Ravenheart87

I have a soft spot for RQ3e, especially the british Basic version. Nice, clean, short, and has a simple point distribution method instead of fiddling with professions.

On 3/25/2024 at 8:47 AM, Mugen said:

And yet my biggest problem with the system is not linked to these YZEisms, as it's completely possible to defend and attack in the same round in Forbidden Lands.

It's like playing in Pendragon, but you're forced to chose between reckless attack and defensive stance, and the the latter doesn't give you a Shield bonus if you're hit.

You can dodge and parry multiple multiple times, it is just gated behind a Heroic Ability and costs WP. It doesn't bother me that actions are limited (it does a quite good job at reducing the whiff factor), though I too prefer multiple parries and dodges with cumulative penalties.

38 minutes ago, g33k said:

I admit to a bit of puzzlement, on a couple of items above...

"A production budget for their game."
If the creators are mostly "new and upcoming" then they don't likely have any reasonable background to estimate such a budget.  If their target is a 48 page manuscript with at least a small color artwork on most pages, plus a half-page piece at each chapter, and a full-page cover... what should their art budget be?  Are they up to 64 pages in total?  If they have no skills/background in layout, what should they budget for?  Etc...

"A competitor market analysis of their game, showcasing where it fits in the market as a product."
Similarly, I'm unclear how much competence the newbie author/dev brings to this element.  I suspect that any of a half-dozen folks @Chaosium will do better at this with a minute or two of thought, than any given "new and upcoming creator" will do after 20-30 hours of research.

Thanks for any assistance in helping me resolve these  puzzlements!

My thoughts exactly. This isn't for the hobbyists, but small publishers who probably did some crowd funding or released some products already.

On 3/5/2024 at 1:18 AM, GothmogIV said:

(not 7e because...someone decided that attributes would be 1-100 instead of 3-18, which is how GOD ORDAINED IT!) 

Divide them by 5. They are basically the characteristic rolls from other BRP-based games. Converting NPCs from CoC7e is just as a no-brainer as from any other BRP-based game. Monsters on the other hand...

Alas they had to introduce a separate sub-system for monsters, without any guidance for creating or converting them. Its terminology is nebulous (where do NPCs end and monsters begin?), its mechanics are confusing (half the FAQ is about how parrying, blocking, tests, conditions work for monsters), and goes against one of the best features of the BRP family: that every creature is described using the same terminology and follows the same mechanics. Even the simplification of NPC stat blocks backfired, because after the beta feedback they had to introduce a bunch of rules of thumbs for handling untrained skills and attributes for them, which are all over the place in the rulebook...

Make no mistake, I love Dragonbane and I know the rules by heart at this point. But it could have been a cleaner and tighter game if they resisted introducing their Year Zero Engine-isms into the system and leaned closer to the original BRP design principles. But enough ranting, I have a Duck Tower to convert from RuneQuest to Dragonbane...

23 hours ago, smiorgan said:

Sorry. Real life hitting hard on me these days. But, I'll go back to this experiment as soon as I have a bit of time. The first objective will be to solo my way out of Hwamgaarl using Stormbringer scenario "See Hwamgaarl and die" and Dragonbane's solo rules. 

No pressure, I'm in similar shoes. :)

Characteristic rolls are good for generic test not covered by skills plus they define a lot of other attributes - not everything is a skill after all, like your HP, encumbrance, initiative, and so on. They might even influence skills, if you use skill category modifiers. They are also useful in describing someone.

I'm keeping an eye on this hoping you will do a conversion of Stormbringer's magic system.

Never heard that word before.

How about Mission Briefing or Datalog?

7 hours ago, g33k said:

Rolemaster/MERP/etc is an entirely-different (and much more complex) mechanic; I don't think it is related in any way to BRP (given the complexity, I presume RM was in the design-stages for a LONG time... too long for RQ/BRP to be foundational).

WHFRP is... I dunno, maybe mechanically-inspired by RQ/BRP?  But pretty different.

