Questbird

I'm playing a Coriolis campaign at the moment. I'm finding that Traveller-inspired randomised improvisational style really useful for it. I'm sure the Coriolis writers use this too; it has its own d66 random tables scattered throughout the rulebook.

I remember seeing this one in a store back in the 90s and I was sorely tempted but even then it was very expensive (probably justified by its size) and I hadn't been playing enough Call of Cthulhu to justify it. I did regret not buying it; it disappeared from print soon afterwards. Nice to see it is back and who knows, maybe I'll pick it up now. (I have been playing -- extremely slowly -- my way through the old Curse of Cthulhu campaign. I started in 2004.)

Check out Fire and Sword By one of Runequest's original designers RayTurney. It has many interesting ideas including using the d20, hitpointless combat, abstracted cost-of-living and ways to track reputation and favours with different organisations. I learned a lot from reading Mr Turney's design notes for the game.

I ran Troubled Waters from River of Cradles as my first Runequest adventure. I started Borderlands later but by then the characters had no interest in working for Duke Raus. We completed the first adventure, then transported far away via a mystic portal from Horn Gate. I've got Dorastor: Land of Doom but I've never run it and it looks like it is designed to slaughter PCs (think Tomb of Horrors in AD&D). So probably not such a great choice for a first adventure, if that's what you meant.

If you want subtle magic, the Maelstrom system is excellent. It's hard for outsiders to tell if an effect is the result of magick, or a freak of nature. It's also great because it is situational and makes the spell caster think about their situation and timing. A spell to kill all of your enemies with lightning bolts is easier to cast on top of a tor in the middle of a howling storm than in a cellar underground. As for power level, there are many natural effects which can be very powerful. The Maelstrom system is all about modifying the likelihood of things occurring. Only 'impossible' things are hard (but not impossible) to magick into existence.

In my Lankhmar low-magic campaign I use a combination of Maelstrom freeform magick and Rolemaster Spell Law, where each list of spells is counted as a skill. The Spell Law spells are generally less powerful than the D&D ones. Between Spell Law and the Maelstrom system I can accommodate a wide diversity of spell casters. In fact no two are alike, which is as I like it.

It is certainly an excellent super-hero comic, one of the best. In it Mr Gaiman manages, by transplanting them from modern USA to 17th century England, to reveal the unchanged essence of these superheroes.

Yeah The Green and Swords of Cydoria were two of my favourite monograph settings too (also Rubble and Ruin).

I've refereed one session on roll20. It wasn't BRP (it was Coriolis) but I can give my impressions of how it works. The interface is a bit clunky but usable. There's a central visible screen (as described below) with a sidebar. The main bit of this sidebar you'll use is the chat window where you roll dice etc, but there's also a 'journal' section which has all of the character sheets and a 'jukebox' which lets you play sound effects and music. I was interested in this bit -- why not use the advantages of an online platform as well as enduring the disadvantages? You can also use the 'settings' to change the size of your video avatars and -- I like this one -- roll 3d dice across the screen visible to all players. For the referee, you need to do quite a bit of prep to upload your maps or pictures to create different screens which the players can see. The screens have three layers: a base (map) layer, a token layer, which the players can interact with, and a GM-only layer on top which the GM can change the visibility of objects there. The layers are a bit like those in Illustrator, Photoshop or the GIMP; they can have elements visible, there can be a grid overlay etc. The GM then moves a bookmark to indicate which screen is visible to the players at any given time. They were a bit fiddly to make but the tutorial was adequate. I found that it was tricky to create these screens 'on the fly' during the session but my pre-prepared ones worked quite well. In my session my players switched between a introductory scene-setting picture and a map of Coriolis Station where they were doing their investigation. To set up character sheets I created the character in the 'journal' section and then gave ownership of the character to their player. It was a new system for my group so I had had some 'zero sessions' with the players already on the platform to create their group and characters. I didn't find the character sheets perfectly easy to use but they were OK. I pretty much left it up to the players to refer to them during the session (similar to a live session). I had my adventure outline written up in a text file (an org-mode outline so I could easily flick around between sections) which I referred to on my computer while running the session (alt-tab back and forth). To change maps was just a matter of moving the bookmark between the pre-prepared screens. I also had the rulebook on the table next to my laptop, and spent a bit of time flicking around in that. Next time I would probably include some page references in my outline file. I used names only avatars partly to save screen space and partly to create an audio-only and more immersive RPG experience, a bit like a radio play. Again, trying to extract the strengths from the platform. However there were a few technical glitches and having no avatars made me miss some connection issues. Overall the session went quite well. A roll20 session needs to be quite well prepped, at least the technical side of pre-uploading maps, images and music you might need. There are music and sound effects available on the platform, but you need to go through them and listen to stuff to decide what's appropriate for your game.

