KingSkin

Case 2 makes sense to me, a more elegant way of doing than my earlier suggestion. With regards to the horse training aspect, I think they only need to be trained for combat in general (i.e so they don't get panicked by the smell of blood or shy away from heavily armed bastards charging towards them) rather than specifically to act as an archery platform.

Historically it just took knowing the secret and practicing it, a lot. To represent that aspect I'd make it an Archery roll with a -30% difficulty but only allow characters with both Archery and Ride at something like 65% - 75% minimum to attempt it. I don't even think the horse has to be specifically trained for it. As long as they can gallop in a straight line, when they hit the right speed their gait changes so they start leaving the ground completey. At that point you're not getting bounced around so you can aim and fire while the horse sort of sails through the air. It just provides a more stable platform than when you're getting bounced around which is the key to it. You could restrict it's use to a particular culture though as it takes a lot to learn and a French knight would get laughed out of court if he was seen trying it. Mainly because he'd miss with the first few thousand arrows he fired and also fall off a lot which can be bloody dangerous as well as embarrasing. For the less realistic option you could make it a separate skill only available to students of a particular martial arts school. As to using it, they have to be galloping or they have no chance of success which can limit its utility in a lot of gaming situations. If someone tries it without having high enough skills or while simply cantering along I'd make it a straight 01% chance of success. Although my players point out I'm a right bastard sometimes so you'll probably want to tailor the above for your own campaign/GMing style. Oh, and I think stirrups also need to have been invented because I think a key component is standing up in them but I may be wrong on that score.

@Solardog: If you're interested in SF themed music then Fear Factory's Oblivion album is pretty cool. It's a sort of cyberpunk concept album. But by far the best I've ever heard is the Deltron 3030 album by Del Tha Funky Homosapien. He appears on quite a few Gorillaz tracks so you may well recognise his voice. It's another concept album with a loose story running through it but it's very cool with a lot of great tracks. I've linked a few below on YouTube: Battlesong He was supposed to be doing a follow-up album but so far it hasn't been finished. Hopefully next year although I've been saying that for about the 5 years now...

If you're interested in using an Action Point system I wrote one up and chucked it into the downloads section (here). I haven't had much of a chance to test it out properly but we've had a few fights in my game and it's worked pretty well so far. The biggest stumbling block is the delay between declaration and resolution but people seem to get it locked in after a couple of goes.

I think that statement is key and I think it's generic simply because there are a lot of different interpretations of 'martial arts', even in 'real-world' discussions. As I see it, the basic skill simply represents someone who is skilled at inflicting fight-stopping damage, quickly and decisively. Whether that skill is because they've spent years going to a kick-boxing class or been through enough actual fights to keep their head and know what they're doing, it can be applied to almost all settings without causing problems. For, let's say, a campaign set in Fuedal China, you may want to emphasise this ability and write up different abilities and bonuses for certain schools (bonuses to particular strikes or special combat actions, for instance). Then again, for a campaign set in actual Fuedal China and not the Hong-Kong/Hollywood version of it, you may well want to stick with the basic rules. This brings up a second problem with writing martial arts rules. People often have widely differing ideas of what that actually means. I, to my own mind at least, think I have a fairly realistic view on it. Training in a dojo/gym/whatever is all well and good but proper fights are far better preparation for being in a fight. I also tend to avoid ascribing quasi-supernatural traits to Eastern martial arts because, well frankly, it's ludicrous. I'm not saying that studying a martial art is pointless but when considering martial arts you have to accept that boxing and having fights are both martial arts in their own right. They may not be as elegant as Hapkido or Wing-Chun but trust me, simply punching someone in the face is often every bit as effective as delivery an axe-kick or grabbing their pyjamas and flipping them over. It honestly doesn't come down to which art is better (which is something you see a lot of and which is neatly curtailed by the standard BRP system) but things like how good the fighter is, the combat situation itself, who wants the fight more and what they're prepared to do to win. Now, grappling is slightly different to a standard combat in that you're not aiming to do enough sheer damage to either force a retreat or take someone down but rather trying to force them to submit due to raw pain (as in Aikido/Sytema style joint-locks) or by making it their only option (say, a choke-hold or a full-nelson). I haven't really played about with them but an option to lock someone up and then force a submission (i.e. they stop fighting when you release them) or force them to make CON-related Resistance Rolls or surrender wold make a lot of sense. I can't say I've read the grappling rules in any great detail so this may well already be covered. Zit: I think we're broadly thinking along the same lines but for the sort of abilities you specifically mentioned (if I was running a game for which that sort of thing was appropriate) I wouldn't use Brawling and Martial Arts as is. Instead you'd have one skill for your pure combat ability (say, Karate) and another for your school (e.g. Shotokan), your school skill would cover all the abilities you listed (perhaps giving Stat bonuses/special abilities at particular thresholds) while the Karate skill would be the equivalent of the standard Martial Arts score and would give you the enhanced damage effects. If I was doing it I'd also probably double the points cost compared to standard skills simply because of the utility you'd get out of it. Also, thinking about writing up schools like that, you could limit all the 'goofy' abilities to skill thresholds above 100 so you could use the same system to represent both realistic and Wuxia-style abilities. Hmmm, I may have to give this some thought...