RoleMaster was a bunch of rule modules for AD&D that ended up being a game of its own, and ironically the core for D&D's modernization when Monte Cook brought its design principles with him to D&D3e. It is a d100 + bonus vs DC mechanic, but there are charts for various DCs with different results. It has nothing to do mechanically with RQ/BRP.

WFRP had a mix of integer and percentile characteristics. The scale of percentile characteristics, how much they can improve, and how skills work is totally different from RQ/BRP.

8 hours ago, GothmogIV said:

(I believe the original Dragonbane in Sweden was an iteration of BRP or Runequest).

It was basically the original BRP booklet and Worlds of Wonder's Magic World booklet translated to swedish.

1 hour ago, Renfield said:

* How does everyone feel about Characteristics being just  for base modifiers?  (i.e.  You only ever roll the x2 , x3, x4 mod on the Characteristic if you absolutely cannot find a skill that matches... but.... with that said, we are thinking of making a slightly more typical Skill that ties to each Characteristic which should catch 99% of all 'generic' uses of a Characteristic...) 

example:

- Instead of rolling Dexterity x2,  x3 for doing some odd jump tumble, balance move = we have a skill of "Acrobatics", and that is described as "Covers all non-athletic/martial-art style movements" in the way a generic Dex roll would cover.

- or instead of Strength x2, x3 for lifting, pushing, dragging, etc = we have a skill of "Brawn" and that is described as "Covers all acts of non-combat actions where weight matters" in the way a generic Str roll would cover.

Note that this functionally is the same as Characteristic xN,   but for my players it has eliminated the knee-jerk panic of mid-session maths.  And it lets me leverage the above mentioned Difficulty penalties instead of changing the multiplier  (that way its a rather standard mechanic/math for all actions in the game)

(and yes yes i know, some folks are ok with multiply/division mid-game.  But I have found in my experience, that if there is a clever way to not do it and get same results, it won't hurt the mechanics of the game at all, and eliminates all complaints to such.)

There are already characteristic rolls with char x 5% value (Effort, Stamina, etc.), so you are one step away from turning them into a skill. Mythras, OpenQuest also turned them into skills (e.g. Brawn, Athletics). In both games every test is a skill test, they don't use characteristic rolls or resitance matrices.

3 hours ago, NickMiddleton said:

Personally, I loathe a single skill per spell (makes it all way to fiddly IMO, especially if one adds additional skills a la RQ3 Sorcery)... but a SINGLE Sorcery skill is very appealing, and something I now do in Magic World, with an option to NOT roll for "rote casting" without risk, or roll and get bonuses at the risk of failure or fumble imposing deleterious effects on the casting.  

I had a BRP-lite homebrew I never finished where I did something similar, but put the magic spells into four or five skills. I might revisit the idea, but instead of D&D-like rigid magic schools I think I should put them into actual traditions which might overlap here and there if they share similar interests - kind of like Combat Styles in Mythras.

Your sorcery idea sounds neat too. And tempting, because the sorcery spell list is a bit more flavourful than the magic spell list.

5 hours ago, DreadDomain said:

Cheekiness aside, my point is that we now have concrete evidence the issue with Magic World has little to do with content and a lot to do with everything else from art, graphic design, layout, marketing, Chaosium lack of brand recognition at the time. Notice how all of those things have now been resolved with Chaosium and Chaosium's products?

The extremely generic title Magic World didn't help either. If I saw it first today it would remind me of a classic Gunshow comic strip line ("Dare you enter my magical realm?"). Stormbringer? RuneQuest? Dragonbane? Now those sound cool as hell and immediately catch my attention. Magic World? Not so much. Before someone wants to hold a history lesson: yes, I know where the name comes from. But MW ended up being quite different from the little booklet in the Worlds of Wonder boxed set, which is a product only BRP/RQ grognards remembered by the 2000s anyway.

