NickMiddleton

I only found it yesterday (thank you link page!) and haven't given it a proper look yet. It looks more like an NPC creator from my first brief look. You can add new races, so I presume it can do monsters too. Perhaps not the really weird though.

My memory from using it last year on a PC was that it could create PC's and NPC's. for pretty much any race (icluding custom ones) - someone urgently needs to port it to a platform independent format like Java, or I'm going to have to look in to one of the emulatino / virtual machine options for running Windows XP on my iMac, as it was very useful when I was running RQIII last spring / summer.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

Great work on the stat block Shaira, and I'd have to agree that examples 3 and 4 in the PDF from DirkD seem clearest to me as well.

Does mean I have a chunk of stuff I'll have to revisit to make it look presentable now though...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

Looks fine in Camino (same engine as Firefox) and Safari 3.1 on my iMac. Black text against the parchment is a bit hard on the eyes, but apart from that, no complaints.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

While I'm enjoying the (mostly) positive comments about the EZ version, I've very mixed feelings about it knowing how substantial the edits I submitted* were.

When the edits are incorporated and the "official" version is available, I think people will notice a vast number of regrettable errors are gone, sections have been clarified, some unclear issues resolved or clarified, and some last-minute additions have made it just that much better.

* Again, my sincerest thanks to Sarah Newton "Shaira", Ben "Zomben" Monroe, Rodney "Threedeesix" Leary, and many others from this forum for their contributions to the editorial process.

We all knew that we were buying a proof copy - if anything it somewhat restores my faith in RPG publishing to hear that Chaosium have taken on board the comments about BRP0: too many modern RPG publishers these days would have simply released BRP zero and then thought about a revised printing if there was enough of customer reaction.

I'd always intended to get at least one copy of the full proper printing anyway

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

Pretty much all the "magic powers" in Dune are actually just phenomenally well trained and integrated skills. The "weirding way" is a superstitious Fremen description for Bene Gesserit prana-bindu based martial arts, "the Voice" is clearly described as a technique of vocal modulation and pitching aimed at a specific individual. Even the truth saying thing is IIRC a matter of reading body language and vocal nuances. The only thing that's not a matter of training alone is the actual pre-gog.

So I'd say Pete's correct that most of it could be handled by some setting specific skills, an dother wise there would be no "powers" at all. Appropriate equipment descriptions would be key - no energy weapons (apart from the banned lasguns...), eprsonal shields etc. The officially NOT cannon Dune Encyclopedia would make a good reference, especially if one were aiming at the "classic" setting of the original three novels.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

So basically they were used as "models" to show different shapes. And G Gygax went "hmmm if only they were numbered!"

I believe (from the Wired article somebody linked to earlier) that Gygax was using a system of picking sight unseen a single chit from a set numbered 1 to 20 before he was show the icosahedron in an education supply catalogue. So he already had the idea of a 1-20 random range (flat distribution etc.) but didn't have a die shape until he saw the icosahedron...

Nick Middleton

So what were icosohedrons used for before D&D?

Geometry lectures and classes - the Icosahedron, like the tetrahedron, cube, Octahedron, Dodechedron are Platonic solids - regular convex polhedra.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

The "Advanced Readers Copy" (aka BRP Zero) PoD edition of the new BRP book that Chaosium originally did for final proof-reading / editing purposes and which (due to fan pressure) they also made available through their web site, was printed in a limited run of 420 (Jason Durall, the author, getting number 1...), the number being written inthe front of each book.

Some one suggested those who had a copy sig which one they got, hence the x / 420 notation in many peopel's signatures...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

I ran my first BRP game a few days ago. It was a lot of fun. I'm using the Hollow Earth Expedition as background and BRP as the system.

One thing came up however. I kept whanting the players to make a perception role to see if they noticed certain things. However, there isn't a "perception" skill. The closest was "Insight" which doesn't seem quite what I was after. Nor does "Spot" seem correct. What do people here use? An "Idea" roll?