Unfortunately true about the Stone Age roleplaying (I bought Land of Ice and Stone, BTW). There are interesting rpg settings, and there are the ones your players will agree to play in..

Magic World's main claim to fame was that it was the closest thing to Elric! that was in print at the time. My main campaign is a Nehwon swords and sorcery game using Elric! rules. I have two copies of that game, and my friends have a couple more. I didn't really need to buy Magic World (though I did anyway).

I'm about to start a Coriolis game on Roll20. It will be the first time I've used the platform as a GM (I have played D&D there this year).

M-Space has this Special Effect, which is basically suppressive fire: * in M-Space Willpower is a skill which begins at POWx2 BRP doesn't have Special Effects, which you gain from a difference in success levels between attacker and defender. However you could have a BRP attacker announce a Pin Down attack in their declaration. For each defender with lower DEX rank in the attacker's line of fire, make a check as described above. This costs one clip of ammunition, regardless of the outcome for regular firearms. For weapons designed for this kind of thing like rapid fire miniguns etc, you could have the attacker make a Luck roll to avoid running out of ammunition for each round of 'Pin Down' fire.

I think I missed Leviathan and Twilight's Peak but I remember playing Annic Nova and The Chamax Plague.

Not that it's not interesting, but Magic Systems in BRP is some way off topic from "D&D vs BRP".

I started young. My older brother was given Holmes D&D and we didn't know what it was. I found other gamers at primary and high school, and some others along the way. We had time to play for many hours in those days. I ended up GMing more often than not. I wasn't so confident with my own stuff as a kid so we played many pre-made adventures. I stuck with various incarnations of D&D and Traveller for years, but tried Gamma World and Paranoia and some others. Later I got into Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk and Shadowrun. It wasn't till the 90s that I picked up Elric! and was so amazed. For me running campaigns is one of the good things you can do with RPGs, and something which distinguishes it from computer RPGs and other games. I've run several of my own, or partially confected from adventures I've read. My best campaigns have lasted about 10 sessions. One of the things I like about pre-made adventures is that they can be a shared experience for gamers. For example, lots of people have experienced some version of The Keep on the Borderlands or various incarnations of Pavis, Sun County, Big Rubble or the Spinward Marches, sometimes multiple times or with different gaming groups. Of course, wives, kiddies and the rest happened to me and my friends too. A bit over a decade ago I started a regular monthly roleplaying session, as a compromise -- but it has lasted. I agree it does make long-term campaigns more difficult. It's hard to remember plot points. Sometimes people couldn't make it, so we ended up having several campaigns on the go (not all GM'd by me). Sometimes we'd have a meh session, which is more depressing when it's your only session for the month. I'd prefer to to game more frequently. By 2019 I was getting a bit burnt out with it, and a bit bored with my long-term Nehwon campaign and my players' characters. I started a Renaissance campaign and my players bailed after the second session. Then 2020 happened and RPGing ceased for me until the middle of the year when I got contacted by an overseas friend who wanted to play D&D. I think my regular sessions will resume, maybe with some changes next year. I did like the 6-week block idea -- thanks @David Scott. I might propose that to my players. I got sick of monthly chopping and changing between campaigns -- often due to very late cancellations. It resulted in poorly-planned and unsatisfying sessions.

The last straw for GMing D&D for me was many years ago when a party of 5th-6th level adventurers wiped out an entire tribe of orcs in a pitched battle. No tactics, just hack 'em up. It was like tanks vs. infantry in the 20th century.

Traveller had meson cannons where an antiparticle was calculated to decay inside the boundary of an enemy ship. Who knows what the range of that might be. But OK. If it's close range the next thing is that people will most likely have the same weapons (lasers or some kind of radiation weapons are the most likely, given the speeds). Any weapon which hits is likely to be pretty deadly (unless you have force shields) so it comes down to who shoots first. So ambushes and stealth will play a big part. A ship without much signature (or deliberately powered down to have low emissions) would wait for another and then BLAM, light up, and light 'em up. Unless they get detected first, in which case the other ship alters course and speeds away.

This discussion assumes space combat would be like aerial dogfights -- the Star Wars or Elite:Dangerous model. I think it would likely be more like submarine combat, fought at distances where the combatants can't see each other. Half the battle would be working out where your opponent was with sensors and/or guesswork, then your computers and theirs would activate the energy beams and someone would get fried. It's a bit less fun though.

I had a similar experience as others. Rolling the characters almost was the game. I did stick with it and played quite a few one shots and eventually the Traveller Adventure. It's only now that I can appreciate the many sub-systems of that game such as trade, system building and starship design, which remain exemplars of science-fictional game design.