See, I don't fudge dice at all. Apart from things like hidden Spot rolls and the like, everything gets rolled out in the open so I have no option but to go with the flow. I prefer it that way because it means that while the GM and players can both influence the story, there's a 3rd element at work that generates unexpected results and forces you to take them into account. I used to fudge dice but now these days I tend to think that if you ignore the dice when they give a result you don't like then you may as well not use them. I realise that's a bit extreme but I love the unexpected results the 'Lords of the Dice' bring to the table. It can be a bit shit when a character dies unexpectedly to a random goon with a lucky shot and I know some people hate to lose or kill characters like that but from either end of the table I genuinely prefer it. If every death is a poignant moment wrapped up in acres of plot then it loses its sting, especially when players are facing mooks and gain that feeling of Plot Armour. That's just my take on it though. I recently lost a character because he tried to punch out a dragon (partly through stupidity, partly through trying to buy his friends time to close a portal) and the GM felt bad because he was a much-loved character that brought a lot of fun (and 'pragmatic violence') to the table. But my point was that if he'd fudged it then I would have felt like I was playing the character on borrowed time and it would have spiked the enjoyment I got from him. Then again, when I used to run D&D I stripped out all the resurrection magic because I got bored of seeing death get neutered like that so I may be a bit odd here. Oh, and the extra life thing was just when a developer revealed too much behind the curtain. If he hadn't couched it in terms of each Fate Point being a 1UP I wouldn't have minded because that's pretty much how they function. But describing it like that just reminded me too forcefully that's its just another game and put me off the idea of them. Although, as I said earlier, if I end up running a slightly less gritty game, or my players decide they want them, I'll probably use a modify the system to something closer to yours and slot it in.

I used to quite like them, having used Fate/Fortune/Hero points in a few different systems. I tend to stay away from them these days though (I'm not using them in my current campaign) for a couple of reasons. Firstly, WFRPs 2nd Ed (which is a great game) used them as a way to avoid death. Unfortunately the developer's notes section made it clear that these are basically an 'extra life' for characters 'just like in a computer game'. That just broke them for me and I started to dislike the idea of them. Secondly, they tend to fall into the same position as potions. People never want to use them in case they need them later for something more important so they just end up stock-piled for no reason. I have one player who is the exception to this. He will, without fail, blow all available points on the first roll he fails in a game because he's determined to use them up. I was toying with using them for my current game but seem to vaguely remember not liking the BRP implementation when I read through the rules. Although I may use them for another, more heroic game, when this one ends. Maybe tinker with them a little to make them more what I want.

Damn man, that sucks. Personally I'd recommend just going "**** it" and running it yourself anyway. It's such a simple system at heart that if you've got any experience with running games at all you should find it a breeze. I'd suggest starting off with as few of the optional rules turned on as possible at the start and running something fairly simple like a one-shot (which for me usually means 4-5 sessions) to get you and the players used to it. The beauty of BRP is that pretty much everyone gets it immediately so the rules just sit behind the game, supporting it perfectly without getting in the way. I've run some really difficult systems in the past but BRP is such a dream to run that I don't think you really need the experience of playing it first. EDIT: I've just been censored by the forum. I feel like I'm in a Marvel Max comix, "edgy" but for god's sake don't actually print any swearing. How odd.

