQ3 values. Stops that much damage, except on a special hit (1 in 5).

Shields

These are handled in a better way IMO than in a lot of BRP variants. A S-M-L shield simply adds 3-5-6 points to your armour value, but only against front or left attacks, on a roll of 1-2 on d6 for S-M and 1-3 on d6 for L. They do protect against special attacks, but at half value. If an attack does more damage than their value, their protective value declines by one. There's also a mechanism for bashing with a shield which requires a successful Dodge (Evade) check and can be parried or evaded as usual -- possibly allowing for a riposte.

'Close' combat

Basically Wrestling range, closer than normal combat range, requiring a Dodge (Evade) roll from the attacker which can be dodged or parried as usual by the defender. Once in close combat you can't Parry; only dodge.

There's also Dave Morris' Tirikélu rules ( https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B63rIuFhh29eVHpZVFlGYUNLSXc/view )which are vaguely Runequesty and has some quite interesting ideas, especially for combat. I have the Patrick Brady Tékumel game from Guardians of Order as well as good old Empire of the Petal Throne (which actually holds up rather well). They all have lots of good info. My problem is that my players aren't super interested in playing there.

On 5/22/2021 at 6:01 AM, d(sqrt(-1)) said:

 

I've just come across this post some 10 years later(!). Many thanks as the original was lost when the gamingtavern lost its .eu domain.

We've not had much time on Tekumel lately as we've been playing other stuff. I do still have a large InDesign document with Sandy's text in it and some stuff I added from (mostly) Gardasiyal.

 

 

 

Ha ha

Quote

That is not dead which can eternal lie and with strange aeons

 

even old threads can rise!

How did your Tekumel BRP gaming go?

24 minutes ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

Hey while we are at it...

While I am ok with the way HP and armor works in a medieval setting... Against modern (or scifi) firearms I'd like it to work more like Borderlands 3. With up to 3HP stack (HP, Armor, Force Shield) and each of them being mow down in order... And I have been toying with various ideas without being satisfied.... Wonder if anyone can help me brainstorm?

I got an idea this morning while driving!
Armor could come with both its AP, but a "Internal Armor Point" (which is the durability of the armor itself, could be higher or lower than the AP). If damage is > IAP then damage above is also applied to the armor!
Same for shield.... So in case of armor and shield, have to take shield down first so can take armor... But I fear it's all too complicated though...
 

 

Swords of Cydoria is a science fantasy which mixes old and new armours and weapons. They have a rule that 'primitive' armours are worth half value vs 'advanced' weapons. You could apply the same rule for any major difference in tech level between armour and weapon. Easier than layering, internal armour points etc.

1 hour ago, Barak Shathur said:

In RQ3, blunt weapons halve the AP of flexible armour (like chainmail), so they can be quite effective.

In BGB, the battle axe beats the blunt weapons (and probably all the other one handed weapons too) with its higher damage, so blunt weapons are kind of superflous.

 

Blunt weapons halve armour value of flexible armour. That's an easy houserule to remember.

On 5/5/2021 at 12:55 AM, GothmogIV said:

So playing online for the past year, I can tell you that a great part of D&D online is how integrated their resources are. Want a monster? Click. Want to roll an attack? Click. Want to see how a spell works? Click. It's so easy, and it is an enormous time saver for the GM. I haven't looked at the BRP stuff on Foundry, but does it have that level of interactivity? Can you roll from the Golden Book?

If Chaosium's BRP system could be supported on Roll20 in the same way that D&D is, it would be a game changer. The BRP system is better than Wizards for sure, but Wizards is easier to run, and easier to design with, in my opinion. 

 

I noticed the same thing. The 'click to roll' thing is very useful when playing online. Fortunately it's not restricted to D&D, although D&D has the most sophisticated player and GM tools. I started a Coriolis game which has a similar feature built into the character sheets. I'm sure there would be BRP versions too. I've been using roll20.

I'm playing the computer RPG Divinity: Original Sin at the moment. It has an interesting system of professions as skills, with levels as @Jaeger mentions. There are eight of these large-scale skills: Scoundrel, Marksman, Man-at-arms; and (magical ones) Aerotheurgy, Hydrosophy, Geomancy, Pyromancy and Witchcraft. These skills are enablers for other skills or spells which you can learn (in the game by finding or buying 'skill books') which are separated into Novice, Adept and Master skills. Level 1 in one of the umbrella skills will let you learn up to 3 Novice skills in that category; level 2 will allow you 5 Novice and 2 Adept skills, and so on. There are also a few other skills (Bartering, Leadership, Crafting etc.) which are separate from those 8 categorised ones.