"Spot" would seem well suited to what you want:

The art of noticing tiny details, use this skill for to search a room for important details, find a hidden compartment, notice a fleeting detail, recognize a disguised foe, or spot enemies lying in ambush. Keen eyes and quick wits are both essential.

Alternatively, perhaps an Idea roll?

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

Hmm... I didn't even remember writing that. Might stop somebody from posting so maybe not the best idea.

I think I should probably adjust it so the CC license only counts for the wiki.

Or what do you think?

Since you mention it, I think defaulting ALL posts to CC, and burying that fact in the T&C's would probably NOT stand up in a European court if someone chose to contest it (but I am so NOT a lawyer) and more importantly could, if people understood the implications, put people off posting in the forums as effectively ANY idea they have posted here is now CC licensed...

So I think keeping the wiki as CC licensed is OK (but that fact needs prominently displaying), and the forums should default to normal copyright conventions - but if there's an easy way for those who wish to "opt in" to a CC license for their posts, that would be cool: perhaps a standard disclaimer on each page that provides people with a link to show how they can put a suitable blurb / link in their signatures?

I certainly think for those who AREN'T comfortable that everything they post here is CC licensed should have an easy way of opting out even if the majority are in favour of the CC licensing...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

My instinct has always been to use pretty much full bore RQIII to capture the brutal feel of the original setting: Spirit Magic and the Shaman rules (with a little adaptation) cover the Will; Elemental and Dragon-King Worship is neatly covered by Divine Magic and Defiling / Preserving is an adaptation of Sorcery where the MP's DON'T come from the individual but from the surrounding flora (terrain dictates the rate at which MP can be drawn, defiling is significantly faster but defiles the area affected, MP drawn and terrain determine the area of effect of the defiling).

However, now BRP Zero is out and the full version hopefully soon, I'd be tempted to look at adapting the Psychic powers and Magic systems from that for Athasian Psionics and Preserving / Defiling. I still think RQIII Divine Magic is pretty good fit for Templar / Elemental worship powers though.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

In celebration of the release of Avenues & Alleyways (The supplement for a game I've most looked forward to ever in my entire life).

I think I'm looking forward to Iron Ring more myself...

I'm one of the seemingly few people who bought and absolutely love this game. I just cant seem to find any kind of fan community (apart from the Contested Grounds boards). Does anyone have any good links, scenarios or just general experiences with running the game? What stuff did you live what did you not like so much?

I've never persuaded a group to play it and I'm increasingly fearful that it's going to end up as one of those games I own but never get to play - which would be a tragedy as it is a fabulous setting.

The system, whilst basically very much my sort of thing (unobtrusive, bascially simulationist), isn't scinitillating, and I've have been happer with some more substantive scenario and campaign suggestions. But other than that (and the minor quibble that the custom a|state font isn't as legible as it could be) I think a|state is stunning: it's a genuinely beautiful book and a remarkably haunting and richly imagined setting.

Personally I absolutely love the background, the look, the tone of the writing, the possibilities for so many different types of story. From low life adventures amongst the shadows of the towering macrocorp domains to inter corporate war stories in the contested grounds and just the mystery of what is really happening. What is the origin of the city? What was the bombardments? Who/What are the outsiders and what is their purpose? How does dog taste?

So come on please don't leave me feeling I'm the only one out here with any love for this work of art. Also if anyone's interested I'm working on a BRP conversion of the rules with a sort of "life path" style character generation system.

I've been holding off on doing the same to wait for BRP to settle (albeit it ought to be possible to do a conversion using BRP zero) and for some free time... And I had some vague ideas about adapting the RQIII professions model to BRP to provide a "prior history" / life path type set up (albeit I'd done very little on that.

I do have an outline of a an a|state scenario I wanted to try somewhere as well...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

I had a pickup truck and they promised me something better.

Then, frankly you either weren't paying attention or wilfully misconstrued what was said. Chaosium (and Jason) have consistently said that (to continue the analogy) they were producing the best motorbike they'd ever done, based on all their previous motorbike designs. Certainly, the "high cargo capacity" configuration was going to learn some lessons from the pickup truck they had made and marketed twenty plus years ago - but the new product has always explicitly been a motorbike, not a pickup truck.