That's interesting. I've worn proper hauberk before and didn't find myself noticably slowed although I didn't do any fighting in it so that's not a great example. I'm never used MRQII* so I don't know how the combat manouevres work but it sounds as though they may balance out the loss of speed. For me to use armour that slowed me it would have to be a hell of a lot better than the best non-slowing alternative but from my own experience, acting first in a fight makes all the difference. *I've got a copy of GW/Avalon Hill RQII and the 'Advanced Runequest' book which I picked up for 50p at a car-boot sale last year. Very nicely books, I always loved RQ when I first played it years ago because it's not bog-standard 'Tolkien fan-fic' fantasy which just bores me. That and CoC made me fall in love with the system originally because it just does its thing well in the background and lets you concentrate on telling the story and playing the game.

That's how I play it, penalising combat skills is counter-intuitive to its function. As I said in the Strike Ranks thread, if armour slows you down or impairs your ability to hit it's just going to get you killed. I'd only apply skill penalties to fine motor actions (like lockpicking or repair) and things like swimming (where the weight will impair you) or athletics (where you need complete freedom of movement). Although even the athletics may be going too far. I've heard of accounts of, I think an Italian Count, who could perform full backflips on his horse while wearing plate.

That seems like the most sensible way to go about it and I don't think you're actually sacrificing realism with that approach. Different creatures have different ratios of musculature to overall mass. Chimpanzees for instance are proportionately much stronger than humans so factoring it directly from Size would give wonky results that don't mirror the real world. By picking what feels right rather than slavishly using a fixed system for factoring SIZ/STR/CON in relation to each other you'll probably get a more realistic set of stats.

I don't know about rays but sharks have bloody amazing immune systems. Our are targetted so when something comes along our body throws general shit at it to slow it down then starts tailoring its defences. Sharks instead have what we have as babies (up until about 30 days I think) which is just a broad spectrum immune system that hits everything. The advantage is that they're incredibly resistant to most diseases but because they just use the same blanket defence against everything, if something comes along that can get through it will always get through. They have particular problems with a common form of occular parasite that their immune systems just can't touch.

@Froggy: Cheers buddy, glad you liked the vid and I'd welcome any feedback on the AP system. I'm finally getting my game together so we'll be starting on Monday and I'm expecting combat to come up during character gen (because I'm trying something a bit odd). That should give me a brief chance to test it. @Pete: Slowing your actions rather than losing them sounds better but I still think that's a good way to get killed. From my days of running and playing CoC I've always said that going first in BRP is critical (that and good tactics) and anything that reduces your chances to act first means you're going to suffer more attacks. When a single hit can effectively take someone out then you want to being going first so you can eliminate the opposition before they retaliate. I haven't used RQII's combat system but it wouldn't surprise me if armour that slows you down is more likely to get you killed than weaker armour that lets you move at your full speed. @Green-Eyed Monster: That would make more sense (although possibly be a little too harsh) but if that is the case then it's pretty well-hidden. As I said before, I may well have made some drastically wrong assumptions as to what the SR system is meant to do. So it could be that some of the issues I had with it are because I was expecting a washing machine to give a blowjob.

I like the idea of random armour as a shortcut to hit locations but I don't plan on using it for the same reason I never used the daft damage staging rules in Shadowrun; it just adds an extra step to combat and I like to try and keep things fast moving.

I don't like my players rolling dice at all. It makes them look shifty and I'm convinced they're up to something. Sometimes they'll idly roll dice 'for the fun of it' when I haven't called for a roll at all. Those guys are the worst of the bunch. I keep a little file on each of them, noting down their shifty rolls and whenever they write on their character sheets. What are they writing?

I've always assumed the active side makes the roll because, well, it's the 'active' side.

Good use of tactics is key in a game where you don't collect HP like my suit does cat hairs. Whenever I'm running a game as brutal as BRP can be I always drill it into my players that smart, tactical thinking will save lives and D&D-esque "it's only a million orcs, let's go toe-to-toe" gameplay will result in more dead players than a nuclear strike on London's West End (or Broadway for you Yanks).

