NickMiddleton

Presumably a mechanic to allow suitably "cinematic" / "pulp" actions in the game... Cheers, Nick

Weird. Will check that when I'm home. Chaosium have the PDFs too: Chaosium Inc. Chaosium Inc. - Uncounted Worlds #2 FREE PDF Cheers, Nick

Dustin posted (or at least updated) this on the Chaosium catalog last week - Chaosium Inc. - Articles info Cheers, Nick

Magic World is based on Elric!. It has a few RQ-ish features added (skill categories; cultural backgrounds) and has removed the detailed Demon rules to the Advanced Sorcery supplement, but it remains recognisably a revision of Elric!. Quite why that would "annoy" you I'm not sure, but if you didn't like Elric! or Stormbringer 5th edition, you almost certainly won't get on with Magic World. It bears far less resemblance to the earlier editions of Stormbringer however, so if it was those you weren't keen on, MW might be worth a look. Cheers, Nick

Not that it matters to me (my menal arithmetic is fine and I usually do all the math for all my players anyway) but multiplication is generally classified as the next most difficult operation after division... Cheers, Nick

And that IS a quantified and specific criteria. I would suggest that the halving idea may still not be the best solution anyway, because the differences are only really pronounced with high skills - and if you prefer gritty to cinematic, do you often see skills over 100, or even 150? If you do, the switch will be VERY noticeable and might well throw some people. Bear in mind that the Sheriff of Nottingham is probably 150% or so attack - an opponent that Errol Flyn would be VERY wary of riposting against. The riposte is for dealing with the mob of guards at the castle gates... And if you WERE running a cinematic, heroic game, would you want Erol Flyn to get bogged down in to a protracted fight with four no-name mooks at the castle gate? For gritty games I tend to a) cap skills at 100 anyway and revert to the Call of Cthulhu / RQ rule where you get to roll two out of three of an attack, a parry or a dodge each round, if I don't just revert to a subset of the BGB that looks almost exactly like RQIII... Cheers, Nick

So, explaining the terms I used; explaining the original rules contexts of the specific rules we are discussing (including highlighting some subtle features you appeared to have missed); pointing out the work that had gone into developing these rules; querying the exact criteria the change you were proposing is supposed to satisfy; explaining that I believe there is a large body of evidence supporting the assertion that division is more "difficult" than subtraction... This is "crushing dissent" is it? Here's the thing: one could easily justify using the halving rule more generally iff the exponential decay rate was what one wanted - and in some cases I can absolutely see that being the case. In part the arête rules I've done for Magic Wold I use the exponential decay as a deliberate design choice: but simply saying "it looks like another unrelated bit of the rules" doesn't strike me as a compelling reason to do so. Especially when your previous statements suggested you didn't see any significant differences between the two methods of successively reducing the defenders skill. People disagreeing with you is not "crushing dissent", nor is suggesting that revising rules needs a somewhat more robust and quantified criteria than "frogspawner thinks it should be different". Cheers, Nick

Errol Flyn, Rapier Skill 184%: Chunks - 154%, 124%, 94%, 64%, 34%, 4%; Halving 92%, 46%, 23%, 12%, 6%, 3%. The former is linear, the latter is exponential. Also note that the original intent of the halving / doubling rule (from one of the Call of Cthulhu Keeper's Companions) was that they be applied ONCE, not repeatedly. That is, make an overall assessment of ALL factors that apply and then either halve (because it's HARD) or double (because its EASY); not halve it for this reason, double it for that, then halve it for the other reason and halve again for that additional dis-benefit. The flat penalty per defense (originally IIRC only available to masters i.e. skill 90+) was explicitly designed so that high skill combatants against low skill opponents have a substantial advantage, which halving reduces significantly (third defense for Errol RAW is 124% - with halving its 46%; fourth defense is 94% vs 23%). Its BRP, it'll forgive most changes - but Elric! (now Magic World) and the BRP BGB are the two most considered and polished iterations of it Chaosium have ever produced and the numbers in the system were arrived at after substantial testing to deliver a consciously chosen result. Some debatable and ill-defined notion of "elegance" seems a poor reason to change something that already works well. And the last time I checked the general consensus and majority of evidence was that division is the basic arithmetic operation people find hardest / most time consuming: which certainly corroborates my experience in nearly 35 years of running and playing BRP games. Regards, Nick

On the contrary, actually - if you bother to consider the mathematical framework they operate within, 30 point penalties make a lot of sense. The "break points" fall in good positions (91+ skill to get 4, 120+ to get 5) for typical skill ranges but aren't too frequent, are generally easier for players to calculate on the fly and remain linear, unlike halving, which isn't linear, rapidly and sharply penalise subsequent defences and are generally harder to calculate on the fly... Regards, Nick

Minor correction - "Arete" does NOT use magic points at all. Although the starting point was Land of Ninjas ki skills (which do use mp) those are explicitly just another form of magic, and I thought it was more interesting and more appealing to have a system that purely rewards exceptional skill. It also provides a method of explaining, stating and allowing characters to create legendary items. Bit more explanation here - http://basicroleplaying.com/magic-world/magic-world-lets-talk-about-3082/4/#post47305 Cheers, Nick

I'm not a huge fan of the Investigators Companion (the professions are ok but the special abilities don't seem right to me), but have found both Keepers books useful. Malleus Monstrorum is a very useful reference work for a Keepervirrespective of the period they run in... But other suggestions do rather depend on weather you have a favoured period (Gaslight, 1920's) or location (Lovecraft country; the Severn valley etc) or prefer campaigns or standalone scenarios... Cheers, Nick

Neat Hmm - the last two are presumably fairly time consuming to produce (unless John has them both written and tested already?) so although I'd love them I'd be a little wary that they might impact the delivery date - it'll come as no surprise I (like many I suspect) want RoH YESTERDAY! Cheers, Nick