We now have at least 3 good versions of BRP/RQ out there - RQ3, RQM and BRP. All are different but all are sort-of compatible. Us old folks would have liked them all to be a bit more compatible and to usher in a Golden Age of RQ where RQ would be used for all kinds of settings and have many supplements to buy and play.

BRP is entirely compatible with RQIII - pick the right set of optional rules and, bar a few skill category names and the contributing stats, it's mechanically indistinguishable. Add the BRP Magic Book monograph and it has the same magic systems as well.

Will I buy BRP Zero? Not in a Million Years. It's incomplete, needs a lot of changes and is a cynical marketing ploy to get people to buy 2 copies of BRP, one as a "numbered collectors' item" and one to use to play.

Customers requested a product be made available. How is this a "cynical marketing ploy"?

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

I'd be inclined to shout "Questworld" if we could get enough people to want to game in the same fantasy setting. Some sort of baseline setting would be nice, as long as the rules don't limit other uses of BRP.

That was precisely the original motivation behind Gwenthia, albeit we wandered quite some way from that original motivation fairly rapidly...

I think any "in house" setting needs to be "in house" at Chaosium. While there are a lot of other worlds, include Jorune, they are owned by someone else and so would be difficult to impossible for Chaosium to use.

The difficulty is there is no "in house" at Chaosium: they have no designers / writers on staff any more (well, Lynn Willis has written stuff in the past, but I gather these days he only does editorial work). It's possible they might consider some sort of supervision / licensed arrangement I suppose...

Either a Chasoium closed setting, or an open setting that we all work on, could be nice. That's why I thought of Questworld. Back in the early days of MRQ several of us were going to put together an open game world, but the concept died after MRQ came out and half the contributors decided that they didn't want to play MRQ.

The concept, however, is still a good one.

Indeed, and perhaps something that this community could do in it's wiki, or on a clsoed sub set of the forums?

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

More worrying about what might have happened in the past is that it's just up the coast from Sizewell Nuclear Powerstation! Adn not that far from Southwold (which is very pretty, but also right next to Walberswick...)

>:->

IICR there was a rather nice piece in a late issue of Valkyrie magazine about the whole area.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

why couldnt it happen?

Pop quiz: who said, during the first big thread about Mongoose doing RuneQuest at RPGNet that the intent was to create "the same system but not the same copyright words"?

Who's website still says RuneQuest was/is a very poor system to represent Glorantha ( here )?

First Age and Godtime etc are free for development.

But perhaps there are politics of which I am unaware.

It would be so cool

Meh. Stafford and Chaosium couldn't come to a deal two years ago for whatever reason (if they even tried), I can't seeing them doing so now and frankly, Glorantha will not help sales of the new BRP: it's already supported by two in print rule systems in different eras and even if Mongoose would countenance another licensee (which, given the apparent terms of their Traveller license, I doubt), I really don't think the market would sustain it.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

Massively over worked in CAD Support and the alternative to dipping in to a few online forums when I can would be a grisly office massacre.

With the added bonus that my line manager works ina different office 250 miles away...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

Does "Ringbearer" count?

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

Hi Nick,

Ahhh, a man drawn as though hypnotized to the bosom of yorkshire!!!!!

Had a lot to do with the charms of my ex-wife as well - but since we split up nearly nine years ago and I'm still here, perhaps not that much!

I'm in Sheffield m8, where abouts do you call home in this green and pleseant land?

York itself - I occasionally get down to Sheffield to visit Patriot Games, and pass through regularly when travelling back south visit family in Somerset. And I really ought to get round to seeing some of the other Sheffield gamers I know mostly via the 'net...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

Brief digression: so where about in the South West are you Jack? And where in Yorkshire, Ken? I'm curious as I'm originally from the West Country (and thus the South West proper was a frequent holiday destination) and I know reside in Yorkshire...

:focus:

Has anyone been keeping proper track of which numbers have gone?

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

If you can't say who your source is, then why post about it at all until, and if, you can?