On a different note... If you had the BRP rulebook only, which magic system would you use for a sword & sorcery setting? I like in Magic that each spell is a different skill, it neatly goes hand in hand with the rest of the system, but since the original WoW MW booklet the spell prices got really high, plus the casting test followed by resistance roll feels a bit much. Sorcery is cool and has a great spell list, but I feel it lacks something with not having skill rolls, and the demon summoning cost still feels wrong (it kept the 9 MP starting cost, the book also mentions varying costs for demons á la Elric!, but omits any rules about how to calculate it and how it works).

I do it for NPCs in Mythras and my Warhammer hack too. And RuneQuest kinda did something similar back in the day to give some NPCs more character: I recall some of them had besides your usual skills some, which where no actual skills in any rulebook or supplement with a percentile value.

I would use Magic World, probably mostly as written. Which is not that different from what @Jason D mentioned above, because MW is Elric! with the serial numbers filed off. The BRP rulebook also has recommendations for what rules you should use for different genres in the Settings chapter.

On 12/31/2023 at 12:06 PM, Dangermouse said:

Exceeding 100% in a skill - Page 119
There's a conflict in the text which says:

"Only successful experience rolls can increase skills beyond 100%. If your character has 100% or higher in a skill, you must roll over 100 on D100 for your character to succeed at an experience roll, which means that the experience modifier is necessary. No matter how much over 100% the skill has risen, any roll of 100 or over earns a skill improvement."

So is it a roll greater than 100 to improve or a roll greater than or equal to 100?
 

Yeah, the last part should be over too. That's why you need an experience modifier: you can't roll over 100 on d100 without it.

14 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Oh, and let's not forget RingWorld. IMO it probably would have done better as a generic sci-fi RPG, without the Larry Niven stuff. 

RngWorld totally deserves a new version, even if it's with serial numbers filed off like Magic World.

The vibe is really strong with Dragonbane too, that's sure.

Magic World has a decent list of fantasy professions.

9 minutes ago, Mugen said:

As for myself, I didn't like their implementation of opposed skills, where ties are broken using a "lower roll wins" rule, and the fact that, by default, you have to forfeit your attack to defend yourself in melee.

Opposed rolls are meant to be used only rarely as I understand. I would have went with a blackjack tiebreaker too. I might actually do so.

The action economy is probably the way it is so you can have heroic abilities that override your limitations (there are HAs that allow you to parry and dodge more at the cost of WP). I have no issue with that. I'm more grumpy about things that I would normally just ask a skill check for, but here require a Heroic Ability - like disguise and crafting. It feels like some skills got neutered of their expected functions to justify the presence of some HAs.

I love it and can't wait to give it a go. It has a simple core system and covers a lot in a single rulebook. I am torn on some of their "frialiganisms" though - especially the monster mechanics and some of the heroic abilities.

On 11/11/2023 at 4:20 AM, g33k said:

Parry???

The "Melee Weapon (various)" skill (p.47) and "Shield" skill (p.50) say these are the skills to use when Parrying.
The "Parry" discussion on p.125 reinforces this:  your "combat skill" is your parry skill.

Jason's very-fine summary of the differences between BGB-vs-UGE editions explicitly states (with emphasis added by me):

-- https://www.chaosium.com/blogbasic-roleplaying-universal-game-engine7-changes-in-the-new-edition/

But there is a separate "Parry" skill listed on p.48 !!?!

Is this entry an erroneous leftover from prior version, or...?
(There is no "CHA2036" when I search the Well of Daliath, and previously-addressed issues have been removed from this thread; how should I have searched to see if this issue has already been addressed?  n.b. my PDF-reader's "Find" returned 179 instances of "Parry," and I haven't checked them all out... )

I mentioned this several times in the errate thread, but my comments got deleted without any feedback or fix, so I have absolutely no clue why it's still there. It's confusing, especially for newbies.

The two magic systems are the old Magic World booklet's magic system (each spell is a percentile skill) and Elric!'s sorcery.

Kudos for using thick and sturdy matt paper for the rulebook.