Being serious for a moment, I am well aware of the reputation of FGU / Scott Bizar and I'd be far more likely if I had a lottery win to use it to fund creating a BRP SF game with similar feel and the same inspirations (but the sort of production values a lottery win could fund) rather than try and untangle that particular mess. There was a serious effort to relaunch Ringworld, or a version rebadged as Known Space about eight years back, and subsequently some extensive discussion of the concept of a "BRP Space" on one or more of the BRP Yahoo groups. To summarize what I took away from those discussions: one should be DEEPLY skeptical that any licensed IP is either feasible or workable (especially for Chaosium, especially in the current market); and equally one should be highly critical of any generic "SF sourcebook" proposal. There is a surfeit of the latter for many generic RPG systems and pretty much every genre of SF; and the former bring with them a tangle of legal and practical complications that will seriously impact the viability of any product. My own opinion then and now is that what Chaosium / BRP needs is an in house SF game: based on the BGB, and through its subsystenms laying the groundwork for future takes on different sub-genres with a setting specifically tailored to maximize its appeal, whilst leaving the door open for future supplements Self contained in a single book, so a single purchase will let people get started. Fond as I am of Future*World neither it, nor even a "modern" reworking such as my own Outpost 19 fits the bill I suspect. Nor will a Ringworld with the serial numbers filed off I suspect. I think better approach is to think about what tabletop RPG's excel at; what their strengths are (teams; action on the scale of individuals; stories focused on characters) and build the initial setting from there and use that as the spring board for the game. Cheers, Nick

http://basicroleplaying.com/magic-world/core-rules-questions-3257/#post48840 Ben addressed that, I think. Nick

River of Heaven | D101 Games It's an SF game that draws on modern authors like Alastair Reynolds, Richard Morgan, Neal Asher and Ken MacLeod rather than the writings of the cyber punk authors of the seventies and eighties or the space opera writers of the fifties and sixties. Cheers, Nick

Primarily the magic system IIRC. Four is the edition Ben Monroe worked on that introduced the more complex, nuanced Demon breeds and powers system, but I don't remember and huge changes to other systems - but is been years sinc I looked a my copy. Cheers, Nick

What is the base score of Dodge? Now consider who has the advantage at diving out of the way of a rock thrown by a giant, the 8 stone weakling who happens to have average hand eye coordination (STR 8, DEX 11 so Dodge 26 untrained) or the athletic Warrior with similarly average coordination (STR 16, DEX 11 so Dodge 30)? The skill category bonuses are (especially in the case of skills like Dodge, which are based on other Stats) a small part of the starting values of skills, and represent a broad aptitude across a whole category. No, but it would over emphasise Dex's role in combat in my opinion as Dodge would start at 2.5 x DEX. If you are that bothered about it I'd exempt Dodge from having ANY skill category modifier tbh. Nick

I ran a 2300AD game with the BRP rules last year with no problems, and I've run a bunch of other SF stuff over the years using generic BRP. I am really looking forward to River of Heaven and I've been kicking around some ideas for a rather different take on BRP SF - alas time as ever is against me so it progresses slowly I keep plugging away though, I'd love there to be multiple, well supported BRP SF games, in the same way there are multiple fantasy games. If I win the lottery I'd buy the rights to Space Opera and retool it to use BRP. Cheers, Nick

The "framework" (of weapon groups that distinguish between large thrusting weapons, short thrusting weapons etc) is IIRC still there, so a Chronicler could easily add it back in. Interestingly, my original revision of the matrix and comments on the MS around that time suggests I at least was assuming that "impale" as a special effect of thrusting weapons WAS staying, but I'm at work so don't have access to all my notes and emails and I can't for the life of me remember the exact ebb and flow of the discussions on that specific topic. Errm, there is still at least one subtle distinction: if you manage to Dodge an attack at the same level of success, you avoid the attack entirely; if you Parry an attack at the same level of success, you have to hope your parrying object holds up... And Shields are are significantly tougher than weapons designed to parry, which are in turn significantly tougher than weapons NOT designed to parry... Cheers, Nick

Depending on which printing of Elric! you have, the footnotes and wording on the matrix can be ambiguous regarding how parrying works - add that to an ambiguous passage about shields in the combat chapter and its possible to get quite tied in knots over how weapon and shield parries work. I went through the table carefully and (hopefully!) disentangled those ambiguities and amended the terminology to suit the terminology of the BGB ("special" and "critical", rather than "critical" and "impale")... Cheers, Nick

Not radically, no. Magic World is a subtle evolution of the SB5 / Elric! rules, which were in turn ONE of the major sources for the "baseline" core system in the BGB (Call of Cthulhu sixth edition was the other). So the majority will look very familiar, albeit it is more straightforward to read as their aren't as many optional sub-systems as there are in the BGB. Plus, there are a few subtle tweaks: the "combat matrix" have been revised to the (corrected) Elric! version but with MW terminology for example... Cheers, Nick

Yes, it's part of the character creation process. Ben revised the basic concepts from RQIII and then found away to fit them into the streamlined MW framework. It's one of the small, subtle changes Ben made to Elric! that I really like. Cheers, Nick

The summoning rules for Magic World are in Advanced Sorcery (as the Summoner's Art) IIRC. Cheers, Nick

According to Sara's Facebook she's busy writing (she recently mentioned the full redraft of the CoFE novel) both fiction and RPG stuff, albeit a lot of rthe later is for FATE rather than BRP... Dunno why she's not been here of late though. Cheers, Nick

Very sad news. So many of the books I really rate from Chaosium have Lynn Willis' name (or one of his anagrammatic pseudonyms...) on them, as a writer or editor. My condolences to his family and friends. Nick