My character, a kind of sorcerer/thief started with lvl 1 of Aerotheurgy, lvl 1 of Scoundrel and lvl 1 of Witchcraft, with starting subskill from each (Thunder Jump, Walk In Shadows and Vampiric touch respectively) As the game progressed I found a few Geomancy skill books, which no one else in the party had, so I learned Geomancy lvl1 to acquire those skills. Later I put Scoundrel and Geomancy up to level 2 as I found more skills for those. But it was quite an opportunistic and organic process; quite a pleasant contrast to the rigid levelling of D&D*

* Although the most recent Dungeons and Dragons does allow characters to change profession when they level up, which allows for some flexibility.

9 hours ago, wbcreighton said:

Not sure if anyone mentioned this or not but by the time I purchased Traveller in 1979/1980 ish there was a lot of stuff published for fantasy games, and the one of the biggest differences to me is the lack of illustrations in those LBB.  

D&D had really established a euro centric medieval style game with Tolkien inspired elements.  You could page through the books looking at the illustrations and get a good feel for the settings. 

The lack of illustrations, and more importantly a set of standardized norms for a sci-fi setting was a big detriment to running the game. The problem with the wide range of technology that I could imagine was that every single activity that the players undertook took explanation.  Was this Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.  Were there transporters, photon torpedoes, fighters, laser swords ?  What did the bridge of the starship look like ?  What are the procedures to land a ship ?  What do the different types of weapons and armour look like ?   What do the star ships look like ?

The big advantage that Star Wars rpg and Star Trek rpg have is that to understand the look and feel of the setting takes one viewing of a movie or a couple of episodes of a TV show.  Those games are also lavishly illustrated.

Any time a Traveller book was published with an actual illustration was a big deal to me.  I can still remember most of those illustrations.

To me it felt like the GM had to literally invent every aspect of everything the players were going to do.  A picture is worth a thousand words.  Without those illustrations the GM had to come up with those thousands of words of description for the most mundane activity.

 

The Traveller Little Black Books were designed to be generic, a toolkit to run science-fiction games, like the Big Gold Book for BRP. I think many of us here struggled with what to do with them. I did love the occasional black and white pictures though.

4 hours ago, g33k said:

Blood sacrifice looks inherently evil...  it's not just  what you do  with that "tool," it's that  you've used the tool  at all, to do anything  (even to heal somebody; one dies that another might live???  Shades of the "trolley problem" in ethics...).

Sympathetic magic isn't that way.  It's a tool more like a knife... you can carve a masterpiece that will bring joy to people, or stab an innocent in the heart.

===

Now, if you have defined a setting where all magic is (by it's very nature, as part of the definition of the setting) corruptive... then yeah, sympathetic magic  is obviously part of that whole corruptive metaphysics.

 

 

Quote

“None can use black magic without straining the soul to the uttermost—and staining it into the bargain. None can inflict suffering without enduring the same. None can send death by spells and sorcery without walking on the brink of death’s own abyss, aye, and dripping his own blood into it. The forces black magic evokes are like two-edged poisoned swords with grips studded with scorpion stings. Only a strong man, leather-handed, in whom hate and evil are very powerful, can wield them, and he only for a space.”

 

-- Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry

But Leiber also mentions White magic, rare and hard to keep pure. The Gray Mouser begins his training (as "Mouse") under a white wizard. I like the idea that not all magic is Black, even in a Swords and Sorcery setting.

8 hours ago, Nikoli said:

The only issue I have with Spell Law is that some of the professions are perhaps too rigid at times, expecially for Mage, since it’s so elemental. I think it might be useful to just use profession lists and closed lists for a PC to design their approach, or if the GM has an idea in mind. But the channeling companion does that work well for priests/clerics in a way that feels appropriate. I only mention mages because it was a typical MERP class but it now reads as very limited relative to other games like D&D or BRP. So more flexible profession design might be good for wizards. I think that could work well though. E.g., a wizard with perhaps two or three alchemy lists might reflect a Saruman type. One could also use Spell Law as a massive grimoire and buy individual spells with Int. I discuss a combination of the list and grimoire approach in the post cited above.