The HP question is a bit tricky, especially if you're using Hit Locations. I love how brutal the system is but it can put players off when they realise how easily a guy with a knife can kill them. I'd recommend using the basic HP system as even with doubling their HPs a decent hit to any location will wipe it out instantly. I love hit location systems but the problem with the BRP system is that instead of just adding more detail it makes the game a lot harsher. This is because the weapons are set up to deal damage to 'global' HP where location doesn't matter. A shot from a gun dealing 10 points is usually survivable when it's being dealt to abstract body areas (think of it as points from the leg reinforcing the hand that got hit). When you divide it down by location a 10-point hit is going to wreck a limb easily. I'm planning on using the doubled-HP in my upcoming game but mainly because it's SF and so there are going to be some fairly damaging weapons around and while I want the players to feel combat is dangerous I don't really want them getting wiped out the first time they pick a fight with someone toting an assault rifle. For a fantasy game that may not be such a problem. The healing suggestions are very useful though. Natural healing rates in BRP are fairly realistic and while this can be great to underline how dangerous combat can be often you won't want to take a 3-week break while someone heals up. I played a D&D game once where our party (of two) didn't have a healer and the GM just refused to make up for this by letting us stock up on potions or find easy healing between adventures. It led to a very frustrating game. Perhaps that was because our D&D expectations were different. If it had been WFRPs or BRP we probably would have accepted it more easily but quick and easy healing are D&D's bread and butter.

OK, so I've been a bit ill and haven't actually been on here much so I missed a lot of the discussion (or had a banging headache and couldn't be bothered to reply!) I've looked at what people have been saying and agree that the reach and SR systems aren't supposed to work together. I should have read into things more carefully before assuming that. Anyway, I could live with the SR melee system as it stands. Unfortunately that still doesn't sort out my biggest issue with the SR system which is that missile combat is needlessly confusing and almost all projectile weapons take the same amount of time to use. There's no way a bow should be as quick as a pistol but under the current rules it is. I'll admit that I upon re-reading the SR rules I may be expecting them to do something they were never intended for but as it stands I can't see what their purpose is really. They move toward a more detailed system than DEX ranks but don't seem to go far enough and sort of end up as a half-way house. Anyway, rather than whine on about it I've simplified the Action Point rules from my homebrew game and rewritten them for BRP. I've uploaded the first draft (here) although they haven't been playtested in their current form in any way so any feedback would help. If anyone finds them useful let me know. There are lots of options in there and you can play about with the costs of actions if you don't like how they're currently set up. There's also a brief 'Mook AP' section to make it easier to deal with lots of low-level NPCs, if that's something that comes up in your games. Oh, and a quick note about the MRQ2 armour rules: I haven't read them but I don't like any rules which make armour actually slow you down in combat. If it's slowing your physical actions down it's going to get you killed. Even full medieval plate didn't do that. Watch this to see it explained fully. If you want to model that properly then armour should cost fatigue points to fight in but not reduce your actions. If I get a chance today I'll bash up the AP tracker quickly and upload that. It's fairly basic though and any simply numbered track with space for a marker will do the job well enough.

Yeah, I understand why long weapons have a lower SR than short ones but that is also covered by the weapon lengths system so it seems as though the speed of smaller weapon is not taken into account at all whereas the extra reach gets accounted for twice. I can live with the SR system for melee as it is though, the major problems are with missile weapons. The listed SRs don't really make sense and aren't explained well and it doesn't seem to make much of a difference what sort of weapon you're using. Any ideas?

I've been re-reading the SR rules of my shiny BRP hardback as I was planning on using them for my game but I keep running up against some odd portions of them which don't seem to make sense. For instance, the fact that small weapons are slower sort of makes sense because of the added range a sword has over a dagger. But the weapon length rules seem to cover that so it feels like small weapons are getting penalised twice for the same thing. If you're within range to stab with a knife it's a hell of a lot quicker than doing it with a sword. I'm thinking I may change around the weapon speeds (so a dagger is 1 SR and a sword is 3) and enforce the length rules. That should balance it out a bit more. It seems a bit of a cumbersome way of having to do it though. The other problem comes when you look at missile weapons. The x/SR system doesn't make a lot of sense and unfortunately isn't explained too well. Page 200 states that missile weapons have a default SR of 0 but then in the equipment section (page 257) it says that 1/SR (the most common SR for missile weapons) means you fire your first shot on your Dex rank then add your Dex rank +3 to this to find out when you can fire next. This brings up a couple of problems, firstly which one is correct (possibly it's both but if so it's really badly explained), secondly, if 1/SR actually means Dex rank + 3 then what does 2/SR mean? I can't find that explained anywhere. I think it means you can fire twice on the same SR but I can't see why, for instance, an SMG would have 2/SR and an assault rifle only 1/SR. Does that mean you just ignore the Attacks listing for weapons when you use the SR system? Also, according to the stats in the book it takes just as long to shoot a bow twice as it does to fire a pistol twice. Which is plainly bollocks. I've fired both and drawing and nocking an arrow takes longer than recovering from the minimal recoil of a pistol. Firing both barrels of a shotgun takes less time than two arrows. I like the idea of using the SR system because I like the added granularity to actions but there doesn't seem much point if most weapons have been kludged together into a single listing. So, what have others done to sort this mess out? I don't want to use the plain Dex ranks system but I don't really want to have to make too many changes to the SR system. Any nice, easy tweaks people have come up with would be much appreciated. If worst comes to worst I can port over my own AP system but I was hoping to be able to avoid that much work. The most annoying part of this for me is that I love every other aspect of the system and really like the fact that it doesn't need much in the way of house-ruling, just turning options on or off works excellently. This is the only real sticking point I've found.

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that spear-users would have had to rely on something other than the business end in times of desperation but whether it was part of military doctrine and consequently something they actually practiced is another matter. Again it comes down to how much of a factor skill should play in determining Initiative and even what you can do when you act. If you wanted the extra detail you could work out skill bands for each weapon class and give extra abilities for higher levels. So, for spears you could have something like: 01 - 25: Basic proficiency, no bonus 26 - 50: 1 'free' Parry per round 51 - 75: +1 to Opponent's SR when they attack you 76 - 100: +/- 20 to Hit Location (your choice) when attacking Obviously games that allow skills above 100 could add in more spectacular 'epic level' abilities in the higher bands.

Reach is an advantage in any combat but whether or not is should be tied into initiative is another question. With a spear for instance, if someone gets past the head then your weapon is far less useful. As to the no-initiative stuff, the Karma system (by Bards and Sages) does this. My group's using it at the moment. Basically everyone declares their actions then rolls and tells the GM their results. Opposed actions are compared on a success Vs failure basis (and then degree of success is factored in if both succeed) and the GM interprets the results. It works pretty well but does require a decent GM who can hold a fair amount of stuff in his head at a time. I do like it though and it certainly ends all the initiative arguments that can bog a game down. Multiple attacks are handled by giving a negative modifier to all attacks by a character. If the person they're attacking beats all their rolls then all attacks fail, if one rolls higher than the defender then only one hits. You can also split attacks. Last time I did this I tossed a mace in the face of one attacker and stepped in to take a sword swing at another. Both rolls (after modifiers) beat the relevant defender's rolls and so they both got hit. It works quite well but I could see some GMs not getting on with it at all and also some players really disliking the lack of initiative. I'd be willing to bet however, that a new player with no prior experience of initiative systems would find it simple and intuitive and I doubt they'd ever consider there could be another way of handling it.

I'd have to agree with much of this. Certainly weapon length is useful for keeping an opponent at bay but broadly rolling that into initiative is an extra level of abstraction. When it comes to talking about pure speed of action/reaction natural reflexes play a role but more important is muscle-memory. Someone who has repeated the same movements over and over doesn't need to factor in their thinking time as it's their body carrying out the motion automatically without the need for conscious thought on how to do it. The brain only needs to initiate the 'attack' or 'parry' command and the body then takes over. That's why martial arts use katas and armies drill soldiers repeatedly in doing the same thing over and over. To me that suggests that skill level should also be factored into Initiative if you're going for absolute realism. As to how much that comes down to an argument of natural ability Vs experience and training.