Questbird

Thanks for posting. I bought the scifi and fantasy versions to have a look. There are lots of BRP-compatible spells, psi powers, equipment and vehicles for those who have been complaining about their lack in core BRP. The professions available are also interesting. The sci fi version has rules for running robots and androids as PCs, as well as various animal-human-hybrid-like aliens. They (the games, not the aliens) are very hefty for the price and clearly a lot of work has gone into their creation.

I excited. 🤩

I think that was the way it worked in Worlds of Wonder and it always made sense to me.

In Elric! the benefits of being a Champion of the Balance were deliberately nerfed because the Balance was so weak in the Young Kingdoms. However I liked it that you could achieve Balance apotheosis only by hard and consistent roleplaying, with the temptations of Law (good skills) and Chaos (easy access to magic) always there. I also loved it that the Champion of the Balance could win the game. In my long Elric! campaign in Nehwon I had one sorcerer become a Champion of Chaos and one Vadagh-like elf become a Champion of Law, but no one ever got near being a Champion of the Balance, though some tried.

Elric! was the game which weaned me permanently off D&D. It was my first and favourite flavour of BRP. It perfectly suited the Nehwon setting which I'd already started playing in. The slim, well-laid out volume was a joy to work with at the table and showed that you could have a full game without having to refer to a pile of tomes. Like @NickMiddleton I give the honorable mention to the Games Workshop Stormbringer 3, with its crazy random character generation and its terrible glue binding.

Like Fire & Sword: d20 -based but basically cut from the same cloth; incidentally a good game with a completely free licence. Now back to more nitpicking about the BRP OGL licence..

I've been painting 28mm sci-fi miniatures with my children, for use with Infinity. It is very relaxing and mindful to sit in the sunshine painting together.

I agree. It is important for a license to be as unambiguous as possible. Future lawyers will argue about the the spirit of the agreement. Some early free and open software licenses (one of the ancestors of things like the OGL and Creative Commons licenses) caused problems down the track because of their language. Even the most robust and well-thought out free software licenses have been through several revisions. It's a great gesture from Chaosium to open up Basic Roleplaying. Many of the constructive criticisms of the published license have been from those who have published good d100-related things before and may do so again with this new license if the legal status of those new works is clear -- to everyone's benefit.

I think it is very positive news to have a BRP Open Game License. I think the intent of the document is clear, though the nitty-gritty of legal language may cause headaches down the track. My question is, what is the status of the monographs under this document? Some of them were pretty damn fine. Did rights to their content revert to their owners, and can they re-publish them with the BRP OGL, or are they still covered by the fact that they were once published by Chaosium so referencing them is out of bounds? My favourite monographs and a hat-tip to their creators who are still on these forums: The Green -- haven't played it yet, but I still want to. Swords of Cydoria -- love it; this one at least got re-printed/re-imagined as Exiled in Eris, but it wasn't BRP 🙃 Rubble and Ruin -- Played it the other day! Aces High -- Haven't played it but would if I was doing a wild west campaign

With an official conversion I would be more likely to buy it.

I've used Zoom to work from home recently and I've been impressed with its quality. It's pretty easy to use and allows screen sharing if you want to show maps or websites (eg. dice rollers or atmospheric pictures). I've asked my gaming gang if they want to try it on Friday, which was to be our regular meetup. One thing to note - I think the free tier of Zoom limits you to 40 mins (and 100 people but that's one big rpg session). However I don't think it's a problem if the meeting is called by someone on the paid tier -- but I can't confirm that. I suppose you could always have breaks every half hour or so if that did turn out to be a problem. Zoom is just a video/screen sharing app so it is fine for ease-of-use but doesn't give you any special gaming prep powers except for the screen sharing (which would require prep in order to remain immersive). I haven't tried Roll20 (not a D&Der) or heard of Astral before, but I'd be interested to hear how you go with those.

This article made me want to play Pirates of Drinax. I went to DriveThruRPG and it was reasonably cheap but the exchange rate is a killer for me at the moment, so I desisted. Especially since I have not much chance of playing it in COVID-19 lockdown. Maybe later. I'm still thinking about it.

If you wanted to represent different amounts of loot you could have a limited number of wealth checks to share between the players. So for example if you had four players but they hadn't found much wealth that session you could make them share 3, 2 or 1 wealth checks -- someone would miss out. Of course, the wealth levels is an abstraction meant for games where loot gathering is not the prime goal. If your game is truly an old school shoot and loot dungeon bash, you mght be better off counting coins, gems, statuettes, necklaces, goblets, silks -- and encumbrance!

Related but non-BRP. In Star Wars Edge of Empire and Infinity RPG there are 'talents' associated with each skill which are like Blood Tide Stunts. Talents have mini skill trees which require other talents; you could do the same with Stunts by requiring a Stunt as a prerequisite for another stunt in @Lloyd Dupont's table above. Also similar to Perks in the computer game Skyrim, which give you extra abilities associated with a skill. I really liked the Stunts in Blood Tide, but I haven't used them or anything else in the game yet.

And how do you carry it home without revealing to all and sundry that there's an empty dragon cave filled with loot? That's what caused the Battle of the Five Armies.. On the original topic, Swords of Cydoria (science-fantasy) had a wealth 'skill' too. The rewards for various artifacts and so forth tended to be a permanent increase in Wealth. One thing you could do is use checks against wealth. So if you find a bunch of loot, you could have an experience check against your wealth at the end of the session. If you make it your wealth increases (like any other 'skill'). Super wealthy characters wouldn't increase their wealth level much by finding loot in this way; poor characters would get wealthy faster. Once everyone is Jeff Bezos, finding some gold in some dungeon is not going to cut it. Maybe characters with Bargain or Appraise or something might get more points from this method (eg. +1 skill points on a successful check). You could also have a monthly wealth check to see if you maintain your standard of living, if you have those in your game. Failure could indicate a loss of 1d6 Wealth (like a negative experience check). Special failure means you drop a lifestyle level. Special success means your lifestyle level increases for this month. A fumble could mean a catastrophic financial event (fraud, bankruptcy, lost investments, sunken ships, burned home or warehouses etc). A critical might permanently increase your standard of living (a windfall, inheritance, promotion, stipend, title, magic fish etc.) In either of those cases it would probably be a good idea to drop straight into roleplaying the event.

I agree. It's BRP; we should discuss it here unless the traffic goes wild.

You can also try a hitpointless variant, which I found worked well with science-fantasy Swords of Cydoria

Yes, I have seen Eclipse Phase and I agree it's pretty good. I'm looking for something a bit less transhuman. I'm really enjoying reading the Infinity RPG right now. It's set 170 years in the future, with recognisable political groups, a few exo-planets accesible by wormhole, semi-randomly generated characters and a decent equipment list. Probably the same sort of zone as Traveller 2300, which I never got into but liked the idea. Which reminds me: @pansophy has uploaded a 2300AD conversion to BRP, available right here. Maybe that might help your immediate problem.

I've been looking for a setting like this for a while, a hard sci-fi Solar System game, collecting various rules sets along the way and not quite finding it. I have RIver of Heaven and M-Space (and Clement Sector, Fading Suns, Jovian Chronicles, Coriolis, Infinity RPG..) The old Cyberpunk 2020 had deep space supplement that was pretty good, but would be way out of print now. I saw one called Shadows Over Sol recently, which was Solar system-based and had some interesting ideas, and there is High Colonies coming up (a recent Kickstarter) from Columbia Games (Hârnmaster like, so approaches BRP). Cthulhu Rising was a Solar system-based Monograph (hard to find now) by Jon Ossoway , author of River of Heaven, with some extra solar planets which I was going to ignore (along with the Cthulhu mythos in space stuff). Another old Cthulhu monograph which may be useful (in terms of skills, equipment) is End Times, which was set on Mars in the future when Earth has been overwhelmed by the Cthulhu mythos. There are elements of The Expanse which are scifi-horror, but I'm generally not so interested in that particular crossover genre.

Don't forget River of Heaven, an OpenQuest-derived sci fi game. So there are two d100-DNA scifi settings in print. Just not by Chaosium.

The most original element in my generator (which I started with @colinabrett) was the concept of an 'improvement', which basically was a set of skills which gets a number of points added to them. You could get improvements from background, career, education etc. Improvements would stack on a set of base skills so that you end up with a complete character after several iterations. Different variants of BRP handled this in different ways. The system was designed to be able to create characters for a number of BRP variants. I started with BRP (fantasy) and Magic World, which do character creation slightly differently, and later added most of Mythras Imperative. Basically the improvement would take any list of skills, for example a set of career skills for a particular profession like Warrior, divide them into Primary, Secondary and Other and allocate points to them in a certain ratio. For BRP it would pick 1-3 random skills from the list and make them Primary, and allocate 40% of the available points. A further 1d4+1 would be Secondary and they would get 35% of the points. The rest of the skills in the list would be Other and get the remaining 25% of the points divided between them. Magic World worked a little differently: it allocates a fixed number of points to certain skills, for example 60% to one skill and 40% to two other skills. The improvement works the same way, choosing skills from the list and allocating the points in that more rigid style. I got this working for Mythras Imperative too, which has standard and professional skills for each career but the code started to get out of hand. Here's an example: BRP fantasy Explorer. She has 1d3 Primary skills: (I rolled 2) and 1d4+1 Secondary skills: (I rolled 2 again) and all the rest (6) other skills. A 'Normal' level BRP game gives her 250 points to spend on these skills with a maximum of 75 allocated to any particular skill. The ratio is 0.4 : 0.35 : 0.25 for Primary/Secondary/Other skills, which translates to: 100 points for the Primary skills, 88 points secondary, and 62 points other. So each other skill gets 10% and the last one 12%. Skill list: Track (other) 10% Hide (Secondary) 44% Spot (Primary) 50% Listen (other) 10% Climb (other) 10% Navigate (Primary) 50% Stealth (other) 10% Missile Weapon (other) 10% Melee Weapon (other) 12% Knowledge (Region) (Secondary) 44% These values would be added on to the base skills. So this person is like a scout; particularly knowledgeable about moving unseen through a certain piece of countryside, and observing things in that wilderness. It is a bit tedious to randomise character generation like this, though I just did exactly that with some online dice rollers. But you do get some interesting or unexpected skill combinations sometimes.

The percentile thing is a big part of it. The simplicity of it means you can pretty easily move between genres or import systems you like from other BRP games.

I don't hate the BRP character creation process, it's just maybe something I don't love about BRP. You can certainly make interesting and distinctive characters with it. Openquest is one that goes the fewer skills route, which can make it easier. It's not necessarily just the speed. Maybe I'm just feeling some nostalgia for crazy random characters from Stormbringer 2nd edition. One thing about random characters, or characters which you don't have complete control over is that they can take you out of your roleplaying comfort zone and make you try new things instead of playing (Eternal champion style?) the same character in different forms, over and over. Recently I've been reading the Infinity RPG which is not very like BRP but which has an interesting semi-random character generation system a little like Traveller's. You go through 9 'decision points' in your character's life, starting with homeworld, early life, education, career and so forth. Each one has certain cumulative effects on your starting attributes, skills, gear and other traits. At each point you roll randomly and consult various charts but you have 5 'Life points' which you can spend along the way to override the dice rolls. So you can craft the kind of character you want to an extent, or go totally random (you get to spend any remaining Life points at the end to get more gear or more 'Infinity' [=hero/fate] points). This system is interesting but it isn't much faster than spending skill points. A while ago I started, but didn't finish a random Magic World character generator which did randomise the skill selection in a reasonably clever way from the career skills. It wouldn't be difficult at all to come up with a few charts to do the same in BRP; it's just not there out of the box.

I agree with those 5. I've run an Elric!/Magic World campaign set in Fritz Leiber's Nehwon for many years, a classic sword and sorcery setting. That setting fits all but one of the list above (no.2) perfectly. There are many gods in Nehwon but none of them are very powerful. There isn't really an obvious good vs evil or law vs. chaos. But I really like the Allegiance system so I use it anyway.

I like most things about BRP. I wouldn't be a regular at these forums if I didn't. My favourites are the skill mechanic, so easily explained, the complementary skill improvement mechanic; and the relatively lethal combat. However if pressed to mention one thing I don't like so much, it would be that characters can take a long time to make. You have to allocate skill points and that takes some time. I guess you could randomise things, but it doesn't work that way out of the box.