I think with a bit of tweaking, Spell Law and its companion books can give one everything in terms of magic, with MW becoming a more elegant and streamlined chassis on which to run Rolemaster magic. I do love lists as skills as opposed to spells as skills. 🙂

 

I don't use the professions as listed at all, nor do I pay much attention to 'open' or 'closed' lists as defined by Spell Law. When a player wants to make a sorcerer character I am generally happy for them to mix and match from all the lists -- even across the 'boundaries' of sorcery, channelling or mentalism if they can justify the concept. Having said that, I generally only allow about three lists (ie. magical skills) for a starting player.

6 hours ago, g33k said:

n.b."Sympathetic" magic -- as an in-game / in-character method, and as a game-mechanic -- should be neutral, or at least, not necessarily corruptive.  It looks tailor-made for beneficial magics, too... buff's, healings, etc.

 

 

Possibly true, although it also brings up images of witchcraft and voodoo dolls for me. In Nehwon, Melniboné and other Swords and Sorcery genre worlds, sorcery is generally presumed to be bad news, though Leiber does mention white wizardry too. I like the idea of powerful black sorcery being 'quicker, easier, more seductive' like the Dark Side of the Force in Star Wars, with a corresponding moral and physical cost.

On 2/17/2021 at 6:19 AM, g33k said:

I kind of feel like "corruption" might properly be considered both externally and internally.

Maybe corruptive spells cast ON you tend to cause more physical warping, but leave you mentally/morally unchanged -- a prisoner of your warped body.

Maybe someone who CHOOSES corruption -- studying & practicing the material, using the magic, and (most especially!) gaining benefits from corrupting magic -- tends to gain mostly mental & moral corruption.

I might consider getting into a Passions mechanic, and include "corrupt" Passions like "Bloodlust" and "Lust for Power" and suchlike, as effects of Corruption.

===

Also, I've gotta point toward the "Madness Meter" mechanics from UA, long regarded as a "better SAN rule" by many (albeit not simpler!) .

 

 

 

 

The Mongoose RQ Lankhmar Unleashed (as mentioned by @RogerDee) has a black magic system gets you to make corruption checks if:

• You learn black magic
• You cast a black magic spell (I define that as one that causes harm to another creature)
• You kill someone with black magic

That black magic system allows you to make spells more powerful by using Agony (feeding the caster's HP or characteristic points into the magic), Hatred (the more hate the caster has for the victim, the higher the bonus) or Sympathy (the more connected the caster is with the body of the victim, the more effective the spell, eg. using a victim's blood or clothing).

In my Nehwon campaign I use the Elric! system and Chaos allegiance points to represent Corruption. But I didn't want to make all uses of magic corrupting. I award Chaos (=corruption) points for magic use which either fulfills the above conditions OR where the caster uses Agony, Hatred or Sympathy to enhance the spell OR where the caster draws on Chaos Allegiance points as extra magic points for a spell. In other words if you choose to call on the dark forces you gain power in exchange for corruption.

Ray Turney decided that the advantage of d20 over d100 came down to just the number of dice to roll. I mentioned Fire and Sword (an offshoot of RQ1 and RQ2) as a d20 adaptation of BRP earlier in this thread.

From his Fire and Sword designer's commentary (which is gold BTW, whether or not you play Fire and Sword.)

Quote

The first controversial issue is the choice of dice to roll. There are three major categories of system: D20; D100; and D6. The strength of D20 based systems is that a player or GM only has to roll one die to resolve a skill test. At first sight, this is a very minor advantage. But a large fight may involve 300 attacks and parries. It is easier to read 300 dice than to read 600 and remember that the dark die is the higher when interpreting them each time. This advantage is even greater when compared to a D6 game. D100 Systems have the advantage of greater granularity.This has a lot of appeal for some people, because their intuition tells them that there are many more than 20 different levels of skill in doing almost anything. Finally, D6 systems have the advantage of producing a normal distribution {when you roll 3D6 on a skill test you’re most likely to get 10, 11, or 12}. This is very important in a system like D&D, where parrying is just a modifier to skill, less so in a system like Pendragon, where a skill versus skill mechanic is used.

I decided that I wanted skill tests to be resolved by a single die roll, which left me with D20 as the best option.