Not to seem rude, but I agree - there may well be additional circumstances involved, and at the very least if you can't give any details, we can't know when the email to Chaosium was sent etc... and it all becomes rampant speculation. For example, if what they (whoever they are) had a substantive proposal to put to Chaosium, why didn't they duplicate it via conventional mail - that would be the professional approach in my book (and indeed, in most niche publishing circles I'm aware of...).

Not saying you're wrong Triff, but until we can have some details, this is a bit nebulous...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

Me think Chaosium will lose more than Gwenthia. They don't answer the emails of other publishers who want to make licensed publications for BRP either.

Care to elaborate? The only established publisher I'm aware of who has expressed a definite interest in a BRP license is Seraphim Guard - and they got one; but I'm certainly NOT privy to ANY of Chaosium's communications nor at all connected in the industry, so I've no idea if anyone else has approached them.

One thing is that they may not care about answering fans, but not even answering buisness related emails? That suck... :mad:

Speaking personally, I approached Chaosium some time ago about Uncounted Worlds in what I hope was a concise but sufficiently informative email (outlining what I wanted to do, who I was and what I beleived I needed from Chaosium) and whilst I didn't get the fastest of replies, I did get one.

Cheers,

Nick

Yes, you're right. I was thinking they could be separate downloads available in Chaosium's website or here, much like PEGINC's one-sheets.

have you seen the "Tuesday Terribles" at Chaosium's site? Mostly on Call of Cthulhu themes, and they only did them for a while, but they were little snippets for games (an NPC, artefact or location) and some were rather good. It would be cool to see them revivied and their remit expanded to include BRP...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

I think Dodge as an opposed roll would be fine, as long as it works the way I think it does (and if it doesn't it might still be fine, depending on how it works. ).

So a Dodge that wins the opposed roll means that the attack failed, no damage is done. A losing Dodge that still succeeded on the roll reduces the degree of the attack if it lost by degree (Special vs. Success for example) but not if it tied the degree of success but still lost (or it would reduce it to a success regardless of degree more likely). A Failed Dodge of course does nothing to reduce the attack and a Fumble could make it worse.

The way I assumed things worked when I ran my play test games for Dodge was that:

1. Dodging an attack used the opposed skill rule.
   
2. That if the Dodging character won, they avoided the blow.
   
3. That if the Dodging character lost, the blow hit them.
   
4. That a "tied success levels so higher roll wins" result meant a normal success for the winner (so a losing despite rolling a critical Dodge means you only took a Normal blow)
   

I need to find the time to sit down with a clear head, think through exactly how I usually play this, write that out and then re-read the combat and systems chapters carefully, as the problem is as much the half a dozen subtle variations in my head as what's actually in the text. Alternatively Jason will clear this up soon.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

...I'm sure it's actually extremely straightforward - you seem to have SB5 with Criticals and Specials rather than just Specials, so it should be just a question of clarifying the permutations and making sure the whole narration flows from top to bottom...

And SB5 / Elric! DID have "impales" for some weapons, which we're even more effective than specials, so I suspect the confusion has arisen from translating that table (which had five levels of skill roll for Attacks ("impale", critical, normal success, normal failure and fumble) but only four for Parry or Dodge) to the BRP table (which has five levels of for Attack, Parry AND Dodge).

And speaking as one of the play testers, I'm kicking myself for not spotting these ambiguities at the time. *sigh* sorry all.

It might be worth going back to teh SB5 / Elric1 approach and having separate tables for spell out the Att vs. Parry and Att vs. Dodge principles.

One thing I will say: having seen the farce which was MRQ's muddy and confusing portrayal of combat 18 months ago when the rules first came out - and the fact that people on the MRQ forums are *STILL* asking today how combat works, I think it's worth making sure this is CRYSTAL clear in the BRP rules! I know the BRP *rules* work fine in this respect - we just need to make sure the *wording* of those rules is completely and unambiguously clear, even at the risk of repeating things.

What's particularly galling is that (unlike MRQ), Jason / Chaosium haven't tweaked anything substantial at the 11th hour... But you are absolutely right, this needs to be absolutely crystal clear.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton