frogspawner

As I say, when success levels are tied I use "best margin" (i.e. target - roll) ...

There you go - one number minus another! Hard maths! :eek:

Or one-way time travel from the near future, as per Julian May's Multi-Coloured Land books (that'd not be a bad setting, either...)

One problem is to find a plausible explanation for the existence of humans in the planet (all those books assume humans are long gone).

Re-colonization by humans from (a variety of) ancient outposts established on far-flung stars?

I think the "Hide/Spot duel" is the classic example that makes people perceive a need for opposed rolls. So if we can come up with a good system for it, using a sequence of normal rolls, then we can forget the whole Opposed Rolls issue... and the hard maths!

(Regarding opposition to opposed rolls: )

I can understand the "keep it moving" mentality, but there is a problem with roll and move on. If a PC makes a stealth roll and sneaks past the guard, no problem. But if an NPC assassin makes a stealth roll and sneaks past the PC they are going to wonder why they didn't get a chance to see the person. Particularly if it results in the death of a PC.

"But I have a Spot of 100%! How could he sneak past me?"

If you only roll the Sneak, a character with 100%+ will almost never (96-100) be spotted no matter how good a lookout you are.

You modify the assassin's stealth roll. And/or allow a modified listen roll for the prospective victim. Or do a POW:POW roll or other resistance table roll. Or treat it as an ambush (it's not necessarily going to be fatal, even if the assassin hits...this ain't D&D). Lots of ways or combinations of ways, and they all work without bogging things down with a counter-intuitive resisted roll, and they create tension and fun just the same. Hey, whatever works.

I liked the RQ:AiG version. A successful sneak/hide halved the listen/scan chance of the guard (more if the guard was not expecting anything).

I'd prefer to keep the (Sneak/Spot) rolls entirely separate, and not affect each other at all if possible. Something more like the attack v parry system in combat, perhaps? (without opposed rolls, of course!)

Or maybe somehow use a concept of "layers" of success: Just sneaking by/away is easy (one success required); but sneaking close to someone to pick pockets is harder (two successes); and assasination is even harder (a third success required)?

Currently I use a system where each side makes it's rolls (Sneak/Hide and Listen/Spot respectively) but the success levels just contribute bonus/penalties to a final perception-type Idea Roll by the spotter. Still not really happy with this method though.

Heroism is in what you do and how you do it, not in how skilled you are.

Exactly.

If you HeroQuest at Heroically high levels, you need the skills and abilities to back it up. Period. Full stop. There's no getting away from it.

Right again, of course. Sorry, I shouldn't have mentioned "high level" - just loose talk. The point was the roughly-equal importance of personality/obligation etc.

Politics is normally a background thing where HeroQuesting is concerned. ... Obligations are important on many levels. Your relationships to your clan/village/city/nation/cult will determine how much support you get on the Quest. ... Personality is also something that affects a HeroQuest, or can affect a HeroQuest. ...

Politics/obligations are probably too setting-specific to generalize into a system easily. But personality should be manageable.

HeroQuest (the Game) covers this very well with Relationships and Personality Traits having the same weight as Skills and Abilities. BRP doesn't quite have that depth in mapping personality and relationships, but there's no reason why it can't.

That's pretty much what I'd like to aim for. I'm now revisiting Hero Wars (which I assume isn't too different from HQ in this), with the intention of mining it for personality/relationship stuff. Having looked at similar bits from Pendragon recently, I'm now thinking they're a bit restrictive and, frankly, dull. But maybe HW/HQ is a bit too wide-ranging? And does it lack "crunch" (i.e. proper rules), or am I just not understanding it enough yet? Anyway, the FATE system has been mentioned in another thread as combining RQ & HQ well, so I guess I'd better check that out too...

I had looked in all the RQ3 supplements and pulled out stat summaries of all the nasty greeblies. That's the bit that took an hour and died ... so it will have to wait until another day.

Very sad. It'd be good to get a consensus on what skill-levels constitute "High", "Hero" and "Superhero", just for consistency's sake.

(BTW, the roasting elf's suffering was obviously needless - elf can always be eaten raw.)

How would you determine when something was 'significant'?

I'd think that would be the player's call. A classic exmaple would be.

Spend a point to get a better result when selling your airspeeder? No.

Spend a Point to make sure your proton torpedoes blow up the Death Star. YES!!

Quite. It'd be up to the player to decide when to spend the point(s). However I'm intending to only allow it for 'luckily' escaping death, not just improving any old rolls* - and that is a GM decision. (*The Death Star shot could be argued, though - given they'd die if he didn't make it. But maybe Leia's roll, not Luke's...?).

Just one roll of 'Defence' ability, I think, but xPOW spent on it (decided before rolling). If it comes up, the damage is reduced by 10 (20 for special) (or some other sort of bonus for non-damaging deadly stuff?). A 'lucky escape' would normally be interpreted as riding the blow, involving a 5ft knockback, or possibly the shot hitting that bible/flask they always carry in their breast pocket...

But not going back in time and changing things that had already 'happened' (i.e. been rolled). Because, yes, it's all about how it feels. Is that ok?

I think the main thing I wanna keep is the feeling of danger...

Absolutely.

Yeah, bad news. I just Ctrl-C it before hitting submit (like carrying an umbrella to prevent rain). But would that've helped in this case?

Thanks for the advice, gents. I shall give it a try, allowing Defence rolls at a cost of 1 POW (MP, I mean). Hopefully it'll be balanced between magic-specialists and combat-specialists by the fact that the combat-guys will need it more often, and the magic-guys put themselves more at risk the more they cast...

One further thing I'm not sure of - should they be able to do more rolls if the first fails, and so on until POW runs out?

I'm sure characters can be just as heroic with 185% skills as with 500%+, or even 20W11 (whatever that means. 1120%?). That's just the sort of discrepancy we've have to put up with by not having a system to guide us.

Until now...?

BTW, my Cults of Terror says the Crimson Bat had Fly 500%, Bite 750% - and could swallow anything under SIZ 50 on a normal success (and 90 on a special, i.e., er, normally!). What other official yardsticks are there?

Whatever the actual percentages, is it fair to say that Questing at Heroically high levels should be as much about personality, obligations and politics as about combat and the usual adventuring skills?

I just picked up a used copy of Hero Wars: Roleplaying in Glorantha with some X-Mas cash. :thumb:

Uh, oh...

Sorry - just had to step in with a health warning as soon as I saw this! ...

I was going to do the same. ...

...and they're absolutely right.

I got the 'deluxe' boxed set of Hero Wars a few years ago (that same book, plus three others: Glorantha - Introduction to the Hero Wars (background), Narrators's Book - Game Mastering in the Hero Wars, and one of related short stories (quite good). Interesting, but I still haven't figured out how to play it. And it's put me off HeroQuest (the 2nd ed.) big time, too. But not HeroQuesting...

Maybe only half a war doesn't allow time for that to happen...

Oh my god. "This product may contain nuts" the packets said. And, innocently, I ate them... <spits copiously>

This could be an interesting thread :thumb:

Firstly, my take on this is that there's no need to reinvent the wheel. It's clear that HeroQuesting-as-we-know-it is fairly well understood, and doesn't require mega-high-powered characters to do it. It's more a ritual / worship / pathwalking thing than fighting The Big Ugly Monster, and there are a lot of good essays around on how to do it. ...

It certainly should be interesting - so far so good!

Agreed. I also agree that BRP does great for gritty-level adventuring. And now it's at least claiming to handle super-levels too... I'm sure we can help it acheive that aim, even if there are some gaps initially!

How do the Divine Intervention/Favour systems from SB work? Could they do the job, or be extended?

I see the problem with (lack of) Hit Points. Maybe something like the 'Defence' ability I described over on the Fate Points thread might help.

As for super-spells, that's what HeroQuesting could be for. One reason I like soltakss's HQ system (from reading, I've not done any such exalted adventuring) is it makes Heroic acts (like super-Jumping) possible if you have done the relevant Quest - effectively you gain a super-Rune spell for it. This fits seamlessly with the existing Rune magic system - if you assume the normal Rune spells are just ones with easy, well-known Quest-paths and just take an afternoon's role-play and incense-sniffing at the temple (and POW sacrifice) to get.

How about, if we had a kind of Mastery system, and a character criticalled, it might be possible to bump up that critical into something like a Heroic Critical, and achieve a superhuman effect?

<snip>

Any thoughts?

I'm not convinced of a benefit, mathematically, to dividing into 'Mastery levels' and applying 'bumps'. In your example: 150% Jump gives 30% Special, 7% Critical; but 50% Jump +1bump would give 50% Success (bumped to Special), 10% Special (bumped to Critical), 2% Critical (bumped to super-Critical). It just seems to add inaccuracy in translation (and slightly upgrade the results). Why bother? I'd probably allow a critical Jump to cover double height/length anyway.

Is the idea for these Mastery/bump things to make a kind of 'plateau' of Heroic activity (then Superheroic, then Godlike...), so that Heroes can basically ignore non-heroes trying to oppose them, and rise above the common herd?

PS: Is "BEM" a bowdlerized acronym for "Big Ugly Monster"?

Even with that I'm leery in a linear die roll game like BRP until you get so good that you're making the roll almost all the time; just the fact you have to roll multiple times makes it mathematically almost certain to screw up soon.

Yeah, I agree! But it's better than not having such Defence at all - that way you 'screw up' every time (at least this way, you have to be doubly unlucky for that bad hit to coincide with the failed defence roll). But I know it's not ideal - that's why I'm asking the massed intellect of the forum to help come up with something better...

I think any sort of soulition needs to be of the limited number of uses variety to keep things intestesing. A pool that can get used up is more dramatic, espeically since it can be tracked while getting used up, than a dice mechanic that will turn a hit into a statsitical abnormality.

I see what you mean. I wanted a mechanism that wasn't too reliable, though, i.e. predictable as to when it was going to 'run out' (like the D&D abomination of gross numbers of HPs). Not RQ2-style Defence either - that just races away and becomes daft pretty quickly (and difficult to calculate).

Maybe using a POW point per Defence roll (like you suggested before elsewhere - thanks again!) would make it selective, reserving it for use only when significant (a principle I approve of generally). I'm just not sure about the feel of an 'elective' mechanism: would it be too much like "OK, I'm killed - so I'll play my Get-out-of-death-free Card"? Too much like a spell? (Also, I have the problem of not currently using POW. And it'd be more valuable to some characters than others). But I'm coming round to liking the idea more...

I'd say the fledgeling heroes are on their own, though - it's the ones who've made the grade to 100% Defence that deserve saving from unexpected ignominous deaths...

I'm fairly familiar with the various pre-Hero Wars heroquesting rulessets out there, and there are some interesting ideas in them, although the "super-RuneQuest" approach can get a bit munchkiny. I think the "Mastery" system of the current HeroQuest is a very good mechanism, and could well be applicable to BRP quite easily.

Where you see munchkinism (powergaming?) in the super-RuneQuest idea, I see design elegance and scalability. Venturing into the "Otherworld" is a good excuse for simply dividing skills by a factor (5 or whatever), and avoiding scaling problems. We've got a good system already (BRP) - so let's use it.

I don't know how it would work outside Glorantha. It has never worked for me in non-Gloranthan games. Mythic Russia has a HQ stab at Fantasy Europe HeroQuests, but those are really interacting with Fairy Tales and Planes and don't really work for me.

Really? I would have thought the whole other-world idea of HeroQuesting would lend itself pretty well to all sorts of other worlds: Faerie-style, Arthurian, Olympian, Native American (of course - and hence even Western!), Australian, Cthuloid...

Agreed on the skill resolution method - the Mastery concept of bumps up and down is something I'm going to experiment with in BRP to see if it's a go-er.

It looks like the "bumping" idea has crept into new BRP as an option for the way to use Fate Points. (Which I tried a few years ago, but didn't like).

I think the "bolt-on" approach of MRQ's Legendary Abilities is very D&D clunky, but there may be a kernel of a good idea there. Overall I'd prefer something more integral to the rules - which is what HQ does well.

Some of the benefits you could get from HeroQuests could be like that. And that'd be a better excuse for getting them.

For me, that's part of the fun - seeing the characters grow, the continuity of a campaign. I did find that RQ sort of petered out into "more of the same" rules-wise after you got to reasonably high level (Rune Lord Priest).

Absolutely. It's crying out for a good HeroQuest system! Let's find one...

I have given POW gain rolls for successfully resisting and overcoming with spells and in spirit combat, with no difference in the chance of getting one until you have maxed out, but still my players do not have high POW. Divine Intervention keeps them down

So you don't see the problem - because you've already solved it by giving POW-gain rolls for successfully resisting. Pity the rest of us, trailing in your wake...

At least now we have all a solution, as the official BRP way gives 'em for that too.

Re Pendragon Traits... I am thinking of having the values (and passions too) add to rolls ala Hero Quest rather than the Inspiration rolls in PD.

I'd recommend fewer, bigger bonuses (say, doubling the skill) rather than fiddly "augments" of +10,+20,+50 or whatever. Straight adds are inconsistent in value between low (say 30%) and high levels (say 120%), and make it harder to calculate new special/critical chances etc.

As for HeroQuesting, it's time to use that nice new "New Thread" button...

...a few spots where imperial measurements are provided.

Three cheers for Creeping Imperialism!

About a Defence/Luck skill used to avoid damage...

That depends on how Defense is handled. In most versions of BRP I'm familiar with, it had to be broken up amidst attackers in some way or another, so numbers quickly diluted it badly.

That's why the version of Defence I'm talking about isn't divided. Just roll it, full-value, against any hit and reduce the damage accordingly.

Most GMs I know are not going to worry too much if one PC increases five skills by 6% while I've failed all my experience rolls after the session. Hero points however are potential lifesavers and require close attention.

That said, I realize now I've started a rather esoteric discussion that probably few readers are interested in.

Just the right level of esoteric-ness for me, thanks! I have had to field complaints from players about exactly this point - Hero Points (aka Defence points round my way) are too valuable to submit to the vagaries of increase-rolls. And they were right, too - so now I have to just award them, straight, without the usual mechanic. But, as I give them as rewards for good roleplaying, I think the linearity is fair.

I trust you already got the one I mentioned a while ago (from the images) about Chapter Eleven being called "Creatures" on the contents page, but referred to as "Bestiary" on p16 & p19 (and maybe elsewhere)?

THe difficult lies in the "Batman scenario" I mentioned earlier. Left strictly to the dice, a hero will get overwhelmed by numbers....

1) The PC needs to make a luck roll and then can mark off damage against his Magic/Luck/Power Points....

2) Give players points for criticals and/or special successes...

Yes, sheer numbers will be overwhelming at some point. Once a character reaches 100% Defence, though, they can pretty much rely on ignoring most incoming damage. Enough to give them delusions of god-hood? I hope not - players still seem pretty nervous at that level (which I'd say is about equivalent to Rune-Lord).

I'm reluctant to give up this system unless it's proved to be broken. Thanks for the suggestions, but: #1 doesn't eliminate chanciness, adds admin and would make POW much more valuable; #2 seems to act after a hit has happened (a fine distinction, I know) but that doesn't feel quite right - and again it adds admin overhead. By all means give 'Fate Points' for critical/specials if you like - but I actually prefer to have a mechanism that rewards RP (and by not 'spending' the points when they are used, you get a tally of how much good RP you've done with that character, which I think is neat).

BTW, what are the Book options?

Double+ PC hitpoints like I suggested or a Fate point model ala WFRP.

I don't like systems that give the PCs unfair advantages over NPCs - that makes them into bullies, not the heroes they should be. Doubling their HPs would do that - just like D&D (spit). I don't know how FPs work in WFRP, but I wouldn't be keen on allowing story-fiddles or re-rolls or 'get-out-of-death free' cards. Would the players stand for it if the NPCs did that too?

Without some sort of active defense against missile attacks we'll have problems.

Some variation on Dodge/Defence seems to me to be the way to go. It can always be ascribed to 'luck', even if 'gods' don't exist in the genre.

I currently use a skill (called 'Defence', but not working quite like the old RQ2) which is a percentage chance to avoid any damage from melee/missile/magic (or at least 10hp worth of it). And the 'skill' increases only via ticks for role-playing, so that's how PCs can get better at it than the NPCs. Obviously it's chancy and unreliable below 100%, so I'm not sure about it. But maybe that's a good thing. Any better ideas?

It looks like the default BRP method to gain power rolls is if you overcome someone with a higher power than yours OR if you successfully resist someone with a higher power. Which sounds pretty good to me.

Yes, that does sound good! More restricted (slightly) and yet more balanced (in just the way we were independently proposing) than the old RQ method. Nice one, BRP!

Maybe Chaosium are hoping one set of options will emerge as generally accepted, so they'll get a "generic, universal" system to build on...

Hi J. (In Triff's absence, welcome a-board!)

Yes, bin that AD&D and go BRP! I had an AD&D campaign since the 70's, and wasted 20 years being dissatisfied and trying to fix the rules - before finally switching to a BRP/RQ-like system. And what a relief: It's great! It works! It feels so right! (And vampiric ducks are entirely optional).

You'll love it, since you so like CoC... (oo-er, missus!)