 

 

 

Fire and Sword uses d10 for easy tasks, d20 for normal tasks and d30 for extremely hard tasks. Roll under, of course.

25 minutes ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

which beg the question... what people are missing exactly when they look at D&D?

 

I think what people miss about D&D is the blood-rush of 'levelling up'.

D&D characters are like superheroes in combat. They each have their special powers. When you level up you get even more powers.

25 minutes ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

 

even though I am a D&D basher.. there are a few things that I dislike with BRP (particularly in contrast with how D&D handle those same thing) and slowly find my own ways to deal with them...

I have a problem with elemental magic in BRP... I think it's not fun and either too expensive or too deadly or too useless but never just right, and I have a problem making swordmasters duels (i.e. both with like 120% skill) interesting... Though I have some untested fix in progress... 🙂

 

If you have a duel between masters you have a stalemate situation. Each has physical skills which match the other. But if you think about famous swashbuckling scenes (eg. The Princess Bride, Star Wars or Erol Flynn movies) there's a lot of dialogue as well as the flashing blades. There's also opportunistic use of terrain, maneuvers obstacles and hidden weapons to distract. Each combatant is trying to find a psychological weakness for his opponent, a chink in their armour even if it's not physical. The same is true in chess competitions between grandmasters. For masters the one to make a mistake first is the loser. In BRP this will come out mechanically but somewhat boringly if you just roll dice back and forth. It might be more interesting if you incorporate some kind of parallel psychological duel which affects the combat rolls from round to round. How well the duellists know each other would be a factor here, as well as their Passions (if you use those).

@Nikoli has used a variant of this Spell Law system too. I think unlike me he did more work on conversions for the Rolemaster damaging spells, and he also discusses using the critical tables in some detail. Of course we in this thread so far were all party to that one too 🙂

29 minutes ago, Simlasa said:

I love Magic World, but yeah, there are always going to be rules that want to be tweaked to evoke a particular setting. Not that there aren't already a good variety of magic systems for the different flavors of BRP... some variations of BRP even have each spell as a separate skill.
Is this Rolemaster adaptation something you created or is it available online somewhere? Rolemaster was an influence on DCC, which is the aesthetic I'm after at the moment. I've never played that system but it seems to have inspired a number of other RPGs to some degree.

 

I never played Rolemaster, but I picked up some of the books later including Spell Law which is a huge tome of lists of spells. I made (and use) a simple system which would work with any lists of levelled spells. Rolemaster has Sorcery, Chanelling (like Divine Magic in RQ or clerical magic in D&D) and Mentalism. The main difference as far as I could see was where the magic energy comes from. Sorcery uses a kind of general magical power, like Maelstrom or RQ. Divine Magic comes from the gods direct; and Mentalism comes from the caster's own power. When players want to make a sorcerer character I get them to think about what sort of magical tradition they've come from and pick a few lists to be their collection of magical skills. Their skill in each list determines which spells they can cast because of the levels. As their skill level improves they get access to the more powerful spells in the list -- though not necessarily to the power required to cast them.

Spell Law does have a whole lot of magical criticals in it (Rolemaster is famous for detailed criticals per weapon in Arms Law) but I haven't used them.

1 hour ago, rsanford said:

I would love to see how you converted Maelstrom magic. I did the same thing but finally came to the conclusion that Maelstrom Magic just isn’t that useful. I would be pleased to be wrong!

 

 

Looks like we've discussed this before! 😆

The Maelstrom system encourages tactical thinking from the wizard to make events more probable and therefore easier to affect with magic. For example getting a gust of wind to blow someone down is more probable (and dangerous) on a mountainside than in a cellar. In fact the system works best for those mages who can think on their feet and take advantage of their environment. It is freeform magic after all. What the system does not do is duplicate D&D (or even BRP) magic with its fireballs and resurrections and pizazz. If you want fiery effects you need to have a fire source handy (fireballs become probable if you are near an active volcano). The system is subtle because no one else really knows if magic happened or just some freak of probability. Maelstrom also allows for the concept of a specialist in a particular domain of magic, which makes the probability of casting spells affecting that domain one notch easier, and the choice of domain is also freeform. Eg. I had one Maelstrom sorcerer who specialised in shadow magic, so he was often using magic to sneak and conceal using shadows.

The Maelstrom system requires both the GM and sorcerer player to be able to think quickly about the likelihood of events. It makes for interesting, improvising play.