I've had a positive experience with D&D5e this year. A friend from overseas has got into RPGs (namely D&D) through his work. He's been refereeing a D&D game for us over Roll20. It's my first experience with D&D5e and these online platforms. I'm probably of a similar vintage to @GothmogIV and not played D&D for a couple of decades. It was fun for me because my regular gaming was disrupted by the pandemic, so it was my only RPG fix. It was also great to re-connect with my friends, overseas and local. As far as actual play goes, I can see there is a sort of superhero vibe about even 1st level characters. Cantrips for example are moderate spells that can be cast without limit. They make low level spellcasters a lot more powerful. However I never minded D&D at the low levels -- it was after about 5th level that things began to get ridiculous. Low level D&D5e characters are more like BRP characters. They are moderately competent and they can still be killed if they are unlucky*. Also, knowing that I was going to play D&D I pulled out my tattered old copy of Central Casting, a gonzo fantasy background generator from the 80s by Paul (at the time, now Jenell) Jaquays and made a completely random character -- and then tried my best to fit that character into the D&D class stereotypes. The fun thing about that approach is that you can avoid making a comfortable 'same' character over and over. I rolled a somewhat dreamy and god-touched barbarian hunter whose family had been made into outcasts. That translated to..a D&D Barbarian complete with rage attacks and whatnot. But I picked proficiencies which sort of worked, like stealth, survival and religion. I just played with my friends, so I didn't bother with forums or worrying about racist orcs or wheelchair-bound wizards. Maybe that's also why I had a better time. * in fact my character did die later and got raised from the dead in true D&D style. But he did change his life and become a priest after that.

There has been much talk about BRP sci-fi variants on the main forums. But none of them have quite got to the game I want to play. There are a few games out there which definitely aren't BRP which are a bit closer. The science-fiction game I want to play is: Moderately hard science fiction Set entirely in a future Solar System which is not filled with horror and Cthulhoid monstrosities but (possibly strange and Vancean) flourishing human societies in space. No interstellar drives (except long-departed generation ships) No aliens (except for the genetically adrift human inhabitants of future interplanetary society) Probably no psi-powers, though I don't mind technological or biological enhancements Book inspirations: Kim Stanley Robinson 2312, Aurora and Mars Trilogy, Cecelia Holland Floating Worlds, Charles Stross Saturn's Children, Robert Heinlein The Moon is A Harsh Mistress, Dan Simmons Ilium and Olympos, Jan Mark The Ennead, SA Corey The Expanse (I haven't read the books only seen the show), with a dash of pulpiness with Colin Greenland's Take Back Plenty or Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. Film inspirations: Moon, 2001, maybe some Outland or Silent Running, but not Alien. Game inspirations: Eclipse Phase (without the extreme transhumanism), High Colonies (without the aliens), Jovian Chronicles (without the mecha), Jovian Nightmares/Cthulhu Rising (without Cthulhu), Shadows Over Sol (without the shadows), Infinity RPG (without the extra-solar planets), Traveller 2300AD (without the aliens or extra-solar planets).

In my Swords of Cydoria (scifi/fantasy) campaign I used a hitpointless system where you resist damage (via the Resistance Table) using a Resilience score of (SIZ+CON+POW)/3. If you made the check you were still fighting, but if you failed you were down (not necessarily dead) due to shock, pain or fear. Your Resilience could improve if your POW did. You could get a chance to increase POW if you made a harder than average Resilience check. (no maximum POW for humans), so like your system you could gradually get better at resisting damage. In the case of Swords of Cydoria I wanted to have the pulpy swords and blasters thing going without 'oh my hand has been shot off'. The hitpointless thing allowed it to be a bit less gritty.

My copy finally arrived the other day and it is impressive. I've had a bit of a glance through the PDF but I don't love that format so I'm looking forward to leafing through the physical Lyonesse tome. My first impressions: it is much thicker than I expected and the colour maps are lovely. Years ago, when I was thinking about where to base my campaign, Lyonesse was one of my top 3 choices. It lost out (to Fritz Leiber's Nehwon) simply because of the terrible map in my tattered Lyonesse paperbacks and that I would have to do the adaptation work which you have now done! I'm looking forward to reading it in detail.

Ok, I stand corrected. However it's still a pain to do so in RPGs. Players don't want to because there are only penalties to be had for carrying too much. And it's a lot of extra work for GMs to monitor it, so they don't either. Items accumulate on player's sheets and before you know it they are waltzing around with tons of stuff. And most of the time it doesn't really matter anyway. I do think it's funny that most RPGs regard coins as having negligible weight too.